City Research Online

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing body of scholarly work on Iranian cinema, but this literature has some significant lacunae, including relatively little consideration of music and sound more generally and few writings on documentary film. This chapter explores the sonic intimacies of Khosrow Sinai’s film A Lost Requiem (Persian: Marsiyeh-ye Gomshodeh, 1970-83), a beautifully poetic and moving documentary that tells the little-known story of Polish refugees in Iran during World War 2. The chapter introduces the film and explores the ways in which Sinai uses music and sound - including diegetic and non-diegetic music, ambient sounds and the human voice – to engage the viewer in a highly emotive relationship with the film and its subject matter. In particular, the rich combination of sound, music, voices, still images and film, and the palimpsestic merging of the filmic present and the remembered and imagined sounds of the past, creates a complex multi-sensory experience in which the sonic becomes a space of intimacy within which to mediate memory and affect.

Publication Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Ethnomusicology and Its Intimacies available online: http://www.routledge.com.
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Performing Arts

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