A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 9780822393542

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A So ci a l His t ory of Ir a n i a n Ci n em a Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

Praise for A Social History of Iranian Cinema “Hamid Naficy is already established as the doyen of historians and critics of Iranian cinema. Based on his deep understanding of modern Iranian political and social history, this detailed critical history of Iran’s cinema since its founding is his crowning achievement. To say that it is a must-read for virtually all concerned with modern Iranian history, and not just cinema and the arts, is to state the obvious.” —H oma Katouzian, author of The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran “This magisterial four-volume study of Iranian cinema will be the defining work on the topic for a long time to come. Situating film within its sociopolitical context, Hamid Naficy covers the period leading up to the Constitutional Revolution and continues after the Islamic Revolution, examining questions about modernity, globalization, Islam, and feminism along the way. A Social History of Iranian Cinema is a guide for our thinking about cinema and society and the ways that the creative expression of film should be examined as part of a wider engagement with social issues.” —A nnabelle Sreberny, coauthor of Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran “A Social History of Iranian Cinema is an extraordinary achievement, a scholarly, detailed work in which a massive amount of material is handled with the lightest touch. Yet it is Hamid Naficy’s personal experience and investment that give this project a particular distinction. Only a skilled historian, one who is on the inside of his story, could convey so vividly the symbolic significance of cinema for twentieth-century Iran and its deep intertwining with national culture and politics.” —Laura Mulvey, author of Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image “Hamid Naficy seamlessly brings together a century of Iran’s cinematic history, marking its technological advancements and varying genres and storytelling techniques, and perceptively addressing its sociopolitical impact on the formation of Iran’s national identity. A Social History of Iranian Cinema is essential reading not only for the cinephile interested in Iran’s unique and rich cinematic history but also for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the cataclysmic events and metamorphoses that have shaped Iran, from the pivotal Constitutional Revolution that ushered in the twentieth century through the Islamic Revolution, and into the twenty-first century.” —S hirin Neshat, visual artist, filmmaker, and director of the film Women Without Men

A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volu me 4

Hamid Naficy

A So ci a l His t ory of Ir a n i a n Ci n em a Volume 4 The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 Duke University Press Durham and London 2012

© 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Julie Allred Typeset in Scala by BW&A Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of Communication at Northwestern University, Northwestern University in Qatar, and the School of Humanities at Rice University, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

To my parents, Batul Okhovat and Abutorab Naficy, who instilled in me the love and pleasure of knowledge and the arts. To my country of birth, Iran, and its extraordinary culture and history. To my adopted country, the United States, and its cherished democratic ideals.

Con t en t s

Illustrations, xi Acknowledgments, xv Organization of the Volumes, xxi A Word about Illustrations, xxvii Abbreviations, xxix



1 The Resurgence of Nonfiction Cinema: Postrevolutionary Documentaries and Fiction War Films, 1



2 Under Cover, on Screen: Women’s Representation and Women’s Cinema, 93



3 All Certainties Melt into Thin Air: Art-House Cinema, a “Postal” Cinema, 175



4 Emergent Contestatory Films, Media Culture, and Public Diplomacy, 269



5 Iranian, but with a Different Accent: A Cinema of Displacement or a Displaced Cinema? 369

Appendix A: Iranian Films in Distribution (c. 2005), 513 Appendix B: Film House of Iran’s Film Collection, 517 Appendix C: International Film and Video Center Iranian Film Collection, 520 Notes, 523 Bibliography, 559 Index, 591

Il lus t r at ions

1 Documentarian Morteza Avina holding the camera in “Headless in the Alley of Love,” 12 2 Camaraderie between soldiers and cameramen on the Iraqi war front, 13 3 Opening title in “Operation Valfajr 8,” 14 4 A child appears to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in Headless in the Alley of Love, 18 5 Militia music video from Headless in the Alley of Love, 19 6 Poster for Sinai’s In the Alleys of Love, 23 7 Flyer for a screening at ucla of Operation Valfajr 8, 26 8 Searching for those disappeared in Naderi’s First Search, 30 9 Publicity photo for Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust, 32 10 Polish immigrants in Sinai’s Lost Requiem, 34 11 Publicity photo from Bashu, the Little Stranger, 35 12 The destructive effects of war drove Bashu into exile in Bashu, the Little Stranger, 35 13 A shell-shocked war veteran about to marry his fiancée in Marriage of the Blessed, 41 14–15 Mohammad Khatami adored by young female fans in A Man for All Reasons, 44 16 A female nurse runs for a village council seat in Zinat, 49 17 Poster for Mokhtari’s “process documentary,” Saffron, 76 18 Similarities between women’s veiling outdoors and architecture in Pari, 103 19 Children, particularly girls, stand in for adult women in The White Balloon, 115 20 The crisis of Pahlavi-era female representation in Report of a Murder, 117 21 Women suffer from disembodiment and men are afflicted with embodiment in Marriage of the Blessed, 118 22 Veil as an article of fashion in The Fall of Sahra, 123

23 Veiling of women by shot composition in Travelers, 124 24–26 A goat as a sexual mediator between Gabbeh and her beloved in Gabbeh, 125 27 Pervasive veiling in The Apple, 129 28 The shaved head signifies the removal of the physical veil and other constraints on women’s self-expression in Ten, 130 29 Semiotics of female power and shaved head in Women’s Prison, 131 30 Triumph of direct gaze and scopophilia in Bashu, the Little Stranger, 141 31 Love means having to sacrifice your own interests in Leila, 144 32 Teenage love among the “third generation” in The Girl in Cotton Sneakers, 145 33 Production still from Divorce Iranian Style, 152 34 Banietemad naturalized the veil in order to achieve realism in The May Lady, 160 35 Poetry and epistolarity are vehicles of expressing love and making present the male lover in The May Lady, 161 36 Violent and abusive men in Two Women, 168 37 The bare body parts of female models displaying lingerie were censored with black markers in “What I Saw in Tajrish,” 172 38 Neorealism as marketing in Close-Up, 182 39 Counterneorealism in Close-Up, 193 40 The car crash dooms the family in Travelers, 195 41 Response to a casting call in Salaam Cinema, 198 42 Deliberate sound problems interfere with dialogue in Close-Up, 204 43 Authoritarianism, conformity, and regimentation in society are explored in Homework, 207 44 A self-reflexive poster for Where Is the Friend’s Home?, 210 45 The clergy is critiqued in Under the Moonlight, 212 46 Reaching for metaphysical heights by contemplating the material things in Nar ’O Nay, 220 47 Internal character psychology is symbolized by external landscape of mountains and clouds in Color of Paradise, 222 48 Afghan refugees in The Cyclist, one of the first films in the “Afghan film cycle,” 234 49 Kurdish life is driven by relentless hardship and persistent hope in A Time for Drunken Horses, 237 50 Afghani women, aestheticized in their multicolored burquas, in Kandahar, 238 51 Brochure for the Fifth Anniversary Iranian Film Festival in Chicago 1994, 243 52 Program for Rice University Cinema’s Spring 1999, 244 53 Rice Cinema’s lobby in 2004, 245 54 Screening for Unwanted Woman at Stanford University in 2005, 255 55 Cartoon parodying international film festivals, 258 56 Frank Reynolds, anchor of abc Evening News, 1979, 277 57 The Iron Sheik action figure, 282

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58 Cover of Gardun magazine representing the West’s “cultural invasion,” 308 59 Frame grab from People & Power—Iran: Inside the Protests—10 July 09, 320 60 Frame grab from Iranian Green Movement, 320 61 Illegal satellite dishes dot rooftops in Tehran, 345 62 People at the barricades in Bella ciao, Iran, 351 63 A bloodied protester from Mirror: Support the Iran Green Movement, 351 64 A dead man in the street from People & Power—Iran: Inside the Protests— 10 July 09, 351 65–66 Videos of protest recorded in For Neda, 352 67 Neda at the moment of death from Neda, 355 68 Frame from “I am Neda” campaign, 355 69 Frame from “I am Neda” campaign in For Neda, 355 70 Frame from “I am Neda” campaign, 355 71 Frame from music video Another Brick in the Wall, 358 72–73 Frame grabs from Iranian Green Movement, 366 74 Frame grab from Bella ciao, Iran, 366 75 Frame grab from Iranian Green Movement, 366 76 Claustrophobic temporality ends in The Suitors when a persistent suitor is stabbed, 405 77 Poster from the Iranian Diaspora Film Festival in 2002, New York University, 409 78 Postal card from International Festival of Films Made in Exile, Gothenburg, Sweden, 410 79 Flyer for Bloody Friday, 414 80 Poster for In Defense of People at Fox Venice Theater, 415 81 Flyer for Iran in The Throes of Revolution in Royal Theater, Santa Monica, California, 417 82 Production still from Till Revolution, 418 83 Flyer for screening of Blood Will Triumph over the Sword, 419 84 A nurse visits a shrine in Women Like Us, 425 85 Kurdish mysticism in Beyond Words, 425 86 Planning to emigrate to Canada in Khaneh Ma: Places We Call Home, 429 87 Interview of Iranian American cabdriver in Caught Between Two Worlds: Iranians in the USA, 433 88 Photograph that inspires A Tajik Woman, 440 89 Poster demonstrating fear and anxiety in Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport, 443 90 A Catholic American woman and a Muslim Iranian woman meet on the same page—a playing card in Shahrbanoo, 444 91 Ahmad pulls his cart in Man Push Cart, 448 92 Mother and daughter face each other’s images in Mother/Country, 450 93 Three playful naked women under the veil in Walls of Sand, 451

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94 Publicity card for In the Bathtub of the World, 455 95 The first generation of Iranians in the United States in The Best in the West, 458 96 A flyer from Dreams Betrayed, on the prerevolution new-wave cinema, 462 97 Fans mourning Gholamhosain Saedi’s death in The Last Farewell to Dr. Saedi, 463 98 Shirin Neshat’s photograph “Untitled” (1996), 470 99 A gendered-separated audience is held spellbound by reciter in Fervor, 472 100 Mystical absorption, annihilation, and reunion of self with the Other or with nature in Tooba, 473 101–102 Binarist renditions of an organic, traditional East with an industrial modern West in Soliloquy, 478 103 Production still from The Predator, 483 104 A poster by Ghazel for the 2006 Sydney Biennial, 487 105 Ghazel emerges from the sea in Me 1, 489 106 Ghazel in Me 5, 489 107 A blindfolded Ghazel in Me 9, 491 108 Photograph of a nude model wearing a veil from “Patriotic women among us,” 497 109 Ghazel in “Keep the Balance” in Me 60, 499 110 Sohrab Shahid Saless before his death in Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home, 504

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Ack now l ed gmen t s

D

uring the three decades spent researching and writing this book, I accrued debts to many people who helped me in various ways big and small, which are briefly acknowledged here. First of all I thank all the film directors, producers, camerapersons, actors, critics, and television producers who supplied me with copies of their films, videos, and biographies, and sometimes with stills of their films. Many of them also granted me interviews, in person or by telephone, mail, e-mail, and even tape recording. Underscoring the globalization and diasporization of Iranians—including mediamakers—these interviews spanned the globe, from Iran to various European countries, and from New Zealand to the United States. And underscoring the duration of the project, they extended in time from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. The interviewees and filmmakers were Abbas (Abbas Attar), Nader Afshar Naderi, Jamsheed Akrami, Mohammad Reza Allamehzadeh, Farshad Aminian, Amir Amirani, Taghi Amirani, Jahanshah Ardalan, Shoja Azari, Fuad Badie, Ramin Bahrani, Bahram Baizai, Rakhshan Banietemad, Manuchehr Bibian, Arlene Dallalfar, Mahmud Dorudian, Ghasem Ebrahimian, Esmail Emami, Tanaz Eshaghian, Shirin Etessam, Anna Fahr, Golshifteh Farahani, Shahriar Farahvashi, Simin Farkhondeh, Bahman Farmanara, Aryana Farshad, Jalal Fatemi, Tina Gharavi, Ali Ghelichi, Ebrahim Golestan, Shahla Haeri, Mohammad Reza Haeri, Khosrow Haritash, Melissa Hibbard, Mohammad Ali Issari, Erica Jordan, Pirooz Kalantari, Shahram Karimi, Maryam Kashani, Mehrdad Kashani, Maryam Keshavarz, Laleh Khadivi, Hossein Khandan, Fakhri Khorvash, Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Kiar­ ostami, Masud Kimiai, Parviz Kimiavi, Kim Longinotto, Bahman Maghsoudlou, Moslem Mansouri, Dariush Mehrjui, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Behnaz A. Mirzai, Bahman Mofid, Ebrahim Mokhtari, Ali Mortazavi, Manuchehr Moshiri, Fatemeh Motamed Arya, Granaz Moussavi, Marva Nabili, Amir Naderi, Shirin Neshat, Asadollah Niknejad, Sara Nodjumi, Annette Mari Olsen, Mehrdad Oskouei, Soudabeh Oskui-Babcock, Faramarz Otan, Katia For­

bert Petersen, Rafigh Pooya, Ghazel Radpay, Hamid Rahmanian, Hosain Rajaiyan, Neda Razavipour, Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri, Robert Safarian, Fereydoun Safizadeh, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Marjan Safinia, Bigan Saliani, Mohammad Shahba, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mahvash Sheikholeslami, Amir Shervan, Kam­ ran Shirdel, Khosrow Sinai, Manuchehr Tabari, Nasrin Tabatabai, Mitra Tabri­ zian, Parisa Taghizadeh, Mohammad Tahaminejad, Barbod Taheri, Hosain Taheridoust, Mohammad Tehrani, Susumo Tokomo, Mehrad Vaezinejad, Shahin Yazdani, Abbas Yousefpour, and Caveh Zahedi. Each volume’s bibliography provides details of the interviews. I interviewed several cinema and television administrators in Iran during the periods of the Pahlavis and of the Islamic Republic to gain insight into official procedures and perspectives. Those interviewed included Gholamhosain Alaqehband, Mohammad Beheshti, Mohammad Hasan Khoshnevis, Kambiz Mahmoudi, and Alireza Shojanoori. To gain insight into the movies’ socio­ historical contexts of production and reception I interviewed spectators, witnesses, relatives, and scholars. These included Mehrdad Amanat, Zia Ashraf Nasr, Hamid Khan Bakhtiari, Cosroe Chaqueri, Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh, Houshang Golmakani, Faezeh Golshan, Jalal Golshan, Shusha Guppy, Ahmet Gurata, Latifeh Haghighi, Jafar Hakimzadeh, Amir Hassanpour, Badi’eh Mi­ saqiyeh (Eshraghian), Reza Nafisi (my uncle), Parviz Navi, Alaviyeh Okhovat (my grandmother), Batul Okhovat (my mother), Amir Bahman Samsam, Emmanuel Sevrugian, and Ali Shakeri. The Foundation for Iranian Studies in Washington kindly supplied me with transcripts of interviews with major cinema, television, and culture-industry leaders of the Pahlavi era, including transcripts of lengthy interviews with Farrokh Gaffary, Shahrokh Golestan, Kambiz Mahmoudi, Mohammad Naficy, Arby Ovanessian, and Mehrdad Pahlbod. Likewise, the Boroumand Foundation in Washington, which documents human rights violations in Iran, provided me with newspaper clippings on the Rex Cinema fire in Abadan and political persecutions in Iran. Poori Soltani, a senior research librarian at the National Library of Iran, graciously supplied me with data on film periodicals. Hosain Tousi, the director general of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance’s Research and Cinematic Relations immediately after the revolution, provided me with the early, unpublished regulations and guidelines governing film review and censorship under the Islamic Republic. Hasan Khoshnevis, the director of the National Film Archive of Iran, facilitated my research and film viewing at the archive in Tehran and sat for interviews with me. I also benefited from discussions with other colleagues at the national film archive, namely Gholam Haidari, Fereydoun Khameneipour, and Ladan Taheri. To examine nonfiction films about Iran, I visited the United States National Archives and Records Services and the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, both in Washington, to examine xvi

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records of usia/usis films and other documentaries. A visit to the Defense Audiovisual Agency at Norton Air Force Base, San Bernardino, California, produced information on military newsreels and raw footage shot by U.S. military units inside Iran after the Second World War. The ucla Film and Television Archive helped me with information on Hearst News and Hearst Metrotone News newsreels. A visit to the University of South Carolina helped with materials on the following newsreels about Iran: Fox News, Fox Movietone, Paramount News, Pathé News, Universal Newsreel, upitn, Visnews, and Pathé Sound News. The British National Film Archives and the British Film Institute in London were helpful on various newsreels and documentaries on Iran. I also visited the British Public Records Office in London to examine the files of the British Council’s cultural activities in Iran. In the United States I obtained the Confidential United States Central Files on Iran’s Internal Affairs and the Foreign Affairs Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Iran for the Second World War and the Cold War through microfilm and Internet research. These British and American diplomatic files are rich in documents relating to Iran’s sociopolitical and cultural conditions, if one persists long enough in sifting through thousands of pages of unrelated materials. They proved invaluable in my charting the rivalry among the former allies after the Second World War to influence the hearts and minds of Iranians through cinema. At the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, the archivist Mikael Braae helped me with screening and translating the railway film Iran, the New Persia. Another archivist, Palle Bøgelund Petterson, supplied additional printed information and films. Professor I. B. Bondebjerg, the head of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, facilitated my visit and research in the Danish capital. In Washington, I was able to examine the collection of Antoin Sevruguin’s photographs at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery thanks to Massumeh Farhad, the chief curator and the curator of Islamic art. In Heidelberg I interviewed Sevruguin’s grandson, Emmanuel Sevrugian, for further insight into his photographic and filmic career. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I examined the M. Eleanor Fitzgerald Papers for materials on Nilla Cram Cook, with assistance from the archivist Christel Maass. Finally, I visited the Brigham Young University Archives to examine Merian C. Cooper’s papers on Grass and King Kong, and I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York to view the original black-and-white and tinted versions of Grass, as well as footage shot for its remake. I gained further information about films on Iran by corresponding with the Imperial War Museum in London (for wartime newsreels), the Scottish Film Archive and the British Petroleum Company Limited (for oil films), the United Nations Visual Material Library (for un films on Iran), the Sherman Grinberg Film Library (for various newsreels), the John E. Allen Inc. Film Library (for Kinogram and Telenews newsreels), and the Abraham F. Rad Contemporary Jewish Film Archive in Jerusalem. For television newscasts and documentaries on ac knowl ed gments

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Iran, I visited and corresponded with various television archives, including the abc News Television Archive, the cbs News Film/Tape Documentary Archive, the nbc News Television Archive, the pbs News Tape Archive, the bbc News Television Archive, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the ctv Television Network (Canada), and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in Nashville. Abazar Sepehri, the head Middle Eastern librarian at the University of Texas, Austin, helped me many times to track down Persian-language sources and articles. Likewise, Jet Prendeville, the art and architecture librarian at Rice University, assisted me in tracking down English and foreign-language film sources. Academic colleagues in various disciplines in the United States were very helpful. Paula Amad and Peter Bloom provided me with copies of the film Yellow Cruise and with relevant materials on it; Jennifer Fey commented on my paper on Rakhshan Banietemad, as did Janet Afary on the chapters on Reza Shah and the preface, Marianne Hopmann on my discussion of the oral tradition, and Majid Naficy on parts of chapter 6 (vol. 2) and the preface (vol. 1). George Marcus, Chuck Kleinhans, Mehdy Naficy, Nahal Naficy, Azar Nafisi, and Mohammad Nafissi also commented on the preface. Philip Lutgendorf shared with me his unpublished paper on Indian cinema, and Natasa Durovicova shared her articles on sound and dubbing. Camron Michael Amin provided information on U.S. government files on Iran, and Amir Hassanpour provided information on Kurdish cinema and satellite television. Jalil Doostkhah helped with the names of the Isfahan circle of intellectuals. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa was extremely helpful throughout my research, supplying me with films and assisting me in tracking down information on Iranian cinema and filmmakers. Colleagues in Iran were also very helpful. Houshang Golmakani, the editor in chief of Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film, made sure that I received issues of the journal, sent me stills that I requested, and assisted with other inquiries. Massoud Mehrabi the publisher of Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film also was very helpful with photographs, among other things. Mohammad Atebbai of Iranian Independents put several documentaries at my disposal. The documentarian Pirooz Kalantari was conscientious and generous in supplying me with documents, books, films, photographs, and other research materials from Iran, far beyond his own works. Shahin Kharazmi of Tehran’s Industrial Management Institute supplied me with data on media uses and audience demography in Iran. Esmail Emami facilitated my meeting with members of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers in Tehran. Mohammad Tahaminejad was very helpful with information on the history of Iranian cinema, and he and Homayun Emami both helped with information on documentary cinema as well. Elsewhere, the art curator Rose Issa in London shared with me videos and posters of Iranian movies. The journalist Homa Sarshar and the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles kindly supplied me with a copy of the film A Mother for Shamsi. Mehdi Zamani facilitated my interview in Los Angeles with the actor Bahman xviii

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Mofid, while Mohammad Ali Yazdi did the same for my interview with Sohrab Shahid Saless. The photographer and artist Soody Sharifi kindly put at my disposal her photograph of the “movie set.” Sima Shakhsari of the University of California, Berkeley, helped identify Iranian blogs and movie blogs. Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies made Iranian films available for my viewing, as did Barbara Scharess, the director of programming at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. I helped launch two long-lasting annual film festivals at universities in the United States. I worked with Geoffrey Gilmore in 1990, then of the ucla Film and Television Archive, to curate one of the first and longest-running festivals of Iranian cinema in the United States. In Houston I worked with Marian Luntz, the film curator of the Museum of Fine Art, and Charles Dove, the cinema director at Rice University, to organize an annual festival of Iranian films there. Programming and curating these festivals, which still continue, provided me with important venues and opportunities for further research, film viewing, interviews with filmmakers, and the promotion of Iranian cinema. At Rice University my research assistant Danny Stuyck and the visual resource assistant Kathleen Hamilton scanned still images for the book. Michael Dyrby Jensen translated a Danish text for me. Nahal Naficy, a doctoral student in anthropology, was a valuable, resourceful, and cheerful help as my primary bilingual research assistant. She wrote the draft of the caption on Sharifi’s “movie set” artwork (vol. 2, chapter 4). At Northwestern University in Evanston my research assistants Neha Kamdar, Daniel Bashara, John Nicolau, Jason Roberts, and Racquel Gates helped with the book’s images and bibliography. Beth Corzo-Duchardt not only performed those duties but also proved indispensible in expanding the database of Iranian diaspora filmmakers for chapter 5. At the Northwestern University campus in Qatar Meriem Mesraoua was a helpful image researcher. The research phases of the book were funded in large part by summer research grants that I received from the deans of humanities at Rice University, Gayle Stokes and Gary Wihl, which allowed me to take research trips and to visit archives in various countries, as well as to write. The Art History Department’s Segal Fund at Rice University paid for my research assistants and equipment. A travel-to-collection grant from ucla’s Von Gruenbaum Center for Middle East Studies made possible my research visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The writing phase of the book was primarily funded by major national grants from the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship (neh-05020401) and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for Humanities International and Area Studies Fellowship (r14820–363000, neh fa-51979, osr 05020401), which Rice University matched, thus allowing me to spend the academic year 2004–5 entirely on writing the bulk of the manuscript. Gary Wihl also kindly provided subvenac knowl ed gments

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tion funds for the publication of this multivolume book, as did Barbara O’Keefe, Northwestern University’s dean of the School of Communication. North­western University in Qatar also contributed. I thank all these institutions and individuals for their generous assistance. My editor Ann Klefstad went through the manuscript as usual with a finetoothed comb, helping to sculpt the text. Ken Wissoker, the editorial director at Duke University Press, was a delight to work with; he guided the project with openness, patience, wisdom, and élan. A project as extensive as this naturally involves not only professional colleagues but also family and friends in various witting and unwitting capacities. My siblings—Naficeh, Nahid, Nasrin, Nooshin, Mehdy, and Majid—all helped in one way or another with research, information gathering, and the mailing of films and other materials for the book. I interviewed my mother and my paternal grandmother about their social lives and experiences with cinema. I learned to appreciate Iranian popular culture, perhaps initially from the joyful and lilting manner in which my mother sang the popular songs of her youth, songs that her strict Muslim parents had forbidden to her. My father’s researchmindedness and intellectual curiosity, which turned our childhood outings into lessons in local botany and medical anthropology, became a model for my commitment to academic research and education. During my research travels many family members and friends in various places provided me with a home away from home: Mehdy Naficy and Fariba Jafar-Shaghaghi in Heidelberg; Mohammad Nafissi and Georgiana Parry-Crooke in London; Fatemeh Ebtehaj and Hamid Hakimzadeh in London; Azar Nafisi and Bijan Naderi in Washington; Nastaran and Vahid Naficy in Tehran; and Paul and Helen Edwards in Helena, Montana. Montana’s majestic and enduring natural world offered an implacable contrast against which human history, particularly one as recent and as marred with moral and political ambiguities as that of the cinema and entertainment fields, found its proper perspective. This book has been with me for so long that it feels like a third child, older than my two biological children, Cameron and Shayda, both of whom are now thriving, idealistic young people close to the age at which I unknowingly began this project. My life partner Carol (Kelly) Edwards has been with me every step of the way, through thick and thin, in Iran, in the United States, and in many other places in between. All three have been unconditionally supportive of my life choices, my career and its demands, including this book project. I hope that I have, in the end, been deserving of their respect, love, and trust.

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Orga n i z at ion of t he Volu mes

T

he book is divided into four volumes, covering the social history of more than a century of Iranian cinema, from around 1897 to about 2010. The history of Iranian society and the cinema it produced in this period is bookended by two revolutions: the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, which brought in a constitutional monarchy, and the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79, which installed a republican theocratic state. While the impact of the first revolution on cinema and film culture was apparently limited and inchoate, the latter revolution profoundly affected them, resulting in their unprecedented curtailment and efflorescence. As a work of social history and theory, these volumes deal not only with such chronological developments in society and in the film industry but also with the synchronic contexts, formations, dispositions, and maneuvers that overdetermined modernity in Iran and a dynamically evolving film industry and its unique products. I locate the film industry and its mode of production, narratives, aesthetics, and generic forms in the interplay of deeply rooted Iranian performative and visual arts and what was imported, adopted, adapted, translated, mistranslated, and hybridized from the West. The interplay between Iranian and Islamic philosophies and aesthetics complicated and channeled cinema, particularly that involving women, in ways unique to Iran, which are discussed throughout the volumes. Likewise, the contribution of Iranian ethnoreligious minorities both within the country and in the diaspora, both widespread and profound, gave Iranian cinema additional specificity. The volumes also situate Iranian cinema at the intersection of state-driven authoritarian modernization, nationalist and Islamist politics, and geopolitics during its tumultuous century, charting the manner in which local, national, regional, and international powers competed for ascendancy in Iran, affecting what Iranians saw on screens, what they produced, and the technologies they adopted.

The logic of dividing the work into four volumes is driven by both socio­ political developments and the evolution of the film industry. While these volumes are autonomous, each contributes to the understanding and appreciation of the others, as certain theoretical, stylistic, industrial, commercial, cultural, religious, sociopolitical, biographical, authorial, and governmental elements form lines of inquiry pursued throughout, gathering momentum and weight. Each volume has a table of contents, a bibliography, an index, and, when needed, appendices.

Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 This volume offers a theory linking Iranian modernity and national identity with the emergence of an inchoate artisanal cinema and with an othered cinematic subjectivity. Qajar-era cinema consisted of the exhibition of foreign actualities and narratives and the production of a limited number of domestic ­actualities and comic skits by pioneer exhibitors and producers, all of whom are featured. The image of women on the screens and the presence of women as spectators in movie houses proved controversial, resulting in the first act of film censorship. Borrowing from the curtain-reciting tradition, live movie translators (dilmaj) helped increase narrative comprehension and the enjoyment of Western movies. Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty in 1925 and ruled until 1941. During his rule, the first Pahlavi period, the state implemented an authoritarian syncretic Westernization program that attempted to modernize and secularize the multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic Iranians into a homogenous modern nation. Cinematic representations of a fast modernizing Iran in documentaries and fiction movies were encouraged, photography and movie production were tightly controlled, movie houses were regulated, and perceived affronts to Iran in Western documentaries were taken seriously. The veil was outlawed and dandies flourished. All these developments receive extensive coverage in this volume. Despite efforts to centralize and control cinema, film production proved marginal to state formation and remained artisanal. Only one silent feature film was produced domestically, while all sound features were produced by an Iranian expatriate in India. This latter fact and others discussed in the volume show Iranian cinema’s transnational nature from the start.

Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 During the second Pahlavi period (Mohammad Reza Shah, 1941–79), cinema flourished and became industrialized, producing at its height more than ninety films a year. The state was instrumental in building the infrastructures of the xxii

Organizat ion of t he Volumes

cinema and television industries, and it instituted a vast apparatus of censorship and patronage. During the Second World War and its aftermath, the three major Allied powers—the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR— competed with each other to control what Iranians saw on movie screens. One chapter examines this fascinating history. In the subsequent decades, two major parallel cinemas emerged: the commercial filmfarsi movies, popular with average spectators, forming the bulk of the output, and a smaller but influential cinema of dissent, the new-wave cinema. The commercial filmfarsi movies, exemplified by the stewpot and toughguy genres discussed extensively in two chapters, were for entertainment purposes and drew their power and charm from their stars and their rootedness in Iranian traditions, which were juxtaposed favorably and often comically or melodramatically with modern Western traditions. A dynamic nonfiction cinema evolved, which receives a chapter. Ironically, the state both funded and censored much of the new-wave cinema, which grew bolder in its criticism and impact as Pahlavi authoritarianism consolidated. The new-wave films, produced by the collaboration of Westernized filmmakers with modernist dissident writers, did well in international film festivals, starting the globalization of Iranian cinema. The impending revolution could retrospectively be read in the fear-driven narratives of the new-wave films and in the various cultural struggles around official culture and arts festivals, the censorship of films, religious sermons on audiocassettes, poetry-reading nights, television trials and confessions, and underground filming, all of which I discuss at length.

Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 Identified toward the end of the Shah’s rule as one of the agents of moral corruption in the country, movies and movie houses became targets of a rising anti-Shah movement, resulting in the destruction of a third of all movie houses nationwide. This volume charts both such revolutionary destruction and the subsequent rebuilding and evolution of the film and media industries. Many above-the-line personnel in these industries found themselves sidelined, banned, arrested, deprived of property, or exiled. The star system, a major attraction of filmfarsi cinema, was thus dismantled. Movies were banned, cut, redubbed, and painted over to remove offending features. After such iconoclastic destructions and “purification,” the new Islamic regime undertook a wide-ranging effort to institutionalize a new film industry whose values would be commensurate with the newly formulated Islamicate values. The first rules and regulations governing film production and exhibition were adopted in 1982. Like the second Pahlavi regime, the ayatollahs’ regime put into place a strong, centralized, and draconian system of state regulation and patronage to encourage politically correct movies. The import of Organizat ion of t he Volumes

xxiii

foreign movies oscillated but was eventually banned, leaving the field open for a new domestic cinema. The long war with Iraq, the gendered segregation of space, and the imposition of the veil on women encouraged certain ideological and aesthetic trends. Foremost was the reconceptualization of cinema from a despised agent of corruption and othering to an agent of nation building and selfing. However, the resulting Islamicate cinema and culture were neither homogeneous nor static. They evolved with considerable personal, institutional, and ideological struggles.

Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 The revolutionary experience, the bloody eight-year war with Iraq, and the perceived Western cultural invasion of Iran all encouraged soul searching, national epistemophilia, and a desire for self-representation, resulting in an array of documentary films and film forms about the revolution, war, and the various social ills and inequalities that accumulated under the Islamist regime. The state-run television and fiction film industries, too, funded and supported filmmakers committed to Islam who made powerful “imposed war” movies in which sacred subjectivity replaced modernist subjectivity. Women’s presence both on camera and behind the camera increased significantly in all genres and types of films, in both the television and movie industries, leading to a veritable “women’s cinema.” The veil evolved from a repressive social institution to a dynamic social practice and critical aesthetic. A deepening sociopolitical and cultural struggle over cinema, media, and culture, and ultimately the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic emerged in the country. This was reflected in, and shaped by, a new form of public diplomacy, chiefly between Iran and the United States, during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, which intensified under his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a new “cultural turn” the antagonistic governments began to recruit all sorts of mutual domestic, diasporic, and international film, television, radio, and Internet media and formations to serve this diplomacy, sometimes with dire consequences for the participants. Foreign and exile videos and satellite televisions were officially banned, but enforcement was chaotic, encouraging a thriving culture of resistance and duality that continues to date. With the rise of opposition to the regime of the Islamic Republic two oppositional cinemas emerged: underground cinema and Internet cinema. The postrevolutionary era bred its own parallel and dissident art-house cinema, involving some of the best Pahlavi-era new-wave directors and a new crop of innovative postrevolutionary directors, placing Iranian cinema on the map of the vital world cinemas. They brought self-respect and prestige for Iranians at home and abroad. The displacement, dispersion, and exile of a massive num-

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ber of Iranians, many in the visual and performing arts and in cinema and television, resulted in new formations in Iran’s social history and cinematic history—a diasporic formation of people with a complex subjectivity and an “accented cinema,” made by first-generation émigrés and their second- and third-­ generation descendants. Both the wide circulation of films made in Iran and those Iranians made in the diaspora, as well as the vast diasporic dispersion of Iranians, helped globalize Iranian cinema. One chapter deals with each of these developments.

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A Wor d a bou t Il lus t r at ions

I

have used several types of illustration here, each providing supplementary or complementary material to the text. Production stills show something of the behind-the-scenes process. Frame enlargements, taken directly from films or videos, offer visuals for textual analyses of the films’ aesthetic and generic systems. Posters offer not only an encapsulated rendition of the film by artists other than filmmakers but also showcase the art of poster design and production, which form important components of the movies’ publicity, exhibition, and reception. Like the movies themselves, this art also evolved through time, an evolution discernable in the posters included in the present volumes. Cartoons and other material objects about cinema demonstrate the wider circulation of things filmic among Iranians. The flyers announcing film screenings and cultural and political events featuring screenings served as important vehicles in exile for advertising, political agitprop, and film exhibition immediately after the revolution of 1978–79. They provide a good sense of the films, of the political culture of the time, and of the sponsoring groups. Finally, the many tables in the book offer other forms of data for the analysis of the films’ cultural contexts, such as audience demography, production output, film export and import, organizations involved in production, and the regulations concerning censorship and the banning of movies. Because of the diversity of sources and the deterioration of some films and videos, the quality of the pictorial illustrations varies.

