Document Type : Research/Original/Regular Article
Author
Department of Art Research, Faculty of Art, Neyshabur University, Neyshabur, Iran alirezaazizi@neyshabur.ac.ir
Abstract
In Iranian Sacred Defense cinema of the 1980s, the Iran–Iraq War is framed not merely as a series of historical events but as an experiential and perceptual human condition. Image, narrative, and temporality operate as mechanisms that transmit wartime experience and transform it into a shared collective memory. This study examines these aesthetic mechanisms and their role in the production and stabilization of collective memory—an aspect often overshadowed in prior scholarship by descriptive or historical approaches. The significance of the research lies in its focus on the formal and perceptual dimensions of Sacred Defense cinema, avoiding a reduction of war films to event-centered or overtly ideological narratives. The main research question asks how Sacred Defense cinema contributes to the formation and stabilization of collective memory through aesthetic means.
Using a qualitative, text-based methodology, the study conducts an aesthetic analysis of narrative structure, cinematic temporality, and visual logic in three selected films—Didban, Mohajer, and Parvaz dar Shab. The findings demonstrate that experience-centered narration, emphasis on stillness and waiting, slow and contemplative temporality, visual economy, and the omission of explicit violence shift war from a historical event to a shared perceptual condition. Furthermore, the portrayal of the combatant as a situational moral agent contributes to the formation of an ethical memory of war. Accordingly, the aesthetic language of Sacred Defense cinema in the 1980s functions as a cultural mechanism for producing and stabilizing a durable collective memory of war.
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