Konstantin Vasiltsov

Natalia Kazurova

• Occupation: Senior Researcher
• Affiliation: Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences
  
• Address: 3, University Emb., 199034, Russia

The proclamation of the Islamic Republic made its own adjustments to the cultural life of Iran, but despite the imposed restrictions and prohibitions, modern directors and artists continue to saturate their works with references to poetic images of wine. In cinema, the authors act quite straightforwardly, although sometimes in their films there are more inventive methods of mentioning an illegal drink (verbal ac-companiment of the visual series through reading poetic lines about wine).

Representatives of the modern art scene can resort to the wine motive in a more diverse form than their colleagues in the field of cine-ma, since it is easier for them to encrypt this topic in their works. Artists turn to the leitmotif of wine, classic for Iranian miniatures, both in abstract drawings, experimenting with calligraphic patterns, and in figurative painting, creating various compositions from mystical and phantasmagoric plots to everyday realistic sketches.

When examining the image of wine in historical retrospect, the connection between poetry and Iranian art is clearly visible. The poetic tradition is deeply rooted in Persian culture, an environment so deeply formed by metaphor and permeated with allegory, depicting not the literal, but the symbolic. In addition to the fact that great masters of literature are revered in Iran, poetry is an everyday language in which people communicate today. Therefore, quotes from the poems of poets of the past and present saturate the narrative in Iranian cinema and penetrate into modern fine art, thereby uniting the eras into a single cultural field.