A bbr e v i at ions

abf Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of

Human Rights and Democracy in Iran afrts American Forces Radio and Television aidfp Association of Iranian Documentary Film Producers (Anjoman-e Tahiyeh Konandegan-e Sinema-ye Mostanad-e Iran) aioc Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

api Anglo-Persian Institute



bbc British Broadcasting Corporation



bc British Council



bmf Basij Militia Force



cia Central Intelligence Agency, United States

cidcya Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults cuscf–Iran, 1945–49 Confidential United States Central Files on Iran’s Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1949 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication, 1981) cuscf–Iran, 1950–54 Confidential United States Central Files on Iran’s Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, 1950–1954 (Washington, DC: University Publication of America, 1958)

emb Empire Marketing Board (Britain)



faa Fine Arts Administration



fcf Farabi Cinema Foundation

fidci Film Industry Development Corporation of Iran

ff Filmfarsi (Farsi-language films) fhi Film House of Iran



fod Foundation of the Dispossessed (Boniad-e Mostazafan)



gfw Golestan Film Workshop



gpo General Post Office (Britain)



hoc House of Cinema (Khaneh-ye Sinema)



iatc Islamic Art and Thought Center (Howzeh-ye Andisheh va Honar-e Eslami), a division of the Islamic Propaganda Organization

idhec Institut des Hautes-Études Cinématographiques, Paris, France

ifvc International Film and Video Center

irgc Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah-e Pasdaran Eslami)

iri Islamic Republic of Iran irib Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (aka vvir)

isaus Iranian Student Association in the United States

isdf Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers (Anjoman Mostanadsazan-e Sinema-ye Iran)



mca Ministry of Culture and Art

mche Ministry of Culture and Higher Education mcig Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance mfh Makhmalbaf Film House

mfs Misaqiyeh Film Studio



mos Mithout (without) sound, filming without sound



mrc Ministry of Reconstruction Crusade (Jehad-e Sazandegi)



msf Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film (a monthly periodical)

mpaa Motion Picture Export Association of America nefc National Educational Film Circuit nfai National Film Archive of Iran

ngo Nongovernmental Organization

nioc National Iranian Oil Company nirt National Iranian Radio and Television opec Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries

pfc Progressive Filmmakers’ Cooperative (Kanun-e Sinemagaran-e Pishro) pfoi People’s Fadaian Organization of Iran

pmoi People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran pogo Public Opinion Guidance Organization (Sazman-e Parvaresh-e Afkar)

pov Point of view

rds–Iran, 1930–39 Records of the Department of States Relating to Internal Affairs of Iran, 1930–1939 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication, 1981) xxx

a bbrev i at ions

savak Sazman-e Amniat va Ettela’at-e Keshvar, Homeland Information and Security Organization

snh Society for National Heritage (Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli)

usia United States Information Agency

usis United States Information Service



voa Voice of America

voks All-Union Society for Cultural Relations (Soviet Union) vvir Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (aka irib)

a bbrevi at ions

xxxi

1 T he Resurgence of Nonfiction Cinem a Postrevolutionary Documentaries and Fiction War Films

I

n the decades since the revolution, nonfiction cinema underwent fundamental transformations, creating several new genres, though structural continuities in infrastructure did exist. Postrevolutionary fiction cinema benefited from the continuity of technical personnel and the reinstatement of new-­wave directors; postrevolutionary documentary cinema did not rely so much on experienced directors for its revival. Some documentarists had left the country: Ebrahim Golestan, Reza Allamehzadeh, Barbod Taheri, Parviz Kimiavi, and Manuchehr Tayyab (some later returned, such as Kimiavi and Tayyab). Those who stayed, such as Kamran Shirdel and Mohammad Tahaminejad, continued to make films for government agencies, major industries, and civic associations but many of their films—­almost all of Tahaminejad’s—­were banned. The resurgence of the documentary awaited new filmmakers, including women, and a generational change in the 1990s. Surprisingly, this resurgence was driven by three fiction filmmakers whose stylistic innovations in their documentaries proved influential across both cinemas. These were Abbas Kiarostami’s Problem, First Case . . . Second Case (Qazziyeh Shekl-­e Avval . . . Shekl-­e Dovvom, 1979), Kianush Ayyari’s Summer 1979 in Today’s Tehran: First Timers (Tabestan-­e 1358 dar Tehran-­e Emruz: Tazeh Nafasha, 1979), and Amir Naderi’s First Search (Jostoju-­ye Yek, 1980). Ayyari’s film is an important historical film as it presents documentary footage of the immediate postrevolution period when there was much fluidity and freedom, with street vendors displaying rows of books and pamphlets, young stand-­up comics accurately mimicking prerevolution enter-

tainers (Fereydoun Farrokhzad) or political leaders (the Shah) for a large and delighted audience, a sign outside a movie house asking customers not to bring weapons inside, people arguing about politics in the streets or lecturing the passersby, and unveiled women strolling and carrying out their business freely in public places. The other two films also contain valuable and historical documentary footage of the early postrevolution period mixed in with fictional elements. They inaugurated in the postrevolution era the mixing of fictional and nonfictional elements, began during the Pahlavi era, which became a hallmark of the art-­house films. Iranians in the diaspora turned to documentaries with a vengeance, producing scores of films, often focusing on their traumas of displacement and dramas of identity deformation, both personal and national. Both new and reinstated nonfiction filmmakers made many films supported by state-­r un institutions. These included the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (mcig) and its subsidiaries—­the Young People’s Cinema Society, the Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films, and the Farabi Cinema Foundation (fcf)—­as well as the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (cidcya) and the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir, aka irib). Major heavy industries, such as steel, automobile, oil, and gas, commissioned documentaries, as did the newly created Kish Island and Qeshm Island “free-­trade zones” in the Persian Gulf, which turned to documentaries to promote tourism. Many of these big industries were either wholly or partially state-­owned, increasing the government’s stake in, and control of, the documentary cinema. Independent documentarists, such as Khosrow Sinai, Ebrahim Mokhtari, Orod Attapour, Mahvash Sheik­holeslami, Pirooz Kalantari, Kamran Shirdel, Mohammad Tahaminejad, Farideh Shafai, Ramtin Lavafipour, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Mohammad Shirvani, Hosain Torabi, Mehr­dad Oskouei, and Rakhshan Banietemad worked freelance for both public and private organizations. But documentary cinema remained part of the state ideological apparatuses: funded primarily by the state and the big industries under state control, it also relied on television networks (now eight, all state-­ owned and state-­operated) to censor and screen its products. Nongovernmental and nonfestival outlets for documentary screening were few and small. The international circulation of documentaries lagged behind that of fiction, but it grew in the 2000s. Most of the top Pahlavi-­period documentaries gained fame not because they were shown widely but often precisely because they were not screened at all, or if so only at film festivals, university cine-­clubs, and foreign governments’ cultural societies. Inaccessibility and censorship conferred value. Sometimes the restrictions were due to the film’s critical intelligence, but not always. In the period of the Islamic Republic, the problem of inaccessibility was addressed by more than doubling of Persian-­language television channels, which in the 1980s showed many nonfiction programs about the social turmoil of revolution and the devastating war with Iraq. Censorship, however, remained both a prob2

T he G lobalizi ng Era

lem and a criterion for conferring value. As a form of constraint, censorship also encouraged creativity and innovation in theme, style, and narrative form. In the iri’s first decade, the eight-­year war with Iraq propelled the documentary into a major form, buttressed by the heavy investment of resources, personnel, broadcast time, and exhibition space by key state institutions, such as the vvir, the mcig, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc). Many of these films were more ideological and amateurish than artistic and professional. Documentary productions gained a measure of prestige, institutional vigor, heightened quality, thematic diversity, and increased output in the 1990s. The cultural openness brought on by the election in 1997 of Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami as the president, initiating the reform era, allowed documentary filmmakers to emerge from war wariness and dystopic inertia by producing critical and innovative films. Pivotal was also the establishment in 1997 of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers (isdf, Anjoman Mostanad Sazan­e Sinema-­ye Iran), a professional organization within the House of Cinema. Until that time, two dozen professional unions and societies had been registered at the House of Cinema, which worked to support professionals in the fiction-­film industry. Those making documentaries and animated films had been left out. The isdf was the first society that pushed for the recognition of the rights of documentary filmmakers, not only those working in the public sector but also those in the commercial and independent sectors. The society maintained an informative website.1 It organized domestic film festivals (including the Week of Iranian Documentary Cinema), and placed domestic documentaries in international film festivals.2 Its membership grew from 41 to 115 by 2005. Another association that helped professionalize the documentary industry was the Association of Iranian Documentary Film Producers (aidfp, ­Anjoman-­e Tahiyeh Konandegan-­e Sinema-­ye Mostanad-­e Iran). Created in 2000, its initial website stated that it aimed to “promote the business and art of documentary film production in a country where the cultural, social and political landscape had experienced one of the most overwhelming challenges of the last millennium.” 3 The hardening of the political atmosphere seems to have caused the aidfp to refine its own characterization, for its constitution in 2011 stated that aidfp is “a professional, nonprofit, nongovernmental entity that includes producers of film and television documentaries and operates under the laws of the Islamic Republic under the supervision of the House of Cinema. This Association does not belong to any political group, organization or party.” 4 Nevertheless, the aidfp’s mission remained the promotion and expansion of the documentary film industry at home and abroad, participation in devising appropriate cultural and financial policies governing the documentary field, raising the quality and quantity of documentary productions, and protecting the material and moral rights of its members. The aidfp held regular meetings, screened key foreign and Iranian documentaries, published a newsletter, and promoted and lobbied for the documentary cinema. To promote the education of its members, its website carried a T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

3

bibliography of the documentary books that have been translated and published. It is likely that the creation of these two professional entities bolstered the documentary field and increased publication of books on the documentary. Nonfiction cinema required serious government attention: this was indicated by the fact that in 2002 the mcig issued its first official pamphlet, like similar booklets for fiction cinema earlier, which spelled out the dos and don’ts governing documentary filmmaking.5 Local, regional, national, and international documentary festivals occurred not only in Tehran but also in other places, including on Kish Island. The technological revolution of the early twenty-­first century enabled a vital documentary cinema, as well as a new generation of young cinephiles. The ready availability of inexpensive but high-­quality production and editing equipment, such as Hi8 and digital cameras, and sophisticated desktop and laptop editing software both enhanced the quality of the films and encouraged bolder formal and thematic approaches to the documentary. The emergence of cell-phone cameras enhanced the spontaneity, mobility, and grittiness of documentaries, adding a haptic aura to them. Explosive personal and political issues, such as an increasing tendency toward the values of liberal democracy, secular modernity, and individualism, entered the purview of documentarists. As such, documentary cinema became a key purveyor and embodiment of modernism’s individuality. The emergence of the Internet, with its vast resources of information and connectivity as well as its gargantuan capacity for the posting, linking, exhibiting, distributing, archiving, marketing, blogging, uploading, downloading, and streaming of audiovisual materials opened hitherto unthinkable possibilities, expanding documentarists’ horizons far beyond domestic and niche markets. Despite government attempts to limit the use of the Internet, particularly during the retrenchment era of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Iranians of all kinds flocked to it, making Iran one of the most connected countries in the region. Iranian blogs also proliferated, some of them dealing with cinema. Like fiction cinema, documentary cinema became transnational. It took two forms: extraterritorial documentaries, filming outside the country by Iran-­ based filmmakers, particularly in the Middle East; and accented documentaries, production, coproduction, and exhibition of documentaries by Iranians in the diaspora. European broadcast, cable, and satellite television outlets were particularly receptive to both the coproduction and exhibition of documentaries, opening a vast potential resource to frustrated domestic filmmakers. The emerging ­Persian-language satellite tv channels operated by European and American governments, such as the bbc Persian Service and the Voice of America’s Persian News Network, offered further production and exhibition venues for Iranian documentarists inside Iran or outside. Foreign film festivals, particularly those in Europe and North America, at first showed Iranian fiction cinema and ignored documentaries. Yet several apparently contradictory factors helped internationalize the Iranian documentaries. The regular release of successful fiction 4

T he G lobalizi ng Era

movies raised foreign interest in Iranian society at large, which documentaries could satisfy. On the other hand, as Iranian fiction movies became somewhat repetitive, formulaic, and formalistic they began to lose their luster, making room for documentaries. The irony is that fiction cinema owed some of its luster to its nonfictional sources (see Kiarostami’s letter to Shirdel later in this chapter). At the same time, documentaries, particularly social-­problem films, underground films, and Internet films bent on exposing the underbelly of the Islamic Republic and on critiquing its treatment of women, homosexuals, ethnoreligious minorities, and dissidents countered the art cinema’s nonpolitical, aestheticized, and humanistic representations. Finally, documentaries entered the smaller but powerful international academic, museum, gallery, and cultural boutique markets.6 No doubt, this expansion into foreign markets will affect what documentaries will be made, as it did with fiction films, and it is likely to bring with it diverse charges of distorting Iranian reality, the peddling of exoticism to the first world, the washing of internal dirty laundry in full view of the international public, the undermining of the Islamist regime and aiding opposition, and the whitewashing of the Islamist regime’s crimes. In the 2000s, documentaries dealt unflinchingly with violations of individual rights, gender inequality, curbs on freedom of speech, manipulated elections, drug smuggling and addiction, torture, unemployment, housing problems, and political violence, as well as with explosive personal and even sexual issues, such as prostitution and violence against women. They did so not indirectly, as fiction cinema tended to do, but directly, boldly, and critically, resulting in a complex typology of forms. News films and amateur films of the revolution, compilation and historical documentaries about the revolution, sectarian films by antigovernment groups and ethnoreligious minorities, biographical documentaries, underground documentaries, accented documentaries by Iranians in the diaspora, documentaries on the eight-­year war with Iraq, wartime city films, electoral campaign documentaries, social protest documentaries, ethnographic films, arts and crafts documentaries (including those about film), student documentaries, and Internet films are some of the types of documentaries identified and discussed in this and other chapters in this volume. Their high quantity and the professionalization of the documentary through its civic society formations helped build a documentary film culture with its own literature and publications, including informative websites.7

The Sacred Defense War Movies The war with Iraq, officially dubbed the “sacred defense war” or the “Iraqi-­ imposed war,” produced the “sacred defense cinema” (sinema-­ye defa’-­e moqaddas) or the “imposed war cinema” (sinema-­ye jang-­e tahmili). War documentaries and feature fiction war movies are covered here. T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

5

Iraq officially invaded Iran in September 1980, an event that was charged with powerful historical and religious symbolisms from the early Islamic era, with crucial repercussions for Iranian and Iraqi national and religious identities.8 Iranian Shiites trace their primordial moment of identity back to the murder of Imam Hosain in Karbala, Iraq, at the hands of Sunni Arab caliphs in the seventh century. The war between Shiite-­dominated Iran and Sunni-­ run Iraq paralleled this story in ways that the Iranian government—­as well as filmmakers—­used, or abused, fully. Although the war could have ended in mid 1982 when Iraqi forces retreated from their last stronghold inside Iran, the Islamic Republic leadership did not agree; considering the war a blessing and an opportunity to consolidate their control over the postrevolution society, they pursued the war relentlessly, resulting in massive destruction, loss of life, and trauma. War documentaries and fiction war movies both stereotyped Iraqi soldiers, but they did not use the anti-­Arab racism typical of Pahlavi-­ period films; they saved their venom for Saddam Hussein. The literature of the immediate postrevolutionary period exhibited a similar tendency (Karimi-­ Hakkak 1983:174). The motive may have been the possibility of pan-­Islamic reconciliation—­something that the subsequent U.S.-­led invasion and the toppling of Hussein and the occupation of Iraq destroyed. But all the war films contained trauma narratives about the losses and destructions of war and of childhood, loved ones, homes, hometowns, and homeland. The compulsion to repeat in these films is commensurate with the depth of the loss and its repression. At the same time, by featuring the technology, machinery, planning, strate­ gies, and tactics of war, the sheer destructiveness of war machinery and firepower, and the speed, noise, disruption, and movement characteristic of battle­fields, the war movies—­documentary and fictional alike—­inscribed and pro­jected modernity and its attributes. By focusing on the psychology of individual soldiers, martyrs, and the wounded, and their families, they inscribed and encouraged modern subjectivities, even if in some cases these were configured as collective or sacred subjectivities. Finally, war modernized and enhanced the film industry’s capacities for specialized cinematography (aerial and underwater filming), for mise-­en-­scène (war-­related set design, props, décor), and for creating special effects (demolition and explosion). The construction of the Sacred War Movie Town near Tehran further facilitated war-­related filming (Jahed 2010). Soon after Hussein’s invasion, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a total mobilization of all social sectors for war, which he marshaled into further consolidation of the Islamists’ rule. Because of the shortage of both raw stock and funds, it took the mcig and the private sector some time to mobilize the film industry. The Foundation of the Dispossessed (fod), the Basij Corps, and the Islamic Art and Thought Center of the Islamic Propaganda Organization redirected their resources to covering the war. The mcig and the fcf sent crews to the front, and the vvir created war units for its newscasts and documentary programs. Attempts were made to screen war films at the front. The 6

T he G lobalizi ng Era

Table 1 Organizations contributing films to the Imposed War Film Festival, 1983 Producing Organization Voice and Vision (tv networks)

Documentary

Fiction

14

2

Armed Forces’ Ideological-Political Bureau

1

0

Islamic Propaganda Organization

2

0

Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults

3

1

Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance

0

2

Islamic Center for Artistic and Cinematic Studies

0

2

Islamic Center for Amateur Filmmaking

0

2

Revolutionary Guards tv Unit

2

0

War Propaganda Organization

1

0

Islamic Art and Thought Bureau

1

0

Private Sector

0

2

24

11

Total Source: Adapted from Nuri and Ashuri 1983

mcig’s mobile film units showed shorts, documentaries, and features to the fighters. In Ahvaz, the fod opened the Praise the Lord Jerusalem Cinema (Cinema-­ye Salavati-­ye Qods), where spectators watched films free of charge, and whose opening film was Shahriar Bohrani’s Flag Bearer (Parchamdar, 1984). The plan was to screen two to three sessions of war movies daily, during which the spectators were required to utter aloud the praise-­the-­Lord formula called salavat (hence the name of the cinema).9 The first feature films about the war, Iraj Qaderi’s Living in Purgatory (Barza­ khiha, 1980)—­with the highest box-­office sales in Iranian cinema up to that time, selling 1 million tomans’ worth of tickets a day—­and Jamshid Haidari’s Border (Marz, 1981), were private-­sector films, but the public sector produced the lion’s share of war movies. The first government-­supported fiction war movie was The Fifth Kilometer (Kilometr-­e 5, 1982), which Hojatollah Saifi directed for the mcig. During the long war, fifty-­six features were made, most concentrating on military operations, while a few focused on the war’s social and psychological toll. By 1990, two years after the cease-­fire, this number had increased to seventy-­four feature movies (Dorri Akhavi 1992:13), and by 2000 there were two hundred (Saifollah Dad, quoted in Farasati 2000c/1379:461).10 By the mid-­ 1990s, seventy directors had made at least one war film. One-­quarter of the film industry’s output was war-­oriented.11 Governmental and paragovernmental organizations supported both fiction and nonfiction war films. Table 1 lists the organizations whose films were T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

7

screened at the Imposed War Film Festival of 1983 in Tehran, which became an annual event, and the number and types of films shown (they were shown at the Azadi Cinema). These ranged from feature-­length to short films and from fiction films to documentaries—­although documentaries clearly dominated. The winners of the Best Film awards in 1983 were Saifi’s The Fifth Kilometer and Mohammad Reza Eslamlu’s short film Abadan, the Innocent City (Abadan, Shahr-­e Mazlum, 1982). At the festival’s conclusion, the jury declared that unlike foreign war documentarists who focused on materialistic and militaristic aspects of wars, Iranian filmmakers had chosen to reveal the “love, sacrifice, and resistance” of the war.12 This reflected only the official view, for neither film-­ industry professionals nor spectators shared it. The authoritative film journal Mahnameh-­ye Sinemai-­ye Film, for example, noted that while Italian filmmakers had created highly authentic neorealist cinema under war conditions, Iranian cineastes were “concentrating on phony war adventures, sensationalism, and superficial sloganeering to encourage the war effort.” 13 That audiences were turned off of these films’ low quality and strident rhetoric was evident from both their low turnout and their walkouts at the war film festival screenings in 1982. The reduced number of films entered into the 1984 festival indicates the filmmakers’ low interest in war films. Compared to thirty-­five films in the 1983 festival (twenty-­four documentaries and eleven fiction films), only twenty-­one films were screened in 1984 (fifteen documentaries and shorts and six fiction films). Some of the films were not new and half of them had been screened in the Fajr International Film Festival. The failure of war movies seems clear. Finally, the quality of the films in 1984 was so low that the jury refused to select a best film or to grant a prize to any film.14 There are many reasons for the poor quality. Most of the directors of war films were young and inexperienced. Making war movies constituted their training. The movies concentrated on the fighting and disregarded the home front. They missed chances to tell individual war soldiers’ and commanders’ dramatic life stories and failed to recount decisive war operations, such as the siege of Abadan or the defeat of the enemy in Khorramshahr (Farasati 2004/1382:14). The diversity of governmental and paragovernmental organizations supporting war movies demonstrates the state’s impact in overdetermining the official war culture nationwide. A vast “war culture industry” produced and marketed a plethora of plays, musical recordings, journalism, television and radio programs, poetry, slogans, literature, visual arts, photography, documentary films, fiction movies, celebration and mourning rituals, wall graffiti, postage stamps, and even jokes, which in turn celebrated and commemorated the war and its heroes and victims, generally the leaders of the Islamic Republic and Iranian fighters, and criticized and condemned the perpetrators of the war, generally Hussein and his U.S. supporters. Sometimes the low-­end, unofficial, vernacular, and populist arts (slogans, graffiti, and jokes) took a jab at the authorities as 8

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well. The war lasted eight years (1980–88), reportedly causing more than 1 million casualties and billions of dollars of damage on both sides, during which this culture of war both deepened and evolved. There were some independent documentaries about the war, but these did not deal much with the war front, for they would have required government approval and aid. Instead, they tended to focus on the home front, such as U.S.-­based anthropologist Roxanne Varzi’s thirty-­three-­minute documentary Plastic Flowers Never Die (2008), about the culture of death and martyrdom during war years.

Official War Documentaries In place of the suppressed oppositional documentaries a new “official documentary cinema” developed, which like the Pahlavi-­era official documentaries upheld the dominant state ideology with its specific production mode and aesthetics. Like its predecessor, this cinema was supported by various governmental and paragovernmental agencies. That these agencies produced thirty-­three of the thirty-­five films in table 1 demonstrates the significant part that the state played in propagating the war culture and its official style in its early phase. The state played this part not only due to its control of military and coercive forces but also because of its control and funding of society’s signifying institutions, which were thus deeply committed to propagating Islamicate values and the official government ideology, instead of responding to authorial urges, generic and aesthetic considerations, market forces, industry exigencies, and specta­ torial reactions. With fourteen of the twenty-­four documentaries to its credit, the vvir was the engine of war-­film culture. This is no surprise, as the broadcast networks were under direct control of the Supreme Leader and they operated several documentary and news film divisions devoted to covering the war front regularly. The vvir’s various channels produced and aired many documentaries about the war, theirs or others, too many to discuss here individually. However, the production mode and aesthetics of two of its major units—­Forty Witnesses and Jihad Television—­were uniquely Iranian and Shiite, worthy of a fuller analysis.15

The Forty Witnesses (Chehel Shahed) Film Unit This was a novel war-­related entity formed in conjunction with Operation Al-­ Fath in early 1982 within the volunteer Basij Corps, a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (irgc), spearheaded by Akbar Ureh’i, who had a degree in sociology. Forty Witnesses was one unit of many within the War Propaganda Command; it began with forty cameramen. It retained the original Forty Witnesses name even though numbers fluctuated. Unit members were male high school students, particularly from the Union of Islamic Societies (­Etehadiyeh-­ye T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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Anjomanha-­ye Eslami), some of whom had never seen a film camera. After about twelve hours of training they were sent to the front to film, using Super 8 equipment (some 16mm and video footage was also shot). If they were short in both general education and film education, they were supercharged with Shiite faith, Islamicate values, youthful idealism, and the belief that “their cameras were more effective than weapons.” 16 They were truly “embedded” into their assigned military units, sharing soldiers’ sleeping quarters and meals, and while their comrades fought with weapons, they filmed them with cameras (Farasati 2000c/1379:110). Both the cameramen and the militia volunteered for the war and for each specific mission. Their object was less making films than documenting the war. As the professor of documentary film Mohammad Shahba stated in an interview with me, members of the Forty Witnesses “did not consider themselves documentary filmmakers; they were fighters who instead of weapons carried Super 8 cameras; they were eyewitnesses to the war, who followed a fighting unit and were members of that unit” (Naficy 2005j). In at least two cases the duties merged. A cameraman known as Ramesh used his Éclair camera like a weapon to capture an Iraqi soldier in the Fath al-­Mobin Operation, and the cameraman Mohammad Davudi abandoned his equipment and took up a rocket-­propelled grenade launcher and stayed at the front to fight (Tahaminejad 2000/1379:139). This tight relationship had a decisive impact on the resulting footage and their point of view, which centered on scenes of action, killing, and dying. While such footage was valuable, it was insufficient from a larger historical perspective. Asadollah Niknejad and Mehrdad Kashani, vvir filmmakers who for a while instructed the Forty Witnesses members in filmmaking, attempted to correct this shortcoming, as they explained to me in an interview: “We asked them not to limit themselves to these action scenes, for the primary aim of war films is a historical one. After the end of the war, history will want to know what happened, where it happened, who was involved, and when it happened. We taught them to cover the contextual issues and to take notes and identify what they were filming. We wanted them not to deal with the war emotionally, but rationally; instead of filming the jets bombing, we wanted them to concentrate on the victims and on the consequences” (Naficy 1987b). Accompanied by an assistant, who carried both a machine gun and a supply of film, each cameraman-­w itness showed great individual initiative and bravery in covering the front. According to Seyyed Mohammad Ali Shaikh al-­Eslami, the head of Forty Witnesses in the early 1990s, the resulting footage and accompanying sounds were not of the highest quality; they were rough, like documents written with a shaky hand. Nevertheless, they constituted important eyewitness accounts of an unjust war (quoted in Farasati 2000c/1379:111). The footage was sent to the Basij militia headquarters for processing, and it is unlikely that many of the crew members saw the rushes they filmed in the war. To ensure the security of missions, not much of the vast amount of footage was 10

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turned into completed films or shown publicly. However, it was screened privately to some military units and authorities. Apparently, the conditions under which this footage is stored are dismal and it is fast deteriorating (Sadri 1995/1374:44). That the original Super 8 stock was positive (with no negative original) meant that any screening of the footage damaged the original. Unless the Super 8 footage is transferred to a more current format, or to internegative stock, or digitized, its usability will diminish further. The war took its toll on the young filmmakers: by mid-­1984, eight boys had been killed, with one declared as missing, adding to the growing number of filmmakers, photographers, and journalists who perished in action.17 By February 1988, near the end of the war, at least ten cameramen had been declared “martyred” on the front or “missing in action.” Despite these losses, their number remained at least forty as new recruits—­or “enamored lovers,” as Ettela’at called them—­replaced the fallen comrades.18 One film assembled from the Forty Witnesses output was Muharram in Muharram (Moharram dar Moharram, 1983), about a military operation in 1982, called Moharram, which took place during the sacred month of Muharram. Niknejad and Kashani directed the film, whose editing took an inordinate amount of time, some eight months, as the footage, by many amateurs, had not been shot with the intention of putting a film together. A compilation war film, Muharram in Muharram begins with photos of the Forty Witnesses “martyrs,” which link the Iran-­Iraq war dead to the martyrdom of Imam Hosain at Karbala, an event whose anniversary is celebrated and mourned annually during Muharram.19 The film emphasizes this by intercutting the scenes of the current war with Iraq with the taziyeh passion-­play reenactments of the events of Karbala. Another film was Forty Witnesses, the Second Narrative: Liberation of Khorramshahr (Chehel Shahed, Ravayat-­e Dovvom: Azadi-­ye Khorramshahr, 1983), which documents the Baitolmoqaddas Operation that led to the liberation of the Persian Gulf city of Khorramshahr from Iraqi hands.20 While the war naturally raised the output of war-­related movies, it actually had a dampening effect on the film industry as a whole by interfering with nonwar movies and with film distribution and exhibition. During a period of heated combat in 1980, blackouts reduced screenings in commercial cinemas from five to two per day. Air-­raid warnings evacuated movie houses, sometimes without compensation to customers. These factors made it uneconomical to produce new movies unrelated to the war or to import new foreign movies. The resultant recycling of old movies fed into the downward spiral of quality and the upward spiral of disenchantment. Film exhibition improved whenever missile threats on cities decreased but plummeted when the threat shot up. The banning of foreign movies, however, had the felicitous effect of pushing producers to invest in domestic productions.21 The other development of note regarding war cinema was the rise of two Is­ lamically committed filmmakers who produced a range of war-­related films that T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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1 Willingness to die for the cause was a criterion for Jihad tv. Morteza Avini holding the camera, in a frame from an episode of the Chronicle of Victory called “Headless in the Alley of Love.” Frame enlargement.

were of high quality, both in style and thought, and who proved to be politically and cinematically influential. These were the most prominent filmmakers of official cinema, one a documentarian, Seyyed Morteza Avini, working for the vvir, the other a fiction-­film director, Ebrahim Hatamikia.

Jihad Television, Seyyed Morteza Avini, and the Chronicle of Victory Series Avini (1926–1993), a renowned filmmaker and theoretician of “Islamic cinema,” headed Jihad Television’s documentary film unit, cosponsored by the vvir’s First Channel Network and the Reconstruction Crusade. This in-­between status was fecund, Avini testified. He stated that if it were not for this “suspended position” between the two organizations, which freed Jihad tv personnel both from the television networks’ bureaucracy and from the Reconstruction Crusade’s rural-­development orientation, “none of the films about the war that were made by this unit would have been made.” Along with the advantages of interstitiality came certain liabilities, however, such as a lack of full official recognition and appreciation of Jihad tv’s work. As Avini told it, personnel came to the unit not because they were assigned, or to earn more, but because they were fired by the same revolutionary ardor that motivated frontline fighters. Their primary motivation was ideological: “If they were not willing to die, the best film directors of the world could not be useful to, or be respected by, us” (Avini 1992b:41). His own brief life exemplified the spirituality of and receptivity to martyrdom that he admired and preached (figure 1).

Modern Subjectivity versus Sacred Subjectivity Martyrdom—­self-­sacrifice for the collective or religious good; self-­annihilation, immersion, and union of the self with God or with a beloved—­all of these seem contrary to modernity’s individuality. Individuality in its Western sense “does not exist in Islamic mysticism” because humans are “never separated from God 12

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2 Immersive subjectivity and camaraderie between soldiers and cameramen on the Iraqi war front, from an episode of Chronicle of Victory. Frame enlargement.

and never obtain an independent and distinct identity of their own” (Arjomand 1997/1376:23). They acquire their identity through their worship of the beloved. The cinema that came closest to an Islamicate cinema in these terms was war cinema, the best of which, particularly the work of Avini, Hatamikia, Rasul Mollaqolipur, and Kamal Tabrizi, attempted both to depict and to embody an immersive “sacred” subjectivity.22 Born in the town of Rey in Tehran’s poor South End, Avini received a master’s in architecture from Tehran University, during which time he also wrote stories and poems. With the start of the revolution, however, he gave up writing: “I threw all my writings, from philosophical writings to short stories to poems, in a few gunnysacks and burned them, for I had decided never to write another ‘auto’ biographical work, never to speak about my ‘self’ again. I attempted to annihilate my ‘self,’ so that all that remained would be God. I am thankful that I remained steadfast.” This dissolution of the self also problematizes authorship and auteur theory, another core concept of modernity, a problem Avini approached in the following fashion. “Of course, anything that an author writes emanates from inside. All arts are this way. Likewise, a film is the result of the filmmaker’s inspiration. However, if one entirely immerses oneself in God, then God will inspire his works and appear in them. That is my goal, not my claim.” 23 Authorship is thus immersive, always already collective, not individualistic. Because of its philosophical and mystical underpinnings, some consider Avini’s films to constitute a “cinema of illumination” (Madadpur 2005/1384). An episode of Avini’s documentary war series Chronicle of Victory, entitled “Oshlu” (1987, directed by Avini), demonstrates such immersive sacred subjectivity and collective identity that are conducive to martyrdom. It deals with the various “martyrs” of the Al-­Mahdi Army who fought in the Valfajr operations, including the Karbala 4 Operation. In one sequence, the camera focuses on a group of teenage soldiers eating a meal in a dirt field (figure 2). Soon, this simple, worldly scene is transformed into a powerful philosophical one. The boys smile and playfully talk in their Isfahani accent with the cameraman-­interviewer, when one soldier asks him not to film him, “because T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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3 The opening title of an episode of Chronicle of Victory called “Operation Valfajr 8.” In the background, a young Muslim chanter, following the oral narrative tradition, repeatedly chants: “Hosain, Janha fadayat (Hosain, we sacrifice our lives for you).” The series’ title, Chronicle of Victory/ Ravayat-e Fath, is superimposed on his image. Frame enlargement.

when my mom sees it on tv, she will cry.” Another soldier decides to mock television reporters by taking up a microphone and trying to interview his cohorts. However, one by one, they shy away, evade answering, and refuse to become the object of attention. The narrator (Avini) intones that these youngsters do not want to be set apart because they are here to sacrifice themselves for the collective and for their faith (as the Persian saying goes, they are here to “surpass themselves”). In another sequence, the mother and wife of the “martyr” Kazem Nazempur are interviewed; they say he was so humble and self-­effacing that they did not know what he did in the war. Every time they inquired, he refused to elaborate, merely admitting that he was a Basij volunteer. Only after his death did they learn that he had been a valuable and high-­ranking commander. Many of the Chronicle of Victory films identify those who were killed on the screen and refer to them in their narration as “martyrs.” Thus elevated to the highest level of human spiritual achievement, it is no longer possible to show these characters as weak or hesitant, or to show them evolving—­another hallmark of modern subjectivity. Even if the filmmakers were inclined to show these psychological states, they are disarmed by the fact of martyrdom. This fed into the wartime tendency to stereotype, in documentaries as well as in features (in the war films after the end of the war, more variation crept in). Jihad tv was productive. In ten years it produced for national broadcast a massive series of half-­hour films collectively called the Chronicle of Victory (Ravayat-­e Fath). Aired in five series from 1985 to 1992, each series contained between eleven and fourteen films (figure 3). Avini directed, wrote the narration, edited, and read the voice-­overs of about half of the total series.24 In addition, Jihad tv produced series about rebellions inside Iran, such as Six Days in Turkmen Sahra (Shesh Ruz dar Torkaman Sahra, 1980), about the Turkmen rebellion in the north; Hand-­Picked by the Khans (Khan Gozidehha, 1980), in six parts directed by Avini, about the oppression of Qashqai tribes in the southwest by their chiefs Naser Khan and Khosrow Khan, who were allegedly colluding with foreign powers to destabilize the iri regime; Triumph of Blood (Fath-­e Khun, 1981), a three-­part film about the war of cities; and Truth (Haqiqat, 1985), an eleven-­ 14

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part series about the first two years of the war with Iraq in Abadan, Susangerd, and Dezful. Finally, the unit made films and television series about Islamic movements outside Iran, such as Mirage (Sarab, 1991), a twenty-­part series about Lebanese youths’ revitalized interest in Shiite Islam, and The Revolution of Stones (Enqelab-­e Sang), about the first Palestinian intifada against the Israelis (Avini 1997/1375; 1992b). These extraterritorial topics demonstrate the extent to which the Chronicle of Victory was a product of official cinema, for support of Palestinian independence and opposition to the Israeli oppression of Palestinians and Arab Jews were both pillars of the Iranian regime’s foreign policy. Jihad tv’s production personnel came from various Islamist institutions, among which were the Reconstruction Crusade, the irgc, the Basij Corps, and First Network Television. According to the cameraman Mostafa Dalai, each film unit consisted of between three and six members, and each military operation was assigned from one to six such units. His description of the Islamic ardor that drove the members, particularly the soundman Reza Moradinasab, who was killed in Operation Karbala 5, corroborates Avini’s analysis of the importance of selfless passion and faith. He [Moradinasab] was only one example of the type of dedicated people I worked with. I was very close to this man, and he was truly full of ardor. . . . During military operations, he was so excited that he could no longer fit inside his own skin. When I was working with him I was both enthusiastic and apprehensive. I was enthusiastic because his excitement energized me to follow him; I was apprehensive because I worried that I might come up short and be left behind by him. Finally, when we were on the Island of Bovarin, God chose him for martyrdom. Everyone was within range of the enemy bullets, but none received even a scratch while he received four bullets. (Farasati 2000c/1379:118)25 Filming went on without much prior planning; filmmakers covered the front as it evolved. This is evident in frequent scenes in which the camera roams around as though looking for things to film or in scenes in which it is clearly waiting for something to happen—­something to start, to go off, to blow up—­ but missing it when it happens, because it occurs too suddenly. The visual meandering and waiting are echoed by verbal chaos in the voice-­overs. There is a sense in some of the films, such as in Headless in the Alley of Love (Sarbakhteh dar Ku-­ye Eshq), an episode of Avini’s At the Pinnacle of the Victorious Mountain (Bar Setiq-­e Jebal-­e Fath, 1987), that the film could have ended in several earlier places, but that somehow it got a second and a third wind to continue on. Later narration sometimes repeats earlier narrations. Repetition may be due to the chaos of production or to sermon-­based aesthetics. The Jihad Television unit also made linear films covering an entire military operation from preparation to conclusion. For example, The Road (Jaddeh, 1986), directed by Avini, focuses on the third day of an operation to fill in a swamp T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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to make a military road.26 It shows Reconstruction Crusade members—­from teens to a fifty-­five-­year-­old man—­operating bulldozers, backhoes, and trucks for twenty-­four relentless hours to transform the swamp, ending with the completed road at sunrise. The films do not generally use maps, diagrams, or aerial imagery for battlefield views, so perspectives are limited, even claustrophobic, even though most of the footage is of open field and desert engagements. Early on, the Chronicle of Victory was filmed on 16mm reversal stock, but by 1987, when the front had moved to Iraqi Kurdistan with its snowy, rugged mountains and fierce fighting, which required agility and mobility, the cameramen shifted to video as the primary format. Éclair cameras and Nagra tape recorders gave way to Handycams. Regular unit members were a cameraman-­ director-­interviewer, an assistant cameraman, a soundman, and, in later years, a still photographer. The stills that unit photographers took were incorporated into the resulting documentaries, adding aesthetic punctuation to moving images. Often the editor was someone not involved in filming. The marks of television news reportage—­hand microphones, news questions by in-­frame reporters—­were minimized, as were news-­camera moves like zoom-­ins. The idea was for the cameraman to become one with the subject, as part of the politics and poetics of a collective, sacred subjectivity. The Road contains such interviews with Reconstruction Crusade workers: the (unseen) friendly director-­ cameraman asks his questions using intimate forms of address, asking workers where they are from, what they are doing, why they are in the war, and how they are feeling about what they are doing. Invariably, the answers are couched in religious and ideological terms, suturing them to a collective identity with Shiite martyrs in the Karbala paradigm. Rarely do they speak in the personal terms of a modern individual. The interviewer bids them farewell like a friend. The interviewer-­cameraman and the unseen narrator refer to workers and soldiers as “kids” (bachehha), a term of endearment and familiarity whose closest (unsatisfactory) English equivalent is “guys.” As the camera passes, fighters and workers wave and smile, as though to a friend. Rituals of hospitality abound. When the crew had more time, as when filming the series Hand-­Picked by the Khans, crew members walked around town holding up cameras and tape recorders without filming, to acclimatize the population to the crew’s presence. This familiarity put the tribespeople at ease when they faced the cameras to recount the terrible things their leaders (khans) had allegedly done to them. Here is Avini’s touching description of what followed; it underscores the ideal of identification of the film crew with its subjects as part of cinematic sacred subjectivity, which erases journalistic objectivity: “They came one by one toward the camera and spoke, shouted, and cried. The camera turned and faced another person who was also shouting and complaining of his pains and suffering. The cameraman was also weeping, his tears streaming down his cheeks from behind his viewfinder; likewise, the soundman was crying as he held the microphone toward the speakers; Gholamabbas Malekmakan [the photographer?] had 16

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lost his composure [and] had taken refuge [at] a wall nearby and was striking his own head from sorrow; I, too, was crying, while the scene continued to unfold” (Avini 1992b:42). In smaller film units, the cameramen had a difficult task as they had to nimbly cover the unfolding action, think like a director in terms of shooting strategy, and conduct interviews with subjects, often during fighting. Out of necessity and to enhance realism, much of the footage was filmed handheld and in synch sound. A huge and historically valuable archive was collected. The Chronicle of Victory’s voice-­over narration, which interrupts the cacophony of bullets, machine guns, grenade launchers, helicopters, fighter jets, and tanks, as well as military music, generally gives little information about the specifics of the military operation, the personnel involved, location, or time—­ perhaps partly for security reasons. However, it is suffused with Islamic and Shiite rhetorical devices, personalities, mythology, and philosophy, using a poetic Persian language that elevates mundane acts to acts of transcendence and faith. Mehrzad Karimabadi aptly characterizes Avini’s voice-­over narration of the series as a “manifesto of martyrdom” (2011:381). In Operation Valfajr 8 (Valfajr 8, 1986), directed by Avini, an episode of the Chronicle of Victory devoted to the battle of Iranian foot soldiers armed with only machine guns and shoulder-­ fired, rocket-­propelled grenade launchers against Iraqi armored tanks, a man is bulldozing the earth to create a defensive ramp, while others are digging a trench with small hand shovels. The voice-­over, read emotionally by Avini, states: “Seated on a mountain of iron, he is moving the earth. Unless you become one with the soil, you cannot reach the height of transcendence. They are building the future of the human race, a future that is inspired by God.” In the night sequence of The Road, throughout which workers toil in darkness, the narrator intones: “Rational thought tells you that night is for sleep; however, love tells you to remain awake in the path of God, so that your soul will become one with the Almighty. How can you sleep when the warm blood of Imam Hosain is boiling up from the desert of Karbala, beckoning you?” In another sequence, the narrator analogizes the road to the trunk of a tree that is necessary for its life. Using a plural adjective that implicates the viewers, he concludes the film: “The road carries life’s blood in its veins to nourish the body of the army of love, so that the branches, leaves, and flowers of Islam are kept alive. Our roots are in the soil of faith and our trunks are our roads. The future is ours.” Unlike the other Iranian movies about the war and some of the art-­house films, which were given to the exploration of the physical and phenomenological world of the senses (Abecassis 2011), the Chronicle of Victory series tended to be metaphysical and abstract, particularly because of Avini’s voice-­over. Many Chronicle of Victory films, such as Operation Valfajr 8 and The Road, follow the form and structure of a religious sermon (rowzeh), showing how Shiite performance traditions have influenced the films. They begin and end with religious chanting by a cantor who is echoed by passing groups of soldiers, Basij volunteers, or members of the Reconstruction Crusade. While repeating his T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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chants they also rhythmically beat themselves, creating a religiously and emotionally powerful scene. Sometimes, these moments are followed by scenes of sorrow or jubilation in which mothers and fathers see off their young sons going to war, kissing and hugging them or exhorting them to martyrdom. In one scene in Operation Valfajr 8, a Basij volunteer marching with his chanting cohorts through the streets on their way to war carries an infant in his arms (presumably his own); while in another, a mother holding an infant with a Basij bandanna around his forehead cheers them on. Emotional scenes of disabled fighters (janbazan), some with missing arms or legs, meeting up with each other or bidding each other farewell, are also frequent, as are scenes of camaraderie, the sharing of water and oranges, and the caring for the wounded and the dead, accompanied by poetic and staccato voice-­over narration that like religious sermons makes frequent allusions to Shiite martyrdom and mythology. The opening sequence of part one of Avini’s At the Pinnacle of the Victorious Mountain, called Headless in the Alley of Love, is essentially a dynamic military music video that, invoking Imam Hosain’s martyrdom in Karbala, urges martyrdom in the current war in defense of Islam. The soundtrack is provided by the chants of a young bearded Muslim cantor whose refrain is “Hosain, we sacrifice our lives for you” (Hosain, janha fadayat). Throngs of male soldiers and Basij volunteers, who form circles and rhythmically beat their chests with two hands, punctuate his chant. Fighters shoot grenades from their rpg launchers, men tie red bandannas of martyrdom around infants’ foreheads, one bandanna-­ wearing child carries a grenade, another an rpg launcher, men pray in the fields of war, soldiers crawl like snakes in the mud, Iranian flags wave in the air, men say farewell to each other, and marching women carry flags and babies (figure 4). The staccato cutting of these scenes comes to rest on a large placard that reads: “To our last member, to our last way station, and to our last drop of blood we will fight for God’s words.” The whole opening music video comes to a close with the rousing speech of a woman marcher in a black chador who states that she wishes Imam Hosain were here to see “how full of love these kids go to war.” Then, with her voice rising, she declaims: “As long as there is a

4 In Headless in the Alley of Love a child appears to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Frame enlargement.

