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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Online ISBN:
9781800852167
Print ISBN:
9781800859203
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Farshid Kazemi
Farshid Kazemi
Simon Fraser University
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Published online:
22 September 2022
Published in print:
1 August 2021
Online ISBN:
9781800852167
Print ISBN:
9781800859203
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night analyses the eponymous film within three theoretical coordinates: vampire cinema, psychoanalytic (film) theory and German Idealism. The book situates the film in the history of the vampire genre through the spectral vampire in early German expressionist cinema (Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922) and theorizes it as part of a transnational movement in Iranian films that represents ‘the uncanny’ between the two modes of ‘the weird and the eerie,’ theorized by Mark Fisher. The film is situated in relation to the history of Iranian horror films, as well as the female vampire’s evocation of the figure of the Nightmare in Iranian myth-folklore, and the cinematic vampire’s relation to Islamicate occult sciences. The book provides an intervention in second-wave psychoanalytic film theory (Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek) through a Lacanian reading of the film that analyzes the female vampire as ‘the return of the repressed’ of feminine sexuality, and as the Lacanian (traumatic) Real in female sexuality for the Shi’ite clerical order in Iran. The romantic love story at the heart of the film is theorized through ideas of central figures in German Idealism, such as Hegel and Schelling. The book establishes a relation between the female vampire and the spectral vampire by linking German Idealism and its deployment of metaphors such as phantasmagoria in early magic lantern projections. The book’s central theoretical intervention is an enactment of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Hegelian dialectics that brings out what is hidden on the surface of the film’s textual unconscious.

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