The “Reframing the Argument” workshop at the University of Notre Dame helped me recognize the distinction between documentary, non-fiction film practices, and videographic criticism. Unlike the essay film, which may be entirely creative without adhering to a specific methodology, videographic criticism requires a clear analytical framework. Radiograph of a Family (Firouzeh Khosrovani, 2020) brings together elements I was seeking: a personal narrative, the use of archival materials, and dramatized sequences based on a true story. I reframe the film by working with the juxtaposition of text and images and the concept of “home” as a motif. The film is partly archival (film and still images), epistolary, personal, and fictional all at once. Therefore, it can be considered a pioneer of this genre in contemporary non-fiction Iranian cinema. On the film’s website, Khosrovani shares her lived experience: “My mother married my father’s photograph in Tehran.” She continues: “He was studying radiology in Switzerland, and for mother to come and live with him, marriage was obligatory.” As she explains in the beginning of the film as well, her mother was religious and from an observant family, while her father was from a secular, modern family. This contrast would become a central challenge for the filmmaker’s family.

A symbolic act representing not only Iranian contemporary history but also her generation’s lived experience, the director probably, perhaps even subconsciously, follows Jameson’s principle to “always historicize” (1983: ix), allowing her intimate family story to resonate as a historical allegory of a nation in transition, a revolution. The father, as a representative of the secular and modern segment of society, which made up only a small percentage of the population in Iran before and after 1979, eventually gave up and yielded to the Islamic extremists and their ideology. For him, art became overloaded with meaning: it carried the political and utopian dreams that had disappeared from real life (Anderson 1984: 17). For the mother, coming from a religious family whose identity was suppressed and who felt deeply alienated and lost in the West, in Switzerland, and during the Pahlavi government in Iran before 1979, the Islamic Revolution (1979) seems to have been transformed into an unconscious desire. In Jameson’s sense, her attachment can be read as part of the political unconscious, where repressed historical and social contradictions find expression through personal experience.

However, like millions of others who shared similar beliefs, she was unaware of the consequences, which the director allegorically depicts as nothing but fragmentation through the house’s mise-en-scène and the camera movement, as a motif. As though the film were a Persian poem, with a tender yet indistinct love, and a refrain of home as the birthplace of love. The revolution thus becomes, for the mother, the imaginary resolution of a real ideological conflict she has faced between secular modernity and religious tradition. Desire for change, more than forty years after the Islamic Revolution, remains constant, but the context is now different. This can be interpreted from the film’s final sequence, where the house, the furniture, and the filmmaker’s memories shift from the allegorical mode to the real. It is worth noting that the ending, intentionally or unintentionally, recalls Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), another personal documentary (animated docufiction) in which the style suddenly changes from animation to live footage.

In my video essay, the house is used as the backbone, while the photos and text layer arguments over it. The trajectory of the narrative proceeds without the voiceover and the archival films, unlike the original film. By isolating the photos and house accompanied with the sound and adding text, I foregrounded these elements, to show how the passion for photography and photo itself as personal and collective memory played an important role in shaping this film. The director playfully intertwines the concepts of photography, photos, and images with those of radiography and radiology: the former reflects the father’s personal interest, while the latter relates directly to his profession. Additionally, by bringing back the torn photographs that were about to be discarded as part of the mother’s attempt to erase a portion of her life, the daughter/director, Firouzeh reminds the audience that she has symbolically carried and preserved the family’s memory since childhood, while also suggesting that the new generation embodies hope by building upon the past.

By using a triptych album layout, I not only evoke the family album style shown in the film and signify history and temporality, but also emphasize the importance of photography and memory, the relationship among father, daughter, and mother, and the harmony between text, image, and sound. The only voiceover is at the end of the video to highlight how it renders the film more subjective, whereas text introduces a greater sense of objectivity. As mentioned above, the filmmaker begins in the synopsis with the line, “My mother married my father’s photograph in Tehran.” This is also the first sentence heard in the film, narrated over the wedding photos, presumably by the director’s voice (although it is not her voice, as the audience discovers in the end credits), in which the bride/mother is shown beside the framed picture of the groom/father placed almost next to her.