18

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two-­month-­old baby alive in Iran, we will defend Islam . . . We will punch the super­powers of the world so hard across the mouth that none of them could rise again.” A barrage of weapon firings that burst into pockets of light brings the video to an end. The film that follows concentrates on the self-­sacrifice of the soldiers of the Al-­Mahdi Army fighting in Operation Karbala 5. The charismatic commander Khalil Mottaharnia is seen displaying poise and quiet bravery under fire; his dead body in the end is found seated, but without a head—­hence the title of the film. Avini’s voice-­over thus eulogizes him: “If there be no martyrs, the sun will not rise and the winter will not end. If there be no martyrs, tear ducts will dry up and hearts will turn into stone. . . . If there be no martyrs, Satan will forever reign triumphant.” In its montage of war footage and hardware, along with religious chanting and propaganda, the opening sequence of Headless in the Alley of Love fuses modernity’s technological hardware and speed with countermodernity’s sacred subjectivity. In some ways, this combination resembles what, in discussing the videos of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (pmoi), I called “militia music videos” (Naficy 2002a). A difference, of course, is that Avini’s music video is a pro-­government work, while the pmoi’s opposes the Islamic Republic (figure 5). Avini himself traveled to the front and made Jihad tv films; he also trained film crews ideologically and technically, and he wrote about cinema from a religious viewpoint. In addition, he edited an arts quarterly, Sureh, from 1990 to 1992, which covered cinema. At least seven Jihad tv crewmembers, including Avini, were killed in action. He was killed in April 1993 in Fakeh, Khuzestan, site of some of the deadliest battles.27 He stepped on a mine, losing first one leg and then, on the way to the hospital, his life. Jihad tv and the Chronicle of Victory, as a production unit and a program series, continued to operate for years

5 Headless in the Alley of Love opens with a spectacular “militia music video.” Frame enlargement.

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after the war and after Avini. At war’s end, Avini founded Chronicle Foundation (Bonyad-­e Ravayat), which became an umbrella organization for many other cultural institutions in the country devoted to producing and disseminating war-related cultural material and films. These included Center for the Cinematic Arts of the Revolution and the Sacred Defense (Markaz-­e Honarhay-­e Sinema-­ye Enqelab va Defa’e Moqaddas); The Revolution and Sacred Defense Film Center (Markaz-­e Sinema-­ye Enqelab va Defa’e Moqaddas); and The Revo­ lution and Sacred Defense Film Association (Anjoman-­e Cinema-­ye Enqelab va Defa’e Moqaddas). A massive studio and backlot dubbed the “City of the Sacred Defense Cinema” was established off the Tehran-­Qom highway, where all war films were shot, as well as popular television series about historical periods. According to Narges Bajoghli, an anthropologist researching war movies and the Basij, these institutions received “further funding and political clout” from the irgc and the Basij “to propagate narratives about the war and its values” (Naficy 2011). The City of the Sacred Defense Cinema was not only funded but also guarded by the irgc and the Basij because it held weaponry from the Iran-­Iraq War. Other centers under the Chronicle Foundation’s umbrella included the Revolution and Sacred Defense’s Theater Association (Anjoman-­e Teatr-­e Enqelab va Defa’e Moqaddas) and the Chronicle of Victory Institute (­Moasseseh-­ye ­Ravayat-­e Fath) in Tehran (managed by Avini’s brother), which housed the archive of Avini’s film crew. In addition to archiving, the latter institute enshrined Avini as a martyr, published his works posthumously, taught film and other arts, and distributed his films and books about the war.28 Iraqi war movies had an ambiguous, even contradictory, relation to the modern. By encouraging the dissolution of individuals into a collective identity of soldiers, martyrs, and living martyrs (disabled veterans) fighting for Islam and the homeland, these films were countermodernist in the best, idealized sense. On the other hand, in their emphasis on massive industrialized killing, on metal, noise, movement, speed, and planning, they embodied modernity at its most deadly. Theoretically, spectators tapped into both masochistic and sadistic scopophilia. Spectators could identify with the heroic fighters, most of them very young boys, and with their selfless actions, terrible hardships, and mutilated bodies. On the other hand, they may have drawn aberrant, sadistic pleasure by identifying with the perpetrators of mutilation and violence. The first form was dominant as most families had at least one member at the front whose memory intensified the structure of masochistic identification. In addition, war movies engendered sacred subjectivity, driven variously by the immanent awe produced by being in the presence of the sacred, by the mystical identification with the sacred, and by the haptic annihilation in the sacred and the beloved—­ variously coded as God, Shiite imams, Ayatollah Khomeini, fellow fighters, and the nation—­all of which deepened identificatory fusion. What made the films of Jihad tv stand out, in particular those of the Chronicle of Victory in which Avini had a hand, was their promotion of multiple sa20

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cred subjectivities on behalf of the warriors who were filmed, the cameramen who filmed them, and the spectators who watched them. While realistic and ideological—­fitting the immediate propaganda purposes of the war—­many of the films were also idealistic and spiritual, embodying and inculcating Islamicate values. As Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Ali Zam, the longtime head of the Islamic Art and Thought Center (iatc) at the Islamic Propaganda Organization and a major producer of war films, defined it, the best Iranian war movies differed from Western ones by their focus on war’s spiritual dimensions.29 He urged Iranian filmmakers to focus on Iranian-­Islamic spirituality instead of on military violence, exciting action, and technological hardware, for which Western filmmakers were much better equipped. This meant concentrating on showing resolute defense, martyrdom, faith in God, self-­sacrifice, righteousness, and jihad with the self (against one’s internal temptations) and jihad with the world (against external temptations) (quoted in Farasati 2000c/1379:128–29). He suggested employing religiously committed filmmakers who have serious intentions (niyyat) to make such films. In short, “To reach good ends we must resort to good means” (132). Avini, Makhmalbaf, and Hatamikia were three such “good means.” 3 0 The last two evolved from faith-­based filmmaking into auteur critical filmmaking, while Avini died too early for us to witness his evolution. However, change surely came—­in his absence. In due course, the sacredness of the war with Iraq and of Avini’s status as its ardent chronicler underwent reevaluation and revision. By 2010, dvds of his Chronicle of Victory series were harder to find in Iranian video stores. Bajoghli quotes a prominent writer and cultural producer of war-­related materials commenting on the possible reissue of the series, stating that, “We have to take off Avini’s narrations from his films if we reissue these because this generation doesn’t understand these narrations and doesn’t even like it. . . . To understand Avini you need a whole dictionary of Shiite terminology. No one talks like that. It was specific to the time of the war when we needed that propaganda. I don’t think any of our youth even understand that language anymore” (Bajoghli 2011:8). It was precisely Avini’s voice-­ over narration, so passionately justifying and celebrating the ardor of war and of sacrifice, that had distinguished these films from other war documentaries, endowing them with their sacred subjectivity. Now, that narration had become a liability. Changing times, particularly during Ahmadinejad’s retrenchment period and the political dissent it spawned, necessitated a different kind of narration and chronicler. Avini’s books, too, vanished from bookstores without any explanation, including from the Chronicle of Victory Institute’s own bookstore. Gradually, the institute itself became somewhat marginalized and its mission reduced. According to Bajoghli, its functions were limited to producing films on Musa Sadr, both for Iran and Lebanon, maintaining the archive of the Chronicle of Victory films and the Institute’s bookstore, supporting the work of mostly Lebanese Hezbollah filmmakers, and acting primarily as a consultant on other films and television shows about the war, not making new films (Naficy 2011). T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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Wartime City Films Whether made by the Forty Witnesses group, by the Jihad TV film unit, or by independent filmmakers, war documentaries assumed many different forms and dealt with many topics. Some concentrated on the documentation of a single battle, which could involve several fronts. Some of these used the major operation’s code name, such as the Chronicle of Victory film Operation Valfajr 8 and Rasul Mollaqolipur’s forty-­five-­minute Fath al-­Mobin Operation (Fath al-­Mobin, 1982). Mahmud Bahadori’s On the Wings of Angels (Bar Bal-­e Malaek, 1982) compiled the footage of more than one hundred vvir cameramen to portray the Fath al-­Mobin Operation. Some focused on one location at the front, leading to a genre I call “wartime city films.” These resemble the classic “city symphony” films such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s Only the Hours (Rien Que les ­Heures, 1926) about Paris, Walther Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, 1927), Jean Vigo’s On the Subject of Nice (À Propos de Nice, 1929), and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kino­ apparatom, 1929) about Moscow. Like these modernists “city films,” wartime city films exhibited a tripartite unity of place, time, and causality, which gave them coherence and impact. Unlike their predecessors, which celebrated urbanity’s novelty and industrialization and modernity’s sensory overload, these films were primarily eulogies for lost cities, cities that had been damaged, defended, destroyed, or had survived modernity’s worst onslaught: mechanized warfare. The figure of the flâneur, a prominent feature both of modern urban life and of city symphony films, is also present in the wartime city films. However, in these films the flâneur is not celebrating the freedom, levity, excitement, serendipity, and excess of modernity and urban living; instead he or she is at a loss, bewildered, and is weighted down by and mourns the loss of the city. Mohammad Reza Eslamlu’s thirty-­five-­minute film Abadan, the Innocent City, treats Abadan and its remaining residents early in the war with Iraq as they endure tremendous hardships. Unlike many wartime documentaries that embraced the war, this film’s outlook is bitter and dark. The last sequence poignantly focuses on the burial of a family whose members had been interviewed at the film’s beginning. Unlike the eulogized dead warriors, these casualties will not go to paradise, and they are not mourned as martyrs. Gholamreza Jennatkhahdust was a prolific cameraman, shooting twelve thousand minutes of footage of the war, six thousand minutes of which are kept in war archives (Tahaminejad 2000/1379:141). He made several films from this vast footage. His My City Abadan (Shahr-­e Man Abadan, 1982) focuses on the recent history of the city, from the Rex Cinema fire to the ruined city under Iraqi control, and on those who stayed put instead of deserting it. The veteran documentarian Khosrow Sinai also made two moving city films about the loss and ruination brought on by wars. In one of these, In the Alleys of Love (Dar Kuchehha-­ye Eshq, 1990), made for the mcig’s Center for Experimental and 22

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6 The French poster for Sinai’s In the Alleys of Love. From the author’s collection.

Semi­professional Development, he focuses on a young man who returns to his hometown of Abadan after the war, ambivalent about whether to resettle there. As he travels through the ruined city, including the carcass of the Rex Cinema, and the city’s deserted alleys, where the elders patiently endure life’s difficulties and humiliations, he recalls the carefree, playful, and richly textured times of his own childhood with friends and lovers. He also notices a glimmer of hope: the sight of children turning the ruins into a new playground. Both steel his resolve to stay (figure 6). The port city of Khorramshahr (meaning “prosperous city”), which fell to Iraqi forces after a month of heroic resistance and great destruction, obtained the sobriquet Khuninshahr (bloodied city), a shift that captured the imagination of filmmakers. Mahmud Bahadori, Farhad Lesani, Hosain Haqiqi, and others made Khorramshahr, City of Blood, City of Love (Khorramshahr, Shahr-­e Khun, Shahr-­e Eshq, 1981), which focuses on the deadly battle over the city in December 1980 between the Pasdaran Army inside the city and the Iraqi soldiers outside, who represent “world imperialism.” The film, part of the six-­part television series The Just Battle (Nabard-­e Haq), graphically depicts the desperate defense of the city; however, it extends its reach beyond the chronotope of the wartime city through letters between individual Pasdar and their loved ones on the home front. T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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Mehdi Madani’s The Victory Bridge (Pol-­e Azadi, 1982) centers on Khorramshahr, which along with about one thousand square kilometers of Iranian territory had fallen to Iraqi forces. Made for the vvir’s War Unit, the film presents in powerful images the two-­year Iranian effort starting in May 1982 to construct a temporary bridge over the Karun River to retake the destroyed city. In the end the task is to search for bodies; a sad but rousing mourning song is sung to the rhythm of chest beating. Tahaminejad’s December ’80 in Bushehr (Dey Mah ’59 dar Bushehr, 1980) deals with the harsh life of the residents of the southern city of Bushehr five months after the start of the war with Iraq. The overcrowded city is full of dispirited immigrants and displaced people competing with each other for food. On the other hand, some wartime city documentaries centered on victory and the reconstruction of cities. The Pasdaran Army Television Unit’s Recapturing Khorramshahr (Fath-­e Khorramshahr, 1983) covers the Iranian armed forces’ recapture of the fallen city, while Homayun Purmand’s twenty-­six-­minute film Another Growth (Ruyeshi Digar, 1982) deals with the reconstruction of Khorramshahr. Another film, Forty Witnesses, the Second Narrative: Liberation of Khorramshahr (Azadi-­ye Khorramshahr, 1983), assembled by Kiumars Monazzah, documents the Baitolmoqaddas Operation that led to the city’s liberation. Some wartime city films concentrated on the war’s lighter side, and many serious war films contained humorous episodes. Jennatkhahdust’s On Al-­Faw Front (Dar Jebheh-­ye Fav, 1982) covers the comedy of life on the Al-­Faw Peninsula, an important wartime target that changed hands several times.31 Some films and footage were censored for ostensible security and military reasons, others for ideological reasons. For example, the cidcya sent Purahmad to the south to film the front for the film War Children (Bachehha-­ye Jang). Because his footage from a besieged Abadan focused on the displacements of war, it was shelved and never finished (Purahmad 2001/1380:351–56). The official pro-­war ideology of heroic martyrdom was preferred to films that emphasized the cost of the war.

Feature Fiction and Nonfiction War Movies Alongside official war documentaries an official fiction cinema of war also emerged. Criticism leveled by professional filmmakers, critics, and spectators against the Imposed War films of the early 1980s at festivals continued throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. Most features focused on war action, reaction, and violence, and they resorted to cliché plots, sloganeering, moralizing narratives, and stereotypical and binarist characters. The Iraqi enemy was generally portrayed as incompetent, venal, and heretical, while their Iranian counterparts were represented as devout, idealistic, and heroic. Moreover, the majority of stories involved men and all the directors were men. If 24

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women were shown, they were grieving family members. The mere fact that these films were touted as “imposed war” and “sacred defense” movies interpellated the filmmakers, foreclosing any expression of ambivalence or of antiwar sentiments. Whether or not they believed in Islamicate values or government war policies, filmmakers were channeled into taking the government position instead of expressing alternative, authorial, or critical points (some exceptions are discussed below). The war movies—­whether the government documentaries of the Forty Witnesses and Jihad TV, pacifist documentaries by Amir Naderi, or fiction movies by the commercial film industry or by semigovernment agencies such as the ­c idcya (the producer of Bahram Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger)—­constituted a new cinema in Iran. The majority of war-­movie directors were young and new to film, without prior experience in the Pahlavi cinema. They brought with them both inexperience and enthusiasm. This cinema also brought new audiences: Muslims who had shunned tv and film before because of these media’s association with moral corruption. Finally, war cinema was not homogeneous. Official and critical documentaries and fictional movies were all included in the category of war movies, and there were at least two general chronotopes: films made during the war and those made in its aftermath. The criticism above applies primarily to the fiction films made during the war. The postwar period produced more engaging, adventurous, and critical movies. Each phase lasted about one decade, so enough films were made to allow for studies of their genres and styles, as well as of their making and themes. Limitations of space preclude a detailed treatment of these topics here. Some critics have argued that war fiction movies constituted a genre because of their thematic and narrative similarities.32 However, to be classified as a genre, a set of movies must go beyond the mere sharing of thematic and narrative features, constituting textual formation. They must be undergirded also by various rule-­bound industrial, authorial, generic, cultural and social, and spectatorial formations. Jihad Television’s output more appropriately constitutes a genre than fictional war movies produced by disparate filmmakers sponsored, commissioned, and supported by different agencies and motivated by differing ideologies. The Chronicle of Victory series, for instance, was made by small, Islamically committed production units employing a televisual, semi-­industrial production mode and strategies of filming, editing, and narration that resulted in textual regularities, as did the shaping presence of Avini as director, writer, editor, and narrator of many of the series’ films. Finally, culturally specific Iranian and Shiite textual elements were also mobilized; the pleasure and power of the films came from familiarity as well as from the new. The films’ run of many years enhanced the series’ power to hail some members of the audience, while invoking haggling and alienation in others. Some episodes of the Chronicle of Victory, such as Operation Valfajr 8, found their way abroad via video (figure 7).

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7 A flyer for a screening in July 1983 of Operation Valfajr 8 at UCLA. This was part of a weekly event, sponsored by the Islamic Art and Research Group, which included film screening, discussion of Iran-related news from radio and newspapers, recitation of the Quran, a speech by Ayatollah Khomeini on the “Imam line,” and evening prayer. From the author’s collection.

Ebrahim Hatamikia (b. 1961, Tehran) As Avini was the most influential war documentarist, Hatamikia proved to be the most prominent director of fiction war films. He was born in Tehran, and with a degree in cinema and theater, Hatamikia was one of the few war filmmakers with a previous background in Super 8 and animated film production to join Jihad tv and the irgc Audiovisual Department unit in 1986, an experience he discounted. Instead, he preferred to say that “I truly did not come to the war 26

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from cinema; rather, I discovered cinema through being in the war” (quoted in Farasati 2000c/1379:218). He volunteered for the war because he believed in the new regime.33 The most important wartime discovery for him, as for Avini, was his passion for the “Islamic revolution” and his deep love for, and faith in, Shiite Islam and its values of self-­sacrifice, spirituality, and martyrdom. His fiction war movies, made after his experience as a cameraman and documentarian with Jihad tv, used the internal and subjective experiences of the war—­the psychological aspects of modern war—­more than its mechanics and machineries. This psychological attention allowed him to create Islamically committed but less stereotypical and idealized characters. His were modern characters in formation, with the tensions and ambivalences of individualized subjectivity and sacred religious identity engulfing them. In his Sentry (Didehban, 1988), a guard sacrifices himself to save his comrades by attracting the enemy’s fire, and in Migrating Birds (Mohajer, 1989), about remote-­controlled military drones (called migrating birds), a military leader sacrifices his own niece for the safety of the group. In each case, the decision to sacrifice is something with which the characters have to grapple; it is not a given. Significantly, from this attention to subjectivity, Hatamikia reached a point opposite Avini. While Avini’s emphasis on Islamic passion drew him toward the collective, spiritual, and godly, Hatamikia’s stress on the same values guided him toward the personal, universal, and authorial. That is why he did not engage in self-­deprecation, like many directors of war movies, including Avini, and he could state categorically that “Sentry is my war front, it is no one else’s” (quoted in Farasati 2000c/1379:221). The same attention to individual subjectivity—­of both diegetic characters and the extradiegetic filmmaker—­transformed him into a modernist auteur, albeit an Islamicate one, who surpassed most of the faith-­based filmmakers. Many of Hatamikia’s works are concerned with key concepts of Shiite Islam and with Islamicate values. For example, his Identity (Hoviyat, 1986) deals with truthfulness; Sentry with self-­sacrifice; Migrating Birds with faith; Union of Blessed (Vasl- ­e Nikan, 1991) with fate; and The Scent of Yusef’s Shirt (Buy-­e Pirahan-­e Yusef, 1995) with waiting and expectation, particularly for the arrival of the Mahdi (Farasati 2000b/1379:306–9). However, as another mark of his modern authorial signature, he did not remain static, for his works followed a tripartite evolutionary trajectory that moved him from certainty toward doubt. His first phase produced seminal pro-­war movies such as Sentry and The Emigrant (1990), which centered on the front, with a highly Islamist texture. For example, Sentry’s characters frequently spout cliché Islamic phrases such as “God be with you,” “God brought us a gift of a missile,” “trust God,” “God willing,” and “God is great,” as well as such images as soldiers performing their ablutions and daily prayers in the battlefields. With such unquestioned faith, the sentry single-­handedly manages to demolish scores of enemies. With the success of these films, which one critic called “the most important fruit of the Iranian war films,” Hatamikia became an influential director (Seif 1998:349) and T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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a highly prized progovernment filmmaker. In his second phase, Hatamikia began to examine, sometimes critically, topics hitherto not considered proper subjects of cinema, or topics that emphasized the social impact of Islam and war on society. In Green Ash (Khakestar-­e Sabz, 1993), he turned his attention to carnal love, instead of mystical love, telling the story of a cinematographer who seeks his lover, a photographer, in the ashes of the vicious wars of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, while in Heavenly Tower (Borj-­e Minu, 1995) he argues for care and sympathy for the living, not just for the martyrs. From Karkheh to Rhine (Az Karkheh ta Rhine, 1992) explores the psychology of a disabled veteran suffering the effects of Iraqi chemical attacks who cannot be treated at home and must be sent on a medical trip to Germany. In relocating his diegeses to foreign countries Hatamikia further differentiated himself from other faith-­based directors. With his The Glass Agency (Azhans-­e Shishehi, 1997), Hatamikia moved into his third phase, forcefully criticizing the treatment of war veterans, as well as the conduct of veterans themselves. Produced by Varahonar Films, then an Iranian Hezbollah company, the film deals with the crisis of reintegrating war veterans into a society that nearly a decade after the war’s end seems apathetic to their plight. It critiques the government, which had recruited the soldiers to fight and now seems to have abandoned them, and it critiques society, which revered the soldiers but now wants to get on with life. In a hostage-­taking drama that resembles Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the film centers on a veteran who takes people hostage in a travel agency in a desperate attempt to exchange his car for plane tickets to take his buddy, a veteran damaged by Iraqi chemical attacks, to London for emergency surgery. The Iraqi use of chemical weapons was a vicious strategy that killed or wounded about one hundred thousand Iranians, while the world looked the other way, and it created major medical and psychological problems for the victims and survivors and social problems for society (Sciolino 2003). It is not surprising, then, that these attacks resulted in a body of fiction films and documentaries.34 As one of the most popular and controversial films of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema (shown simultaneously in fifteen cinemas in Tehran alone), which swept eight of the top awards at the Sixteenth Fajr International Film Festival, The Glass Agency is an ambivalent and, as some charged, expedient film. On the one hand, it seems to call for an end to the “war-­soaked” era with its preferential treatment of veterans in employment, housing, social services, and education—­ which riled many more qualified civilians who were denied these benefits; on the other hand, it seemed to unfairly critique those who questioned the war and its deleterious effects on society. Some claimed that the film was advocating the restoration of true Islamicate values, while others charged that it was encouraging “terrorism” and lawless vigilantism.35 This diegetic tension is emblematic of other social and authorial tensions: the tension within a society clamoring for reform and liberalization that had elected Mohammad Khatami as president on a promise of a “civil society” characterized by the rule of law, equality, and 28

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greater political freedoms, and Hatamikia’s own internal conflict as he began to distance himself from the ideology of official cinema, to which he had contributed so much. In essence, with this and subsequent movies, Hatamikia was demanding to be considered an auteur director, not just an ideological filmmaker. Despite his questioning of the preferential treatment of war veterans and of the official manipulation of the “blood of the martyrs” to consolidate power, he found room in The Glass Agency—­however briefly and implicitly—­to criticize the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, represented by a self-­centered Westernized intellectual among the hostages who wears dark glasses indoors (like Kiarostami).36 Despite his evolutionary transition toward wider, less certain, and more critical ideological terrains, Hatamikia did not publicly renounce his adherence to official Islamicate values, unlike Makhmalbaf. That From Karkheh to Rhine and The Glass Agency posed Germany and England, respectively, as an alternative “elsewhere” to the Islamic Republic, even if it is for medical treatment, is indicative of both Hatamikia’s disenchantment with aspects of the Islamic Republic and of his search for a better place elsewhere. This latter search and pining for elsewhere became a film subgenre in the late 2000s, a kind of Iranian heimweh film (escape from home), as a protest against the regime and the claustrophobic and panoptic society it had spawned. The space of freedom began to be perceived as existing either abroad or at home but in the underground—­each of which produced its own film and film movement.

Amir Naderi (b. 1945, Abadan) Secular filmmakers turned the Shiite concept of waiting for the savior into other forms of waiting. Waiting and searching for the dead, the missing-­in-­ action, and the disappeared drove some of the best pacifist war movies, such as Naderi’s, made in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. He made two feature documentaries for the vvir when the filmmaker Masud Kimiai was head of production at Channel 2: First Search (Jostoju-­ye Yek, 1980) deals with searching for the dead and the disappeared in the run-­up to and during the revolution—­those who left home to participate in the protest never to return; Second Search (Jostoju-­ye Do, 1981) centers on missing-­in-­action soldiers, without featuring the Iraq war itself (figure 8). For First Search Naderi interviews the relatives of the disappeared, workers at Tehran’s giant cemetery Behesht­e Zahra, staff of the city morgue and coroner’s office, ambulance drivers, and ordinary people in his, and their, searches to identify them. Some testify that they saw soldiers carry masses of dead bodies by trucks, helicopters, bulldozers, and other vehicles for burial in city trash heaps or for dumping in the Salt Lake near Qom. The devastating effects of this tragedy are also shown in the mournful, distracted, and traumatized faces and lives of the survivors and the “lost person” announcements in the newspapers. The use of long sequences of T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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8 Searching for those who disappeared during the revolution in Naderi’s First Search. Frame enlargement.

searching in complete silence and the slow pace of the film emphasize both the search and the loss and the idea of waiting (entezar), a key religious and philosophical concept in Shiism. The themes of dogged search and relentless effort, which become major motifs and narratives in Naderi’s later films in Iran, intensifying manifold in his exile films, seem to come together with these revolution and war documentaries. The failure to locate and to bury the missing turned the disappeared and the dead into powerful presences, haunting the living, disrupting their thoughts, dreams, and lives. Thus possessed, the living—­Bashu in Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger, Haji in Makhmalbaf’s Marriage of the Blessed (1988), and various people in Naderi’s First Search and Second Search—­are unable to properly mourn, which intensifies survivors’ trauma and guilt. Sometimes these absent figures are made present by the agency of their ghosts, as in Bashu, the Little Stranger; sometimes by television and video, as in Marriage of the Blessed; and sometimes by dog tags, letters, and other memorabilia, as in Hatamikia’s The Scent of Yusef’s Shirt. The living are haunted not only by the dead but also by the nagging doubts about who is alive and who is dead and by the searing question of why they are alive and others are dead (Varzi 2002). Since war so overshadowed everything in the 1980s, even movies not directly about the war were haunted by it. Naderi’s brilliant fiction film about a group of young street boys who eke out a meager living in a Persian Gulf port city, The Runner (Davandeh, 1985), was filmed during the war with Iraq, when 30

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many Iranian cities near the Gulf as well as far away came under attack. Although neither the film’s characters nor its story are war-­based, war is palpable in the presence of so many street urchins, the freedom with which they roam the city, the longing of the lead character, Amiro (Majid Nirumand), to escape his homeland, and in the latent way the war affects the film’s structures of feeling. As Naderi told me in an interview, The Runner was filmed after his birthplace, Abadan, had fallen to Iraqi forces. This forced him to shoot the film elsewhere, in eleven different locations near the war zone, where the crew could hear the sounds of gunfire and bombings in the distance (Naficy 1996). This subverted the coherence of time and place obtainable in other city films. However, thanks to Baizai’s seamless and dynamic editing, The Runner gives the impression of a single location, effacing the war, even though it remains as a haunting presence (Baizai had also edited Naderi’s Second Search). This clandestine presence of Abadan under war condition turns The Runner into a wartime city film. Naderi is a materialist filmmaker. His other visually stunning fiction movie Water, Wind, Dust (Ab, Bad, Khak, 1989), which he finished before emigrating to the United States, offers another case of waiting and searching for material things, not spiritual values. Because of their materiality, these films are counterhegemonic to the Islamic Republic, but not so much at the level of politics as at the level of philosophy and aesthetics. Like his Second Search and The Runner, this film focuses on a single male protagonist (Majid Nirumand) who, returning to his village on the outskirts of a desert, encounters a devastating drought that has dried up the lake, reduced animals to strewn carcasses, and made people into homeless nomads wandering in the desert’s blinding sandstorms. Such environmental devastation resembles that caused by war, turning Water, Wind, Dust into an allegorical haunted-­by-­war antiwar movie. Significantly, Naderi’s characters also oppose the war: as lone modern individuals with personal desires, they must make autonomous materialist decisions instead of ideological, religious ones. They are not part of a group; their personal identities are not immersed in and subsumed by a collective or a sacred identity as in the Chronicle of Victory and other war movies. Their identities are not dissolved in the process of becoming united with the beloved, as in Hatamikia’s mystical war films. Even though uprooted and made homeless, the young boy at the center of Water, Wind, Dust does not give up his search and his humanity; he defiantly and doggedly fights on to find a magical material source of water—­not a mystical source of enlightenment. The film’s end, unfortunately, is as forced as a similar ending appears natural in Naderi’s The Runner (figure 9). In Azizollah Hamidnezhad’s humanist war movie Hoor on Fire (Hoor dar Atash, 1991), an aged father searches for his son who has gone to the front. The quest takes him and a comrade of his son into the beautiful and mysterious marshes of southwestern Iraq (later criminally drained by Saddam Hussein to flush out his opposition), a quest that begins to resemble that of Joseph Conrad’s T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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9 All that is left is wind and dust in Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust. Publicity photo.

character in Heart of Darkness, except that this one is undertaken by a member of an older generation for the younger generation, and the heart of darkness is not so much the heart of a jungle as it is the war front. However, the more they search for the son, the less they find him. Kurtz has disappeared and they face a slippery, untrustworthy watery world, beneath which, and all around which, lurk harrowing dangers. The father plays the reed flute, highly reminiscent of Rumi’s famous “Song of the Reed,” the paradigmatic Persian poem about exile and separation, which expresses the longing of the father for reunion with his lost son. Hamidnezhad filmed this feature and an earlier war documentary, Life in the Heights (Zendegi dar Ertefa’at, 1985), when he was a frontline soldier: he was intimately familiar with both the conduct and the cost of war. These cinematic hauntings, a narrative feature of war movies, generally failed to help assuage the pains and sorrows of the diegetic families; however, they may have helped assuage those of the spectators. The idea of films as aids to mourning is congruent with one of the ideas behind Shiite passion plays, where audiences mourn not only for iconic religious martyrs but also for themselves and for their own lowly martyrs. If we accept Eric Santner’s thesis that the inability to mourn the horrors of the Nazi era and of the Second World War in Germany accounted for the persistence of the New German Cinema’s traumatic films (1990), then we can expect something similar in the case of Iranian filmmakers. To quote Lotte Eisner on German expressionist cinema (1973), another “haunted screen,” an Iranian one, may be on the horizon. Censorship was one reason that spectators did not get to properly mourn the war and its costly aftermath. Many art-­house films about these topics were banned or released only after extensive cutting. Both of Naderi’s search movies were banned. Enqelab-­e Eslami, an official organ of ruling clerics, attacked First Search for its “one-­sidedness” and its singular focus on the survivors’ search for their dead and disappeared, instead of on cheerleading the revolution. The publication lauded the film’s early sequence showing the tumultuous uprising against the Shah, which created “a beautiful, massive, and magnificent unity,” 32

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but it critiqued the later despondent search through mass graves, deserts, and city dumps.37 Naderi’s prescience about the revolution turning sour and his contextualization of Islamic heroism in the tearful personal grief of individuals (a mark of modernity that countered the collectivity of the revolution) was unacceptable. It is not surprising that First Search was banned for more than a decade and released only after the events in the film were shifted to prerevolutionary times. It was broadcast in 1991. Second Search, too, has been banned since its production (Middle East Watch 1993:99, 101). Even Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust was banned for four years, and it was shown in a limited fashion only in 1989. Because of his emphasis on the high cost of revolution and war, Naderi can be considered the first major pacifist and antiwar filmmaker. Having all his postrevolutionary films banned was perhaps sufficient reason for him to choose emigration to the United States.38

Khosrow Sinai (b. 1940, Sari) In his feature documentary Lost Requiem (Marsiyeh-­ye Gomshodeh, 1970–83), Sinai turned his attention to loss and disappearance of another kind and in an earlier war. Begun in the early 1970s as a film about a Christian family, Lost Requiem took Sinai more than a decade and a change both of regime and of focus to complete. Initially called 1942 . . . Do You Remember, the film focuses on a rarely discussed and seemingly forgotten chapter of the Second World War, one involving the Holocaust: after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Polish laborers, Jewish refugees, and displaced persons stranded in Siberia were forced out of the country into Iran and invited to join, if they wished, a Polish army that the Allies were forming. Within weeks, between 114,000 and 300,000 “starving, haggard Poles began trudging toward Iran” (Faruqi 2000). They arrived mostly over the Caspian Sea in rickety, overloaded, and disease-­ridden ships, landing at the Iranian port of Anzali (then called Pahlavi). A young photographer, Gholam Abdolrahimi, who documented the arrival of the disheveled and distraught refugees, says in the film, “They were in bad shape, thin, ill, and in rags. A friend of mine, a carpenter, used to make coffins for them. About fifty were dying every day.” Iranians welcomed them with greetings, dates, and nuts. Their reception was such that some refugees later wrote of it as entering “the paradise.” Most volunteered for the new Polish army, serving honorably under General Wladyslaw Anders, but many who were aged, women, and children had no place to go. For three years while stranded in Iran, many of these people were kept in refugee camps built by the Allies, and many died there. Jewish community and Zionist organizations found places for others. Tehran’s Catholic cemetery in Dulab holds 1,892 graves of Polish men, women, and children. Sinai told me that it was these graves that first intrigued him about their story (Naficy 1977). In Ahvaz, the refugees were housed in a district that is still called Campolo (short T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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10 Polish immigrants in front of an imposing pigeon tower in the fields near Isfahan in 1943, in a photograph from Sinai’s Lost Requiem. Courtesy of Khosrow Sinai.

for Camp Polonia), although no one seems to know why it is called that anymore. In Isfahan, thousands of refugee children and orphans were housed in twenty-­four different locations, including in the Armenian district, New Jolfa.39 As a result, Isfahan became known in Polish émigré circles as “the City of Polish Children” (figure 10). The majority eventually migrated to other countries; about seven hundred moved to New Zealand; more than eight hundred Jewish orphans were sent to Palestine; and some refugees remained permanently in Iran, where they married, lived, raised families, and died. The Isfahan Christian cemetery, which I have visited, contains many graves of these Poles. Sinai visited the survivors and their descendants in both Iran and New Zealand to create a moving film about loss, human aspiration, and resilience, using letters, recollections, and photographs. His own description provides a glimpse into his film’s power: “My film deals with the destiny of Polish people in Iran: how they arrived, how they lived, how they died, how they married, and where they left to. . . . And, now, what has remained from them, and what they remember from Iran and Iranians. And, then: what they don’t remember, what they wanted to forget; what their children know about them, and what they don’t want to know!” (Haidari 1991–92:54). Although Lost Requiem was screened at a solemn occasion in the winter of 1983 in a Catholic church in Tehran before four hundred guests, and excerpts of it were screened by the vvir, like its title it seems to have disappeared, as it has not been shown publicly in full again either in Iran or abroad.40

Bahram Baizai (b. 1938, Tehran) The themes of the disruptions and displacements caused by war were widespread: losses of houses, homes, and homeland; escape, expulsion, emigration, exile, and longing to return. Films encoding these themes tended to be pacifist. Baizai’s moving fictional feature Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, ­Gharibeh-­ye Kuchak, 1985) was emblematic and exemplary. While positing that Iran is united 34

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11 Bashu (Adnan Afravian) in Bahram Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger jumping off the truck that has carried him from the Iraq-Iran war zone to verdant northern fields. Publicity photo. 12 Bashu’s description of destructive effects of war on his family, which drove him into exile, is visualized in this scene, from Bashu, the Little Stranger. Frame enlargement.

by its national language, Persian (Farsi), the film establishes that it is a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, and multiracial country (these qualities qualifying this film as a “multiplex film”). This is a radical message considering that the country was engaged in an all-­consuming war, which required homogeneity and unity. Despite its elaboration of Iran as a cauldron of races and cultures, the film, as a mark of its pacifism, portrays reconciliations and cross-­ communications of various interethnic, intercultural, and even interspecies sorts (the latter with birds). Produced by the cidcya, the film centers on an Arab Iranian boy named Bashu (Adnan Afravian) who escapes the Iraqi attacks in the south near the Persian Gulf, which destroy his home and kill his parents and sibling. He stows himself in a truck that takes him to the north near the Caspian Sea (figure 11). There, he takes refuge with, and is adopted by, a single mother named Nai (Susan Taslimi), whose husband is away in search of employment and whose family and village elders oppose her adoption of the stranger. Although physically safe, Bashu is psychologically traumatized and haunted by the war, particularly by the image—­the ghost, really—­of his mother killed in the war, who first inhabits only his memory but as the film unfolds haunts the present (figure 12). War and linguistic, racial, ethnic, and cultural differences are the film’s ever-­present subtexts, but it is the evolving and deepening bond between the little exiled boy and the lively but lonely woman that distinguishes the film. T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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The film is spoken in three languages: Persian, the national language of Iran since Reza Shah’s legislation in the mid-­1930s, and two minority languages, Arabic and Gilaki. The use of language is complex, implicating at once personal, ethnic, regional, racial, gender, and national dimensions of identity and difference. When Bashu finds himself far from his war-­torn home and in the verdant and peaceful fields of the north, he runs into Nai who uneasily takes him in. Initially, the problem is the unbridgable cultural and racial gaps separating the white Gilaki woman from the black Arab boy. Nai comically tries to wash off his dark skin with soap and water, Bashu cannot stand the food that she offers him, and neither side understands the other. He speaks only Arabic; she only Gilaki. This diegetic linguistic situation reflected the real linguistic capabilities of the actors, for Taslimi’s first language was Gilaki and that of Afravian Arabic; she spoke no Arabic, and he spoke no Gilaki and little informal Persian. However, it is through this encounter of the self with the Other, through this difference, that each protagonist begins to create a self-­sustaining identity that, though independent from the other, is inextricably linked with it.41 The film creates privileged linguistic communities within Iran from the speakers of Arabic and Gilaki minority languages, while partially excluding the Persian-­speaking majority because of lack of subtitling. In this bold move, the dominant-­language spectators are forced to experience the linguistic deprivations and frustrations of the film’s protagonists. In this sense the film is an example of “minor cinema,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorized (1986). The film problematizes language and its relationships to ethnic, regional, racial, cultural, and national identities, subverting Iranian nationalists’ ideology of monolingual nationalism. However, if Persian-­speaking spectators, who are othered by the film as outsiders, persist, they gradually begin to pick out the meanings of the words, and by the end they will have become trained by the film as competent decoders of languages not their own—­in the same way that Nai and Bashu learn each other’s tongues. In an interview with me, Baizai said that his filmmaking colleagues had warned him against leaving the majority audience in such a linguistic limbo, for fear of alienating them. As it turned out his decision was validated by audience support (Naficy 1995a). In the process of accommodating the film’s languages the spectators engage deeply with the film, countering its initial alienation effect—­another subtle form of spectatorial reconciliation and humanism that the film engenders. However, the most obvious, heart-­rending, and nationalistic form of reconciliation occurs when language differences are surpassed by the knowledge of Persian. In an emotionally powerful scene more than halfway through the film, the exiled and stigmatized Bashu is being mocked and beaten by local white boys. He picks up an elementary school textbook off the ground and begins to read it aloud. His voice suddenly silences and freezes the belligerent boys, who listen with astonishment as Bashu speaks Persian for the first time (with an Arabic accent). The words he utters are also significant: “Iran is our country, we are 36

