Affective Listening, Sonic Intimacy, and the Power of Quiet Voices in Rakhshan Banietemad’s The May Lady (1998) - Professor Laudan Nooshin

This talk explores a single film, The May Lady by Rakhshan Banietemad (1998), through the lens of sound, with a focus on the act of listening.

Despite the remarkable growth in film music and sound scholarship in recent decades, writings on Iranian cinema have tended to focus on visual and other dimensions such as political and social commentary, and have largely ignored the role of sound.

This talk explores a single film, The May Lady by Rakhshan Banietemad (1998), through the lens of sound, with a focus on the act of listening – who listens to whom and who has the authority to listen and to be listened to - and specifically the ways in which notions of empathy are sonically mediated.

Asking what an attention to sound might reveal, Professor Laudan Nooshin will explore the kinds of subjectivities engendered through sound and the messages that may lie hidden within the sonic. She is particularly interested in how the performative act of listening lays bare the materiality of sound that has been largely overlooked in the literature and how the sonic thereby serves to generate a physically experienced shared affect, intimacy and embodied empathy with the characters on screen.

Laudan Nooshin is a Professor of Music at City, University London. Her research interests include urban sound studies, music and sound in Iranian cinema, music and youth culture in Iran, and creative processes in Iranian classical music. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded project on the sounds of Tehran. Laudan is co-Editor of the CUP series Elements in Music and the City, a Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association and co-Chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies Network.

Join the talk.

Meeting ID:

869 3674 3821