Displaced Bodies and Noisy Memories

Amateur Video Culture, Underground Media, and the Representation of Ordinary Bodies in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Theoretical Dissertation

This practice-led PhD dissertation investigates the emergence of a distinct vernacular amateur video culture in post-revolutionary Iran during the 1980s and 1990s. Following the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic imposed a rigid visual regime of modesty, purging pre-revolutionary pop culture and regulating bodily visibility on state television. Concurrently, an illicit underground network circulated smuggled VHS bootlegs of Shah-era performances, Bollywood films, and Iranian exile television in Los Angeles (Tehrangeles). Iranian spectators experienced a gap between their “experienced life” and “displayed life,” especially during the early post-revolutionary years. Video camcorders enabled the possibility of recording everyday life and bodies , and amateur video practices formed other modes of visibility and visuality. They recorded gendered spaces and marginalized bodies, from female beauty salons to gender-mixed weddings, while also revealing the relationship between amateurism, gaze, camera, bodies, and spaces. At the theoretical core of this research is the argument that aesthetics served as the primary engine of this movement. The distinctive aesthetic of these videos, emerging from VHS noise, tracking glitches, amateur camera movements, and collage-like montage full of visual effects, reflects a kitsch and amateur aesthetic influenced by both diaspora and state media, which sought to reclaim romantic love, everyday life, and the ordinary body onto the screen.

These distinctive vernacular videos were eventually watched on the same television set alongside other bootleg VHS tapes and state programs in 1980-1990s. Grounded in theories of the distribution of the sensible, the study demonstrates how these aesthetic strategies, granted ordinary citizens the capacity to transform their personal experiences into collective memories. Decades later, these amateur videos function not only as important visual evidence of the excluded double life, domestic spaces, and ordinary bodies of early post-revolutionary Iran, but also due their aesthetic, they work as forms of counter-memories.

Artistic Project: The Distance We Danced

The Distance We Danced is the practice-led artistic component of the dissertation. Operating at the intersection of essay film, archival montage, and personal narrative, the film explores how home movies and vernacular media can reconstruct fragmented personal and collective memories that official histories actively erase.

The film traces a journey into the 1990s childhood of a brother and sister growing up in Tehran. Their shared past is recalled through the collision of ideological state propaganda programs, smuggled and noisy VHS cassettes, and intimate, amateur home movies captured inside the family’s private spaces.

The siblings return to these fragile, low-fidelity archives to retrace moments of life in 1990s Iran and remember together moments of joy, separation, sadness, and feelings of inequality, moving through birthday celebrations, family trips, gender-segregated schooling. The siblings discover that the thread constantly connecting them, and serving as an embodied form of emotional resistance across physical and temporal distance, was Iranian dance, acting as a persistent gesture of presence, memory, and survival.

Supervisors:

Prof. Dr. Marie-Helene Gutberlet

Prof. Dr. Olga Moskatova