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nurtured by this water and land, we are all children of Iran.” His knowledge of the formal Persian suddenly dissolves all the hostilities. The boys gather around him asking questions about his past and how he learned Persian. It turns out that Bashu learned formal Persian in school but is unable to understand the vernacular form. In the film’s screenings abroad, this scene proved to be highly cathartic for Iranian exiles, who tearfully identified with both Bashu and Nai as exilic characters. The film offers to both diegetic characters and exilic spectators the healing and unifying power of a national language as an antidote to difference and displacement. In addition, Bashu, the Little Stranger proposes reconciliation by means of epistolarity, which is motivated by the absence of Nai’s husband for almost the entire film, ostensibly in search of work.42 He is made present from time to time by his letters home and by those that Nai sends him. Their epistolary relationship is not direct because Nai is illiterate and uses an old villager as her amanuensis: he reads the husband’s letters to her and writes down what she dictates to be sent to him. This makes public the private acts of reading and writing personal letters, thus violating the confidentiality of the epistolary form, with fascinating results. Bashu is present at some of these sessions, forcing Nai to improvise to include him in the chain of letters as a family member and not leave him out like an outsider. In one such session, Nai tells her husband about the arrival of a “stranger” into her household. In another, the old villager reads the husband’s response to Nai’s letter. When he reaches the end of the letter without mentioning Bashu, a shadow of hurt crosses the boy’s face. Noticing, Nai quickly snatches away the letter, adding (as though reading from the letter) something about how glad the husband is that Bashu is there with his family in a time of need. This touching and clever ploy brings a broad smile of appreciation to the face of the exiled boy. By the end of the film, a transformation has occurred in the epistolary structure. It is Bashu who writes down (in formal Persian) Nai’s dictated letters to her husband. By becoming a link in the epistolary chain, his status shifts from that of a stranger to that of a member of Nai’s family and community. His insider status is sealed when Nai’s husband returns and accepts Bashu as a new family member. The textual and contextual readings of the film produce contrasting meanings on this point. Textually, by reconstructing the nuclear family in the end at the expense of Nai’s primacy, the film produces a conservative, patriarchal saga. Considering its wartime social context, however, the film retains its radicalism precisely because of its insistence on harmony among Iranian subethnics, including Arab Iranians, at a time that the official policy of the Islamic Republic was to prolong the war with an Arab Iraq. This was a message not lost on the authorities, whose objections to the film apparently included its pacifism. The film’s release was delayed by three years. According to Baizai in an interview with me, this was due to his refusal to make some eighty changes demanded by the official censors. This may have had as much to do with its antiwar T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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message (which is the usual reason given) as with its bold transgression of codes of modesty, the direct relay of diegetic gazes, and spectator positioning. The film was released, after the political climate had sufficiently changed, to great public response and without many of the demanded elisions. However, the authorities were apparently still sufficiently unhappy with Baizai to prevent him from leaving the country in September 1992 to attend the Toronto International Film Festival where Bashu, the Little Stranger was slated for screening (Naficy 1993a). Although not dealing with war, Baizai’s next movie Travelers (Mosaferan, 1991), a formally rigorous exercise in which a wedding party is transformed into a funeral procession, also ran into official censorship. It is noted here to show the downside of some of the liberal reforms in film production procedures and of the war-­tinged language of protest that Baizai used to defend his movie. Since Baizai was classified as an A-­list director, he had not been required to submit his film’s screenplay for prior censorship and approval. While this removed one of several phases of censorship and was welcomed by most artists, it also forced the filmmakers to become their own censors or to risk financial ruin. When Baizai submitted his completed Travelers to the mcig for an exhibition permit, he ran into objections and demands for deletions, including of some of the joyful marriage scenes, causing a frustrated Baizai, who considered the changes impossible without destroying the film’s overall structure and meaning, to ask rhetorically in a public letter to the ministry in October 1992: “Is it illegal to be happy?” This partly alludes to the fact that during the long war with Iraq, the display of joy and happiness was officially frowned on, unless it was to congratulate the families of the martyrs on their deaths. Using war terms, he accused the authorities of taking his film “hostage,” adding, “Are we not citizens of the same country? Are you the victors and we [the filmmakers] the defeated enemy?” 43 After protracted negotiations and the changes that Baizai made to the film, its official public screening was still delayed by three years, as Islamist publications such as Kayhan and Sureh, Party of God roughnecks, and “motorcycle riders,” apparently weighed in against it (Middle East Watch 1993:104–6). It took Baizai nearly a decade after Travelers to receive government permission and private-­sector funding to make his next feature, Killing Mad Dogs (Sagkoshi, 2001). The troubles that Baizai’s Bashu and Travelers encountered were expected, for they were made by a fiercely secular and oppositional director used to working in a type of unofficial internal exile, about which he regularly complained but which actually powered his movies.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (b. 1957, Tehran) Makhmalbaf’s break with the ruling Islamist government and with Islamicate values was surprising, for he had been an ardent early supporter of the Islamic revolution, the Islamic Republic’s government and ideology, and of Is38

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lamicate cinema. During his first phase of “amateur Islamicate filmmaking,” he made several stridently antileftist and antimojahidin movies: Nasuh’s Repentance (Towbeh-­ye Nasuh, 1983), Two Feeble Eyes (Do Cheshm-­e Bisu, 1984), and Boycott (Boikot, 1985). Born to a religious family, he made Nasuh’s Repentance in less than a month in response to the controversial film Living in Purgatory by Iraj Qaderi, which according to Makhmalbaf had transformed prerevolutionary criminals and rapists into Islamic and nationalist heroes fighting the Iraqis (Da­bashi 2001:101). As much as this phase’s films were strident politically, they were amateurish in their production. His critics among Iranian exiles charged that these movies of his Islamist phase were so ideologically complicit with the regime that they were required viewing in Iranian prisons to indoctrinate political prisoners. The dissident filmmaker Moslem Mansouri charged that at the time, Makhmalbaf was a virulent proponent of the Islamization of the film industry, to the point of collaborating with intelligence services within and outside the prison system (Mansouri n.d.). Another dissident exile filmmaker, Bassir Nassibi, charged from Germany that Makhmalbaf’s “collaboration” with the Islamist regime was far worse than the collaboration of the infamous filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl with the Nazi regime (Nassibi 2003). In addition, Makhmalbaf in his first phase was a fierce opponent of prerevolutionary new-­ wave secular filmmakers, such as Baizai and Kimiai, whom he had labeled as taquti (idolatrous). Indeed, in an infamous interview in a 1987 issue of Sorush magazine (no. 388, 20 Tir 1366), in response to a question about K ­ imiai’s plan to make a film based on one of his screenplays, Makhmalbaf had shot back: “It is a lie. The taqutis themselves know that I am not even willing to appear with them in a long shot, let alone work with them on a scene or sit down to a conversation with them in a two-­shot. . . . I would not exchange sweeping the floor of the weakest Muslim director or actor with collaborating with the most important non-­Muslim [secular] artist” (quoted in Golmakani 2000/ 1379:144). In this first phase, Makhmalbaf was the best practitioner and theoretician of the Islamicate cinema, rivaling Avini, publishing his stories and polemics widely (Makhmalbaf 1981/1360). This deep engagement with the Islamist regime and with Islamicate values and cinema made his break with them, no less in public, all the more significant. However, a study of his fiction writing during the same period shows “not a trace of the committed ideologue . . . as if they were written by an entirely different person” (quoted in Dabashi 2007:347). Ashis Nandy in an insightful work argued that “highly creative” people have the ability to “partition their selves, disconcertingly but effectively,” a partitioning which serves to “protect their creative insights—­their painfully dredged-­out less accessible self—­from being destroyed by their ‘normal,’ ‘sane,’ rational self.” (1995:240). In the case of seminal Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, he argued, this partitioning exhibits itself in the diametrically opposed worlds of his classical, highbrow, female-­centered, and contemplative films and his popular, lowT he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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brow, male-­dominated, action-­packed published fictions. An intuitively creative person like Makhmalbaf, too, self-­protectively partitioned himself. The real break with Islamist ideology, which seems to have removed the partition, unifying his creative expressions (and presumably his psyche), emerged forcefully with his war movie Marriage of the Blessed (Arusi-­ye Khuban, 1988), released in the year that the war with Iraq ended. This and two slightly earlier movies, The Peddler (Dastforush, 1986) and The Cyclist (Bysikelran, 1986), announced his entry into his “socially concerned cinema,” or as he called it, the “anti-­capitalist cinema” (quoted in Dabashi 2001:186). Marriage of the Blessed focuses on a shell-­shocked photographer as a metaphor for a nation in shock. Haji (Mahmud Bigham), the photographer, is released from the hospital to the family of his wealthy fiancée (Roya Nonahali) for recuperation. Flashbacks of the scenes he has witnessed in the war and television images of African poverty and drought haunt him. He is hired as a photojournalist for a newspaper, which refuses to print the grim scenes of poverty, prostitution, and drug abuse that he and his fiancée—­also a photographer—­have documented in their nightly motorcycle wanderings in the streets of Tehran. Their joint project brings the two closer against the backdrop of opposition from her well-­connected businessman father. On the wedding night, Haji relapses, and in a sequence that provides a cyclical closure, he is back in the hospital. There are no glories awaiting the “living martyrs” in this film, which uses sophisticated flashbacks and surrealistic elements to weave a complex narrative, taking the spectators deeper into both the fevered inner world of the photographer and the decaying moneyed social world in which he must operate. This was not so much an antiwar movie—­although Makhmalbaf dwells on the war’s gore, not its glories—­as one that finds much wrong with the society that had emerged under the Islamic Republic. This was the public declaration of the director’s break with the regime and with the Islamic Propaganda Office’s iatc, for which he had made his early Islamicate movies, and the beginning of his transformation from an advocate to a critic of the regime (figure 13). Gradually Makhmalbaf moved beyond mere criticism to actively opposing the regime, and when in 2005 he and his family left the country, he became an outspoken advocate for regime change, particularly speaking out against Ahmadinejad’s government. The sacred defense war was so important that all officials needed to appear to be ardent supporters of the war effort and of the soldiers, injured veterans, and their families. Preferential treatments were offered these people in housing, medical treatment, employment, and even competitive university slots, without qualifications much beyond their war records and injuries. Having been in the war or being a supporter of those who had been in the war was a badge of honor, and society’s recompense to the survivors was mandatory. This situation upset those who had opposed the war, its needless prolongation, and the unfair preferential treatment of its survivors. Nevertheless, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the war was a benchmark for determining who was in and 40

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13 A shell-shocked war veteran, a “living martyr,” is about to marry his fiancée in Makhmalbaf’s Marriage of the Blessed. Publicity photo.

who was out, as participation in the revolution had been before. For example, when the reformist minister of culture and Islamic guidance Ataollah Mohajerani was under impeachment in the late 1990s, he ferociously defended the various accomplishments of his ministry. Among these he cited the production and rewarding of Hatamikia’s war movies From Karkheh to Rhine, The Glass Agency, and The Red Ribbon (Ruban- ­e Qermez, 1999) and of Saifollah Dad’s stirring air-­war movie Kanimanga Heights (Kanimanga, 1997). He also claimed that “practically one-­third of all the movies” screened at the Fajr International Film Festival in 1998 were “sacred defense war movies,” even though he did not wish to make the “rancor” between the two Muslim countries of Iran and Iraq with majority Shiite populations deeper and recommended “regulating its dose like physicians” (Etemadi et al. 1999/1378:759). Many other directors made war movies, but they are not discussed here due to space limitations. As time wore on and war and its culture began to recede, the production of war movies declined. The high cost of fiction films, which required a huge theater of operation and massive amount of equipment, materials, and personnel, also discouraged the production of realistic war films dealing with the fighting front. This ushered in a genre of cheap war movies. Threatened with the twin problems of mediocre products and the possible disappearance of war movies, the government created the Society for the Sacred Defense Cinema whose charge was to facilitate the production and exhibition of quality war movies.44 Despite the production decline war remains a productive theme since unresolved issues relating to its causes, management, long-­ term consequences, and assignment of blame will continue to haunt the nation.

Electoral Campaign Films and Documentaries Electoral campaign films and documentaries were unknown during the Pahlavi period, as there were no honest multiparty elections, and media campaigns for independent candidates were not customary or necessary. Campaign films are T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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those made by the candidates to promote their candidacy; election documentaries are films that independent filmmakers make about a candidate’s campaign. These documentaries became a viable type of film chiefly during the presidential election campaigns of 1997, which, because of the candidacies of reformists such as the former minister of culture and Islamic guidance Mohammad Khatami, excited large swaths of young people, students, professionals, and women. Such documentaries gained popularity with subsequent parliamentary and presidential elections. In 1997, Khatami was elected president with 70 percent of the vote; his political reforms of transparency and the rule of law received this mandate. Three years later, reformist candidates formed a majority in the Majles. Reformist factions for the first time acquired power in two of the three governing pillars, power they gradually lost over the years, even though Kha­ tami was reelected in 2001 with 60 percent of the vote, as they squandered their opportunities and the hard-­liners, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, thwarted and bested them at every turn. Campaign films were produced during these presidential, parliamentary, and even local elections. As is characteristic, the majority constituted propaganda for the candidates and their affiliated parties. Many were made for television broadcasts only, and some were made in a stealth fashion that increased the cachet of the films, in that well-­known movie directors supporting the candidates were reputed to have directed them without attribution. Among these were Khatami’s first campaign films and the campaign commercials that Saifollah Dad made. Despite their ephemerality, some stood out because of innovative themes, style, personalities, and critical import. A good example is Kamal Tabrizi’s If I Were President (Agar Man Rais Jomhur Budam, 1997), in which the filmmaker conducts impromptu person-­on-­the-­street interviews, asking passersby what they would do if they were elected. Filmed during Khatami’s first campaign for president, the interviews produce entertaining, candid, and critical answers: the film was confiscated. Such films are time-­sensitive, and delay makes them obsolete. Apparently, it was never shown publicly during the campaign. Other filmmakers turned to making documentaries about the election. Perhaps the first of such films was 1936 (1980), an eighty-­five-­minute film, which Mohammad Bozorgnia and Hosain Qolizadeh produced and directed for the Young Iranian Film Group. It focuses on the candidacy of a simple young worker at the General Motors plant named Mohammad Reza Soleimani, who is an independent candidate for the first postrevolutionary Majles. The film follows him to the factory, to his campaign headquarters, and to his campaign events and speeches in the poor part of Tehran, the South End, where he lives. His attempts at juggling family life, fund-­raising, working, and campaigning are covered. On election day, the camera follows him to the voting place, where he writes down his own name on the ballot. When the election results are announced disappointment ensues: he has not been elected, having received only 42

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1,936 votes. The film was twice screened at the Iran National Film Archive but not in public cinemas, as it failed to receive an exhibition permit from the mcig, apparently due to the coincidence of the film’s title, 1936, with the year in which Mussolini had reached power in Italy. The censors claimed that the filmmakers were implying that the Islamic Republic had become a fascist state (Jafari Lahijani 2008a/1387:449). An interesting experiment in election documentary making was A Man for All Reasons (Mardi ba Tamam-­e Dalayel, 2001), directed by Fatemeh Motamed Arya, one of several respected actresses who attained the status of a movie star after the revolutionary dismantling of the star system. The film is a documentary about Khatami’s second presidential campaign and about her making of the film.45 The scenes of her interviews with intellectuals, including Baizai, about Khatami, scenes of her reading newspapers about the election, and those of her struggling to write a script are intercut with the warm public reception that Khatami received wherever he went, particularly from women, youths, and children. Throughout the film, Fatemeh Motamed Arya worries on camera about her film and about how to construct it, implying a concern about whether Kha­tami’s promised social reforms will be realized. In the end, she seems to give up on finding a satisfactory structure for the film, as she tearfully states that it has been like a child that refuses to be born. Despite this somewhat awkward narrative, the film is effective and insightful in several ways. A Man for All Reasons is personal, representing the filmmaker’s own evolving views, confusions, and emotional and intellectual stakes in the film and in the election. The enunciating subject of the film is the director herself, not an officious, unseen voice-­over narrator representing a candidate, which is customary in election films. Fatemeh Motamed Arya humorously compares campaigning to film acting; both involve public appearances, the delivering of speeches, charismatic self-­presentation, and fan adulation. The latter is demonstrated powerfully in many scenes—­perhaps too many—­in which Khatami is surrounded by throngs of men, women, youths, and even children, who seem to adore him, caress him, laugh with him, and hug him. He returns these sentiments with a broad, infectious smile, pats heads, hugs and kisses his fans on foreheads and cheeks. In one extraordinary scene, excited young women clamor to hear his speech in a giant hall. As soon as he enters the tumultuous hall filled with a sea of supporters holding bobbing signs and posters, the front row of young women, with tears streaming down their cheeks, shout words seldom heard about a political leader: “Khatami, we love you, we love you” (Khatami, dustet darim, dustet darim) (figures 14 and 15). At another point, the on-­camera actress wonders aloud: “There is not much difference between acting and politics; the only difference may be that I love my work, I don’t know if Khatami loves his.” The following sequence showing him basking in the glow and glory of his fans visually answers that verbal question. In these scenes, Fatemeh Motamed Arya good-­naturedly both points out and critiques the artificiality and performativT he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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14–15 Presidential candidate Mohammad Khatami as a charismatic rock star; young female fans ecstatically shouting: “Khatami, we love you, we love you.” Fatemeh Motamed Arya’s A Man for All Reasons. Frame enlargements.

ity of political campaigns. In retrospect, the unfinished ending of the film is uncannily prescient in that it symbolizes Khatami’s failure to realize much of his promised agenda of lasting reforms during his two terms as president. With this film Fatemeh Motamed Arya seems to have entered the circle of reformists and dissidents; because of her political activism she would be banned from leaving the country during Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Another noteworthy presidential election campaign documentary is Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran (Khanom-­e Raisjomhur: Zanan va Rahbari-­ye Siasi dar Iran, 2001), directed by the anthropologist Shahla Haeri, who teaches at Boston University. Filmed during the 2000 presidential campaign, it focuses on six professional women out of forty-­seven who, as Haeri notes in her film, took advantage of the gender neutrality of the Iranian constitution, which allows the “political elite” (rejal) to run for president (without specifying their gender).46 She interviews the six women and follows them as they register and campaign, covering their lives as well as the election-­day voting. They range from a woman who confesses to running for the office because she legally can, to others who have more ambition and deeper social-­reform programs. As the film notes, although all forty-­seven women registered their candidacies, the unelected all-­male body that vets political candidates, the Guardian Council, approved none of them. The film records both the women’s elation 44

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at the freedom to publicly speak, to criticize social inequalities, and to run for a high elected position and their disappointment at how circumspect those freedoms are. Filmed by Haeri (seventeen hours of footage) and edited by Masumeh Mohajer, Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran is more journalism than an ethnographic study; nevertheless it is a rich film that counters the usual Orientalist view of women in Iran as veiled and victimized. Haeri related an anecdote in a postscreening talk at the University of Saint Andrews in June 2008 that confirms this point. The head of distribution for the U.S.-­based Films in the Humanities & Sciences, which handles the film, told her that if the women in the film had not been wearing the hijab, she would have thought they were her cohorts, because they were so strong and assertive. The possibility of having multicandidate elections in which real candidates may contest for positions excited not only documentary filmmakers but also fiction directors.47 Among the most accomplished was Rakhshan Banietemad’s Our Times (Ruzegar-­e Ma, 2002), a two-­part film that scrutinized the role of young people and women in the elections of 2000. The first part follows a group of reformist youths, including Banietemad’s own then-teenage daughter, Baran Kowsari, who meet up at a presidential election headquarters to plan campaign strategies and canvas the streets of Tehran in support of Khatami’s second run. Here Banietemad, herself a supporter of Khatami, gives an intimate, humorous, hope-­filled, and affectionate picture of the youths, who are excited about democratic reforms and having a good time with it, even when they are harassed by men and boys and one of them is injured. The harassment is both political and social, both informal and official. During the summer of 2001, apparently in anticipation of the elections, the police cracked down, arresting and flogging “corrupt” people accused of spreading “decadent Western culture.” Their corruption involved selling dogs and monkeys as pets, wearing clothes bearing images of Western pop stars, serving in stores where immodestly dressed women shopped, playing “illegal” music in stores, and displaying women’s underwear or nude mannequins in shop windows (Moaveni 2005:126). The film’s first part shows right-­w ing thugs’ harassment of electioneers. The second part centers on the many women, mostly from the ranks of the urban poor, who nominate themselves for president, all of whom are rejected by the Guardian Council. In this semidocumentary half, the camera follows the candidate Arezu Bayat, a single mother, as she tries to find new housing for herself, her daughter, and her blind mother but is repeatedly rejected as she lacks both a husband and funds. Her boss fires her for having been absent while searching for housing, making her even more desperate. Our Times pre­ sents both a celebration of reform and a protest against its limited scope, but it does so through subtle characters and dialogue, not in the strident, authoritarian language of either doctrinal feminism or Marxism. It bears a personal voice-­over by the director, which reveals her own subjective take on what she sees, which deepens the quiet power of this film about the hopes and hazards T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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of women’s lives at the end of the century. According to Banietemad in an interview with me, this was the first documentary in the Islamic Republic distributed commercially. It was screened in fourteen theaters nationwide (Naficy 2003). For the 2009 presidential election, Banietemad made a forty-­six-­minute documentary, We Are Half of Iran’s Population (Ma Nimi az Jamiat-­e Iran Hastim, 2009), a probing work that brought to the surface the various legal, political, professional, economic, religious, and social issues and demands of women thirty years after the revolution. In a typical intertexual manner, the film is structured around the question that had formed the title of one of Banietemad’s earlier searing films on women, To Whom Will You Show These Films? (In Filmharo beh ki Neshun Midin?, 1992–93). We Are Half of Iran’s Population begins with the director’s voice-­over stating that for years she has been grappling with this question posed in the earlier film, and the solution that she has now come up with is this new film. In it articulate women from all social strata and economic sectors are interviewed and filmed in discussions, seminars, book exhibits, and streets formulating their demands, explaining their grievances in compelling vignettes, and asking direct questions of the candidates about their positions on these issues. From time to time the camera cuts to the several presidential candidates challenging Ahmadinejad, who are seated in a screening room watching the film in progress. The last ten minutes are devoted to their responses. The upshot is that not only rules, regulations, and laws have to be changed to remove those items that are prejudicial and against women but also that the culture at large has to undergo a transformation to remove such prejudicial tendencies among average people, leaders, and institutions. As a small indication of this cultural change, for the first time, the wives of some of the candidates are seated beside them in public, participating in the discussion.48 With each of her documentaries Banietemad became more forthright in voicing her critique of the political limitations not only on women but also on all of society. The Kish Tourism Organization produced an omnibus film, Tales of the Island (Dastanha-­ye Jazireh, 2000), shot on the luxury island of Kish on the Persian Gulf, to which Mehrjui and Makhmalbaf, among others, contributed.49 Makhmalbaf’s Testing Democracy (Emtehan- ­e Demokrasi) begins with a fiction film that evolves into a poetic documentary about the emerging democratic reform movement. Directed in collaboration with Shahaboddin Farrokhyar, the film shows Makhmalbaf filming by the sea with 35mm camera scenes of his short film The Door, when things begin to go wrong due to political censorship, equipment problems, and nonprofessional actors, who refuse to follow the wishes of the director (a local man, for example, refuses to take off his pants in front of the camera). In the meantime, Farrokhyar arrives with a versatile and easy-­to-­operate digital video camera, which entices Makhmalbaf to cease work on his fiction movie to make a documentary about the upcoming elections to the sixth Majles in Tehran. Makhmalbaf, who supported the presidency 46

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of Khatami and Gholamhosain Karbaschi, the former mayor of Tehran, takes a decidedly pro-­democracy stance with this film, indicated in his dedication: “This film is dedicated to its critics!” Like many of Makhmalbaf’s films, Testing Democracy contains arresting, playful, and surreal imagery: Makhmalbaf lectures by the ocean as if giving a political stump speech; when the camera pulls back it reveals that he is addressing a group of seabirds. A ballot box is parachuted from the sky into the sea, where a woman retrieves it and asks people in a nearby boat to drop their votes in it; in Tehran a construction worker is building a wall between himself and Makhmalbaf, causing the filmmaker to recite a famous poem by Ahmad Shamlu about the yearning for freedom, which will arrive on “a day when locks are only imaginary.” Another rising documentarian, Mohammad Shirvani, made President Mir Qanbar (Rais Jomhur Mir Qanbar, 2005), a feature-­length film on a seventy-­four-­ year-­old, jovial, and bearded retired civil servant who, after having participated in a series of other elections without success, is now running for president. Like Don Quixote he campaigns on a donkey, or a donkey cart, from village to village, accompanied by Saifollah, his own limping and disabled Sancho Panza, who is his campaign manager. The film takes both characters seriously and spends a considerable amount of time following their comic, endearing, and improvisational style of campaigning through harsh and rugged rural back roads. The film elucidates the way democratic elections have been internalized in Iran, despite the many systemic and religiously authoritarian tendencies and practices. Shirvani also interviews Mir Qanbar in his home, dressed in his finest, while his fully veiled and partially blind wife silently observes in the background. His answers, delivered in his idea of news-­conference formality, are a mixture of whimsy, wiles, and naiveté. While the film generally treats the two protagonists with respect, in certain places it unfortunately tilts from documentary to mockery. This is particularly noticeable when Shirvani addresses the candidate as “President Mir Qanbar,” clearly goading him, or again, in the many times that he shows Saifollah rushing to pee in the fields during campaigning. The most interesting development in election moviemaking was the thirty-­ minute campaign film that the veteran director Kamal Tabrizi made for Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 2005 presidential bid, a film that backfired after it was aired on television. Called In the Heart of Ruby (Dar Del-­e La’l, 2005), the film presents, in the parlance of popular reality tv shows, an “extreme makeover” of Rafsanjani, an architect of the Islamic Republic and a former president. It documents this by attempting to distance him both from the clerical regime, of which he is a prominent part, by showing him without his turban in certain scenes, and from the powerful and rich elite, of which he is a prominent member, by showing him as a humble, sentimental, and soft-­spoken man of the people, himself a victim of the clerical regime’s excesses. He is seen candidly consulting with his family about his decision, receiving advice not to run again, advice to which he should have listened given his subsequent dismal T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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performance at the polls. The campaign film may have helped defeat him, because its attempt at remaking Rafsanjani’s public persona echoed so closely Tabrizi’s own blockbuster comedy The Lizard (Marmulak, 2005), in which a convicted thief attempts to pass himself off as a legitimate mullah. The parallels were so uncanny that some pundits dubbed the campaign film Lizard 2.50 Another novel tack that In the Heart of Ruby used was to edit down a long news conference into a film. Rafsanjani’s campaign transformed an informal news conference held in the summer of 1995 with a group of young people into a powerful thirty-­minute film designed to humanize him.51 Young people ask him pointed personal questions, unusual in Iranian politics. A man asks if he had problems traveling abroad given the “international condemnations” he had received, referring to charges of his involvement in terrorism and assassination outside the country. He replies disingenuously, “I have no condemnation or any legal cases against me anywhere.” In a lighthearted moment, one young woman asks him: “Have you, in your youth, done anything that you were too shy to admit publicly?” Rafsanjani’s first response is to turn the question around to his interlocutor. When she hesitates, amid the nervous smiles of her cohorts, he volunteers with sly demeanor: “Yes, like everyone else I, too, have done things that I was shy to admit, and I am still too shy to admit now,” causing a loud clap of laughter from attendees. In answer to another question, he surprisingly admits that under today’s conditions the government’s ban on satellite television and the Internet are unworkable. At the end of the film, a student of photography, Parisa Azimpur, speaks eloquently about the dead-­end lives of the young, particularly of women. Breathless with emotion, she states: “I wanted to say that I will not vote this time. I feel claustrophobic. I am tired. This society has completely taken away my self-­confidence. I don’t want to be conned, duped, or lied to anymore. . . . As a woman, no one trusts me. If I am half an hour late coming home I enter with fear and trembling because of what my family will say. At the same time, think of the kind of pressures that my parents are under. . . . At the university the guards, who claim they are under orders, stop me and mistreat me any way they want. I do not expect anything from you. I say nothing and ask for nothing. All I want is for you to return my self-­confidence back to me.” The attendees, stunned at her boldness and affected by her honesty, break into a loud applause. Rafsanjani, who was listening intently, remains silent for a while, mulling over the outburst. Finally, he speaks, urging her and others to become actively involved, ending: “You form a large group and can be influential.” The campaign film demonstrates both Rafsanjani’s artful, pragmatic, and sly self-­presentation and the deep feelings of the youth unhappy with their cloistered lives (after the film’s airing rumors emerged that some of youths in the films were actors). Not all campaign films and election documentaries dealt with national or presidential elections. The veteran documentarist Ebrahim Mokhtari, who had

48

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16 A scene from Ebrahim Mokhtari’s feature movie Zinat, about a female nurse running for a village council seat. Publicity photo.

made Zinat (1993), his first feature fiction film, on the life of a registered nurse in Salakh village on Qeshm Island in the Straits of Hormuz, made a documentary about the lead character, Zinat, on whose story the fiction movie was based. In this and other villages in the south, girls and women usually cover their faces with a black mask (borqeh), which leaves only their eyes uncovered, so that no one other than their close relatives in the privacy of their homes may see their faces. The fiction film dealt with the real-­life story of a nineteen-­year-­old married woman named Zinat Daryai, who in 1985, after bearing several children, defied that rule and exchanged her mask for a nurse’s uniform, becoming the first woman on the island to work outside her home (figure 16). This radical move for an uneducated woman living in a traditional village caused much resistance and controversy in her hometown and her family, and it brought her difficulties. But she doggedly persisted and succeeded in becoming the head of the clinic, expanding her involvement into other social services. Some thirteen years later, when Mokhtari heard that Zinat had nominated herself for the Salakh village council, he began a documentary on that effort, which became the fifty-­four-­minute film Zinat: One Special Day (Zinat: Yek Ruz-­e Bekhosus, 2000). The film begins with Zinat’s first-­person-­singular direct address to the camera: “I am Zinat Daryai,” and it follows her campaign on election day in February 1999, part of the first nationwide local elections since the revolution under Khatami’s watch. Since the authorities had forbidden the public filming of candidates on election day for fear of unfair publicity, most of Mokhtari’s film is shot indoors. He installs his camera in Zinat’s house and records the stream of colorful visitors who offer their pro and con reactions and opinions on politics, elections, and woman’s place in society (her husband, Mohammad Ahmadi, is also running for another one of the five council seats). An old man visits her, complaining of suffering from heart problems; soon, however, it turns out that his real intention is to try and convince Zinat to withdraw her candidacy in favor of her husband, an idea she rejects by offering reasons why she would

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be a better candidate. Throughout these interactions, which also involve the film crew, Zinat charmingly works the crowd, argues forcefully, answers questions carefully, cooks, teases her husband as to who will win, and performs her health-­care duties. The atmosphere is charged but festive, as everyone waits for the results. The news finally arrives that both Zinat and Ahmad have been elected; she wins the most votes, while her husband comes in third. That night Zinat has to attend a seriously ill patient, whom she transfers with a pickup truck to the clinic. The following day, with the elections over, Mokhtari’s camera roams the village showing its inhabitants and their daily routines, as Zinat’s voice describes her plans for improving their lives—­pave the village road, establish a girls’ school, create sports arenas for children, build a handicraft center for women, and bring in piped water, ending her wish list with a hopeful statement: “Everyone tries to dissuade me by saying these are only dreams, but we must work to realize our dreams.” The narrator’s last comment testifies to her success: “Five months after the filming, the village road is paved and eight months later, Zinat obtains permission to build a junior high school for the girls in the village.” Zinat: One Special Day documents a quiet and gradual but powerful social revolution at work even in remote parts of the country, which reflects the pene­ tration of reformist ideas beyond central cities. In this sense, Mokhtari’s film expresses at the local level what Banietemad’s Our Times noted at the national level. It also documents the emergence of a modern subjectivity in the remotest part of the country, where a woman is able to exert her individual subjectivity and personality and become the architect of her own life and identity, despite the collective countercurrents of custom, religion, and patriarchy. Her husband, too, by acquiescing to her candidacy in a race against himself, shows tolerance and broad-­mindedness. The strength of the film is its refusal both to generalize and to politicize Zinat Daryai. It remains focused on this particular situation, this woman, in this village, at this time. Significantly, Mokhtari’s film does not make any references to his fiction film Zinat or to its possible impact on the life of the real Zinat and on her decision to become politically involved and run for a public office. This is a missed opportunity. The freedoms that reformist politicians promised did not materialize, disappointing many citizens, not only with the candidates but also with the traditional big media. This opened the way for the Internet and Persian-­language blogs as new democratic channels of political discourse inside and outside the country. Dissatisfied by the clerical muzzling of the domestic broadcast media, some reformists proposed the creation of an extraterritorial satellite television channel to beam their messages to Iranians at home (Slackman 2005). Such a channel would have to first gain the permission of the clerics, which is unlikely, and then would compete with two dozen commercial satellite channels operated by oppositional exile groups around the world.

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Documentaries of Social Protest The chief differences between the social-­protest documentaries made before and after the revolution were that the latter were more political and more sophisticated in both content and form. The best of them were muckraking works, seeking to expose and protest social conditions. Instead of asserting their politics indirectly, postrevolutionary protest documentaries were frank. The best of them were stylistically and narratively superior to their predecessors, with some exceptions, such as the works of Shirdel, Taqvai, Kimiavi, Tahaminejad, and Sinai. Because of the inroads of video and digitization, a single camera operator without assistants, extra lighting equipment, or a separate sound system could get close to his or her subjects and record intimate and explicit interviews and documentary footage hitherto impossible. Technology not only made the recording of unrehearsed and on-­the-­r un footage easier and more intimate but also made the relationship of the subject and the camera more personal. High-­ quality digital video camcorders and computer editing software, both available at consumer prices, raised the technical quality of the documentaries, including special effects and titling, and made them available to a larger number of professional and amateur filmmakers. Thus technology democratized the docu­ mentary field. Concomitant with technological sophistication, both public taste and filmmakers’ education became more sophisticated as a result of their exposure to transnational media forms, many of them new since the Pahlavi period and some officially banned, such as music videos, movies on dvds, video games, and satellite television. This aesthetic and cultural sophistication led to the inter­penetration of fictional and nonfictional narratives and stylistic features; technique migrated from one cinematic form to another. Experimentation with the documentary form had already begun with the works of Kimiavi and Shirdel before the revolution, but it deepened and widened after the revolution. Documentaries began to look more stylish and dynamic. The dictatorship of the omniscient voice-­over narration, often verbose and poetic, which had weighed down the documentaries of the Pahlavi era, was also overthrown, and with it the monologic directorial voice disappeared. Postrevolutionary docu­ mentaries became dialogic, vernacular, and accented as ordinary people were allowed to speak in their own regional and ethnic dialects and personal voices and dictions. Likewise, filmmakers moved from treating issues generally, rhetorically, and politically to dealing with them personally and deeply by focusing on a few individuals with subjectivities, who became the film’s protagonists. This strengthened documentaries’ storytelling power, increased identification with characters, enhanced the comprehension of larger issues, and obviated the necessity of a narrator. In these ways documentaries became truly modern, both embodying the modern subjectivity of their characters and engendering

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the modern subjectivity of their viewers. Yet the interpenetration of fictional and nonfictional elements was sometimes promiscuous and unwarranted, and not salutary, although in the hands of experienced and innovative filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Kimiavi, Makhmalbaf, Mehrjui, Shirdel, Oskouei, Mokhtari, Shirvani, Mirtahmasb, and Banietemad it resulted in sophisticated and self-­reflexive films. Sociopolitical changes were another difference. It may sound contradictory, but the regime of the Islamic Republic, particularly after the cease-­fire with Iraq, was at once both more authoritarian and more lenient and more flexible than the Pahlavi regime, and the population, which had participated in the uprising, the revolution, and the war, now felt that it had earned the right to critique the regime that it had installed. The emboldened population expressed its wide dissatisfaction with the regime openly, in their daily public lives and in ways they had never dared to do during the Shah’s time: while strolling in streets, waiting in bus lines, reading papers at newspaper stands, shopping in stores, and loitering in cafés, as well as on wall graffiti, in reformist newspapers, in underground hip-­hop music, in documentaries, and on the Internet. Frank speech to film cameras was one manifestation of this emboldened public expression and of modernity’s emerging individualism. This verbal boldness was both a result of consolidating modernity and a reaction to the regime’s imposition of veiling. If men and women were forced literally to adopt an averted gaze due to Islamicate values and their visual and collective regimes of modesty, the voice became more direct, forceful, and individualized. In addition, despite the authoritarian nature of the regime, the Islamic Republic was not a homogenous and monolithic state, as there were genuine public disagreements among the various factions (within and without the government), which were aired in the press, sometimes on television, and often on the Internet and in the Majles, whose deliberations were broadcast on the radio. Opposition figures and government leaders, particularly President Khatami, used the vocabulary of liberalism, speaking of civil society, political reform, democracy, citizen responsibility, pluralism, and multivocalism. Even though many of these ideas remained talk, they gained currency, corroborated by the rising public interest in the values of liberal democracy, secular modernity, and individualism, all of which influenced social protest documentaries. Gender was a further factor in postrevolutionary social-­protest documentaries. During the Pahlavi period, male directors dominated both in fiction and documentary cinemas. However, women’s participation in the revolution and their subsequent adoption of the imposed hijab gave them sociopolitical agency, qualifying them to assert themselves in the public sphere, before cameras and behind cameras. Because one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Islamic Republic was its treatment of women as second-­class citizens, any examination, evaluation, or criticism of women’s status became a judgment on the regime itself and on its Islamicate values. As such, social-­protest docu52

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mentaries about women, which rose in volume and quality, collectively offered a kind of plebiscite on the regime and its values. Some women filmmakers, such as Banietemad, made both fiction and nonfiction movies. Some began as docu­men­tary makers and graduated to fiction cinema. Others specialized in documentary productions only. According to Mohammad Shahba, who taught documen­tary filmmaking at Tehran universities, female students were strongly attracted to social-­protest documentaries in the 1990s (Naficy 2005j). Many of the women-­centered and women-­made documentaries are discussed in the following chapter. Immediately after the revolution, several films documented and critiqued the exploitation of children who had to make a living for themselves and their families. With children and young adults forming the nation’s majority population and with restrictions on women’s representation, films about children and youths assumed extra relevance and urgency. Mohammad Reza Aslani’s three-­ part film Child and Imperialism (Kudak va Este’mar, 1979–82), under the individual titles of Work, Environment, and Leisure, focuses on three spheres of the hard life and disturbing times of working urban children under fifteen years of age during the Pahlavi era and the transition to Islamic Republic. Made for the cidcya, this film was a powerful document of the exploitation of the children for profit in cities and of the deprivation of the children of rural migrants, who could not receive proper education, health care, or housing. They lived in abject poverty in shantytowns called “tin cities” (halabiabad). Mohammad Reza Moqaddasian’s forty-­one-­minute film, Brick Factory (Kurehpaz Khaneh, 1980), also made for the cidcya, centers on the exploitation of rural children on the outskirts of Tehran, who are brought in as laborers to the brick factories whose tall chimneys crowd Tehran’s southern outskirts. The sequence presenting statistics, along with images of sweating and burdened children, is eye opening. An eleven-­year-­old boy working from 4 am to 8 pm has to move five thousand unfired mud bricks from one place to another over a distance that in a day adds up to eighteen kilometers. Likewise, Manuchehr Moshiri’s seventy-­ four-­ minute film for the vvir’s Channel One, With Dust . . . to Dust (Ba Khak . . . ta Khak, 1980), reveals the hard life of children, women, and Afghanistani immigrants and refugees working in a brick factory in Varamin near Tehran and in another brick factory in Minab, near Bandar Abbas. The film also highlights the antagonistic relations of workers with managers, as well as the further difficulties of working in a hot factory environment in the high humidity and high temperatures of the Persian Gulf region. Interviews with children provide emotional and telling documents of their exploitation. Farideh Shafai’s Bread from Mud (Nani az Gel, 1981), part of the Breadwinners (Nanavaran) series, also centers on child labor in Tehran brick factories by focusing on two youngsters, who at the end are seen playing at sunset, while the various clauses of the labor laws that prohibit the employment of children are superimposed. The film won an award from the Oberhausen Film T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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Festival. The theme of workers’ hard lives was rendered more poetically in Farhad Mehran’s Charcoal Makers (Zoqalpazan, 1987), about a man and his three daughters who in the woods of northern Iran turn timber into charcoal. When in February 1980 the vvir aired Brick Factory, it caused controversy in the press; but workers and viewers liked it so much that they demanded repeat showings. Some incendiary documentaries were never aired. A “confidential” government report warned of a thirty-­minute documentary it called In Shanty­ towns (Dar Baiqulehha, 1989), made by the iatc of the Islamic Propaganda Organization in Zahedan, near the Afghanistan border. The film’s screening in a private session at the iatc “transfixed” the audience, it said, documenting drug addiction and prostitution in Zahedan. Claiming that about one thousand houses of prostitution existed, the “bold camera” entered several to show an eight-­year-­old boy using heroin while his mother slept with her client, or a group of children playing games while their mothers conducted business with customers, some of whom were soldiers. The film contained interviews with two prostitutes from neighboring towns who were married, had children, and were Shiites. The governor of Zahedan Province spoke of the public health problems the prostitutes were posing and of the complaints of the Sunni Muslims protesting against prostitutes, 97 percent of whom were said to be Shiite. His interview ends with the statement, “Zahedan is like an orphan with whom everyone has sympathy but who in the end must sleep through the night alone.” Criticism of the neglect of Zahedan Province by the Islamic Republic echoes that voiced against the Pahlavi regime, but the level of prostitution and addiction were new. This apparently frank and devastating film was not publicly screened, and the report about its private screening was part of a document circulated to the authorities to apprise them of social problems. The Marxist antigovernment group Paykar apparently obtained some of these confidential reports in 1989 and recirculated them in Europe and in the United States.52 Drug addiction and prostitution were major social problems under the Islamic Republic in outlying provinces and in major cities; however, their cinematic examination was curtailed by censorship and denial for some time. In 1991, the British television Channel 4 commissioned the Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan (the winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal and the son of the new-wave filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan) to make a documentary in Iran for its South series, which presented films about the global south by filmmakers from the south. Golestan, who had made a name for himself with hard-­hitting and humanistic photojournalism in wartime, received permission from the mcig to make the twenty-­seven-­minute documentary Recording the Truth (1991), about journalism as practiced under the Islamic Republic. The plight of this film demonstrates that having prior permission to film does not guarantee permission for release, exhibition, or export. Golestan interviewed journalists with diverse backgrounds and views about their opinions on the universality of human rights, freedom of expression, and democracy. The 54

