The Iranian New Wave, as that large and heterogeneous body of Iranian art films produced before the 1979 revolution came to be known, was besieged by ruins and ruination from the start. Retaining a faith in what Siegfried Kracauer (whose work at MoMA in the 1940s was a forerunner in thinking film history at a museum) saw as the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality, this essay sets out to explore the cinematic renderings of the ruin and that of the body. 1 The New Wave still occupies an unsettled space, at once affectionately remembered and orphaned. On the one hand, in Homeland, it has finally gained an honored place in film historiography, represented in books and articles published every year in Persian.