A nation of torn family albums: politics of aesthetics in Iranian postmemory documentary film

This article explores the politics of aesthetics in documentary portrayals of history. It focuses on the emerging genre of postmemory documentary in Iran, clarifying how creative documentary aesthetics stimulate the political resonances of inter-generational memories of the 1979 revolution. The article’s case study, the celebrated Iranian-Norwegian film Radiograph of a Family (2020), contextualizes a decades-long family story into the sociopolitical upheavals of Iran between the 1960s and 1980s. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, the findings highlight the aesthetic characteristics that the film’s post-generational narrator employs to appropriate the film’s historical account. Despite the precarious conditions inherent in fostering counter-memories and critically engaging with established discourses in contemporary Iran, I argue that the film’s narrative and stylistic frameworks, which accentuate the indeterminacies and polysemic capacities of mnemonic constructs, contribute to its subjective mode of address, thereby enabling it to engage effectively with the politics of social memory.