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result was “a rare and untainted glimpse into the world of journalists working in Iran who took positions for and against the politics of the government” (Middle East Watch 1993:62). Prior to its release, the participants in the film apparently viewed and approved of it. Following the regulations, Golestan also submitted a copy to the mcig, seeking its permission to export the film to Britain for a scheduled Channel 4 broadcast. Six weeks passed without an answer, and his repeated inquiries bore no result, until a desperate Golestan asked Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Ali Zam, the head of the iatc, to intercede on his behalf. His intercession successful, the film was released for export and aired by South in December 1991. However, the troubles for Golestan were not over, for he became entangled in the “cultural imperialism” debate. On his return to Iran in 1992, he was summoned to the Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office and made to sign a declaration promising not to leave the country. He was barred from leaving Tehran without permission, his reporting permit was revoked pending “further investigation and disposition of his case,” and all participant journalists in the documentary were also questioned and ordered to cease contact with the filmmaker (Middle East Watch 1993:63). This sort of pressure on the subjects of documentaries, not just the directors, was unusual and pointed to the sensitivity of the topic, the sharp edge of the film’s social criticism, and the gathering storm of intolerance. The situation seemed to have eased, for a decade later in 2000 Golestan became a freelance bbc television cameraman in Iran, covering Middle Eastern news, including the war in Iraq. On 2 April 2003, he took his colleagues to the countryside in Kifri, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to celebrate, picnic-­style, the Persian and Kurdish spring solstice traditions of sizdahbehdar (Fassihi 2003). While examining an abandoned fort, first his producer Stuart Hughs and then Golestan stepped on a landmine, which injured Hughs but brought the life of the talented Iranian journalist to a grisly and premature death at fifty-­one. Housing problems in shantytowns, which had been one of the sparks of the anti-­Shah uprising, continued to plague not only Tehran but also other major cities, thanks to the displacements and internal migration caused by the revolution and the war with Iraq, high inflation, and high unemployment. One of the earliest documentaries on the subject was Sirus Kashani’s Grapes of Wrath (Khushehha-­ye Khashm, 1979), made for the vvir, which focuses on Tehran and its social inequalities, worsening traffic, lack of planning, general disorder, destruction of cultural heritage sites and green spaces, and general ugliness and grime, all of which the film claims are problems inherited from a dictatorial, monarchical regime, aided by imperialism and Zionism. Attributing the ills of society to the ancien régime, particularly soon after the revolution, was both popular in society and in the media, including in documentaries. One of the first solid social-­protest films dealing specifically with housing problems was Mokhtari’s powerful Tenancy (Ejarehneshini, 1982), an episode of the three-­part series Shelter: Housing Crisis (Sarpanah: Bohran-­e Maskan), which the minister T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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of housing and urban planning Shahab Gonabadi had commissioned for broadcast on the vvir’s First Channel. As Mokhtari told me in an e-­mail correspondence, the minister’s purpose for commissioning these films was a novel one: to help communicate the seriousness of the housing problems both to the nation and to the Majles deputies so as to expedite housing legislation (Naficy 2005e). The film is a good example of the new and modernist documentary “case study” approach, focusing on the predicaments of six tenants in Tehran. It buttresses these cases, filmed in moving direct-­cinema style, with facts, statistics, and analyses provided by researchers for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, thus obviating one of the perennial weaknesses of Iranian documentaries: inadequate research. The problem, as the film defined it, is that the landlords are forced to threaten and in some cases to evict their tenants because of their failure to pay their rent. The tenants, unable to find new housing at affordable prices, refuse to leave. In several cases, this goes beyond verbal arguments, pleas for understanding, the extension of deadlines, and desperate weeping, leading to terrible physical fights and to police intervention and legal action. The police, too, are in a bind, as some are tenants themselves, whose own rents have shot up, and they sympathize with the tenants they are sent to evict. As Mokhtari describes it, the filming was complicated and the presence of the camera affected the proceedings. Some policemen who were willing to evict the tenants as required by law were unwilling to do so on camera, a decision with which the court agreed. Contrariwise, some landlords who were intent on expelling their tenants softened when the camera was turned on; they negotiated and gave them extra days to raise rent money. Such developments caused the filmmakers to discard sequences already filmed, as the dramatic hoped-­for eviction never materialized. In another case, when the sons of the tenants beat up the landlord on camera, causing a major public fracas, Mokhtari and the crew feared that the worked-­up crowd would turn on them, or turn the protest into a major antigovernment riot. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed (Mokhtari 1994/1373:288–96). Such are the risks of direct-­cinema filming in Iran. Despite all these difficulties, Tenancy makes a persuasive case for changing the housing policies. The film was banned and never aired on the television for which it was made, ostensibly because it contained footage of unveiled women. However, according to Mokhtari, the minister of housing and urban planning screened it “privately for some of the officials and to the Majles deputies,” as a result of which certain changes were made to housing regulations. “Without a doubt the minister was intent on taking positive steps toward improving the housing problems; that is why we filmmakers, too, worked on these films with heart and soul,” said Mokhtari (Naficy 2005e). Only years later, in 1997, when a caption was added at the film’s opening, was it allowed a public screening, but only outside the country, at a film festival in Leipzig, as part of a retrospective of Iranian cinema (Naficy 2005d). The caption declared, “The law governing the relations of land56

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lords and tenants was approved one year before the Islamic Revolution. This film was commissioned after the revolution by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning to moderate this law.” This is perhaps the first case in Iran of a documentary film influencing important social legislation. In the meantime, Mehrjui’s comic feature The Tenants (aka Lodgers), about housing problems, was widely popular, becoming the all-­time top box-­office earner up to that point. The popularity of this scathing social satire, despite a forced conciliatory ending inserted to obtain an exhibition license, demonstrated the issue’s continued incendiary force; it had to be defused in the guise of satire.53 The banning of social documentaries was prevalent but understated, for generally it did not make a public splash, as was the case with fiction movies. The film historian and documentary filmmaker Mohammad Tahaminejad told me that by 1998 he had made nearly a dozen documentaries that had not seen the light of public screens. Their banning had not attracted much publicity, perhaps because they were commissioned and banned by the same organization, the vvir, either in Tehran or in Zahedan (Naficy 1998e). His Remembering Doctor Fatemi, (1980) about the Mosaddeq-­era foreign minister, was banned because it had not dealt with “all the characters in the oil crisis” (Naficy 2005c). His Water Distributor’s Night (Shab-­e Mirab, 1981), about the ancient system in which a water distributor in Aqda, near Yazd, divides the irrigation water to cultivated fields, was banned because of a scene of a village taziyeh, in which the bowl symbolizing the Tigris water denied to Imam Hosain and his warriors is used to remind the waterman of his duty to justly divide the water to the fields. Cut (Qat’, 1982–87) is about Shahrbanu, the daughter of a street sweeper, who because she thinks her facial features are disproportionate and ugly, submits to a series of plastic surgeries that eventually kill her. The film ends with her bandaged face after surgery, over which her voice presciently talks about herself in the past tense: “I had a high school diploma. People harassed me. I loved life.” According to Tahaminejad, the vvir wanted the film to end with a hopeful scene of a successful surgery, to which Tahaminejad did not agree, forcing the film into the darkness of the film vault. Finally, his The Immigrants and Housing Crisis (Mohajeran va Bohran-­e Maskan, 1982), an episode of Shelter: Housing Crisis, was also banned.54 The film was to focus on the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s plan to reverse the massive emigration into Tehran, which had turned the city’s suburbs into teeming shantytowns. Tahaminejad’s impassioned documentation of seasonal workers sleeping in a public garage like sardines, day laborers desperate for work hanging onto vehicles on their way to construction sites, the destruction of illegal houses and overcrowded shantytowns (such as the Gowd-­e Nedai neighborhood), which created more homelessness, women quarreling with each other over water in an overcrowded communal residence, and a desperate man holding the ownership documents of his property that seemed to have vanished, countered the ministry’s optimistic plan. All these films, and Tahaminejad’s other films not mentioned, had reT he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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ceived production permits; yet it appears that once they were finished, the social situation, the policy, the censors, or the sponsoring agencies had changed, or had changed their minds, making the films undesirable. In the late 1990s, after Khatami’s election to the presidency and the emergence of the 15 Khordad Reform Movement, soccer regained its old status as a national sport, with an added twist. Soccer, or football as it is called in Iran, was a major national sport during the second Pahlavi period, when Iranian teams did reasonably well in international competitions and received wide coverage by domestic broadcast networks and the press. Some soccer players became stars. The immediate postrevolutionary Islamist government, however, ignored, even discouraged, organized sports, but with the rise of the reform movement, soccer gained traction and was transformed from a neglected national pastime and an emblem of national identity into an expression of opposition to Islamicate values, their stern and somber enforcers, and the claustrophobic hold of both on society. Going to soccer matches, watching them on television, rooting wildly for star players and hometown teams, wearing colorful clothes, carrying flags, blowing horns—­in short, free, boisterous, and colorful self-­expression in public by both genders—­became big at the same time that the Iranian team’s performances also rose in international rankings. The domestic press and television, as well as the international satellite channels, the Internet, and the large Iranian communities in diaspora, all contributed to this reemergence. Winning in international sports contests countered the degrading political image of Iran as a terrorist, hostage-­taking state, a rogue nation, or a member of the axis of evil. Several films documented this opening of social space and renewed national pride, which some dubbed the “football revolution.” 55 Saifollah Samadian’s Tehran, the Twenty-­Fifth Hour (Tehran, Sa’at-­e Bistopanj, 1999) is essentially a compilation film that documents the impact of the return match between the Iranian and Australian teams in 1998. Iran stunned the sports world by winning, qualifying to participate in the World Cup. The film begins with Iranian youngsters excitedly watching the live broadcast of the match on their television sets at home and celebrating the win by spilling into the streets of Tehran. Cars filled with happy and boisterous youngsters clog the streets, honking horns, shouting slogans, and playing loud, happy, and banned dance music. Some youths are seated on tops of cars, some hanging out of cars, some walking, and some running and carrying flags. In places, the traffic comes to a halt and people joyfully leave their vehicles mid-­street. Male and female teenagers mix freely, whistling, dancing, and playfully joshing; the girls’ scarves slip dangerously down, revealing much hair. The air of celebration and freedom from Islamic restrictions is buttressed by a sense of national pride and assertiveness. Outsiders would not know from the images of Tehran, the Twenty-­Fifth Hour that women had been deprived of seeing their images in these empowering national scenes, for they were urged not to go into the streets or to participate in 58

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the celebration. As the filmmaker Tahmineh Milani complained, the five domestic television channels systematically avoided showing the women who had participated. She angrily complained that her husband, who had not gone to the celebrations due to a schedule conflict, had been able to see on television images of men celebrating this scene of national pride. By identifying with them, he could participate in their pride. However, she wrote, “I who gave away all the sweets and candies we had at home to the construction workers near our house [to celebrate the occasion], I who took my one-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old daughter in my car and drove around the city and congratulated thousands of people, did not see a single image of myself on television, which is supposed to be the mirror of our society. Who is censoring me and ignoring me, and why?” (Milani 1997/1376:5). The empowering sentiments of men and women expressed through soccer and cinema are also at play in Maziar Bahari’s Football Iranian Style (Futbal Beh Sabk-­e Irani, 2001), a sensitive and humorous portrayal of soccer fans’ reactions to the same match. Like many new documentaries, this was an artisanal effort, as Bahari produced, directed, photographed, and edited, wrote, and read the film’s narration. As Clifford Geertz demonstrated in his pioneering study of Balinese cockfights, popular sports events, in which people engage in deep play, when described and interpreted contextually—­in “thick description,” in his words—­can reveal much about a society, its concerns, and its psychic and social orientations (1973:412–53). This is something that Bahari, a stringer for Newsweek in Iran who had studied in Canada and become a Canadian citizen and returned to make documentaries, seemed to have had in mind, as he states, “I always wanted to make a film about football, not just about football as sport, but as a way to show realities of Iranian society. Through football, we can see some of the society’s complexities. We can see things that don’t get shown on the 6 o’clock news bulletins all round the world. . . . When we got the result to qualify, for the first time in 20 years, people celebrated on the streets. For two decades, people only went on to the streets mourning or protesting. For the first time, people were out there joyful, happy, smiling” (quoted in Mangan 2002).56 The unrest at the Tehran University dormitories in the summer of 1999, which led to the security forces’ attack on the students, the ransacking of their rooms and properties, the death of some students, and further widespread antigovernment protests, fanned the already intense flames of discontent and desire for freedoms of all sorts, helping elect a new, reformist parliament a year later and reelect Khatami as president a year after that. Pirooz Kalantari, who previously had directed Alone in Tehran (Tanha dar Tehran, 1999), about the lonely life of an attractive but flighty young actress (Behnaz Jafari), directed That’s Life (Zendegi Hamin Ast, 2001), which focuses on five university students—­four males and one female—­all of whom speak candidly about their drab lives and the limitations they face in postrevolutionary Iran. They discuss the lasting effects of the Iran-­Iraq war and their disappointment at the nonexistence of the T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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promised political reforms and at the failure of the 1999 student rebellion. The film provides a moving, sad tribute to the frustrated hopes and dreams, both political and private, of a young generation. Divorce, adoption, sexual orientation, drug addiction, and violence against women were other important social issues that surfaced in the Islamic Republic and in documentaries—­all of them indicators of the cost and consequences of deepening modernity (many of these films were directed by women and are discussed in other chapters).57 As far as films by men about these issues are concerned, there were several notable examples. Maziar Bahadori’s fifty-­two-­minute documentary, And Along Came the Spider (Va Ankabut Amad, 2002), about violence against women, is truly artisanal, as he produced, directed, photographed, and edited it all by himself. It focuses on the life and execution of the notorious serial killer Said Hanai, who murdered at least sixteen prostitutes. The film features not only graphic images of the mutilated bodies of the victims, but also chilling, matter-­of-­fact interviews with the murderer before his execution and with members of his family, all of whom consider his actions a just and proper method of getting rid of vice and immorality (including his young son, who states disturbingly that he has not yet decided whether he will follow in his father’s footsteps). These self-­righteous views are nuanced by interviews with the presiding judge, a female journalist, and a prostitute. The film was shown on Western television, achieving wide recognition; however, it remained almost unknown inside Iran, as it was never screened either on television or even in specialized venues such as film festivals (Kalantari 2004/1382:72). Mohammad Jafari’s fifty-­minute documentary Christine (Kristin, 1999), focuses on Christine Andersen, a middle-­aged Swedish woman born in Iran, now living in the United States, who was put up for adoption forty years earlier by her poor parents. She was adopted by a Russian father and a Swedish mother then working in Iran who took her to Sweden. In school, she stuck out like a sore thumb and was mocked by fellow students, for she was the only one with dark hair and a tan complexion, forcing her, at age sixteen, to confront the fact that she was adopted, which ignited her desire to retrace her Iranian roots. Christine places an ad in an Iranian newspaper bearing her picture, requesting information about her family. In conflicting and humorous interviews, various people in Iran claim they recognize the woman in the picture as their long-­lost sister or daughter, offering such evidence as “I recognized her because my pulse speeded up” and “my hair stood on end.” Numerous anxious families gather at the airport to welcome and claim her when she arrives in Tehran. As it turns out, each of them had abandoned or put up for adoption a daughter. In answering the filmmaker’s questions about the reasons for abandoning their child, the probable identity of the adoptee family, and what would have happened if they had not given up their child, the families offer a bewildering range of comical, improbable, self-­serving, or pathetic explanations, the basic subtext of which is

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the lesser social value these families placed on baby girls, whom they were willing to give away. Aided by social service agencies, Christine spends days walking around neighborhoods to find the house of her original parents. In one house, she too “senses” a feeling of at-­homeness, but the film leaves unresolved whether she finds her real home or parents, ending with her saying that it is enough for her to have found Iran (over the ending credits, she tries to converse in English on the phone with her purported biological mother without success, as she does not know English). While Christine is less about adoption as a social issue than as a human story, it touches on the tragic situation of the girls who are abandoned or put up for adoption. A new development was that independent documentary filmmakers joined forces in the late 1980s to establish commercial film companies. Jafar Fatemi opened Sherkat-­e Resaneh-­ye Puya with Farhad Towhidi and Farhad Varahram. Mokhtari made Saffron (Za’faran, 1998) and Kalantari his Refugee (Panahandeh, 1990), about the impact of Afghan refugees and their flocks in the Khorasan region, for this company. Dariush Ayyari established Vesta Company with Pirooz Kalantari, which Mokhtari, Moqaddasian, and Mohsen Abdolvahab later joined. Banietemad, Manuchehr Moshiri, Mahmud Bahadori, and As’ad Naqshbandi also created Did-­e No Company, which produced, among others, several of Banietemad’s socially critical films, filmed by Moshiri. Some of these companies did not survive (Did-­e No lasted ten years), but others evolved (Kalantari 2004/1382:36). Although there had been similar efforts in the past, particularly with Golestan Film, the emergence of so many commercial companies for documentary production indicated a new, healthy direction, worthy of further study. By the end of the century of cinema a new generation of young documentarists had emerged, the third generation, which was attracted to more cultural but no less socially relevant topics. Film and cinema themselves became subjects. Mohammad Reza Haeri, born in 1973, in his Do You Know Mr. Kiarostami? (Shoma Aqa-­ye Kiarostami ra Mishenasid?, 1999) offers a fascinating account of Kiarostami as a star director. Turning to another subject, in Final Fitting (Akharin Perov, 2008), Haeri provides a delightful portrait of a famed master tailor, the seventy-­four-­year-­old Abolfazl Arabpur of the holy city of Qom, the official tailor of the country’s religious leaders, including Khomeini and Khatami. As the anthropologist and linguist Niloofar Haeri (Reza Haeri’s aunt) noted in 2005, women’s dress in the Muslim world has been a subject of endless debate, but not that of the men, let alone that of the clerics. However, clerical fashion is in full force, partly driven by the importance that Islam, including the Prophet Mohammed, attached to being well dressed and well groomed. Khatami came to be known as the epitome of a dapper, even dandified, dresser in his clerical garb. “Every new outfit he dons as the seasons change unleashes a fresh round of comment about the colours, textures and shapes of the robes,

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high-­collared shirts and mantles that he wears. After the president appeared on tv during the summer in an elegant cream-­coloured robe, other prominent members of the government followed suit,” wrote Niloofar Haeri in the Guardian (Haeri 2005). With satirical precision, the filmmaker Haeri observes Arabpur as he jovially works in his shop, deals with clerical clients, bickers with one over his fee, and explains the fine points of clerical garb—­turbans and robes—­ and their various styles for traditional, modernist, and even fokoli (dandified) clerics. Like a designer versed in theory, he discusses with precision and humor the semiotics of clerical fashion. Haeri soon produced, directed, cowrote, and edited the audacious thirty-­one-­ minute All Restrictions End (2009; it bears only an English title), a lyrically impressionistic, if sometimes slightly obtuse, poetic essay à la Chris Marker about the politics and poetics of fashion, dressing, undressing, veiling, and unveiling, what the film calls “three thousand years of looking and censoring the gaze,” as well as of photography and cinematography from the Qajar era to the present. Each major regime change in Iran is labeled a “fitting,” auguring its own fashion and regime of looking, ending with the Green Movement that emerged after the discredited presidential election in 2009, with its green banners, palm prints, facial paints, clothes, and placards. Thus the film boldly suggests that this latest movement might be a new fitting, the sign of a brewing revolution. All Restrictions End intercuts a wide array of verbal quotations from writers, sound excerpts from radio programs and speeches, samples from the visual arts and taziyeh performances, and photographs and film clips from domestic and foreign documentaries and fiction movies to create a rich montage effect, filled with bewildering and insightful juxtapositions. Among these is the intercutting at the end of the film of Vertov’s celebrated The Man with a Movie Camera with the footage of the Green Movement’s street demonstrations. In one scene, as Vertov’s camera tilts from a high-­rise building downward, Haeri’s film cuts to a high-­angle shot of a river of demonstrators jamming the streets, the direction and speed of the two men’s cameras the same. This suggests that Vertov’s camera was filming these scenes, suturing the revolutionary Soviet Union of the late 1920s to the revolutionary Iran of the late 2000s and making a parallel between Vertov’s film about looking and filming one day in the life of his country and Haeri’s film about the history of looking and its restrictions in Iran. Bahman Kiarostami, Abbas’s son (b. 1978), also made incisive documentaries. His were about the layered nature of Shiite faith among Iranians, including Art of Weeping (Tabaki 2001), which examines with humor and critical precision the religious schools that train professional mourners, eulogists, and lamenters, who liven up Shiite preaching sessions and mourning festivals. It follows a group of trainees in these arts on a pilgrimage to a religious site by bus; it interviews them and shows their training; and it ends with their arrival at a mourning ceremony in which they practice lamentation and eulogy. In his 62

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Pilgrimage (Ziyarat, 2005), he follows Iranian pilgrims—­males, females, adults, and children—­braving all sorts of humorous and culturally nuanced obstacles, traveling on the backs of overcrowded trucks like cattle, to reach the sacred shrine of Imam Hosain in Karbala, Iraq, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The border crossing is made complicated and dangerous as laws and procedures for pilgrimage are deliberately kept ambiguous and as many of the pilgrims are families of those martyred in the war and they expect, and demand, the right to make this pilgrimage. Many others are Iraqi Shiites who had sought asylum in Iran and now want to return home, some with improper identification. These factors create a teeming market for false ids and strong emotions at passport offices and border posts. Those in the film are part of a large influx of pilgrims, between three thousand and four thousand, who legally and illegally crossed the border each day to reach Karbala while Iraq was under U.S. occupation. This fervor—­fully on display here—­is driven by eight years of war during which reaching Karbala and even conquering it had become the unrealized aims of the war. By cutting to the plethora of slogans, pictures, and graffiti on walls, banners, buses, and trucks urging these aims, the film underscores the emotional and political undercurrents of this pilgrimage. Mohammad Shirvani conducted a fascinating experiment by offering a workshop in filmmaking exclusively to blind women; then he gave digital cameras to seven of them (with different degrees of sightedness) to make a documentary about themselves; he put these together, forming the omnibus feature Seven Blind Women Filmmakers (7 Filmsaze Zan-­E Nabina, 2008). The individual films are A Conversation with the Wall by Sara Parto; The Death of the Witness by Shekufeh Davarnezhad; The Path of Life by Nargess Haqiqat; Notes from Last Night by Banafsheh Ahamdi; Fire by Mahdis Elahi; Goodnight by Naghemeh Afiyat; and Love by Neda Haqiqat. These offer a variety of touching, clever, and ingenuous ways in which blind people attempt to see and make sense of their environment and relate to one another and to sighted people, bringing to the surface their rich internal life for sighted viewers. Watching Sara cook and clean the kitchen, warming milk on the stove, while making sure not to boil it over as she films the scene is both admirable and anxiety producing. Shekufeh and her mother confront her ophthalmologist whom they accuse of having blinded her. “You ruined my life,” she cries, causing a ferocious row in his office. Nargess films her blind husband who lovingly plays soccer with their cute baby daughter in the living room, as on the soundtrack she says, “I love him, it is not habit, I am truly in love.” Banafsheh films the problems of a refugee family from Afghanistan. Mahdis, all dolled up, with long manicured fingers bearing artificial nails, talks about her martyred father while she stuffs thousands of toothpicks into tiny individual envelopes for money. Naghemeh and her sighted husband have been married only two months; at night they reminisce about the first time they met, and she caresses his face to read his reactions—­breaking the no-­touching rule between males and females. A title card states that Neda’s film cannot be T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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shown, reminding the spectators of the specter of censorship, either governmental or personal, which may have removed the film from the anthology. Collectively the women create a world rich in intellectual, personal, and sensual experiences while eloquently showing that the problems of blind people are not very different from those of sighted people. Their filming and editing, which do not follow the rules of a classical realist style, make the so-­called invisible continuity system become visible, thanks to sightlessness. In a postscreening discussion in June 2008 at the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, Shirvani discussed the inspiration and the methodology for realizing the film, which shows the ingenious, experimental, and improvisational features that distinguish third-­generation Iranian art cinema, fiction and nonfiction, from other cinemas. It also gives insight into Shirvani’s creative internal world. One day in 2004 when Shirvani woke up, he stumbled around and fell, sightless. Frightened, he woke up, realizing that he had dreamed his blindness. This powerful experience turned him to exploring the sightless world. He organized a filmmaking workshop at the White Cane Institute, which took six months. A newspaper ad brought in two hundred applicants. On the day of selecting the applicants, “I went from home to the institute with blindfolded eyes, and interviewed the two hundred with my blindfold.” When interviewing them, he told them that he was a director who had gone blind. “My lie caused them to trust me.” He selected fifteen. “Next week, when I started the class with my eyes open, I noticed that I had seen well with my eyes closed,” he said with his characteristic sly humor. Among the films he screened for the women was Kiarostami’s episodic film Ten. He set several guidelines, or as he called them, “dogmas,” for filming, referring to the Danish film movement: the films had to be autobiographical, documentary, without phony drama or artificial lighting, and they must be filmed by the women themselves without assistance from sighted persons. He worked with them in all aspects of the production except the actual filming (he was present at the filming in the ophthalmologist’s office). He and his assistant then edited each film in the presence of the director. Neda’s film, Love, about her relationship with a boyfriend, is not included because she withdrew it as the relation had soured. Shirvani noted that the mcig wanted to remove the title card about the absence of Neda’s film, as it would seem that the ministry had censored the film. The segment director also wanted the title removed as it would point to a relationship that she wanted to forget; plus, it could jeopardize her future relations. Despite these objections, Shirvani left the title in. Like art-­cinema fiction directors, documentary filmmakers ventured abroad to make films outside Iran. Partly because of government politics and policies and partly due to cultural and historical reasons spelled out elsewhere, their chief destinations were Muslim countries in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Europe. An active documentary cinema also emerged in the diaspora. 64

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The Underground Production Mode and Films With the violent suppression of oppositional factions in the 1980s, factional underground documentaries ceased. However, underground filmmaking is a persistent form of activity in authoritarian states, which in the case of Iran refers to a production mode that involves filming without the state’s official authorization or supervision. In addition, it involves a willingness to take multiple personal, legal, financial, and professional risks, to work clandestinely and on the run, using small budgets and film crews, utilizing portable, digital, often amateur equipment, and distributing and exhibiting the products either informally and secretly at home or openly in foreign film festivals, in the diaspora circuits, or on the Internet (Jahed 2011). This mode of production sometimes requires that underground filmmakers clandestinely export their footage to other countries for editing and exhibition. As such, underground films are both deeply local and interstitial in their production and highly transnational and global in their distribution, exhibition, and reception. Thematically, underground films tend to deal with taboo subjects and their mode of production encourages certain aesthetics of improvisation, spontaneity, incompleteness, smallness, and fragmentation and a blurring of fictional and nonfictional elements, which are sometimes mobilized to critique both the dominant cinema and its genres and the state and society and their rules and norms. As such, Iranian underground cinema of the 2000s has an affinity with the Latin American “third cinema” movement of the 1960s. Although discussed here under the documentary cinema rubric, the underground production mode is not limited to nonfiction films and is mobilized in making fiction and other types of films. Finally, Iranian underground cinema exists side by side with other forms of underground arts and culture formations—­literature, poetry, music, media, and graphic and performing arts, by which it is nourished (by becoming subjects of cinema) and to which it contributes (by widening their reach). Such underground arts and culture formations gained momentum in the late 2000s in response to the intensifying state oppression during Ahmadinejad’s retrenchment era. One documentarist who filmed in Iran and smuggled his footage out of the country was Moslem Mansouri. Born in Iran in 1964, he was imprisoned for two years in 1981–82. In the 1990s, he made several critical documentaries “secretly,” under the guise of making other media, what he called the first “underground” films. Despite this claim, his was not a new form, as the concept and practice of underground filmmaking had emerged not only before the revolution but also immediately after the revolution, thanks to the efforts of the People’s Fadaian Organization of Iran (pfoi), the pmoi, Kurds, ethnoreligious minorities, and women’s groups, and the term underground film had been applied as early as 1979 to Allamehzadeh’s Speak Up Turkmen. In applying this term to that film, Mohammad Ali Najafi, then head of the mcig, had warned that an underground cinema would emerge if official intolerance became intolerable. He was correct. T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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As Mansouri noted in his résumé, working underground for him meant making films “under the pretext of other media work” and “outside the control of the Iranian regime.” Not surprisingly, he found working inside Iran impossible and eventually left the country for Sweden, Canada, and the United States, where he edited the footage he had smuggled out of Iran into at least three films. In 1999, he received political asylum from the United States and became a spokesperson for the underground cinema inside the country.58 His Utopia (Jangzadegan/war-­struck, 2003), edited in Sweden, is about rural populations displaced by the war with Iraq who more than a decade after the cease-­fire are still squatting in miserable conditions in cities. Epitaph (Zanan-­e Tanforush/Women Prostitutes, 2004), edited in the United States, is about widespread prostitution by married women, widows, unmarried women, university students, and underage girls who engage in it to make a living and to take care of their families. Shown only in extreme close-­ups of their sides, backs, arms, lips, hair, feet, and hands to conceal their identities, attractive women voice strong criticism against the sexualized and degraded conditions of women in general under the Islamic Republic and narrate their sad and harrowing stories as wives, mistresses, and prostitutes. A weeping mother tells of selling her young daughter to obtain money for formula to feed her baby. The narratives are powerful, but the film’s politics distort its aesthetics. All the interviews with women are filmed in homes, but periodically the camera goes into the streets to observe women. The indoor filming is empathic, but the outdoors filming is voyeuristic and invasive: attractive female subjects in public places are singled out and stalked from a distance and from behind bushes and obstacles. They are shown in slow motion, in close-­up, and accompanied by extradiegetic dramatic music, implying that they may be engaged in sexual behavior without showing any such behavior. As a result, any attractive woman in a public place is made an object both of a male gaze and of moral suspicion. This regressive, male-­driven aesthetics counteracts the unadorned realism of the other women’s speech about their miserable lives. Even the close-­up photography of women’s body parts in the indoor sequences sexualizes the prostitutes into discrete, attractive fetish objects. Mansouri’s forty-­three-­minute film Trial (2002), edited in Canada, centers on a remarkably resourceful laborer, Ali Matini, living in the village of Khosrow near Varamin, Tehran, who during the day works long hours in a brick kiln and on weekends and holidays makes amateur 8mm films, using his fellow villagers as cast and crew. He is also a prolific author, who has written some 110 books, all handwritten and hand-­bound, which are read by the villagers who pass them hand to hand and door to door. He is the true underground filmmaker as he remained inside the country. Employing an artisanal and underground production mode, for ten years Matini made films without the necessary official production license and screened them publicly in his village without encountering any problems. However, someone apparently reported him to the authorities, who rounded up all the cast and crew of his previous movies (about two hun66

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dred people), and obtained an air-­tight promise from them not to work with him any longer on his movies. Matini himself was imprisoned for three months, held in solitary confinement, and released on the promise not to make any more illegal movies. Trial is Mansouri’s fascinating record of Matini’s last movie in the village. Called The Scorpion (Aqrab), it was apparently made like the others without permission in an entirely artisanal manner, as he, his cameraman, and his production manager Hosain Sabzian, who years earlier famously had impersonated Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Kiarostami’s film Close-­Up, go about improvising to make the film.59 Among their entertaining improvisations are these: the cameraman rides a donkey instead of a dolly to get a traveling shot (when the director asks him to dolly backward, the cameraman protests, “How can I get the donkey to walk backward without bumping the camera up and down?”), or the cameraman rides on the shoulder of a strongman who squats or rises to make crane shots. He also records both the objections of some parents to their children’s acting in the movie and the fascination of others eager to participate in it. The most interesting technical improvisation is the editing of the tiny-­gauge 8mm film, as Matini and his cameraman, lying on a bed and squatting on the floor, sift through the filmed footage without using a Moviola or any other editing equipment. They hold the strips of processed film in front of a bare light bulb that a female assistant is patiently holding, judging the shot (“Oh, this is good, he has acted this scene very well”), cutting the film with scissors, and pasting that strip onto another strip with ordinary adhesive tape. This very roughly edited footage is then projected on a screen, while the director, cameraman, production manager, and actors all watch the images and, while passing a single microphone around, they dub the film by saying their dialogue and creating sound effects of gunshots, helicopters flying, men running, and doors slamming. Having thus completed the film, Matini screens it in the open air by projecting it on a white sheet tacked onto a mud wall. Throngs of people noisily enjoy it until it breaks; both children and adults take advantage of the forced intermission to make elaborate hand shadows on the screen. Matini’s film and Mansouri’s film about it are examples of the reemergence of an underground mode of filmmaking and an underground cinema. It is a return, at the turn of the twenty-­first century, to the production mode of the Qajar era, when artisanal filmmakers crafted films themselves without benefiting from industry institutions, professional help, or state sanction. This time, however, the reason for adopting an artisanal practice is not technological but aesthetic and political. Sabzian explains this in an interview in Trial: Matini and his crew stayed with their low-­tech equipment because “we could connect better with our [unsophisticated] actors and spectators using primitive equipment.” Refusing to submit the film for official approval and censoring encouraged Matini’s creativity and improvisation. The banning of Matini’s Scorpion is emblematic of the underground film in an authoritarian state. T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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If Matini’s films are examples of artisanal, local, and domestic underground films, Mansouri’s films are examples of a new emerging transnational underground cinema. Digital technology, which makes possible unauthorized and surreptitious filming and copying within the country, and globalization, which makes possible the traveling, editing, distribution, and exhibition of such films outside the country, facilitate a transnational underground cinema. Mansouri notes, “As soon as people get their hands on something that can be considered a banned film they make copies and pass them on” (Silverman 2004). The clandestine system necessitates exhibition in private homes, in secrecy, or in ad hoc film venues. Bahman Ghobadi’s decision in 2010 to make his banned films available to Iranians on dvd, free of charge, might open up another dimension in the evolution of Iranian underground cinema, nationally and transnationally. Mansouri’s films were screened by Iranian political exile venues, such as Sinema-­ye Azad in European cities, and by mainstream festivals such as the TriBeCa Festival in New York, which in 2003 gave Trial the Best Documentary Award. Not all underground films are political; but the aim of those that are, like that of all agitprop art, is to “expose” the ruling regime and to discredit it, not just critique it, and ultimately to topple it. In an interview published in France, Mansouri, a proponent of this political view, states that the main topic of Iranian underground or “guerrilla” cinema is the “regime itself and the consequences of its presence.” He further adds, “Underground cinema aims at the source of poverty and it fans the fire of social revolt. . . . It is only in the process of such political combat that underground cinema gains meaning. It is not the matter of two types of aboveground and underground cinemas, but the matter of using cinema as an effective instrument in the peoples’ social struggle against the regime, in the same manner that the regime employs cinema to distort their struggle and to sustain itself in power” (Behrouzian 2005). This view of cinema, however, is reductive and instrumentalist; it impoverishes itself as it narrows cinema to politics and its function to political expedience. Like other political exiles, Mansouri has spoken vociferously against international film festivals’ screening films from Iran because, according to him, they legitimize the Islamic Republic. Under the apparently Islamicate surfaces in Iran lurk all sorts of illicit sociocultural formations. Underground films are not just films made using the underground production mode but also films made about such underground formations and practices, including a dynamic alternative youth culture, music, dance, fashion, art, and sexual and gender performativity and crossing. Bahman Ghobadi filmed his No One Knows about Persian Cats (Kasi az Gorbehha­ye Irani Khabar Nadareh, 2009) in an underground production mode and used a mix of fictional and nonfictional elements to expose the burgeoning underground music scene of the young, which in its existence and practices violated much of the Islamicate values and norms. In her first feature fiction film Cir68

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cumstance (2011), the U.S.-­based director Maryam Keshavarz focused on a passionate lesbian love affair. Unable to film it inside Iran but wishing to retain the authenticity of locale and atmosphere, she shot the film in Beirut, Lebanon, in Persian language, and for her three leads she selected from among Iranian diaspora actors. The context for this illicit love affair was the burgeoning youth culture Keshavarz had witnessed on her visits to Iran, including scenes in which young people dub an episode of the Sex and the City tv series and Sean Penn’s voice in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008) for underground distribution inside Iran. However, filming inside Lebanon had its own circumstances that turned the film into a transnational underground film of sorts. The filmmakers were apprehensive about the political power of Iran-­supported Shiite party Hezbollah, which is ubiquitous in certain parts of Beirut. They feared the film’s sexual content might cause problems. But they learned that the Lebanese authorities’ sensitivity was with its Iranian content. As a result, they played down the Iranian aspects by not mentioning the word Iran and submitting an English language version of the screenplay to the Lebanese authorities. In addition, the director asked the crew members not to discuss the film in public or on their Facebook pages. Despite these precautions, during filming they had several run-­ins with authorities who thought they were making either a pornographic film or spying on the military (an apartment in which they were filming was adjacent to a military base). Larry Rohter of the New York Times who interviewed the director, crew, and cast came to the conclusion that the “sense of constant anxiety and dread actually helped strengthen their performances” (2011), characteristic of underground filmmaking. However, they also realized that they were “the beneficiaries of Circumstance and circumstance, that their own experience making the film pales besides the harsh reality that Iranians living under the Mullas must confront daily” (ibid.). Despite its rough edges and uneven pacing, the film succeeds in painting a believable picture of the safe sanctuary that love can create for people living inside an authoritarian pressure cooker. Granaz Moussavi, an Australian-­based filmmaker and poet with several poetry books to her name, made My Tehran for Sale (Tehran-­e Man Haraj, 2009), which was the practical component of her Ph.D. dissertation on the “Poetic Aesthetics of Iranian Art-­house Cinema” at the University of Western Sydney. As Moussavi told me in an e-­mail, she raised the film’s 150,000 Australian dollars’ budget from independent sources in Australia and returned to live in Iran, where she hired a local producer, filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s mij Film, to handle all the legal and production logistics in the country (including obtaining production permits) (Naficy 2011a). The film thus became the first Iranian-­ Australian coproduction. Moussavi rewrote the screenplay three times to obtain a filming permit, one that the filmmakers carried with them everywhere they filmed (having to show it to the police on several occasions). Location filming in summer and fall of 2008 went smoothly. Ironically, in some cases, such as in filming the Zahir al-­Dowleh Cemetery where a cemetery official refused them T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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access, their permit came in handy, for the police intervened on their behalf (although the film does not show the inside of the cemetery, where many luminaries of Iranian arts and literature are buried, including Forugh Farrokhzad). Moussavi used wigs and a variety of head covers, even shaving the head of the lead actress Marzieh Vafamehr, to conform to and to question the nebulous bounds of the Islamic hijab. “My reference for a lot of such devices was the films that were made, some screened and some not, in Iran,” stated Moussavi. While filming was not clandestine or underground, as they had official production permit, they used a low-­key approach, what she characterized as “guerrilla” filmmaking, which served not only the production process but also the narrative style and mood of the film. The film’s story involves the problems that young female artists living independently encounter in Iran and the double life they must lead in an atmosphere of increasing oppression. They defy this atmosphere by engaging in risky and illegal practices, such as drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana and opium, gender-­mixing and dancing, and reckless sleeping around. The young artist named Marzieh (Marzieh Vafamehr, wife of prominent filmmaker Naser Taqvai) meets a young Iranian man at a party (Amir Chegini) who is a citizen of Australia and has returned to straighten his affairs. Their relationship blossoms into a love affair causing them to apply for the emigration of Marzieh to Australia based on marriage. However (spoiler alert!), soon things go badly wrong, as medical tests show that she is hiv+, which causes a bitter row and separation, as each blames the other. In a daring style of checkerboard editing, which intercuts different times and spaces and creates perceptual shifts, the film showcases not only the emancipatory impulses but also the dear consequences of the underground lifestyle of the Iranian youths, which the Iranian exiles and émigrés have tended to only celebrate in their films and autobiographical books. The film was screened abroad and Moussavi, Vafamehr, and Chegini (lead actor and Moussavi’s husband) presented it at the Adelaide Film Festival. Returning to Tehran, it was screened publicly, written about in the Iranian press, and was sent to many international film festivals, where it received high praise. By 2011, however, things had changed. The heated political atmosphere and the emergence of the Green Movement after the discredited 2009 presidential election had made all independent filmmakers and their works alternatively suspect to the government and appealing to the youth, making My Tehran for Sale a hot commodity on the Internet and on the dvd black market. One young man, for example, wrote the director claiming that he had made eighty pirated dvd copies of the film on his own and distributed them free of charge in the Hafiz mausoleum in Shiraz as an act of “charity.” The hardened political atmosphere had changed the film’s reception, turning an aboveground film made four years earlier into an underground work. The lead actress Marzieh Vafamehr was arrested and sentenced to four months in jail and ninety lashes. The problem was her improper hijab and the shaved head. Another in70

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dication of the hardening of the times and of the microphysics of political suppression was that in this case the actress had been charged with a crime, not the film’s director who is responsible for the overall film. This seemed like a new control mechanism. Vafamehr served her jail term but her lashing sentence was fortunately dropped and she was released.60 Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011) is an exemplar of the documentary underground filmmaking in the retrenchment era. After the 2009 presidential election Panahi was arrested (along with Mohammad Rassoulof) for clandestine filmmaking. As noted in chapter 4 of this volume, the two filmmakers were eventually released from jail but were sentenced to an additional six years in prison and were banned for twenty years from making films, writing any kind of screenplays, traveling abroad, and talking to local and foreign media. With this draconian sentence they were in effect condemned to an internal exile. However, exile—­internal or external—­can be suffocating, but also it can be a regenerative space. Without permission, actors, sets, and crew there could be no film—­yet they managed ingenuously to make one while under house arrest. Panahi and Mirtahmasb humorously note that their film is in the genre of “the making of “ films but in the Iranian style: it is not about a film that was actually made but about a film about the making of a film that could not be made. Purporting to be a day in the life of Panahi, This Is Not a Film was shot over a four-­day period by Mirtahmasb, thereby circumventing the ban on Panahi’s filming. Panahi is seen at home making phone calls, surfing the Internet and encountering blocked sites, going to the bathroom, filming Tehran cityscape with his cellphone camera, and reenacting another film whose screenplay is already written, dressing a mock-­up of the set in his living room with makeshift objects and masking tape, and reading from the screenplay. In this way, too, he avoided the dictates of his ban against making a film, but he realizes that telling a film is vastly different from making it. He also watches his own films on a TV set, including the touching scene in his The Mirror (Ayeneh, 1997) in which the main child character, Mina, refuses midstream to continue with the film (an ironic comment on the state-­enforced stoppage of his own filming). The New York Times’s film critic’s assessment of the film’s power and originality is to the point: “Nothing overtly cinematic here: just a video diary of daily life. And yet the plainness of Mr. Panahi’s self-­ presentation—­nothing to see here, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!—­is the source of the film’s sly, subversive power and also of its formal ingenuity. No authority can prevent This Is Not a Film from being exactly what it is not supposed to be, and nobody who holds onto the faith that art can be a weapon against tyranny should miss it—­here or anywhere else it turns up” (Scott 2011). This Is Not a Film was “smuggled out of the country on a usb drive hidden inside a cake” (Hudson 2011) and screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. Mirtahmasb had planned to travel to Toronto to introduce the film at the Toronto International Film Festival, but Iranian officials revoked his passport at the last moT he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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ment. However, Panahi’s daughter and wife, Tahereh Saeedi, were able to attend the festival, where Saeedi, referring to the globalization of cinema, stated, “This painful ordeal had good and bad outcomes. . . . I always thought I had a family of four. But the events of last year made me realize that my family is bigger, it is the family of cinema” (Makinen 2011). Subsequently, many other film festivals scheduled the film for screening and the film found a commercial distributor. Some of the documentary and fictional underground films, such as Masoud Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (Tehran Anar Nadarad, 2007), Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats (Kasi az Gorbehha-­ye Irani Khabar Nadareh, 2009), Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale, and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (Jodai-­ye Nader az Simin, 2011) not only critically depicted and denounced the pressure cooker of the restricted life under the Islamic Republic but also expressed through their narratives a further criticism by envisioning a better life elsewhere, outside Iran (Moruzzi 2011). As such, these films are about the desire for utopian places elsewhere, to escape from home which is found wanting (what in German is called fernweh). This is the opposite of Iranian exile filmmakers’ nostalgia for return to an idealized homeland (heimweh). Even the analysis of the aboveground films of pro-­regime directors, such as Hatamikia’s From Karkheh to Rhine and The Glass Agency and Davud Mirbaqeri’s The Snowman (Adam Barfi, 1994–98) can benefit if viewed through the prism of a desire to escape.

