Counter-Memories (M. Foucault) are subjugated memories that are not allowed to enter history. They have the potential to destabilize official narratives and normative orders of remembering. Inside the main stream of memories those memories stay invisible, marginalized by power effects and epistemic oppression. A genealogic and archeologic perspective as proposed by Foucault remembers history against the grain (Benjamin), excavates silenced experiences and reactivates buried struggles.
Due to the “non existence of a uniform censorship” (Bani-Etemad) and the tactical interventions of Iranian filmmakers the history of Post-revolutionary Cinema is also structured by counter-memories: impure, not 'purified' memories that challenge the officially fabricated success stories of revolution, war and sacred defence (defa’-e moqaddas), interrogate hegemonies and epistemic exclusions, produce frictions between political promises and social realities so that eccentric perspectives interact with mainstream ones. There are, on the one hand, films without screening permission in the context of underground cinema – like Mohammad Rasoulof's Manuscripts don’t burn (2013, Dast-Neveshtehaa Nemisoozand), concerned with the chain murders of 1980-88, or Massoud Bakshi’s A respected family (2012) about the psycho-social and bureaucratic aftermaths of war, including archive footage of wartime. On the other hand there are officially approved or (temporary) un-banned films. Mohsen Makhmalbafs anti-'sacred defence'-movie Marriage of the Blessed (1988, Arousi-ye Khouban) changed the perspective on revolutionary subjectivity through dealing with post-traumatic memories of a war photographer who is not only under shell shock but also under the shock of the unredeemed promises of the revolution. Tahmineh Milani’s film The Hidden Half (2001, Nimeh-ye Penhan) brought up counter-memories referring to the repression unleashed by Islamic fundamentalists against 'gauchistes' and politically committed women after 1979. In the same year as Milani’s film was released, Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City (Zir-e pust-e shahr) opened to wide popular acclaim, a film set 1997 during the presidental elections that resulted in the unexpected victory of Mohammad Khatami and the reform movement. Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s urban realism makes class differences and social exclusions visible and audible, and by doing so she confronts the empty promises of the reform program with social realities. A lot of more examples could be given.

In the framework of the conference, we are focusing especially – but not exclusively – on the mnemonic redistributions that can be found in contemporary Iranian cinema. An archeological perspective looks for ruptures, gaps, frictions, sudden redistributions instead of continuities. The counter-memories we are trying to carve out create a tension between 'remembered time' and 'time of remembering'. They re-configure present and past in the sense of a Walter Benjaminian telescopage of the past through the present, proposing a multiplicity of possible options of the past as an alternative history of the present (Foucault). Thus, we don’t want the term 'memory' to be narrowed down to filmic forms of flashbacks or images with subjective markers. Our concerns regard images and sounds, trauma- and memoryscapes, afterimages of revolution and war that change the rules of what can be said, seen and remembered. This would be the intervention political cinema provides: an intervention out of the present into the present and its perspective on the past.