The synthesis of this shot and the voiceover reveals the film’s core argument, identifying the absent cause (Jameson 1983) as patriarchy, deeply rooted in Iranian culture. The father/groom was absent and his framed photograph next to the bride stood in for him. Photography was the father’s interest, and over time it appeared to substitute for his lived identity. The patriarchy, hidden in the deep layers of the film, encouraged a young religious woman to marry a non-religious doctor living in the West. Moreover, this same patriarchy allowed that man to express his “desire” to marry a much younger Iranian religious woman instead of choosing someone culturally closer to him, equally educated, or a Western modern woman (one whom he tried to shape or form into the woman he “achieved”).

This patriarchy, as an emblem of contradiction, created a married couple who continued to live together as if it were their destiny rather than their free will. That “desire” for a happily married life remained merely a “desire,” just like the revolution, reform, and better life that also remained unfulfilled. Towards the end of the film both sides become frozen into aesthetic or ideological forms, losing their historical energy. When the handheld camera moves back from the photo of Firouzeh, the filmmaker, and her father on the wall and then shows the real house, including the mother sitting and praying, the structure changes, bringing memories and history to life. The handheld camera reduces the agency of still images. It restores historicity by transforming the fixed image into lived experience, turning representation back into process, and allowing the spectator to sense history not as a distant past but as a living contradiction still shaping the present through the praying mother and the radiology image.

Overall, through the interplay of image, memory, and voice, Radiograph of a Family transforms a personal story into a historical allegory of modern Iran. From a Jamesonian perspective, the film shows how private life reflects broader ideological and social tensions. The Islamic revolution, the marriage, and the house represent the absent cause: patriarchy, as the hidden structure shaping both personal and national experience. By shifting between still photographs and lived space, Khosrovani brings history to life, turning fixed images into acts of remembering. In doing so, the film performs what Jameson (2016) describes as the task of historicization, showing the past not as something closed or nostalgic, but as an ongoing contradiction that continues to shape the present. In my reading the daughter has her own space and time and is positioned as an insider, rather than occupying both the outsider and insider roles as she does in the film.

Anderson, Perry. 1984. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. University of Chicago Press.

Folman, Ari, dir. 2008. Waltz with Bashir. Israel: Bridgit Folman Film Gang and Les Films d’Ici.

Jameson, Fredric. 1983. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge.

—. 2016. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. Verso.

Khosrovani, Firouzeh, dir. 2020. Radiograph of a Family. Norway/Iran/Switzerland: Antipode Films.

Yasaman Baghban is an Iranian experimental and documentary filmmaker, educator, and film programmer based in the United States. She earned her MA in Cinema Studies from Tehran University of Art and completed her MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University in 2023. Her short films have screened at international festivals, including True/False, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Female Eye Film Festival, and more. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on Iranian cinema, transnational, diasporic, and political cinema, essay films, and archival and nonfiction art practices.

This video essay reframes Radiograph of a Family (Firouzeh Khosrovani, 2020) through a formal intervention: it removes voiceover and foregrounds archival photographs, music and domestic space. Working within a Jamesonian framework of historicization, it proposes patriarchy as the “absent cause” linking intimate family memory to the contradictions of modern Iran. The ambition to think through form rather than merely about content aligns well with videographic criticism as an analytical practice.

One of the video essay’s strengths lies in its treatment of the house as a spatial system. By layering still photographs over domestic interiors, the video constructs a visual palimpsest in which temporality, repetition, and stasis become palpable. The house functions as both motif and structuring principle, allowing historical contradiction to surface through mise-en-scène, juxtaposition and rhythm rather than narration. In this sense, the work exemplifies how videographic criticism can think non-verbally, operating through recurrence and space.

The Jamesonian “absent cause” claim is persuasive as a hypothesis. The piece holds the secular-modern and religious-traditional formations in productive tension, and its acknowledgement that the mother’s alienation predates the revolution, extending back to the Pahlavi period itself, sharpens the historicization claim. Aijaz Ahmad’s (1987) critique of Jameson’s allegorical framework is useful here as a methodological reminder that allegory can become a master-code unless the analysis specifies heterogeneous and even competing formations. In this film, patriarchy is not only a domestic hierarchy; it is also mediated through shifting gender regimes that do not simply “oppose” women but recruit them. Making these layers explicit refines the historicization claim and prevent “patriarchy” from operating as a catch-all explanation.

