The Evolution of Female Protagonists in Bahram Beyzaie’s Oeuvre

Professor Saeed Talajooy will discuss the evolution of female protagonists in Bahram Beyzaie’s “Puppet Trilogy," “The Snake King” (1966), and “Ballad of Tārā" (1978-9). Ballad of Tārā, the second film in Professor Beyzaie's village trilogy, is focused on negotiating a collective identity that is cognizant of the past but has transcended the obsessions with glorifying or dismissing the past and its heroes. The film marks Beyzaie’s most explicit engagement with “the Iranian imaginal,” where the religious and secular heroes of the past await to be conjured to act as role-models and guides of the present. Rather than glorifying the ideal heroes of hegemonic masculinity, however, the film suggests that these heroes were victims of a violent culture of brother-killing and craved to have a normal life of hard work, prosperity, and fertility. In this talk, Professor Saeed Talajooy traces the origins, formation, rise, and the transformations of female protagonists from Beyzaie’s early plays to Ballad of Tārā in three periods. In the first stage, as reflected in his Puppet Trilogy, Beyzaie reformulates the image of the Girl or Negār in Iranian puppet plays to create a dynamic woman who no longer wants to be a damsel in distress. In the second stage, which occurs in his 1966 play The Snake King, he reformulates the folktale of ‘Mehrin Negār and the Snake King’ to celebrate female heroism in a quest of retrieval. Thus, Mehrin Negār, who embodies fertility and perseverance travels to the land of demons to reclaim her beloved husband who is released from his snake mask of toxic masculinity to become a hero of prosperity and even democracy. In the final stage which occurs in The Crow (1977) and more importantly Ballad of Tārā (1979), Beyzaie creates his ultimate heroine, a savior/trickster who represents the ideals of modernity and citizenship by embarking on a journey to the past or the underworld to reclaim a marginalized sense of being. In The Snake King, there is still a male hero, but he is brought back to life because the heroine risks her life for him. In Ballad of Tārā, however, the final episode marks the return of the hero of the underworld in a process that enables Tārā to rise as an ideal questioning heroine and citizen.

Saeed Talajooy is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Persian at the University of St Andrews, UK. Dr. Talajooy has taught English and comparative literature and Persian literature, theatre and cinema in Iran and the United Kingdom. His research is on the reflections of the changing patterns of Iranian identity in Persian literature and Iranian cinema and theatre. His most recent publications include a monograph entitled Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema in Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (I. B. Tauris, 2023), an edited volume entitled The Plays and Films of Bahram Beyzaie: Origins, Forms and Functions (I. B. Tauris, 2024), and two books which in each case include a translation of a play by Bahram Beyzaie and its analysis: The One Thousand and First Night and Afra or the Day Is Passing.

Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts

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