Ethnographic and Quasi Ethnographic Documentaries In the aftermath of the revolution, ethnographic study and filmmaking declined. The clerical regime was from the start both extranationalist, interested in exporting the Islamic revolution to other Muslim countries, and antinationalist, seeking to suppress the pre-­Islamic and modern roots of Iranian identity and nationalism in favor of revitalizing its Islamic and Shiite roots. This eventually developed into the ideology I have called “syncretic Islamization,” which was posed as an alternative to the secular and nationalist “syncretic Westernization” ideology of the Pahlavis. By presenting tradition and Islam as sources of identity, the regime politicized not only tradition and Islam but also some of the tenets of anthropology, which is given to the study of traditions and religions. Consequently, anthropology ”lost its social legitimacy and popularity” (Fazeli 2004:4). This may account for the decline of serious ethnographic films and the forceful emergence of socially concerned documentaries, which examined the same aspects of society that ethnographic films would have, but did so from critical and politicized viewpoints. This critical space became available only after the end of the Iraq war and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, when social criticism could no longer be suppressed on the basis of war conditions or of what 72

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Khomeini used to call the defense of the “dear Islam.” Universities and other cultural institutions again became hotbeds of critique. The creation in 1988 of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization consolidated research and the restoration of cultural material, as well as anthropological and ethnographic studies, including ethnographic films. Individual anthropologists, Iranian or foreign, who found the Khatami-­era bureaucracy more lenient with research permissions, used recorders and cameras to record interviews and document scenes of daily life, customs, rituals, and performances. Although these were rarely filmed to make documentaries, such unedited footage provides valuable records for future films. Access to them requires contacting individual anthropologists.61 The ethnography of certain subjects remained off-­limits: the prison system, racism, and stigmatized minorities, such as Baha’is, Jews, Afghanistani immigrants, and homosexuals (Bromberger 2004:3). Marxist topics such as class conflict or urban and rural relations joined this list (Adelkhah 2004:2). Filmmakers took advantage of the public spaces of discourse newly opened to cover these in their social-­protest documentaries and in what I call “quasi ethnographic” films. Strictly speaking, these films were not ethnographic. Some were “process films,” showing a ritual from beginning to end; some only focused on one aspect of a traditional ritual; some were impressionistic or descriptive, while a few were research-­based, resulting from lengthy sociological and ethnographic study, participant observation, and interaction with their subjects. Unlike the Pahlavi-­era ethnographic films, given largely to salvaging a disappearing world, these more recent films focused on discovering emergent practices, such as underground rap and hip-­hop music in the case of Mirtahmasb’s Off-­Beat (Seda-­ye Mokhalef, 2003), Amir Hamz and Mark Lazarz’s Sounds of Silence (2006), Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats, and Hassan Khademi’s Rapping in Tehran (2009); female singing in the case of Mirtahmasb’s Back Vocal (Seda-­ye Dovvom, 2003) and Torang Abedian’s No Illusions (2009); transgender identity and practices in the case of Amir Amirani’s Trans-­sexuality in Iran (2005), Elhum Shakerifar’s Roya and Omid (2007), and Bahman Motamedia’s Tedium (aka Sex My Life; Khastegi, 2008); women’s violence against their husbands in the case of Sheikholeslami’s Article 61 (Maddeh-­ye 61, 2005); execution by stoning of women for adultery in the case of Farid Haerinejad and Kazemi’s Women in Shroud (Zanan-­e Kafanpush, 2009); rhinoplasty in the case of Oskouei’s Nose Iranian Style (Damagh Beh Sabk-­e Irani, 2006); and schools for training professional mourners in the case of Bahman Kiarostami’s Art of Weeping (Tabaki, 2001). These shifts from disappearing to emerging cultures and practices and from salvage to critique are other indexes of newer postmodern ethnography, subjectivity, and documentary practices among Iranians—­one that had begun with the films of social criticism during the second Pahlavi period. Some of these films of emergent practices naturally fall within the underT he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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ground film category as well, for they deal with unauthorized and taboo practices and are made in the underground cinema’s production mode. An extensive televisual series, The Children of the Land of Iran (Kudakan-­e Sarzamin-­e Iran), underwritten by the vvir’s Second Channel Network, is a case in point for institutionally supported quasi ethnographic documentaries, which by June 1997 had yielded forty-­nine films by thirty-­one filmmakers. Before being aired by the network, thirteen of the films appeared in cinemas during the Fifteenth Fajr International Film Festival in 1997. As the film critic Houshang Golmakani noted, most had rural settings, with the northern provinces dominant, and they all had narration read by a child, often in the form of a classroom composition (1997:29–30). Not only amateur filmmakers but also experienced social documentarians made films for this series. Many of this series’ films explored with affection and fascination the traditions, rituals, and peoples who provided ethnographically rich windows on Iranian and Islamicate cultures. Notable examples were Mokhtari’s Molla Khadijeh and Her Children (Molla Khadijeh va Bachehhayash, 1996), an affectionate direct-­ cinema film partly shot with a hidden camera, about an old woman, Molla Khadijeh, who runs a traditional religious school called maktab from her leafy home. Instead of being stern and authoritarian as maktab teachers used to be, she is compassionate, patient, and loving with her students, a love and respect they return. Other films of the series were Aslani’s Chigh (1996) about a traditional mat made of reed and wool; Taqvai’s Pish (1998) about a type of cloth that residents of a Bahmani village near Minab manufacture; Farzad Motamen’s Jiran (1996) about the transition from girlhood to womanhood of a budding painter; Bahram Azimpur’s My Tribe, Kermanj (Il-­e Man, Kermanj, 1996) about the Kermanj tribe in Khorasan Province in northeastern Iran, told through the life of a young kettledrum player; Mohammad Reza Moqaddasian’s Meysey and Masan (Meysey va Masan, 1996) about sexuality and early arranged marriages for children and their cultural roots; and Farshad Fadaian’s Inside Seyyed Qelich Ishan’s School (Dar Madreseh-­ye Seyyed Qelich Ishan, 1995) about the life of young residents of a Sunni clerical boarding school in Turkaman Sahra established two hundred years earlier by the Sunni cleric named in the title. Mahvash Sheikholeslami, Pirooz Kalantari, Kambuzia Partovi, Manuchehr Tabari, Farhad Meh­ranfar, and Sinai also made documentaries for the series. The vvir First Channel Network and some of its provincial centers also commissioned many individual documentaries, some of which took an ethno­ graphic approach. Mokhtari made several. In Baluchi Bread (Nan-­e Baluchi, 1980) he shows, through research, patient observation, and elegant cinematography, the destitute lives of the residents of the village of Golmurti in Balu­ chestan Province who live in thatched houses and the process by which wheat is grown and made into bread, their main food staple. For this thirty-­eight-­ minute film Mokhtari focuses on the family of a villager named Akhardad, but his wife considered being filmed a sin and refused to participate, forcing the 74

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director and his crew to look for alternatives. They solved the problem by paying old women and widows brave enough to break the tradition and be filmed. In a letter, Mokhtari narrates an incident that is instructive about how censorship works in authoritarian states like the Islamic Republic of Iran, by becoming self-­censorship. His filming had focused on the problems the village continued to have, not on the solutions, such as piped water and electrification, which the Reconstruction Crusade had provided. This focus on problems had raised the suspicion of the local Revolutionary Guard and a visiting inspector. Mokhtari had interviewed an engineer on audiotape and was asked by the guard and the inspector to play the tape for them in the presence of the engineer. Mokhtari did not know if they suspected him or the engineer or both, but in the light of aroused suspicion, their innocent taped conversation the night before about the conditions in the village could be read very differently, as a subversive anti­regime talk. “My throat was dry from fear,” states Mokhtari. “It looked as though I had been gathering evidence about revolutionary leaders and had tricked the engineer. . . . I became alarmed about the notes I had taken in privacy. If these were read in this suspicious atmosphere, my goose would be cooked.” An argument ensued between the inspector and the engineer, with the inspector wanting to confiscate the footage. Mokhtari responded: “If you want to confiscate the film, then you have to take me and my crew as well.” They temporarily resolved the issue by examining Mokhtari’s vvir employee card and taking down its number to follow up with authorities. On the departure of the officials, Mokhtari erased the interview he had taped and destroyed the notes he had taken during filming, depriving himself of important materials (quoted in Jafari Lahijani 2008b/1387:594–95). Despite a publicized broadcast date, the vvir never aired Baluchi Bread, apparently because it was showing rural areas with a critical eye at a time when government policy was encouraging a return to them and because of a parallel sequence in which the images of the village chief smoking opium were intercut with villagers threshing their harvest. The film was not entered into any international film festivals either, for fear that it might give fodder to the exile critics (598). Some seventeen years later, in 1997, it was screened at Leipzig Film Festival. Mokhtari’s Mokarrameh: Memories and Dreams (Mokarrameh: Khaterat va Royaha, 1999) is a sensitive study of the life and paintings of a naive village artist, Mokarrameh Qanbari, a widow living alone in the verdant fields of the north. Her paintings, inspired by her rural environment, rice paddies, folktales, and her cowife (who happens to be her elder sister), are exhibited in Tehran’s prestigious Seyhoun Gallery. Finally, his Saffron (Za’faran, 1998) is an ethnographic process film, chronicling the growing of saffron in Iran, an important world supplier of this spice (figure 17). Vartan Antasian, who is known for making sports films, made Lochu (1982) about a contest held in Mazanderan annually during rice-­planting season that involves a carpet hung on a wooden rod and ten child contestants (lochu for T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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17 Poster for Ebrahim Mokhtari’s ethnographic “process documentary,” Saffron. From author’s collection.

labeh-­ye chub, means the edge of a wooden rod). Moqaddasian’s four-­part series Water and Traditional Irrigation in Iran (Ab va Abiyari-­ye Sonnati dar Iran, 1984) examines the importance of the qanat system to the health and productivity of towns and villages. Jafar Panahi, working for the vvir’s Persian Gulf center, made Heraldry (Chavoshi, 1990), in which he follows an annual Muslim ritual in Minab where people wash the flag of the Prophet Mohammad, decorate it elaborately, and circulate it with pomp around town, as a herald sings eulogies alongside it. Many documentaries dealt with Shiite mythologies, rituals, and ceremonies. The Islamic Propaganda Organization’s iatc produced several quasi ethnographic films on these topics such as Abdolrahman Shalilian’s Dance of the Standard (Raqs-­e Alam, 1991), about an intense Islamic mourning ritual involving a large decorated standard, whose voice-­over narration is read by Morteza Avini. Shalilian also made two other notable films, The Little Ones’ Hosainiyeh (­Hosainiyeh-­ye Kuchakha, 1993) and Elegy for Innocent Children (Majles-­e Teflan, 1994), about a Shiite religious site and a mourning ritual, respectively. The ­cidcya commissioned Ebrahim Foruzesh’s Standard (Nakhl, 1990–1994), about a Shiite mourning tradition commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hosain in Ashura, during which a large religious standard is decorated and carried by burly men on foot through the streets, accompanied by throngs of men who beat their chests and flagellate themselves with chains. The film was shot in Gonabad, where after the taziyeh performance commemorating the martyr76

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dom, men begin to twirl the giant standard with tremendous force. Kurosh Farzanegan’s six-­minute film, Someone Is Coming (Kasi Miayad, 2001), created a moving, impressionistic visual poem in which the Iranian New Year (Noruz) celebrations are contrasted with the Shiite Ashura mourning ceremonies. Finally, Mohsen Amiryusefi’s Caravan (Karevan, 2002) presents a colorful and dramatic annual procession of mourners in the town of Sedeh near Isfahan in which a taziyeh performance re-­creates the martyrdom of Imam Hosain and his flock in Karbala, interspersed with revealing interviews with the actors. Ingvild Flaskerud made Standard-­Bearers of Hussein: Women Commemorating Karbala (2003) as part of her doctoral research in religious studies and Shiite visual culture for Norway’s University of Bergen (she now teaches at the University of Tromsø). Filmed in Shiraz, the film is unique on several fronts: made by a non-­Iranian and a non-­Muslim woman specializing in religious studies, the film has a felicitous outsider, female-­centered, and ethnographically informed perspective. In addition, instead of the usual documentary films’ focus on men’s Muharram mourning rituals in public places, demonstrating devotional organization, aggression, muscle power, and physicality, she concentrates on the Shiite women’s mourning ceremonies not only during Muharram but also during the month of Safar, which take place in private, female-­only domestic spaces, to which there is limited access by outsiders and none by males. The film shows the processes by which women organize complex mourning events (including using e-­mail and chat rooms), perform in them, and make informed commentary about them. Adhering to the ethnographic ethics of informed consent and reciprocity, the filmmaker sought permission from the main participants, screened the finished film for them, and gave each a copy (with them expressing satisfaction with the result). She buttressed the film by publications that provide contextual information and analysis (Flaskerud 2005, 2008). Few films dealt with the rituals and traditions of Iranian religious minorities. One of these was Manuchehr Tabari’s A Religious New Year: Jewish Passover (Sal-­e No-­ye Mazhabi: Aid-­e Fatir-­e Yahudian, 1990), a thirty-­minute documentation of this celebration as held inside a large Jewish family’s home. Although Ramin Farahani’s documentary, Jews of Iran (Yahudian-­e Iran, 2005), focuses on the political dimensions of being a Jew in contemporary Islamic Iran (filmed in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz), it nevertheless contains certain ethnographic elements as the Jewish community struggles to maintain its tradition against all odds. Because of the minority status of the Jews and iri’s anti-­Israeli and anti-­Zionist politics, Farahani encountered suspicion from both the Jews and government minders during filming. He had obtained mcig’s permission to film; however, after its completion his film was blacklisted apparently because of scenes showing segregated seating in schoolrooms between Jewish and Muslim students and a Jewish student saying that she was told in the school that because she was a Jew she was impure. A non-­Jew, Farahani stated his attraction to the topic this way: “I identify with the minorities in Iran, because growing T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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up, I felt that I didn’t agree with the majority-­v iew of things, and I felt the lack of tolerance for anyone who is different.” 62 Iranian tribes continued to exert their influence on the filmmakers’ imagination, including on Farhad Varahram’s ethnographically rich Taraz Route (Taraz, 1989), which pays homage to two important figures in Iranian ethnographic cinema: his teacher, the anthropologist Nader Afshar Naderi, and the ur-­tribal documentary made by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison, Grass (1924). In it he follows the migration of a Bamadi clan of the Haftlang branch of the Bakhtiari tribe along a route called Taraz, from their summer camp to their winter camp. In proper ethnographic procedure, the filmmaker lived a month with the tribe before their migration to learn about their customs and everyday practices, and then followed their life and travel during three seasons (autumn, winter, and spring) on their route and at various stopping points. Like Grass and Hushang Shafti’s Flaming Poppies (Shaqayeq-­e Suzan, 1962), Taraz Route contains a dramatic sequence of the tribe crossing a rough river, this time the Bazoft River, but unlike the other two, Varahram’s film keeps its anthropological distance from its subjects, refusing to turn them into heroic figures (Emami 2006/1385:205). Similarly, Varahram spent some time with another tribe in Kurdistan, where he made The Sage of Shaliar (­Pir-­e Shaliar, 1995), about an annual ritual celebrating the wedding of this sage in Oraman village. Behnam Behzadi’s twenty-­six-­minute film, Conceal Your True Meaning (Harfhayat ra Penhan Kon, 2001), is about a tradition in a Bakhtiari tribe to betroth girls by the side of a spring that in addition to generating water produces salt. The film sets up the tradition and the convivial gathering of women and girls by the spring only to overthrow it through an intimate interview with a young girl who takes the camera into her confidence to reveal her opposition to being married. Finally, Kiumars Purahmad made an eleven-­part television series, Persian Gulf: The Geography of Poverty and Wealth (Khalij-­e Fars: Joghrafia-­ye Faqr va Ghana, 1979), for the vvir’s First Channel Network. Each part of the series dealt with the geography, demography, and living conditions of the various islands in the Gulf and their peoples and customs. Institutional support by the vvir, the mcig, the cidcya, and the iatc was instrumental in the production of these and other ethnographic films. Just as important, however, was the institutional support for their screenings, for without screening venues no film survives, let alone long enough to become a genre or a type. The vvir was in the best position to offer this venue through its multiple channels and national networks hungry for products. While commercial movie houses generally ignored these films, both general and specialized film festivals helped circulate them. The newest entry into the field of ethnographic film and visual anthropology is the Persian-­language website Anthropology and Culture (Ensanshenasi va Farhang, http://www.anthropology.ir). Begun in September 2006 as a per78

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sonal site by Nasser Fakouhi, then chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tehran, it has grown into a formidable venue for matters ethnographic. As Fakouhi stated to me in an e-­mail, the website’s aim is “to bring together the scientific writings of Iranian scholars, intellectuals, and students inside and outside Iran to create an evolving electronic community of knowledge” (Naficy 2009c). Currently, nearly twenty editors from Iranian, European, and American universities, each editing a specialized section, maintain the website under Fakouhi’s general direction but with relative autonomy. So far, Anthropology and Culture has published more than 150 articles, receiving high traffic: in thirty months, the number of visits topped 1.5 million, with four thousand daily visitors on weekdays. These came from sixty countries, but 90 percent of them were from inside Iran. Visitors from the United States constituted the largest portion of the international users, with 2 percent (mostly from California), followed by those from Great Britain, France, and Germany (each with 1 percent). The website has forty different branches of anthropology, including “ethnography and cinema” and “documentary film and photography,” each offering news, events, methodology, theory, references, interviews, reviews, and criticism. The documentary filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei edits the sections dealing with cinema, which according to Fakouhi are “the most successful” sections of the website, “considering the number of visitors to the site and the number of other websites and blogs linked to them.”

Arts and Crafts Documentaries As before the revolution, documentaries about arts and crafts also received institutional support. One of the most ambitious was Hamid Sohaili’s Iranian Architecture (Me’mari-­ye Iran, 1983–92), a multipart series that the vvir’s First Channel Network commissioned and broadcast. Working with a large group of scholars and artists as consultants, Sohaili produced and directed thirty-­three programs for the series on 16mm film for the vvir’s Culture, Literature, and Art Group. The series, which “expresses the skills, knowledge, and triumphs of humans in their search for new and vital spaces,” is divided into four categories (Mehrabi 1996/1375:363). One group of ten films deals with the periodization of Iranian architecture from prehistory to the end of the Qajar era, another group of six films focuses on individual buildings and monuments, a third group of thirteen films deals with different themes and genres in architecture, while a final group of four films centers on the technology of Iranian architecture. Ever prolific, Sohaili had earlier produced, directed, and written Our Homeland (Sarzamin-­e Ma, 1977–80), a twenty-­episode series for the same vvir group. In the first fourteen episodes, he focused on various handicrafts and on the unknown artists who produced them, while in the remaining episodes he concentrated on the art of calligraphy and on the styles of various famous calligraphers. In T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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addition, Sohaili, in collaboration with the modernist artist Aydin Aghdashlu, made a twelve-­part series, Toward Simorgh (Besu-­ye Simorgh, 1981–83), about the history of painting in Iran. Parviz Taidi wrote and directed Soltaniyeh Dome and Santa Maria del Fiore (Gonbad-­e Soltaniyeh va Santa Maria del Fioreh, 1980), which focuses on the Mausoleum of Il-­ khan Oljaitu, aka Mohammad Khodabandeh, popularly known as the Dome of Soltaniyeh, near Zanjan. Built in the first decade of 1300 ad, this magnificent building, one of the largest brick domes in the world, was designated by unesco a World Heritage Site. Based on the research of Luca Sanpaolesi, the film claims that the design of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence was influenced by the Soltaniyeh. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb wrote and directed nine episodes of Art Stories (Dastanha-­ye Honar, 1996–97), a multipart series for the vvir’s Second Channel Television. Using his studies at Tehran’s University of Art in Iranian and Islamic material and visual culture, he introduced the series’ intended audience, the youth, to various traditional arts and crafts, with an emphasis on their Islamic dimension. The films are Banner (Alam), Tilework (Kashikari), Mirrorwork (Ayenehkari), Plasterwork (Gachbori) Calicomaking (Qalamkar), Metal Engraving (Qalamzani), Copperwork (Mesgari), Enamel (Mina), and Needlework (Ptteh). In each film a child protagonist learns the process that goes into the production of that art or craft, combining aspects of the process film with those of case study film. Mirtahmasb also made a poetically powerful film, The River Still Has Fish (Rudkhaneh Hanuz Mahi Darad, 2002), about Ahmad Nadalian, a charismatic environmental artist, who carves various figures on the rocks that are strewn around the riverbeds in the village of Polur on the outskirts of the majestic Damavand summit. In a lyrical sequence he and a villager wet their hands and feet with mud and water and playfully leave myriad handprints and footprints on the rocks. All the while they hold a Khayyamite discussion about the meaning of what they are doing: these prints are like our lives, some darker, some lighter, all ephemeral. These wet handprints on rocks are also immediately reminiscent of red handprints on city walls during the revolution, soaked in the blood of the injured and dead, or of those of protesters on posters during the disputed national election in 2009 that reinstalled Ahmadinejad as president. The whimsical Nadalian engages a group of children to draw fish on the rocks, providing continuity with Mirtahmasb’s other films, which feature children. The film ends with shots of numerous fish that Nadalian has carved on rocks—­under water, beside water, over water—­accompanied by music. The fishless river thus becomes inhabited with fish. Continuing with his fusion of process and case study film types, Mirtahmasb also made Lady of the Roses (Banu-­ye Golsorkh, 2009), which focuses on the famed former publisher Homayun San’atizadeh, who with his wife, Mahindokht, turned seven to eight hundred hectares of land around the village of Lalehzar, near Kerman, into fields for growing beautiful roses (gol mohammadi) 80

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whose essence they turned into superb perfume, thereby providing employment for the local population who, ironically, at first had urged the couple to stick with growing opium poppies instead of roses. The absence of Mahindokht, who died before filming in a car accident, turns her into a powerful presence haunting the film, as her husband invokes her tireless collaboration on the farm and in his life. San’atizadeh’s death after the film’s completion in turn changes the film into a fragrant memorial for both entrepreneurs who loved each other, their country, and the roses.63 Sinai made several documentaries on contemporary female artists. His Gizzela (1994) is about the life story and paintings of his own wife Gizzela Varga, while his Autumn Alley (Kucheh-­ye Paiz, 1998) centers on Zhazeh Tabatabai’s sculptures and her art gallery. Sinai also directed a feature documentary on pioneer modernist writer Sadeq Hedayat, Talking with a Shadow (Goftogu ba Sayeh, 2006). Based on research conducted by Habib Ahmadzadeh, the film begins with scenes from Robert Wiene’s classic horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920), followed by the famous line from Hedayat’s seminal novel, The Blind Owl (Buf-­e Kur, 1937), ”there are certain wounds in life that eat and wear away your soul in seclusion like canker”; this is a haunting novel in which the protagonist tells his life’s story to his own shadow that is cast on a wall. The film, a mixture of fiction, documentary, and research ele­ments, notes Hedayat’s claim that he wrote for his shadow as a way of introducing himself to his shadow and crucially posits that this structure was influenced by the expressionist horror films he had seen while in Paris, all of which contained shadow figures of one sort or another: Carl Boese and Paul Wegener’s The Golem (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922), and Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Tahaminejad made Masters of Iran’s Classical Music: Master Ahmad Ebadi (Bozorgan-­e Musiqi-­ye Sonnati-­ye Iran: Ostad Ahmad Ebadi, 1990–91) about the sehtar (a three-­string instrument) master named in the title teaching his students in his humble home. The film critic Masud Mehrabi likened the master’s delicate playing to “stringing a pearl necklace” (1996/1375:85). Farshad Fadaian’s 199-­minute film The Last Bakhshi Minstrel (Akharin Bakhshi, 2003) deals with Haj Qorban Solaimani, who is a bakhshi in Aliabad village, near the city of Quchan. The bakhshi is a minstrel with deep roots in northeastern oral culture, which produced the famed national epic poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Haji Qorban writes lyrics and sings them, he narrates stories, and he plays dotar (a two-­string instrument), which he manufactures himself. He is the last of these minstrels, making this sensitively rendered film both an artistic product and an ethnomusicology document.64 The veteran documentarian of architecture Tayyab, after many years of traveling the deserts and two years of filming and editing, made an elegant, impressionistic, and informative film about Iranian deserts and their spaces and places, Accompanied by Wind, into the Heart of the Desert’s Loneliness (Hamrah ba Bad, dar Del-­e Tanhai-­ye Kavir, 1998). T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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Many films were made about cinema and filmmakers, particularly auteur directors. These are discussed in another chapter in this volume. Photography also received documentary treatment. Robert Safarian’s fifty-­four-­minute film essay, Tehran in Photographs: Meditations of a Photographer from Tehran (Tehran dar Aks: Ta’amolat-­e yek Akkas-­e Tehrani, 2007), is notable. It offers the director’s ruminations on the multifunctional uses of photography—­to fix the flux of life, document, remember, memorialize, and incite—­by focusing on his own photography as well as on that of other Iranian photographers from the nineteenth century onward. In the process he identifies important photographic trends, photographers, books, and archives. Of particular importance is the project of the Society of Photographers of Revolution and Sacred Defense, which is to systematize the proper storage of the photographs and negatives of the revolution and the war with Iraq and their computerized documentation, digitization, and retrieval. At the same time, like any good film essay, Safarian’s raises more questions than it answers—­a thoroughly modern and democratic strategy—­unlike most traditional documentaries, which tend to be authoritarian and undemocratic.

Student Documentaries Colleges and universities that teach film are important centers of documentary and other productions, which open a window onto the concerns and problems of the young, what is called since the revolution the “third generation.” The School of Cinema and Theater of the University of Art in Tehran offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in film production and film studies; the Voice and Vision College of Cinema and Television, attached to the state-­owned broadcasting organization, offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in film and television production; Sureh University’s School of Cinema, a private university with branches in Tehran and Isfahan, offers bachelor’s degrees in film production; and Tehran’s Teacher Training College offers master’s degrees only in animated films. In addition, the Young Peoples’ Cinema Society of Iran (Anjoman-­e Javanan­e Sinema-­ye Iran), with branches in many cities big and small, offers training in various aspects of film production. Although the society offers only introductory film courses, its reach is wide: about fifty thousand students have passed through it since 1983. Most of its students do not enter the professional film industry; yet among those who have, the prominent filmmakers Bahman Ghobadi and Farhad Mehranfar may be named. The Islamic Center of Film Education (Markaz-­e Eslami-­ye Amuzesh-­e Filmsazi) is another government-­r un organization that teaches filmmaking to committed Muslims to supply personnel to public filmmaking organizations. Then there are many private film training schools that offer a plethora of specialized short courses and certificates in a 82

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variety of subjects, including makeup, acting, cinematography, and screenplay writing. The growth of these institutions has been rapid, from 41 in 1999 to 190 in 2002 (Muzeh-­ye Sinema-­ye Iran 2004c/1382:31), demonstrating both the continued viability of the film industry as a serious career and its professionalization, industrialization, and bureaucratization. College and university film students in Iran, as do students everywhere, tend to push the envelope on taboo subjects. This is also part of the general culture of resistance that has evolved since Khatami’s presidency, which, as the anthropologist Shahram Khosravi shows, goes beyond mere acts of opposition to encompass “creative and transformative projects” (2003:6). Filmmaking is one of these creative and transformative oppositional practices, countering the state’s Islamicate values as well as the dominant and official styles of film production. As such, some of the student films could be categorized as underground films. Time Bomb (Bomb-­e Saati, 2005) is a film Hasan Rastegar made for his master’s degree at the University of Art in Tehran. It is a feature-­length documentary about the devastating effects of hiv/aids on a male patient (infected through transfusion), a film that has not been screened inside Iran.65 Another is Mehdi Zarrinqalam’s film Me Yet (Man Keh Hanuz, 2004), made for his bachelor’s degree in film directing at the University of Art. The sixteen-­minute video documents the pleasures of mixed-­gender parties, involving two young men and an unveiled unrelated young woman, who apparently engage in recreational drug and alcohol use—­illegal activities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It begins with a young man and woman who one late night in traffic-­jammed streets hitch a ride from a driver, whom they befriend and who takes them to his apartment for a night of fun. There, the woman, Fariba, immediately sheds her veil and nondescript outer garment to reveal a lovely woman with a flowing waterfall of hair, who immediately falls asleep. The rest of the film is devoted to the two young men smoking, chatting, drinking alcohol, getting high, frying eggs, cavorting, laughing, and listening to an eclectic mixture of Western rock music by the Pixies, Jet, the Grateful Dead, the Mothers of Invention, Pearl Jam, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground, which form the background of their good time and phatic conversations. In the end, one of the men stumbles into the bathroom, where he throws up, and they go to sleep at dawn. This slice-­of-­life account is counterhegemonic in its mere existence as a film. Just that it was made so matter-­of-­factly, as though this were the condition of the third generation, constitutes a powerful embodied criticism. In addition, even though it is an apparently fictional narrative, the film is highly realistic, resembling a documentary, for it shows what happens behind closed doors and in the privacy of many homes. The curious disappearance of Fariba from the scene can be interpreted as a ruse to avoid the censorship ax, which would surely have fallen on the film had she been shown to be part of the cavorting and drinking with unrelated boys (her full unveiling would have been enough reason for censoring the film). Rafieh Malekzadeh, a female student, made We Also Exist (Ma Niz Hastim, T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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2004), which deals with veterans who are victims of Iraqi chemical attacks. What made the film unusual, even controversial, is that she focuses on the lives of female disabled veterans, whose bravery, sacrifice, and suffering are not generally recognized. The film is a powerful plea for the validation of disabled women. Another female student, Fariba Amirabadi, made The Other Women (Zanan-­e Digar, 2004), which focuses on the lives of Iranian women who marry men from Afghanistan, whose refugee population in Iran during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent Taliban reign of terror grew to nearly 3 million. The film deals with the plight of the children of such mixed marriages, who because of then current Iranian laws could not bear the names of their Afghan fathers on their birth certificates. Without a legal last name they did not exist. Ahmad Batebi, a film production student at Jihad University who was working on a documentary about social problems like drug addiction for his senior thesis, went to Tehran University in July 1999 and stumbled on a student disturbance at the dormitory and the resulting notorious violent attack by security forces. He had made several short films on existential themes scored with his own guitar, including Four Minutes of Remembrance. He joined the student demonstrations, whereupon he was arrested along with scores of others. An eyewitness and a leader of this momentous challenge later called it an “uprising” that “changed the political landscape and the control the Islamic Republic of Iran had over its youth forever” (Mohajerinejad with Malon 2010:xiv). The Economist agreed: a week after the incident, it published a photograph of Batebi on its 17 July 1999 cover, in which he holds a T-­shirt splattered with the blood of a fellow student demonstrator, accompanied by the caption “Iran’s Second Revolution?” Batebi first saw this image when a judge slapped the magazine before him and declared, “You have signed your own death sentence” (Shane and Gordon 2008). He was interrogated violently, tortured, held for seventeen months in solitary confinement, and condemned to death. The dramatic photo, which circulated widely internationally, not only put him in jail but also probably saved his life. His sentence was commuted to ten years. When he had served eight, he received a medical leave after a stroke. He escaped the country with help from the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran and settled in the United States after receiving quick “humanitarian parole” from the State Department. He documented his journey on the underground railroad out of Iran on a pocket-­size video camera, some of which was posted on the New York Times website (Shane and Gordon 2008). Anderson Cooper presented a segment on Batebi and his case on cbs’s Sixty Minutes, called “Torture in Iran,” which was aired on 5 April 2009, including an interview with him.66 Student filmmakers pushed the envelope not only with their risqué themes and controversial topics but also with their narrative and stylistic techniques. In Me Yet, the director Zarrinqalam frames his shots off-­center, keeping the main characters, action, and speakers offscreen. The dialogue tells the spec84

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tators who the speaker is and what action is taking place, but the camera does not show these; instead, it shows something else nearby—­hands, a telephone, books, paintings, walls, a toilet bowl, and leftover fried eggs in a pan. This technique, which consciously defies the centering rule of the classic realist style, is another way in which the veil enters Iranian cinema as an expressive technique: illicit subjects such as drinking alcohol and drug use are dealt with but in an indirect and teasing fashion, in the same way that women use the veil in social practice to subvert the autocratic rules of the hijab, by strategically covering and uncovering themselves. The film visually covers up what is illicit, while its dialogue and music uncovers and gives expression to it. An interesting dimension of student cinema is the interplay of interior and exterior locations. As Mohammad Shahba noted to me, student fiction movies are generally filmed outdoors, while their documentaries tend to unfold indoors (Naficy 2005j)—­and not necessarily because they are about families. They are often about friends or lone individuals who choose the interior for privacy, to escape the intrusion of the Islamic modesty police, Revolutionary Guards, and meddlesome citizens in public places. For these young filmmakers opposed to the somber strictures of the Islamic Republic, public spaces, the locations for pleasurable relations and joyful activities—­for uncensored reality—­are private spaces. Interior spaces are fecund grounds not only for private joys and harmony but also for private sorrows and horrors. The suicides of several female students who threw themselves off the balconies of high-­rise apartment towers in Tehran brought attention to the intense emotionality and high anxiety of interior spaces. At the same time, since private spaces are architecturally and socially closed, they tend to be psychologically claustrophobic, critiquing the stifling surveillance by either the state apparatuses of coercion or the patriarchal apparatuses of tradition. The students’ protest documentaries generally unfold in public spaces, as their protests are generally against the state, or the society at large, which they consider responsible for their problems. Their message, Shahba speculates, is that “our joy is as small and confined as the private locations that are available to us, while our protest is as large and expansive as the public spaces” (Naficy 2005j). Makers of these films focus more on the social and collective than on the psychological and individual, partly because modernity, where individual subjectivity and agency are valued and personal responsibility is expected, is not yet fully enshrined in Iran. Also, the core self is guarded from self-­revelation, for fear of loss of face, exploitation, and manipulation by others. Cinematic introspection, transparency, and self-­analysis require multilayered truthfulness—­on the part of the subjects of documentaries, on the part of filmmakers to honestly translate subjects’ revelations, on the part of government censors’ respect for unvarnished reality, and on the part of spectators, to openly believe in the veracity of the other three. In a society in which individual T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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agency and responsibility are still conditional, and in whose fiction and documentary films female characters have to cover themselves up from even their most intimate relatives and in the most private of spaces, such as their bedrooms, because the movie will be watched by unrelated males, truthfulness is a highly contingent and complicated category. With the fluid hermeneutics of veiling and unveiling, everything is always already open to spectator interpretation, intentional or inadvertent misreadings, and subversive readings. Nothing is straightforward, particularly truth and honesty. As such, documentary cinema, with its commitment to a rock-­bottom reality or to an unalterable truth of some sort, must brave a difficult gauntlet. Because of technological miniaturization and digitization, new noncommercial, semi-­amateur, and artisanal forms of nonfiction cinema have emerged. Wedding documentaries, made either by production houses or by family members, memorialize this important social rite of passage. Home videos, generally put together by family members, use family photos and Super 8 and video footage of family members to create a longitudinal portrait of an individual member or of an entire family. These documentaries circulate within informal, private, and noncommercial sectors, as well as on the Internet. In recent years, film critics, scholars, and historians have begun to recognize these movies as worth studying and programming (Zimmerman 1995; Citron 1998; Moran 2002; and Ishizuka and Zimmerman 2008). They constitute important primary sources of documenting Iranian life at home and in the diaspora. A final frontier in the documentary realm is the emergence of Internet cinema. Camera-­driven websites that relay a specific Iranian reality for cyberspace visitors anywhere in the world are one type of Internet cinema discussed here. The personal, live-­camera websites, which transmit someone’s reality or his or her performance of his or her private reality, to voyeuristic viewers have not emerged in any meaningful way in Iran due to a variety of factors, including the inside-­outside duality, collective identity (personal webcams could ruin a family’s name), the culture of modesty and courtesy, and fear of security agencies. However, as Reza Haeri shows in his fascinating documentary Saint Internet (Imamzadeh Internet, 2004), the Internet is widely used in Iran, including among the poor and religious strata. Blogging, too, has emerged as a dynamic and forceful method of self-­expression, documentation, and protest, partly due to the muzzling of journalism, as was demonstrated during and after the disputed presidential elections in 2009. Individuals and groups within and without the country use blogs to connect, inform, document, exchange views, share artistic works, coordinate public action, and build solidarity, turning Persian into “the fourth most frequently used language” in the blogosphere, with more than sixty-­four thousand blogs. Reportedly, the volume of blogs in Farsi exceeds those in Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, or Russian (Alavi 2005:1). Many of the blogs provide stills and streaming audio and video files.67 Some blogs deal with topics related to Iranian cinema (many of these are too ephemeral to cite). 86

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Live public websites are also growing, offering glimpses onto Iranian landscapes, historical sites, and ordinary sights such as city traffic (for a while in the 2000s the Tehran Traffic Control and Surveillance Center hosted a site with several live cameras trained on major thoroughfares, refreshed every two minutes). The increasing number of cctv (closed-­circuit tv) cameras in public thoroughfares, transportation centers, and buildings has become an instrument of government surveillance and control, one that Parisa Bakhtavar’s feature comedy, Tambourine (Dayereh Zangi, 2007), uses in its narrative to showcase the efficiency of the police. They have also become sources of documentary films for filmmakers and of sousveillance (self-­surveillance), by artists and the political opposition, to undermine the Islamist regime and to thwart its unwarranted charges on their arrest. The most prominent examples of the latter development were the myriad cell-­ phone and other amateur and low-­tech videos recorded during the widespread protests against Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009, which were uploaded to Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking websites. These were in turn picked up by news and broadcast organizations and amplified and disseminated to the world. Mohsen Makhmalbaf from exile called these amateur videographers “the most honest filmmakers of Iran,” contextualizing them within the history of Iranian cinema, with some exaggeration: “I think the thing they are doing is more important than all of the history of our cinema. . . . For the past thirty years, we were trying to reach some kind of reality in art. We used our films like a mirror in front of society. But their images are full of reality; there is no artificiality. We were talking about democracy; they are in danger for democracy” (quoted in Weiss 2010). These videos are constituent of what I have called an “Internet cinema,” dealt with extensively in another chapter in this volume.