The piece also opens a productive line in clarifying how the patriarchy thesis is generated through the videographic operation itself, particularly in distinguishing the subjectivity of voiceover from the relative objectivity introduced by text, and in describing the triptych album layout as a structural device that links photography, memory, and familial relation.

The question that remains most open concerns the formal consequences of silence. Since Radiograph of a Family’s original voiceover is essayistic and questioning rather than a “voice-of-God” narration, removing it might reconfigure the film’s essayistic structure and the image-sound relation. It can raise some important questions; for example, what the absent voice makes audible, and how it reorganizes the viewer’s relation to the archival image. This would allow the videographic operation to carry the full weight of the argument the piece wants to make.

The video essay is at its most convincing when it isolates moments in which form and argument intersect, especially the child drawing hair onto the woman’s torn head in a photograph. This gesture opens a generational politics of agency, embodiment, and visibility that resonates with debates on veiling and when read in light of movements including Women, Life, Freedom becomes dynamically historical.

Beyond the question of whether voiceover removal substantiates the patriarchy claim, retaining music while removing speech reorients spectatorship: the viewer is no longer addressed directly by an authorial voice but is instead positioned within an affective and interpretive field. This gesture is particularly significant in its transnational address. The work implicitly acknowledges uneven knowledge; some viewers may recognize the historical and cultural context intimately, while others may encounter it obliquely. Rather than compensating for this gap through explanation, the video foregrounds it as a productive condition of essayistic thought.

Ahmad, Aijaz. 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text 17, 3–25.

In her video essay “Reframing a Revolution: Historicizing an Essay Film,” Yasaman Baghban offers a compelling example of the intersection and cross-pollination of the essay film and the video essay. As Kevin B. Lee (2013) argues, “an essay film explicitly reflects on the materials it presents, to actualize the thinking process itself.” If we consider the video essayist to be what Laura Mulvey calls a “possessive spectator” (qtd. in Baptista 2014: 88), a maker who acquires media and manipulates it to create new knowledge, what happens when videographic strategies are applied to an essay film, and how might the videographic essay actualize the thinking process in ways that are distinct from the media that it engages with?

In her exploration and reexamination of Firouzeh Khosrovani’s Radiograph of a Family (2020), Baghban removes the filmmaker’s voiceover and archival footage of the Iranian revolution, retaining docu-fictional scenes filmed in Khosrovani’s childhood home, which move slowly and evocatively through the spaces of the filmmaker’s memories. Placing Khosrovani’s family photos and letters between her parents into a “triptych album layout” of white lines over tracking shots of the home’s interior, Baghban creates a new layer of meaning in which we read and interpret the distinct voices of the three characters in this narrative: the filmmaker, her religiously observant mother, and her secular father. This intervention raises two questions. First, how might Baghban assert her presence more strongly as a fourth character in this narrative, that of the video essayist? Second, because the on-screen text is drawn from the film’s absent narration, how is Baghban replicating the filmmaker’s thinking process, versus actualizing a new one?

One of the strengths of “Reframing a Revolution” is Baghban’s focus on domestic space as a contested site of patriarchy. By centering her video essay in the home, Baghban offers an opportunity to reflect on how Khosrovani’s personal narrative represents a fault line in post-revolutionary Iranian society. In the final scene of the video essay, Baghban breaks the family album layout to show handheld footage of Khosrovani’s mother praying, as the filmmaker interacts with her and with the personal objects and photographs of the home. As the only sync-sound material in the piece, this ending stands out as a significant deviation from the video essay’s established pattern, and reminds us that the filmmaker’s mother is not only a primary source, encountered in still images and text, but an active figure in the family property, where she is a witness to the filmmaker’s past as well as present. While Baghban’s relationship to, and presence within, Khosrovani’s material remains open to interpretation, “Reframing a Revolution: Historicizing an Essay Film” offers an opportunity to consider how essay films and the scholarly video essay both resist categorization and are informed by the makers’ positionalities.

Baptista, Tiago. 2014. “Delaying Cinema: An Interview with Laura Mulvey.” Aniki, 1, no. 1, 86–91. https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v1n1.58.

Lee, Kevin B. 2013. “Video Essay: The Essay Film – Some Thoughts of Discontent.” Sight and Sound, 22 May, https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/video/video-essay-essay-film-some-thoughts-discontent. Accessed 16 March 2026.

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