Public Lecture: To Venture from Home on the Thread of a Tune: Noise, Refrain, and Rhythm in Port City Films

Every port city has a rhythm—a manner of flowing measured by the global circulation of goods and labor, yet immeasurable in its entanglement with environment and landscape. Through crashing sea waves, hills of garbage, industrial portside spaces, and burning horizons, this talk follows Amiro, the orphaned protagonist of Amir Naderi’s Davandeh (The Runner, 1984), to explore a filmic expression of such rhythm. How does cinema as an audio-visual medium express such flows and deterritorialized intensities? Naderi’s film highlights the ambiguities in capitalism’s attempts to regulate not only the flows of goods and labor, but also the flows of signs, noises, and residual waste that exceed regulation. What forms of rhythm might emerge from what capitalism cannot contain?

Please join the Middle East North African Studies Program for a lecture from Dr. Maziyar Faridi Wednesday October 29 in Stone Auditorium at 5:30 PM. A screening of The Runner will be held in Stone a week prior, on Wednesday October 22, also at 5:30 PM. 

Maziyar Faridi is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Clemson University. His under-review monograph, Rhythms of Relation: The Untranslatables of Persian Modernism, stages a critical encounter with a constellation of Persian modernist terms that unsettle modernity's hegemonic rhythms of subjectivity. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University, and his scholarship has garnered national recognition, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Charles Bernheimer Award from the American Comparative Literature Association.