Documentary Festivals Film festivals in the Islamic Republic regularly screened documentary films, including the flagship national festival Fajr International Film Festival, which created documentary sidebars and markets, or specialized festivals such as the Imposed War Film Festival and Roshd Educational Film Festival, which showcased documentary films. State-­controlled television, too, became a major venue for documentary exhibition with its increasing array of channels, including its international satellite news channels, irnn and Press tv, which screened both domestic and foreign documentaries that were produced, commissioned, or acquired.68 Iranian exile television as well as Persian-­language television funded and operated by foreign governments, particularly by the bbc and the Voice of America, became producers, commissioners, and exhibitors of documentaries made in Iran and abroad. Domestic documentary film festivals multiplied; during the 1990s twenty-­two such festivals screened more than T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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one thousand films, mostly produced by government agencies. Each festival was driven by one overarching organizing principle that distinguished it from the others: theme, film type, geographic location, organizing institution, or age group (Tahaminejad 2000/1379:167–75). Founded in 1999 by Shirdel, the Kish International Documentary Film Festival became not only a flagship national venue but also an international one. In a way, this festival helped Shirdel break out of his dystopic doldrums described at the beginning of this chapter. The festival, organized in collaboration with the Kish Free Trade Zone Organization, was held at the Kish University facilities on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. Shirdel, who had spent some time in the Gulf region for his documentaries such as Isolation, Opus One, states that in addition to promoting documentary filmmakers and their films, the festival brought tourists and prestige to the island. Both the selection committee and the jury members were well-­known documentary filmmakers and critics, who brought further prestige to the event.69 Each festival included thirty to forty films from Iran and elsewhere in competition and additional films in special sections devoted to the works of prominent documentarists, national or regional documentary cinemas, or themes. It also held discussions and a film market and handed out awards, including cash prizes. According to Shirdel, the driving idea guiding the choice of films and jury was that “a camera is not a ‘gun,’ but no doubt it is no less than a ‘weapon.’” 70 The festival functioned as a weapon of enlightenment and empowerment by exposing great domestic films to audiences, analyzing the problems besetting the industry, and giving a shot in the arm to the documentarists. It became more professional and robust each year, offering new international films to Iranian filmmakers and audiences and, in turn, exposing Iranian documentaries to foreign audiences, investors, and film buffs who, according to Shirdel, showed “wonderful receptivity” to investing in Iranian documentaries.71 Another important venue for showcasing documentaries was the International Green Film Festival, which also began in 1999, in Tehran. Spearheaded by Yousef Hojjat, a deputy managing director at the Department of the Environment, the festival was cosponsored by the Ministries of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Oil, Energy, and Health, by Iran News, and by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environment Program, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Hojjat spelled out the impetus for this annual festival: “To enhance public awareness and to encourage people to participate in matters related to the living environment.” 72 It proved popular, indicated by the high number of 476 films (from two seconds to 120 minutes) it received for its inaugural festival. The second festival in 2000, which screened 300 films from Iran and foreign countries, was expanded beyond Tehran to twelve other cities, in addition to Kish Island and Qeshm Island. In 2002, a newer, more specialized film venue, Arg-­e Jadid Documentary Film Festival, opened in the city of Bam, which had been hit by a devastating 88

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earthquake that destroyed much of its homes and its fabulous and sprawling ancient fortress (called arg). Held in September by the “special economic zone” created to restore and rejuvenate Bam, the festival showcased a selection of the best documentaries made in Iran since the revolution. Shirdel acted as the festival director, which awarded Kiarostami with its top award, the “Gold Palm.” What Kiarostami said in a note to Shirdel on receiving news of this honor was indicative of the new respect for documentaries: “For years I have been grafting my fictional cinema to the documentary cinema so that I may benefit from its humanist prestige. Documentary cinema is a noble cinema and documentary filmmakers, instead of creating stories and imagined realms, concentrate on describing reality, and they attempt with their realistic approaches to understand the emotions and logic behind things, and to expand human knowledge and solve cultural, economic, and social problems.” 73 Unfortunately, the Green Film Festival closed down after four years of operation, and with the coming of Ahmadinejad to power as president in 2005, both the Kish and the Arg-­e Jadid film festivals were closed down as well, bringing to an end a vital chapter in documentary cinema. Instead, the mcig’s Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films created a new international documentary film festival in Tehran in 2007, called Cinema Vérité International Film Festival, whose aim according to its website was to “express the relationship between reality and truth through documentary films.” 74 Two editions of the annual festival took place with good success, opening a new venue for documentaries; however, the third, slated for October 2009, coincided with the widespread social turmoil that followed the disputed presidential elections, which engulfed the event. In a letter, initially signed by 136 people, that soon after its release acquired another 34 names, veteran and young documentarists declared to the organizers of the Cinema Vérité International Film Festival that they were boycotting it. This was not because they disagreed with the festival or with its hardworking director, Mohammad Afarideh, whose valuable service they lauded; rather, it was because they objected to the government’s impediments to filming the Green Movement’s protests, which would make this festival, whose mission was to reflect and document Iranian realities, look like all other years, as though nothing unusual—­no protest—­had taken place in Iran that year. In their brief statement the protesting filmmakers said, in part: “Unfortunately, extreme restrictions and impediments that have been imposed on documentarists in presenting a realistic and fair representation of our tumultuous society are unprecedented. . . . We cannot ignore the absence of the unmade documentaries about the recent social events, and because of our respect and commitment to expressing truth we have decided to not take part in any aspect of the festival, as filmmaker, critic, and spectator.” 75 Many veteran and emerging documentarians signed the letter, which became highly controversial.76 Despite the controversy, the third Cinema Vérité festival did take place, but with scant film entries T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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and an even scanter audience. The festival’s special guest, the great American direct-­cinema filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, abided by the domestic filmmaker’s boycott and did not show up. The protest accrued one more casualty: the festival director, Afarideh, who was also the director of the Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films. He resigned from both of his posts.

This chapter demonstrates the gradual but inexorable radicalization of the documentary in its politics and poetics. From simple recording of the revolution and the war front the documentary evolved into documenting, commenting, investigating, critiquing, and finally opposing the Islamist regime and some of the Persian, Iranian, and Islamic traditions of the society. Documentarists became the social conscience of society, and sometimes paid for it dearly—­in being censored, banned, imprisoned, tortured, and exiled. In the end, there are several major issues concerning the continued vitality of documentary cinema and several hopeful developments that are worth noting. Despite the Islamic government’s support for documentary cinema, this support pales before the regime’s financial contributions to the fiction film industry. In September 2000, Mokhtari, the noted documentarian and head of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers, wrote a public letter to Saifollah Dad, then the deputy minister for cinematographic affairs at the mcig and a war filmmaker himself, that set out some of the major problems besetting documentary cinema at the close of the century. His chief complaint was that the government had given short shrift to the documentary form. To prove his point, he calculated that based on the government’s own figures and certain assumptions, it had contributed to the film industry between 22 and 36 billion tomans (between US$24,688,609 and $40,399,513) in the twenty years of its rule in Iran. These contributions in the form of outright subsidies, raw stock, film equipment and facilities, and low-­interest loans had been bestowed on only one sector of the film industry, feature fiction cinema, which, unlike documentary cinema, could count on tapping into private funding and the drawing power of movie stars. In addition, he charged that the government’s ban on importing commercial foreign movies had removed an important competitor for the domestic feature film industry, allowing it to become synonymous with “Iranian cinema.” “Any time there is talk of Iranian cinema, it means fiction cinema; it is this cinema that represents Iranian cinema.” No such outright and multifaceted aid was given the nonfiction and animated film industries, which needed more state support because they could not count as much as the fiction film industry on the private sector and the box office. In addition, he noted that the government institutions created ostensibly to support nonfiction films, such as the mcig’s Young People’s Cinema Society and the Center for Development of Documentary and Experimental Films, were either failing or were anemic in 90

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their support. Finally, he claimed that in developing film policies and regulations the government had failed to take into consideration the input of the documentary sector. For example, when the mcig formed the High Council of Film Development (Showra-­ye Ali-­ye Towse’eh-­ye Film), it failed to include as council members representatives of the documentary, short subject, and animated film industries.77 Mokhtari was not alone in this assessment of the anemic state of government support for documentary cinema. Shirdel, too, stated in the same year: “For thirty years we have been trying to hold a documentary film festival in Iran, but it was only after the Kish Island Free Trade Zone Organization accepted our plans that this goal was achieved.” 78 He echoed Mokhtari’s alarming analysis by stating that “no institution in Iran is in charge of the documentary cinema . . . [which] is in the worst possible condition at the moment. There is no support for documentary films and everyone is trying to hurt this branch of the cinema.” In 1999, Mansureh Arbabi, working for the vvir’s Center for Research and Evaluation of Programs, authored a major report, The Place of Documentary Filmmaking in the Islamic Republic Television (Jaigah-­e Mostanadsazi dar Sima), in which she took to task the television networks, the primary nationwide venues for documentary films, for their failure to support quality documentaries because of negligence and faulty planning.79 This diagnosis echoed Mokhtari’s open letter. Of course, government support and funding for documentary cinema can also become a tie that binds, restricting the documentaries in terms of their subject matter, ideology, and style. Organizing internationally recognized venues such as the Kish, Green, and Cinema Vérité film festivals to enhance cinematic exchange relations within Iran and with the world is a good step in the right direction. However, as can be seen, these are not only professional venues but also highly political ones, subject to the exigencies and microphysics of power relations. Another step is to institute national laws and regulations that recognize, support, and reward nonfiction filmmaking as a legitimate art form, a socially significant product, and a valuable economic investment. These laws and regulations could systematize, streamline, and facilitate the financing of domestic documentary productions, their domestic exhibition and distribution, and their international presence through film festivals, broadcasting, and commercial distribution. Another possibility is to create venues for the wider and regular screening of nonfiction films not only in Tehran but also throughout the nation. This could include screening documentaries in commercial theaters before main features, screening them in specially designed documentary cinemas, and screening them either on existing television networks prominently and regularly or on a newly created nonfiction television network, which could air all sorts of domestic and international nonfiction films and programs. Making documentaries available for sale, rental, or streaming on video and through the Internet is another way to expand the availability of this important art form. Enhancing educational T he Resurgence of Nonfi c t ion Ci nema

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opportunities and degree programs for documentary production and study will benefit the industry. A national archive, registry, and research center for the documentary cinema is needed, where originals, negatives, and prints of the films are stored, restored, and maintained, and where information about this cinema is collected and placed at the disposal of researchers and filmmakers. Fully searchable databases of all documentaries available via the Internet would make the study and criticism of the films much more standardized and feasible. For such a sweeping transformation, the cooperation of the government, including of the mcig, the vvir, the Majles, the cidcya, the Islamic Propaganda Organization, the private sector, the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers, and other relevant film industry unions and institutions will be needed.

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2 Under Cover, on Screen Women’s Representation and Women’s Cinema

T

he century of cinema was bookended by two revolutions. Cinema’s existence was threatened during both by reactions against women’s screen representations. Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri is said to have panned the first public cinema in 1904 around the time of the Constitutional Revolution partly because it showed images of unveiled women, while during the lead-­in to the Islamic revolution of 1978, a third of the country’s movie houses were destroyed partly due to the corrupting images of women they had screened in the Pahlavi era. In Iran women were constitutive of cinema precisely because they were deprived of screen representation, film production, and movie-­house attendance. Their structured absence during the Qajar era, their sexualized presence during the Pahlavis, and their desexualized and veiled presence under the Islamic Republic gave Iranian cinema some of its national and stylistic particularity. The Qajar and Pahlavi periods’ depictions of women are treated in previous volumes. This chapter examines women’s forceful emergence as professional directors of feature films and documentaries and the politics and poetics of their veiled screen representations under the Islamic Republic, which forced women crucially to assume both a male and a Muslim point of view. In the aftermath of the revolution, women gradually began to play significant and signifying roles both behind and in front of cameras, as their active participation in the revolution and their adaptation to the postrevolutionary Islamist rules created a new and credible role for them. As the prominent lawyer Mehrangiz Kar noted, the revolution produced a “paradox” in the lives of women. On the one hand, because of their wide participation in it, women gained social agency by persuading religious leaders to “legitimize female par-

ticipation in the social and political process.” On the other hand, due to dominant patriarchal and religious attitudes and legislation, women continued to be treated as “second class citizens” (Kar 2000). Many women left the country because of this treatment, including the filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-­Vafa, who chose to live in the United States. Her reason was: “I know that I am an exile in my own country because I am not a man” (quoted in Sullivan 2001:232). Exile in foreign lands was preferable to internal exile or a second-­class status at home. As will be seen, the paradox of women in the Islamic Republic played itself out surprisingly in the realm of cinema. The contestation over veiling was not just over whether to veil but also over modernity—­represented by a demand for individuality, autonomy, agency, legal equality, self-­representation, and access to work and power. The imposition of the veil was antimodern in that it collectivized women and robbed them of individuality, choice, and many rights; however, women’s adoption of the veil did not foreclose their becoming modern. Filmmakers of both genders uniquely incorporated it into the movies and movie houses. Not only that: more women directed feature movies in the first decade after the revolution than in all the preceding eight decades of filmmaking combined—­and this in a theocratic and patriarchal society highly suspicious of the corrupting influence of cinema on women and of women on cinema. By the late 2000s, well over a dozen women were directing feature movies and many more were directing documentaries, shorts, and animated films. Their penetration into the cinematic public sphere was such that by the turn of the twenty-­first century, the first comprehensive filmography of women working in the motion-­picture industry was published (Moradi Kuchi 2000). The first comprehensive filmography of actresses (Mohebbi 2001/1380) and books on female stars (Khoshkhu 2000/1379; Qukasian 2004/1383) followed. Significantly, the postrevolutionary films that women feature directors made were almost exclusively art-­cinema films, as no woman made a populist Islamist film and very few made popular commercial movies (Tahmineh Milani was one director who did, for example). The output of women filmmakers does not constitute a “woman’s cinema,” for as Alison Butler notes, “‘women’s cinema’ is a complex critical, theoretical and institutional construction, brought into existence by audiences, film-­makers, journalists: a hybrid concept, arising from a number of overlapping practices and discourses, and subject to a baffling variety of definitions” (2002:2). This chapter lays out some of the key historical, theoretical, textual, industrial, authorial, sociopolitical, sexual, religious, and biographical components of the fiction movies and documentaries that women made and of women’s representation in cinema and television, without shoehorning them into a “women’s cinema” or a “women’s film genre” or a “female film style.” Women’s strong entry into cinema was emblematic of participation, indeed real achievements, in other sociopolitical and cultural spheres, despite their second-­class status before Islamic sharia law. By the end of the century more 94

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women were attending universities than men (more than 52 percent and rising), and 297 women had been elected to city councils and 484 to rural councils. Recall Zinat Daryai’s election to the Salakh village council in Qeshm Island in 2000 in Mokhtari’s film, Zinat: One Special Day. Moreover, in fifty-­six cities, women had topped the list of councillors in terms of votes received, while in another fifty-­eight cities they had come in second. By 2000, nearly 1,000 women had either retained their executive positions or had risen to those positions. Three women had been appointed as presidential advisors, 16 as ministerial advisors, 105 as directors general or deputy directors general in government ministries, 1 as vice president, and 1 (Azam Nuri) as deputy minister of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (mcig) (Kar 2000). In addition, fourteen women were elected to the Majles, up from four in the first election after the revolution (Kian-­T hiébaut 2002a:260).1 The 1990s was a crucial decade for gender parity in the educational system, thanks to government efforts. The most significant progress was made at primary and secondary levels, as the Gender Parity Index for primary education rose from 0.90 in 1990–1991 to 0.96 in 1999–2000; that for secondary education went from 0.73 to 0.92 in the same period (Mehran 2003:1). In terms of degrees, women surpassed men, so that by 2005, 60 percent of urban women aged 18 to 30 had an upper secondary degree or above, compared to just more than 50 percent for urban men (Salehi-­ Isfahani and Egel 2007:18). Not all of the women in public were appointed or elected, nor did they all hold governmental or bureaucratic posts. Masumeh Soltan Baloghie was the first woman long-­distance, intra-­city bus driver in Iran and perhaps in the Islamic world, as she drove between Tehran and Bandar Abbas, a distance of five thousand kilometers. The Iraqi director Maysoon Pachachi made an affectionate and textured film about her, Iranian Journey (1999). Taxi Bisim-­e Banovan (Ladies’ Radio Taxi) was formed in 2007 to provide a safe service for female travelers in Tehran; its drivers were all women. These were significant developments, since driving public vehicles had always been a male profession and was considered the territory of tough guys and jahels. Fire station No. 9 in Karaj, west of Tehran, staffed by women firefighters (eleven of them), was the only such unit in the Middle East (they wore scarves under their helmets) (Peterson 2005). This all signaled women’s modernity, as mobility and modernity are inter­twined. Textually, female mobility abounds in art-­house films by male and female directors (Khalili Mahani 2006). The first Iranian to ever win the Nobel Prize was a female human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, who won it in 2003 for her work in promoting peace and human rights. She was not only the first Iranian but also the first Muslim woman to win such an honor. Women made a larger entry into literary and journalistic circles than in cinema. Between the early 1990s, when Shahla Lahiji established the first women’s publishing house, Rowshangaran (Enlighteners), and the turn of the century, 236 women publishers emerged. Likewise, the number Women’s Ci nema

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of female journalists far surpassed that of the Pahlavi era. In 1972, there were 50 women among the 2,000 journalists working in Iran (2.5 percent); in 1997, there were 400 women among 3,000 journalists (13.3 percent). In addition, these were younger and had a higher level of education than their male counterparts. In 1998 they formed Anjoman-­e Senfi-­ye Ruznamehnegaran-­e Zan, the first female journalists’ trade association (Roya 1999:142).2 Finally, the number of women novelists equaled that of male novelists, and they both dominated the list of best-­selling novels and outsold the works of the men (Fathi 2005b). All these were unprecedented achievements, many of them obtained during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency. The presence of educated female role models in various realms “shattered the stereotypical image of women,” encouraging families to send their daughters to school. Such role models included increasing numbers of “female teachers, university professors, researchers, health workers, scientists, physicians, artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, lawyers, athletes, and journalists whose activities are visible at the local and national levels” (Mehran 2003:18). However, despite these real achievements, the second-­class status of women remained and the legalized discrimination and segregation, periodic campaigns of harassment, and the physical and sexual abuse of women continued. Poverty was feminized: the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2001 reported that Iran harbored 1 million single-­mother families, that 29 percent of poor families were single-­mother families, that 70 percent of single mothers in rural areas were illiterate, that women’s salaries averaged 50 percent of the minimum wage, and that the minimum age for marriage for girls officially remained nine years (in practice it was much higher) (Copithome 2001:5–6). In many ways postrevolutionary cinema in general and women’s cinema in particular were formed in the context of these sociopolitical tendencies, but also in response to the earlier treatment and representation of women in the Pahlavi commercial cinema, necessitating further contextualization.

From Sexualized to Segregated Representations Pahlavi-­era commercial movies produced three main typologies of womanhood, which were patriarchal and hierarchical. Blood women, such as mothers, sisters, and daughters, occupied the highest position, and they were generally regarded as ethereal, virtuous, and innocent, off limits to sexual advances. Next were the wives, who shared some attributes of blood women, followed by women entertainers—­singers, dancers, and actors—­considered to be sexually available, morally suspect, and corrupting, nearly on par with prostitutes. For convenience, I conflate the first and second categories to posit a dual filmic typology of “pure/impure” and “houris/whores,” as discussed regarding Siamak Yasami’s Qarun’s Treasure and Kimiai’s Dash Akol. Such cinema also developed 96

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a limited, less moralistic typology for the men, which included tough guys, hajis, and dandies. The limited range of these gender types persisted with minor changes during the Pahlavi eras and were circulated as stereotypes in both popular and high culture, and even, as Nikchehr Mohseni and Feraidun Sanagu Rad showed, in elementary-­school textbooks (1976/2535).3 A comparative study I conducted of gender typology in filmfarsi showed the limited range of the women’s representation as primarily sexual and that of the men as primarily muscular. Independent women were portrayed as bad and whorelike; if good and pure, they were dependent on the men (Naficy 1991:127– 28). The new-­wave auteur filmmakers were less sexist and reductionist, as they tended to portray women with more range than did commercial filmmakers, often even as individual subjects. This is particularly true of Bahram Baizai, in whose films strong women were central. The polar pure-­impure representation of women was not permanent, as women could change polarity in the course of a movie; however, the change itself tended to be polar, in that they shifted from one cliché representation to its binary opposite. Sharp contrasts were the rule, not shades of gray. Pure women fell into prostitution because of their own gullibility and the deceitfulness of men; also typical was the transformation of prostitutes and performers into decent women as a result of love and marriage (the latter is similar to the transformation of the dandies). Ebrahim Nabavi’s study of the professions that women held in the 610 movies produced during the efflorescence of the second Pahlavi cinema both confirms this oversexualization of women and points out the remarkable dissonance between women’s social reality and their cinematic representation (see table 2). The sexualization of women’s professions becomes glaringly evident if the figures for dancers and singers, prostitutes, and cabaret workers are added together (eighty-­four movies) and compared with the women who are students, artists, writers, civil servants, nurses, teachers, and business owners (thirty-­ four movies). Without belaboring the point statistically, it can readily be stated that such a high proportion of women as the movies suggested were not entertainers or employed in morally suspect professions in this generally traditional, conservative, and predominantly Muslim society. In addition, during the decade of this study, the rank of women who were entering the public sphere in civil-­ service jobs, professional positions, and higher education was rising sharply, which means that alternative images of respectable professional women were available. This lopsided representation was not, as both leftist critics of mass culture and Islamic critics of cultural imperialism charged, the result of the machinations of a repressive state in collusion with captains of capitalism to keep the population busy with what Iranian critics euphemistically called “affairs of the lower trunk.” Rather, it served to satisfy diverse imaginative, psychological, sociological, political, and financial impulses—­of the spectators, the state, the stars, advertisers, and the film and culture industries. In addition, the sexualization—­indeed, the oversexualization—­of women in filmfarsi was Women’s Ci nema

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Table 2 Women’s professions in the movies exhibited between 1969 and 1978 Women’s Professions

No. of Films

Housewife

55

Student

4

Dancer and singer

52

Prostitute

22

Artist and writer

8

Cabaret worker

10

Blue-collar workers and laborers

16

Unemployed and vagrant

15

Owner/manager of businesses and land

7

Civil servant

4

Nurse

5

Teacher

6

Other

16

Source: Adapted from Nabavi 1988

as much a function of Westernization as of emerging modernity, because even though it was depicted in a patriarchal and demeaning manner and from a male viewpoint, the display and expression of female sexual desire pointed to the gradual triumph of individuality over the inherent conservatism of collectivity. Women’s desire constituted a threat to a male-­dominated society, and it was curtailed by turning it into a fixed stereotype, a fetish, which disavowed the threat while simultaneously pointing to it. Hence the continued saliency and power of binary projections of women. Whatever its causes, this binarist and hypersexualized representation of women had dire consequences both for cinema and for women’s future participation in it, for it shifted blame to women (and away from dandies) as symbols of modernity’s excesses and vices. Significantly, while the anxieties of attraction and repulsion that the dandies aroused were displaced by humor and ridicule, those aroused by women were defused through violence and the imposition of the veil. Indeed, the revulsion against Pahlavi-­era popular movies, manifested by the destruction of scores of movie houses and the subsequent “purification” and Islamization of the film industry, can be traced to such sexually overcharged female representations, which were further emphasized and manipulated in the overheated postrevolutionary atmosphere. The emphasis on gender segregation, veiling, and modesty in postrevolutionary cinema—­and in writing this chapter—­has to do with this social context. 98

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Women’s representation was loaded not only with sexuality and amorality but also with deeply negative political connotations. Filmfarsi actresses and entertainers were used to spice up not only the movies but also the television and movie commercials rampant in the last decade of the Pahlavi period. In these dancing and singing advertisements, through close-­up photography and framing, special lighting, and appropriate editing, bodies of shapely, scantily dressed women were cut up into isolated, strategic, and sexualized close-­up parts—­legs, arms, breasts, buttocks, faces, eyes, lips—­which, acting like Freudian fetishes, both unveiled and veiled sexual desire to sell consumer products. By thus fusing psychic fetishism with commodity fetishism these modern women became highly potent. They became powerful agents of modernity, consumerism, and market capitalism, pushing not only products (ranging from toothpaste to refrigerators to automobiles) but also Western consumer capitalism and its ideology. Finally, the star system, which promoted young women as romantic figures, sexual fetishes, and larger-­than-­life movie stars, further implicated women politically. Women’s public image during the period under study underwent a series of remarkable transformations, which movies influenced. During the Qajars, women were practically invisible both in the streets and on the screens. In the first Pahlavi period, with its forced unveiling and other measures, they were transformed from symbols of backwardness and confinement to becoming the epitome of modernity and freedom. In the second Pahlavi period they were transformed again, but negatively, into representing modernity’s excesses and vices. Under the Islamic Republic they were initially considered the victims of the Pahlavi state and of the commercial film industry, which had manipulated and sexualized their image for propaganda and profit. However, soon they were transformed yet again, this time being designated as the agents of that era’s moral and political corruption, whose presence in society and on movie screens had to be regulated and curtailed. Many political tracts after the revolution pointed to both the victimization and the complicity of women in promoting moral corruption and consumer capitalism. Among these was a polemical pamphlet by Zahra Rahnavard, an “Islamic feminist with leftist tendencies” (Siavoshi 2004:178), a university professor, the wife of the prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, and, later, the president of the all-­female Alzahra University. Addressing women, she wrote: Yes, they need to conquer new markets. . . . And that is why they use all your physical and other attributes: Your hair, your voice, your body, and your taste .  .  . to advertise and to sell products—­their useless, surplus products. . . . What conspiracy will they devise now to use you to advertise their wares more, to make you become the consumer of their wares . . . to stupefy the people’s minds, to trample on society’s higher values? What conspiracy will they devise for your hair? What markets will they create Women’s Ci nema

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for it and what types of dye, fragrance, shampoo, and hair spray? How will they turn your attention and the men’s attention to those creations and to those hairstyles, breasts, and necks? How will they use these creations as instruments of selling refrigerators, electric fans, and washing machines? (n.d.:27–18, 22) The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emphasized the directly political dimensions of cinema by charging that “it is the Shah who corrupts our young stratum with the usual colonialist movies, which turn our girls and boys into immoral people unaware of the sad state of the country. The Shah’s cinema is a training ground for prostitution and for ignorant dolls and robots, and the Muslim nation considers these centers to be opposed to the national interests” (quoted in Sadat n.d.:T). The mid-­level cleric Hojatollah Javad Mohadessi attacked the representational lie at the heart of cinema, where actors pretend to be characters not their own. In his analysis, being (budan) and acting or representing (nemudan) must coincide; otherwise, duality and the loss of credibility will result, causing the spectators to feel cheated. This necessitates that an actor’s “life” and his “part” be in harmony. He elaborated: “A ‘polluted’ person cannot play the part of a ‘pure’ person on the stage because in addition to himself suffering from duality by thinking less of his role, or thinking that his role is a lie and a hypocrisy, he may impart similarly conflicted sentiments to the spectators. What will the spectators think when they see that an ‘executioner-­ type’ is playing the part of a ‘martyr,’ or that a person with polluted hands and eyes is playing the part of a rescuing angel? How much will such a show inspire them? Can truthful words be accepted if uttered by a fouled mouth?” (Mohadessi 1989/1368:155). It is this principle of the coincidence and harmony of being and acting, of actor and part, which seemed to be at work in the purification process that weeded out the “corrupt” and “idolatrous” entertainers, actors, and filmmakers from the industry. Rarely discussed in cinematic circles, this coincidence is central to Iranians and its attainment is much desired, for it is driven by Islamic religious principals and by Iranian mystic ideals: one of the five pillars of Islam, monotheism (towhid), emphasizes the uniqueness and unity of God (“There is no God but God”), and the Sufi principle of inner purity or sincerity (safa-­ye baten) requires that internal feelings (baten) and external expressions (zaher) be in harmony. Mohadessi was not alone in advocating such a harmony between the actor and the part. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who followed Ayatollah Khomeini as the Supreme Leader, also warned, “We must not weaken good messages by uttering them with polluted mouths and tongues” (Khamenei 1983/1362:27). Gholamali Haddad Adel, then the deputy minister of education, raised a similar point: “How can we battle social corruptions with polluted weapons? It is unwise for actors who before the revolution played prominent parts in scenes that were obviously against Islamic values to take up spiritual and Islamic parts af100

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ter the revolution” (1983/1362:66). Thus actors who had achieved prominence in the Pahlavi-­era cinema in roles now considered un-­Islamic or morally corrupt were not allowed to play the parts of martyrs and revolutionaries (recall the case of the movie Living in Purgatory). They were excised, exiled, and marginalized; in short, purified. Abbas Kiarostami’s film Close-­Up (1989) offers a profound treatise on just this dichotomy between acting and being that is at the heart of both cinema and moral behavior. After the iconoclastic destruction and purification, the Islamic Republic created its own limited representations of women, chiefly based on principles of subservience, segregation, and veiling. By July 1980, the wearing of the Islamic hijab (veil) was compulsory nationwide, with the government sacking civil-­service employees who did not abide by it and replacing female television announcers and anchors who refused to comply (Roya 1999:73). The unveiling campaign, dictated by Reza Shah in 1935, and the veiling campaign, ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, had some structural similarities. A segment of the population was ahead of the official decrees, for unveiled women were appearing in public before the Shah’s decree, including in Ovanes Ohanians’s feature movie Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, in 1933, and, likewise, women were donning the Islamic hijab before the revolution of 1978–79, even secular and leftist women, as a sign of their protest against the Shah’s regime. The imposition of laws took the choice away from the people and set the state against its own citizens, re-­creating the paradigmatic antagonistic state-­citizen relationship that Homa Katouzian identifies as operative in the Iranian polity from ancient times on (2009).4 In imposing veiling and in adopting it in cinema, both authorities and filmmakers had to grope their way, since there was no Islamicate “model” of women for the screen. Contemporary times were different from the idealized early Islamic era. President Hashemi Rafsanjani admitted as much: “We do not have a historical model of early Islam to know what roles women played in society and how we can follow that model and adjust ourselves to it today. The time period of the Prophet Mohammad, which is the only period of true Islam, lasted only some ten years, during which the Quran was gradually given to the Prophet and God’s edicts followed. . . . Life back then was not as complicated at it is today for us to pattern our women after it.” 5 New patterns had to be devised and negotiated. That gender segregation enshrined structural inequality of the genders not only in society but also in cinema becomes clear if one examines the Regulations Governing Exhibition of Movies, Videos, and Slides, approved by premier Mir Hossein Mousavi’s cabinet in 1982 (see volume 3, appendix). One item in the regulations prohibited the exhibition of any segment of a film or the entire film in the entire country that denies, manipulates, or damages certain values. Among these values were the sanctity of the family, the lofty position

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of women, and the women’s constructive role in social affairs and in raising good children. Another item guaranteed the “equality of all humans regardless of color, race, language, and ethnicity before God almighty.” Nowhere was the equality of women and men mentioned as a fundamental principle. Segregated and unequal was the norm.

Modesty as Social Practice and as a Component of Gendered Subjectivity Iranian hermeneutics is driven by a dynamic and artful relationship between veiling and unveiling, between self and other, which constitutes “modesty,” or hijab. This hermeneutics is based on distrusting manifest meanings and concealing core values. In many non-­Western societies such as Iran, India, and Japan, that have strong collective, contextual, and hierarchical relationships, the self tends to be more collective, communal, familial, and hierarchical than individualized, despite the encroachment of modernity and late modernity (Bateson et al. 1977; Banuazizi 1977; Bateson 1979; Beeman 1986; Roland 1988; Hillmann 1990). This psychosocial configuration with its premodern vestiges produces an apparent contradiction between an inner private self and an outer public self, both available to individuals simultaneously. The core is thought to be stable, intimate, authentic, and reliable, while the exterior is construed as the domain of surfaces, corruption, and worldly attachments, unstable and unreliable. In Lacanian terms, the interior is the realm of the undifferentiated self, which is united with the Imaginary prior to the mirror-­stage experience, while the exterior is the realm of the Other, where individuals must negotiate their entry into the Symbolic. This dual, collective, and hierarchical conception of the self produces tensions between individual subjectivity and collective identity that are widespread in Iranian cinema and in women’s representation by it. Women’s subsidiary and cloistered socioreligious status impedes individual subjectivity. Indeed, the veil ensures such subservience and collective identity, which its proponents interpret as universality. As Rahnavard claimed, “A woman through Islamic hijab, is able to give up the allure of individualism, to become one with the rest of humanity, and to recapture her true self—­a self with divine origin” (quoted in Siavoshi 2004:179). Despite such lip service to equality before the divine, women have no autonomous identity; they are taken to be a constitutive part of the core self of the males to whom they are related, and they must, therefore, be protected from unrelated males by following rules of modesty in architecture, dress, behavior, voice, touch, eye contact, and relations with men. Every social sphere and every artistic expression must be gendered and segregated by some sort of veil or barrier inscribing the fundamental separation and inequality of the sexes. However, while aimed principally at women, walls, words, and veils mark, mask, separate, and confine both genders to their places (Milani 1992). 102

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18 Similarity of women’s veiling outdoors and architecture: one protects individual women from the gazes of strangers, the other protects the family. Dariush Mehrjui’s film, Pari. Publicity picture.

I apply the general term modesty, or hijab, to all the strategies of marking and separating males and females, related and unrelated, in today’s Iran. Instances of modesty abound in society, culture, and the arts: high walls separate and conceal private spaces from public spaces, inner rooms of houses protect and conceal the family, formal language suppresses the free public expression of private feelings, sartorial modesty and veiling oppress and conceal women, decorum and status hide men, exoteric meanings of religious texts hide esoteric meanings, and miniature paintings present the world according to a palimpsestic and multiperspectival system instead of organizing it into a clear, unified, quattrocento perspective with a single vanishing point for appreciation by a centered viewer (figure 18). Veiling is the armature of modesty. Historically, veiling preceded Islam, but Islam and Iranian Shiism injected their own particularities into its forms and practices. With the onset of menses girls become “women,” and they must cover their hair and body by wearing either a veil (chador, a head-­to-­toe cloth) or a modest garb consisting of a head scarf, a loose tunic, and long pants. Boys become “men” usually later, with their first nighttime ejaculation. Both women and men must follow the religious conventions of the related and the unrelated (mahram/namahram), which govern both their segregation from, and their association with, each other. Women need not wear a veil in front of male members of their immediate family to whom they are related and, therefore, halal (religiously permitted)—­their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles. All other men are considered unrelated and, therefore, haram (forbidden) to them, and in their presence women must adopt the veil, a demure attitude, and an averted gaze. Unrelated men, likewise, must adopt a formal style with unrelated women and avert their eyes from them. Many of these practices have intensified since the revolution of 1978–79 through the institutionalization of sharia law. Significantly, many of the components of the sharia laws not only long predated Islam in Iran—­going back as far as the Parthian and Sasanian eras (Floor 2008:8–16)—­but also are present in other Islamic, Arab, and third world societies (Abu-­Lughod 1986; Mernissi Women’s Ci nema

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1991, 1987), and they are applied to men and women. The veil does not necessarily imply a lower status. In ancient Persia the veil conferred higher status to the women who wore it, and among the Tuareg of North Africa today it implies the higher status of the men who generally wear it. The higher a man’s status, the more elaborate is his veil (Murphy 1964). Lastly, walls and veils may bring the people who are subjected to them closer to each other. As the earth architect Nader Khalili astutely notes, good neighbors in Iran start their relationship by “sharing the shadow of the same wall from opposite sides” of the alley, a concept that is underscored by the word for neighbor, hamsayeh, which means “united in shade.” “A whole village or a community starts by building the first walls together” (1990:33). There is a direct link between dress and subjectivity. The veil is often associated with traditionalism, backwardness, and premodernity (Balasescu 2003); yet this is only true if its wearing is not a matter of individual choice but is imposed—­by an authoritarian modern state, by a religious establishment, or by patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, if its wearing is voluntary or if, despite being mandatory, it allows for individuality and personality by the choice of material, cut, style, and accessories and by what is worn on the body underneath it, then the veiling may become a form of fashion. To the extent that the veil is mandatory in Iran, it is antimodern and robs women of individualized choices, subjectivity, and personality. On the other hand, to the extent that women have over the years been able to manipulate this imposition into expression, despite periodic harassments by the modesty police, they have succeeded in turning the veil into fashion and into an instrument of resistance. This was on display not only in the streets of major cities in the late 1990s and in the titles of memoirs such as Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad but also in a fashion show in Tehran in 2001, which for the first time showcased the veil on the runway. In the hermeneutics of veiling, the voice has a complementary function: before entering a house, men are expected to make their presence known by voice to give the women inside a chance to cover themselves or to organize the scene for the male gaze. A woman must not only veil her body from unrelated men but also her voice. The veiling of the voice involves using formal language with unrelated males (and females), a decorous tone of voice, and the avoidance of emotional expressions such as singing or boisterous laughter, although grief or anger are allowed. That is why in most news footage and documentaries of Muslim countries, including of Iran, angry women, confrontational men with fists raised in the air, and grief-­stricken, weeping people are so prevalent. Foreign journalists and outsiders are structurally unrelated and haram; they generally have little access to the private spaces of the population, and therefore little access to their private, nuanced emotions. The veil is deeply internalized. The constitution of the self as dual (inner core and outer shell), hierarchical (men superior to women), and collective (fa-

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milial and tribal relations) necessitates an internal boundary, however amorphous and porous, which is encoded in the psyche as a veil or a screen. Like “screen memory” (Freud 1953–73:v01.3:307), this veil protects the core from contamination from the outside through camouflage, dissimulation, disavowal, aversion, indirection, evasiveness, cleverness, performativity, and ritual courtesy. These modesty rules turn life’s daily routines into hermeneutically rich activities, as people continually strive to discover the hidden meanings of others’ intentions while trying to conceal their own. What complicates the social world of Iranians even further is the need to balance evasive strategies of modesty with their equally important opposites, those emanating from the principle of inner purity or sincerity, which requires the unity of the inner world with its external expression. In the West, hypocrisy generally conceals something abhorrent, something that one does not want friends and neighbors to know about; in the Iranian context this is inverted. Hypocrisy (dissimulation) hides that which is most pure and valued—­the core self. Iranian hermeneutics is based on the unreliability of vision that escapes the veil (manifest meanings) and the primacy of core values that veiling conceals. Similar interpretive “depth approaches” have been proposed by Western culture critics such as Roland Barthes, who advocated going from denotation to connotation (1974:6), and Stuart Hall, who considered it essential to move from manifest meanings to the level of cultural codes (1982:71). Such a vertical movement from surface to subterranean levels is a routine interpretive activity among many Iranians, Muslim or not, and it is codified in the common rituals of courtesy and gift exchange (ta’arof) and in the strategies of cleverness and one-­upmanship (zerangi) that some Iranians practice (Beeman 1986). It is also an important hermeneutic concept in Islam, where the principle of esotericism upholds the possibility of hidden or, as Fazlur Rahman put it, “inner meanings” in the Quran to be discovered anew by each reading or by each generation (1968:210–11). It is also present in Islamic religious education, whereby achieving high religious status depends less on producing new texts than on new interpretations of existing key texts. Finally, veiling strategies are encoded in the Shiite doctrine of dissimulation (taqyyeh or ketman), which allows the Shiites as a minority among Muslims to dissimulate their belief if they fear for their lives (Rahman 1968; Enayat 1982:160–75; Milosz 1981). The simultaneous principles of modesty and sincerity result in apparently contradictory, inscrutable, and unethical behaviors among Iranians, for, on the one hand, they profess valuing what is sincere, deep, internal, and invisible and, on the other hand, they tend to place great stock in social performativity and in demonstrating their courtesy and sincerity, despite their distrust of manifest expressions. These complex social strategies have had a profound impact not only on the way the society and the film industry deal with the hijab that the Islamic Republic imposed on women and on cinema but also on the devel-

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opment of certain genres (such as humanist films and war movies), the suppression of other genres (musicals), and the emergence of certain recurring narratives (transgender passing), film styles (self-­reflexivity), and authorial signatures (those of Kiarostami and Baizai, for example).

Hijab and Looking: An Islamicate Gaze Theory The constitution of the self as dual, hierarchical, and familial ensures that desire is always expressed through the hermeneutics of veiling and unveiling. I use this hermeneutics and the pronouncements of key Shiite scholars to develop what I call an “Islamicate gaze theory,” which is the undertheorized engine of cinematic looking and storytelling in today’s Iran, and which is radically different from Western feminist gaze theory. The Islamic system of looking and its semiotics of hijab seem to be based on four suppositions. First, the eyes are not passive organs like ears, gathering information from outside and transmitting it to the brain for processing. Eyes are active, even invasive organs, whose gaze in Persian love poetry is often likened to an arrow that deeply pierces the beloved, the object of the look. Religious literature also formulates the gaze as invasive, but in a far more aggressive and sexualized manner. Ayatollah Ali Meshkini states that “no ordinary or carefree person is immune from rape. Looking is rape by means of eyes, kissing is rape by means of lips, touching is rape by means of hands, whether the vulva admits or not, that is, whether actual sexual intercourse takes place or not” (n.d.:106). He adds that not only voyeurism but also ordinary looking at women’s hair is not permitted because “looking is sexually arousing, and sexual excitement leads to amorality, corruption, and forbidden acts” (110). Abolhasan Banisadr, the first postrevolutionary president, once claimed that women’s hair generates certain powerful “rays” that captivate men; head scarves neutralize these rays (mockery of Banisadr ensued). Second, women’s sexuality and lustfulness are thought to be extraordinary and insatiable. Imam Reza is said to have stated that “women are 99 times lustier than men” (Floor 2008:74). Their sexuality is construed to be so “excessive” that if it is uncontained by modesty, it inevitably leads to the wholesale moral corruption of men and society. For this reason women are urged to refrain from the public, or even the private, demonstration of sexual desire. Third, women are thought to be exhibitionist, something that both men and women manipulate in the culture industry to stimulate men’s sexual urges, movie sales, and capitalist consumption. Finally, men are considered to be weaklings when encountering women’s powerful sexual allure, for their gaze on immodest women has an immediate deleterious impact on the men. Power relations in the relay of gazes in the Islamic world seem the obverse of those posited in Western feminist gaze theory: the aggressive male gaze supposedly affects not the female target but the gaze’s male owner. Since Laura Mul106

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vey’s influential essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema in 1975, Western feminist film theory has made much of the putative maleness of the gaze and of its aggressiveness as a controlling, sadistic agent that serves to oppress women and to support phallocentric power relations (Mulvey 1989; Kaplan 1983). Two chief types of looks are generally identified in cinema, one based on scopophilia and the other based on the constitution of the subject through the identification of the looker with the object of the look. The first, derived from Sigmund Freud, is voyeuristic and the second, borrowed from Jacques Lacan, is narcissistic. There is, however, a third type of look based on masochism (Studlar 1988). This type, derived from Gilles Deleuze’s study (1971), is relevant to the look that modesty engenders because masochistic identification seems to explain the “excessive” power of women and the effect of the male gaze on its owner. Instead of controlling women through their gaze, men are lured and captured by their own look on unveiled women and are thereby “humiliated” and made “abject” by women (Mahmudi 1981/1360:117). Such humiliation and abjection are the sources of men’s masochistic pleasure. This masochistic effect of the gaze on its male owner is not only based on the overcathexis of sexuality in women but also on the direct link between vision and political and moral corruption. Modesty involves adopting an averted or veiled look, particularly by women, while voyeuristic desire promotes its opposite, an almost pornographic, probing gaze, often by men. Like the “looking awry” that Slavoj Žižek formulated (1990:34), the averted look theorized here is anamorphic, as it makes the power relations at work in the game of veiling clearer: anamorphic looking is charged, and distorted, by the voyeuristic desires and anxieties of the lookers and by the regulations of the system of modesty. For this reason the averted look tells us more about Iranian culture than the direct gaze. Major religious scholars (mojtahed) such as Ayatollah Khomeini (n.d.) and Seyyed Abolqasem Musavi Khoi (1976/1395) developed new “commandments of looking” (ahkam-­e negah kardan) that encourage this sort of averted or awry looking. For example, they forbade males and females to look with or without lust at bare bodies or body parts of those to whom they are unrelated (other than their faces and hands). Males are forbidden to look at women’s hair, and women are obliged to cover themselves. Looking at sexual organs of others is forbidden, whether it is done directly, through a window, in a mirror, or as reflected in water (and, by extension, as depicted in the movies). The Quran itself recommends the averted look in social interactions between men and women. In the sura of Nur (24:30–31) it states: “Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and be modest. That is purer for them. . . . And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and to be modest” (quoted in Haeri 1989:220). In practice, the averted look takes the following forms: Many people avoid looking at others directly, with or without lust. Traditionalists avoid establishing any direct eye contact with unrelated men and particularly with unrelated women. When meeting each other, they tend to look down, avert their eyes, or Women’s Ci nema

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look at their interlocutor in an unfocused way, so as to avoid definitive contact. On the other hand, on occasions when someone is not looking, or when one encounters a stranger (an unrelated and haram person), the averted look suddenly gives way to a direct, even invasive, gaze. It is this play between averted look and direct gaze that is partially responsible for the contradictory impressions that Iranians sometimes create for foreigners, of being both evasive and aggressive. This semiotics of looking is tied to the collective conception of self, which requires the traditionalists to subsume their individual desires under the collective umbrella. Modern Iranians, however, do not hesitate to establish direct eye contact through which they convey their individual subjectivity and wishes. The direct gaze is driven by distance between subject and object, which is a constitutive component of pleasure through looking, and it may lead to a pornographic gaze. Freud posited scopophilia (the pleasure of looking at another as an object of sexual stimulation) as a libidinal drive that works through pleasure and unpleasure. In its pleasurable aspect, scopophilia demands distance because “it is in the play of absence and distance that desire is activated” (Kuhn 1982:58). Hijab and its system of looking hide aspects of women (and to some extent of men) and thereby creates the necessary distance that motivates scopophilic looking (voyeurism) and listening (eavesdropping). A person draws pleasure from listening to or viewing a scene to which she or he is not supposed to be privy. To be sure, walls and veils segregate people, but they are not hermetic in this. Veiling also tends to turn the objects of the look into erotic objects; thus women become charged with sexuality because of modesty rules and the desire these rules suppress. This violates the “commandments of looking,” which are designed to protect women from becoming sexual objects. All looks are implicated in power relations. Gender segregation and prohibition tend to invite curiosity and promote pleasure through voyeurism and eavesdropping, both of which are associated with men exerting power over women. Although repressive, veiling promotes exhibitionism, through which women may exert power over men. Voyeurism and eavesdropping tend to promote a dual culture of surveillance and exhibitionism, which is highly coercive and power driven. In the 1980s, a pithy slogan on the walls of many offices in Iran pointed to the power relations of looking: “Sisters, guard your hijab; brothers, guard your gaze” (khahar hijab ra, baradar negah ra). Voyeurism and eavesdropping in authoritarian societies such as Iran are not only driven by the desire to control the other, as Western theorists of the gaze have noted, but also by the subsidiary social position of women and other subalterns, who through these strategies of vision and hearing gain information and knowledge to equalize their situation. The relay of the gaze and eavesdropping and their implied power relations are uniquely embedded in Iranian miniature paintings, which are filled with characters (usually women) located inside homes, palaces, and gardens from which they peer at and listen to performers and others located

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in open spaces from behind windows, curtains, half-­open doors, and bushes. Such voyeurism and eavesdropping by women is motivated by their subsidiary role, sequestered as they are to interior female spaces. They equalize the power relations by engaging in these practices, from which they may gain not only pleasure but also information about how the men’s world operates, information they may use to their advantage. Such power-­and fear-­driven configurations are also endemic to Iranian political culture, including, as Nahal Naficy astutely demonstrates, in that of the exile ngos in the United States, where the figure of Dracula haunts the halls and hearts (2007). Filmic configurations of voyeuristic looking and exhibitionistic display are also common, for some of the same reasons. Unlike its general conception in the West and by some feminists and opponents of the Islamic Republic, veiling as a social practice is not unidirectional. It is a dynamic process in which both men and women are implicated. There is also a dialectical relationship between veiling and unveiling: that which covers is also capable of uncovering. Women thus have much latitude in how they present themselves to the gaze of onlookers, involving body language, eye contact, types of veil worn, clothing worn underneath the veil, and the manner in which the veil itself is fanned open or closed at strategic moments to lure or to mask, to reveal or to conceal the face, the body, or what is underneath. In this sense, they are actually empowered. The American feminist Kate Millet had it right when she characterized the veil as the “theater of chador,” without diminishing its oppressive aspects (1982:50). Enframed by the hijab, women’s faces become the stage and their gazes become primary agents of complex communication. The anthropologist Shahla Haeri explains: “Because men and women are forbidden to socialize with each other, or to come into contact, their gazes find new dimensions in Muslim Iran. Not easily controllable, or subject to religious curfew, glances become one of the most intricate and locally meaningful means of communication between the genders” (1989:229). It is in the context of the chador and of the head scarf as theater that the prevalence of rhinoplasty in the Islamic Republic, apparently far exceeding its occurrence in the Pahlavi era and nearing “epidemic” proportions, must be seen. Mehrdad Oskouei’s film Nose Iranian Style (Damagh Beh Sabk-­e Irani, 2006) adroitly exposes this surgery’s politics and poetics, and Vanessa Langer and Nasrin expose the inner life of one girl, Nasrin, who has had her nose operated on in their joint film, Tehran: 11 pm (2007). Likewise, the proliferation of heavy makeup by women in public turns the limitations of the head cover—­indeed the proscenium of the head cover—­into an occasion for a theatrical presentation of the face and for the cathected play of gazes. This gaze-­driven communication does not constitute a panoptic process in the manner Michel Foucault theorized (1979), because in Islamicate gaze theory vision is not unidirectional. Both women and men see and organize the

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field of vision of the other. Furthermore, although the dualities of religiously related/not related, inside/outside, religiously allowed/forbidden are structured psychically and socially, they are not only porous but also invite transgressive pleasures. In addition, although the veil restricts and oppresses women, it can also empower them through anonymity. The folklorist Margaret Mills notes that Afghanistan’s conservative women have “learned to exploit [the veil] to give themselves mobility, and certain ways of manipulating the public, masculine sphere” (1985:211). Gilo Pontecorvo’s classic film Battle of Algiers (1966) demonstrates the effectiveness of the anonymity that the veil bestows on its wearers—­ male and female—­in scenes in which anti-­French Algerian rebels clandestinely transport weapons. Female gender construction can thus be jettisoned altogether. Many Iranian fiction movies of the 1990s and 2000s played with this concept in the form of transgender passing—­by shaving the heads of their young female protagonists (without hair there was no need for a scarf or the chador), dressing them in male clothing (thus they became androgynous and floating signifiers), and having them adopt male postures and behavior (to hide their true gender, these characters often remained nearly silent). The Islamicate theory of the gaze subscribes to what might be called the “injection thesis” of the power of ideology, cinema, and the genderized gaze. According to this thesis, looking at unveiled or immodest women turns autonomous, centered, and moral males into dependent, deceived, and corrupt subjects. Ayatollah Khomeini’s remarks soon after he came to power offer corroboration: “By means of the eyes they [the Shah’s government] corrupted our youths. They showed such and such women on television and thereby corrupted them. Their whole objective was to make sure that no active force would remain in the country that could withstand the enemies of Islam, so they could do with impunity whatever they wanted” (1984/1363:147). It is this belief that turns women from victims into agents of patriarchal sexualization and political corruption. In religious discourse, the film’s putative power to pervert and corrupt its spectators stems from its direct relationship with pornography. As Žižek notes, pornography is inherently perverse, since while watching it, the gaze of the spectator is made to coincide with the trajectory of the gazes of porn actors (1990:37). This formulation may explain why in the Islamicate gaze theory men must be made abject by the sight of women they see on the screen, because for them the sight of unveiled, unrelated women represents pornography. That is why religious people and leaders often speak of unveiled women as “naked” (orian), while all they mean is that their heads are uncovered. It is to prevent such a humiliation and to avoid—­or alternatively to encourage—­the resulting masochistic pleasure that modesty and the psychology and ideology of the dual, hierarchical, and collective self have produced a system of looking—­ veiled, averted, and pornographic—­that is unique in Iranian society and cinema, and that is partly responsible for the counterrealist and self-­reflexive strategies of both art-­house fiction directors and avant-­garde documentarists. 110

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The Aesthetics and Periodization of Modesty in Cinema Although veiling existed in Iranian cinema during the Pahlavi periods, it was tied to specific characters, social classes, regions, and stories. It was not the general condition of women’s representation, and it was not internalized as style. The Regulations Governing the Exhibition of Movies, Videos, and Slides of 1982 codified and instituted veiling and modesty for the first time. Many of the provisions were vague. Article 2, for example, forbade the movies to ignore the “constructive and effective function” of Muslim women both in society and in raising “committed, saved, and responsible children,” while Article 3 forbade the denial of women’s role in “constructing a progressive and divine society” and forbade using women as “commodities or means to satisfy sexual desires.” Despite their generality, such guidelines had a profound effect on women in cinema. Theologians mined Islamic doctrines to develop further guidelines about women’s representation, their on-­screen relations with men, and the permissible uses of voice and gaze—­theirs as well as those of the men (see Jabbaran 1999/1378). Guidelines, written or unwritten, and their interpretations by the film industry evolved in politically liberal and stylistically experimental trajectories. This liberalization was part of the general trend of opposition to the regime, which had employed religious authoritarianism to regain the legitimacy it was losing in other fields; it was also part of the general trend in the population toward values of liberal democracy and secularism. I have identified four major overlapping phases in the evolution of veiling practices and modesty codes on-­screen and off. These very roughly coincide with the four major political shifts in the country: the Islamization and war years under Ayatollah Khomeini; the reconstruction era under Hashemi Rafsanjani; the reform era under Khatami; and the postreform retrenchment era under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. By toeing the line on some fronts women gained ground in others. They benefited from the regime’s attempt to Islamize and politicize them during the first phase, they gained education and employment in the second, and they were empowered by the meritocracy available in the third phase (Mehran 2003:9). In the fourth phase, they emerged politically ascendant and publicly visible and vocal.

Phase 1: Women’s Structured Absence (early 1980s) The first phase, immediately after the revolution, saw the process of purification and Islamization. The textual ramifications of this process are discussed here. Under Sadegh Ghotbzadeh as the director general of the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir), an almost total blackout of women on television ensued, both as sources of news and as program hosts. As Kate Millet visiting Iran reports, the vvir ignored women’s social protests and presence in its newscasts and it took women off the air “entirely” and “in any capacity,” including Women’s Ci nema

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as newscasters, interviewers, personalities, and actresses—­except for one children’s program. “The women who work for television are furious; I met many of them yesterday” (Millet 1982:225). This was the beginning of the vvir’s slide toward “Mullah Vision.” Images of unveiled women were cut from domestic and imported films already in circulation. The absence was neither accidental nor systematic. When cutting could cause unacceptable narrative confusion—­some films were cut by more than half an hour—­the offending parts were blacked out with Magic Markers in successive frames (by the late 2000s, the magic marker approach would be abandoned in the interest of using digital masking [Zeydabadi-­Nejad 2010]). The offending parts included women’s unveiled hair and their bare legs and arms. However, using markers to put a veil, a scarf, or a skirt on images of women did not produce a clean image, as the blocking was not complete, giving away the attempted veiling and demonstrating the simultaneity of veiling and unveiling. The same method of blocking bare parts was applied to the posters of prerevolutionary movies, with the same ambivalent results. More important, existing films were reviewed and most were banned (largely due to lack of veiling and the presence of unfixable nudity). Many entertainers, singers, and actors—­male and female—­were “purified,” their voices, faces, bodies, or persons banned from film and tv screens, radio broadcasts, musical recordings, magazine covers, and newspapers, and from all forms of advertising. Books that contained any hint of impropriety due to pictures of unveiled women were likewise banned. My own two-­volume book on the history and theory of documentary film, Film-­e Mostanad (Naficy 1978–79), which was published around the time of the revolution and had become a popular university textbook, soon went out of print. When in 1990 I met with Nasrollah Pourjavady, the director of Nashr-­e Daneshgahi, which had inherited the book from Daneshgah-­e Azad-­e Iran Press, to discuss the possibility of reprinting it, he was enthusiastic, but he said that the pictures of unveiled women (and one nude woman) must be removed from it. I did not agree, and the book remained out of print. The media and workplaces became highly masculinized, and urban unemployment among women rose alarmingly, from 11 percent to 30 percent from 1976 to 1986 (Kian-­T hiébaut 2002/1381:495). The filming of domestic movies was affected, not only because of the absence of established female stars, who had been sidelined, but also because of the Islamization (purification) process on the set. As the prominent actress Fakhri Khorvash told me, government minders from the mcig attended filming to ensure that no “unethical” conduct occurred on the set. This meant preventing illegal, immoral, and inappropriate physical conduct or contacts between the cast and crew: no “casting couch” shenanigans, no joking, no improper veiling, and no smoking by women (the latter was considered sexually stimulating to men, hence women were rarely shown smoking on the screen, unless to denote that they were “loose”). In addition, the minders, many of whom 112

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were women, made sure that female stylists did the women’s hair and makeup, and that if in a scene a woman’s hair was to be shown, the actress wore a wig instead of uncovering her own hair (Naficy 1987a). According to the director Baizai, censorship authorities allowed the use of wigs only so long as it made the actress uglier. Wigs that enhanced the wearer’s beauty were banned. Wigs were authorized only for old women, dead women, or negative female characters (Asayesh 1993:17). Whether the cast and crew were “religiously permitted” to see each other was a thorny issue on the set. Of course, proper veiling allowed people who were not related to each other to work together. However, as veiling made work cumbersome, particularly in the generally freewheeling atmosphere of the film industry, creative Islamic solutions were found, which took advantage of the principle of the coincidence of being and acting. In at least one case, the male and female actors playing the parts of husband and wife were reported to have engaged in “temporary marriage” (siqeh) for the duration of filming, both to stay within Islamicate values and to accommodate the looser filming situation.6 In another case, the male makeup artist temporarily married the six-­year-­old daughter of an actress, so he and her mother could become related only during the film shoot, allowing him to do her makeup.7 If young female characters were to be shown unveiled, the actresses playing them had to be prepubescent themselves. Even a phase-­three film by Tahmineh Milani, Kakadu (1996), was pulled off the screens by the censors because they believed the unveiled girl playing the part of a prepubescent was old enough to wear the hijab. Milani argued to no avail that in her casting she had intended to emphasize the young girl’s right to act like male children, that is, to engage in play and physical activity.8 Finally, sometimes immediate family members were used as cast and crew. While temporary marriages were rare, this latter practice took root, aiding the emergence of a new production mode in Iran, what I call the family mode of production. Even though most filmmakers were secular at this time, it is possible that widely known Islamic tales influenced their representations of women as subsidiary characters. According to Hojattoleslam Javad Mohadessi, In Quranic tales, women are secondary characters and shadowy elements. They are never heroes of the stories and are not presented as inherently independent. Since the object of these tales is education, there was no necessity to even name these women. Throughout the Quran only one woman is named, and that is Saint Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Even the mother of all humans, Eve, who had a hand in eating the forbidden fruit and in the expulsion of humans from the Garden of Eden, is not named. . . . Another characteristic is the women’s subsidiary part in stories. Even in stories involving Saint Mary, this great woman is subsidiary to Jesus. In several places where she is named, she is called the mother of Jesus. . . . You can detect the difference between this Quranic rendition of women and the rendition of those who in representing women Women’s Ci nema

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in stories and the performing arts have no intention but to stimulate satanic forces, motivate sexual desires, and enhance the film’s attraction. (1989/1368:181) Such a structured absence of strong women in religious texts, tales, and lore must have been conducive to their absence in other cultural texts, including the movies. For those who were practicing Muslims, approved Islamic females, such as the women around the Prophet Mohammad and around Shiite imams, offered role models. Given the political, social, and religious impediments and uncertainties, it was simply easier for filmmakers during this phase to avoid casting women altogether and to not risk any entanglement with minders, censors, the morality police, and clerics. If they were portrayed at all, even if involved in anti-­Shah revolutionary activities, women were shown at most as sidekicks to their male kin, as in Mehdi Madanian’s Cry of the Mojahed (Fariyad-­e Mojahed, 1979), in which a housewife helps her husband and his male comrades to make Molotov cocktails at home. Women were portrayed as involved in social causes only because their male next of kin were; as a result, they remained “a burden and a parasite to the men” (Moradi Kuchi 1980b/1369:78). To offset the absence of women in films, particularly the absence of their sexuality, filmmakers turned to the other perennial feature of cinema: violence. This was timely, for it coincided with war against internal antirevolution enemies and against external “imposed war” enemies, filling war-­action movies. This further masculinized movies and movie houses. Violence was so pervasive that the Majles speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that “all these violent encounters, noisy clashes, and unnecessary shouting and hollering lower the quality of the movies.” Invoking a higher authority, he stated that he had talked with Khomeini about these movies and that he had concurred with him, adding that “harshness and violence” must be removed from the movies.9 This genre produced some notable movies, but it gradually collapsed due to its own cumbersomeness, the cease-­fire with Iraq, and the weariness of the population. The absence of women may also have encouraged another new genre, children’s movies, in some of whose films the children were placeholders for women, as they represented, in the parlance of producers of the day, the “delicate and beautiful element” (onsor-­e latif ), a position that women had occupied (figure 19).

Phase 2: Women’s Background Presence (mid-­1980s) During this phase, coinciding with the war years, women gradually found their way back onto the screens, but either as ghostly presences in the background or as domestic and domesticated subjects in homes (often as housekeepers, daugh114

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19 Children, particularly girls, as stand-ins for adult women. Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Production still.

ters, and mothers). Rarely were they central, even though modesty rules gradually loosened. Uncertainty about how to represent women was still palpable. Homa Rusta, the star of Mohammad Ali Najafi’s Report of a Murder (Gozaresh­e Yek Qatl, 1987), complained that filmmakers were “afraid to turn to women . . . even when the authorities have invited casting more women.” 10 The statistics that Masud Purmohammad compiled also pointed to the low presence of women as “heroes” in the movies made as late as 1986: of the thirty-­seven movies he reviewed, the chief protagonists in twenty-­five were men (70 percent), in three women were heroes (8 percent), in seven men and women shared equal billing (17 percent), and in two boys were heroes (5 percent) (1988/1367:8). When women appeared, a filmic aesthetics of modesty, including an Is­ lamicate mise-­en-­scène and gaze, emerged. Female characters wore dark head scarves, chadors or veils, and long, loose-­fitting tunics. They were given static parts, and the camera avoided showing their bodies. A postrevolutionary film director, purported to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, underlined these practices by saying that women in the Islamic performing arts should be shown seated at all times to avoid their “provocative walk,” thereby allowing spectators to concentrate on the film’s inherent “ideologies.” 11 On the screen, women were dignified (no running, no laughing aloud) and avoided body contact of any sort with men, including shaking hands, even if they were related by marriage or by blood (in reality or on-­screen). The evolving Islamicate gaze theory and filming grammar discouraged the close-­up photography of women’s faces or of the exchanges of desirous looks between men and women. Filming women in long shots helped hide their bodies and their gazes, producing the equivalent of an unfocused gaze. There were other significant consequences to veiling in cinema. First, all spaces, even bedrooms, were treated as if they were public. This made women either structurally unrepresentable or representable only in an unrealistic and distorted fashion, since they had to veil themselves from their next of kin and in the privacy of their homes—­something they would not do in real life.12 This was true even if the actors playing the parts of diegetic husband and wife were marWomen’s Ci nema

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ried to each other in real life. Immediately after the revolution, when Makhmalbaf was an Islamist filmmaker, he grappled with this issue in a how-­to treatise on screenplay writing: “Suppose in your screenplay you are showing the private life of a husband and wife. If the woman covers her face really well because of the presence of spectators, this action would indicate either a lack of intimacy or the existence of a dispute [between the husband and the wife], and naturally in real life something like this [veiling of intimates] would not occur. If we want to show them walking around in such a manner as though they are husband and wife (even if they are so in real life), then it becomes un-­Islamic, because spectators are unrelated to that woman” (1981/1360:136–37). This curious situation arose because female characters had to veil themselves not only from their diegetic next of kin but also from the spectators and the film crew. This meant that the cast and crew had to behave as though unrelated male spectators were present both in the profilmic scene and in the reception scene. More important, this forced women directors to assume a male perspective in their treatment of women, including a male gaze. This was the price of women’s coming into representation and into the public mediascape, a price that other artists had paid in the past, like Parvin E’tesami, whose popular poetry was not only traditional and patriarchal but also masculine (Alishan 1994). These considerations undermined the voyeuristic structure of looking that Western film theorists posited for cinema, which is based on the unawareness of diegetic subjects that they are being watched (Metz 1982). Iranian films became nonvoyeuristic, a machine for producing presence, instead of a machine for producing absence, which is the normative realist cinema. This is partly the engine of antirealism and self-­reflexivity in Iranian cinema. To counter the “unrealism” of women veiling themselves from their intimate male family members inside their own homes, many filmmakers staged their stories outdoors, where women’s veiling from strangers was naturalized. This was, in fact, one of the solutions that Makhmalbaf offered to his dilemma above, and one that he practiced in such diverse films as The Cyclist (Bysikelran, 1989) and Gabbeh (1995). Women moved from background in one film to foreground in the other. In the former film, the wife of the cyclist is absent through most of the film due to hospitalization, while in the latter the young woman, Gabbeh, is both the object and the subject of male love and desire and is present throughout. The contrasts between these films demonstrate the vast distances that not only Makhmalbaf but Iranian cinema as a whole traveled in a short time, partly by the changed location of the story that allowed women to move from inside to outside. Jafar Panahi’s films all take place outside the home, a conscious decision by him to avoid the unrealism and the social lie of showing women veiling themselves in their own homes. It is this strategy that introduces the woman flâneur as a major and recurring character in postrevolutionary cinema, including in Panahi’s (Niazi 2010). Another narrative consequence of modesty and veiling was what might be 116

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20 Crisis of Pahlavi-era female representation in Mohammad Ali Najafi’s Report of a Murder. Film poster courtesy of fcf.

called the “fragmented presence” of women at the level of style. The whole woman is rarely on screen, as parts of her, such as her body or her voice, are missing. Sometimes she is physically absent and her presence indexed by other means. Early in Dariush Farhang’s gothic drama The Spell (Telesm, 1986), a rich landowner’s wife disappears from the mansion’s “hall of mirrors” and does not show up until the end. However, throughout the film her presence and absence are signaled in people’s talk. In Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist, the absence of the cyclist’s wife is felt throughout because her hospitalization motivates his bravura race to raise funds for her care. The central figure of the second episode of Makhmalbaf’s tripartite Peddler (Dastforush, 1986) is an old woman who never speaks a word, though she is present like a corpse throughout (perhaps this is because a male actor played the woman’s part in drag). In Puran Derakhshandeh’s Little Bird of Happiness (Parandeh-­ye Kuchak-­e Khoshbakhti, 1988), the protagonist is a young girl who is deaf and mute. On the other hand, Najafi’s Report of a Murder, about the time of the Shah, features a female secretary to a factory owner who is never seen in the film; however, her voice is often heard answering the telephone, giving appointments to clients, and welcoming them to the office. She must have been visually erased because of the unrepresentability of the unveiled secretaries of the Pahlavi era. The film did portray a woman who was a member of the central committee of the Tudeh Party, who appears visually but wears a hat to cover her hair (figure 20). Women’s Ci nema

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21 Women suffer from disembodiment while men are afflicted with embodiment in the form of physical and mental disabilities. Haji in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Marriage of the Blessed suffers from posttraumatic stress syndrome. Publicity still.

The case of Report of a Murder points to another narrative consequence of veiling, which is that certain historical periods such as the prerevolutionary era were closed off to cinema. They were simply unrepresentable because of the unrepresentability of the unveiled women. The veteran new-­wave director Naser Taqvai, who directed Captain Khorshid (Nakhoda Khorshid, 1987), corroborated this point: “This very problem about how to represent women has made it impossible to make any movies about the Pahlavi era. You cannot readily show the relationship of a husband and a wife, a sister and a brother, either in the streets or at home, let alone portray other relations of blood or marriage. In Iranian cinema, women’s situation is becoming highly complex and critical.” 13 On the other hand, as Fakhri Khorvash told me, “the authorities sometimes allow direct, lustful looks, which are not allowed today, to demonstrate the shamelessness of the Pahlavi period” (Naficy 1987a). These instances were rare. The narrative, stylistic, and political consequences of the imposition of modesty in cinema on women’s bodies and sexualities are enormous. Filming women in long shots, without a gaze, sometimes without a voice, and in static positions not only desubjectivized but also decorporealized them, as though they had no minds and no bodies—­no weight, no agency. This contributed to their shadowy background presence, which was further emphasized because, unlike the men, women did not suffer from physical ailments or disabilities. In many movies of this period of war, male protagonists are either ill or disabled, and much is made of their physical and psychological problems, which constitute prominent elements of the narratives (figure 21). In Mohammad Reza A’lami’s The Weak Point (Noqteh Za’f, 1983), the male protagonist suffers from

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all sorts of physical injuries; in Makhmalbaf’s Marriage of the Blessed (Arusi-­ye Khuban, 1988), the protagonist is suffering from post-­traumatic syndrome; in his Peddler (Dastforoush, 1987), one of the male protagonists is insane; and Said Ebrahimifar’s lovely but sorrowful Pomegranate and Reed (Nar O’ Nay, 1988) is told from the point of view of a dying man. Only a few movies (some by women directors, such as Derakhshandeh’s Little Bird of Happiness and Tahmineh Ardekani’s Golbahar, 1986) focused on women’s ailments. The lack of injury pushed women further into the background and disembodiment, while men’s injuries foregrounded them as fully bodied and brave in battle, in resisting torture, and in fighting injustice. Men’s bodies became documents of their active presence and agency in society, while women’s bodies, absent or covered up, effaced any evidence of their social agency. Another nuance on gender representation was the absence of males heading families or social units. In Kianush Ayyari’s Beyond Fire (Ansu-­ye Atash, 1987), Kambuzia Partovi’s Fish (Mahi, 1989), Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? (Khaneh-­ye Dust Kojast?, 1986), Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-­ye Kuchak, 1985), Najafi’s Report of a Murder, and Ebrahim Foruzesh’s The Key (Kelid, 1986) the fathers are missing. In Dariush Mehrjui’s The School We Went To (1980–88) the school principal and in his The Tenants (1986) the landlord are absent. In Mohammad Bozorgnia’s The Ship Angelica (Keshti-­ye Angelika, 1988) the ruler of the community is absent. However, these absences are justified narratively in each movie. Such a pervasive gaping hole in the cinematic social fabric deserves a closer look. The development of an averted gaze and the lack of any physical contact between the sexes desexualized both women and men. As well as becoming masculinized, movies became androgynous. As Mehrjui told me: “In postrevo­ lutionary cinema, the religiously unlawful [haram] look does not exist. All women must be treated as one’s own sister” (Naficy 1990). During the first two phases, only the sister and mother types were widely permissible. Love and its verbal and physical expressions, even between intimates, were rare. Films like Makhmalbaf’s A Time to Love (Nobat- ­e Asheqi, 1990) were banned. However, there was a potential religious and spiritual dimension to this desexualization, as there is in Persian poetry: men and women could define themselves more in relationship to a genderless beloved or to God than to each other as gendered subjects. Their identity vis-­à-­v is God was determined by their devotion to him, not by their sexuality or gender.14 Nonverbal intimacy was removed from the screen for a long time, as women veiled not only their bodies but also their sentiments. This burdened the theater of the face even more and presented a formidable challenge to actors who had to express their feelings to intimate relatives in psychologically realistic ways without physical contact. The veteran actress Khorvash told me about her experience early after the revolution:

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In foreign movies, an actress can use her body, arms, and hands to express herself. However, here, we cannot use our bodies in any way in sensitive situations. We must express all our emotions facially. In one film, in which I had labored to concentrate my emotions in my face, I was so charged after filming that I fell on the steps and cried aloud for half an hour to release my pent-­up emotions. In another film, where I acted as the mother of a soldier I had thought was killed in action but who turned up alive, again, I had a difficult time. Because of the regulations, I could not smell him, kiss him, or embrace him. The night before filming I had thought about it a lot and had decided that to express my surprise at my son’s sudden appearance I would take on a look of consternation. I created this feeling during filming, as though I was frozen from amazement and happiness. I both cried and laughed. After filming was over, I began crying aloud again. The director told me, “Excellent! Can you repeat it one more time so I can film it in close-­up?” I said, “I am afraid, I cannot do it again.” (Naficy 1987a) Poetry and poetic language became one option for expressing intimacy. However, even in this situation, a type of veiling intruded: characters expressed their feelings toward one other not by directly using their own poetic language but by quoting poems, often famous love ballads (ghazal). Initially, even this circumspect poetic language was reserved for men, as in a Banietemad movie, discussed below. The aesthetics of veiling also affected men’s on-­screen relations, creating reconfigurations, such as implied homoeroticism, inimical to the ruling ideology and severely punished. For example, in A’lami’s The Weak Point the relationship between a political dissident and the security agent who captures him displays strong but deeply ambiguous sexual undercurrents: The two men engage in activities typical of boy-­meets-­girl-­falls-­in-­love formula films. They go to a park and play soccer with children, kicking the ball back and forth to each other like two lovers; at the beach, they sit side by side and gaze at the horizon as a wild horse gallops by and extradiegetic romantic music seals the scene in its moment. In an amusement park, the security agent wins a stuffed animal in a shooting gallery, which he hands over as a present to his captive (so he can give it to his daughter). In the end, to memorialize such a lovely day, the security agent and his victim take a picture together. During the film, through many flashbacks, a role reversal occurs, with the captive assuming the masculine power position and the agent that of the feminine. What are the implications of the Islamic gaze and the aesthetics of veiling for the spectators? For one thing, the suspension of disbelief, which is part of film spectatorship in general, has to be augmented by the suspension of disbelief about the veil, about the fact that women veil themselves from their intimates in the privacy of their own homes, something they would not do in re120

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ality. For another, the relationship of female spectators to male stars is highly complicated. The male stars are not veiled, while the female spectators in the cinemas are. This replicates the normal public spectatorial situation. Yet when viewing movies in the privacy of their homes, women generally are not veiled. This unveiled viewing of male actors establishes an extra measure of intimacy between female spectators and male actors, an intimacy the women display to male stars in public, to the stars’ surprise. The popular movie star Reza Kianian relates an anecdote illustrating this point. After his television serial Apartment (Aparteman) had made him famous, he was driving on Tehran’s Taleqani Avenue when the people in another car—­a religiously dressed father and son and a heavily veiled mother and daughter—­notice him. The woman points him out to her husband behind the wheel, who indicates to Kianian to pull over. Kianian panics, thinking that they have misinterpreted his looking at them as an invasion of their privacy. He drives on, passing through an intersection. Yet the other car catches up and pulls over in front of him, forcing Kianian to stop. “I thought up a story about why I had looked at them—­an innocent look, no bad intentions,” he says. After disembarking, “before I had opened my mouth, they started to make felicitous conversation with me and to praise the tv serial and the Manuchehr character I played. . . . Mother and daughter were standing very close to me, as though they were intimate with me [mahram], without father and brother taking any umbrage or raising any objection.” The mother and daughter ask for Kianian’s autographs; after obtaining them they depart, “leaving me with a bag of questions.” The answer for the reason behind strange women’s public intimacy with the movie star was supplied later that night by Hayedeh, Kianian’s wife: “When they watch you on tv at home they are not veiled, they identify with you and in the back of their minds they become related and intimate to you” (Kianian 2008:146–47).

Phase 3: Women’s Foreground Presence (since the late 1980s) The third phase, coinciding with the end of the war with Iraq and the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani, was marked by a more dramatic presence of women both on the screen in strong leading roles and behind the cameras as directors. Rajab Mohammadin’s film For Everything (Beh Khater-­e Hameh Cheez, 1991) is an example. It examines with moving realism the difficult lives of garment workers, all of whom are women. The director’s comments express the changes: “In the Pahlavi era, Iranian women were portrayed as miserable, ignorant, and superficial creatures who were used by men for sexual or decorative purposes. I wanted to tell a story in which women were virtuous, active, and socially constructive.” 15 While laudable, this replacement of totally negative images of women by wholly positive ones—­another instance of representational binarism—­cannot guarantee a more realistic and complex portrayal of women. Women’s stronger presence on the screens and the erasure of the link beWomen’s Ci nema

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tween them and corruption by the purification and Islamization processes rendered more complex women’s cinematic representation. They were no longer boxed into opposite binaries of whores and houris—­the former was forbidden, the latter limited. Instead, they were made to depict a variety of ordinary female characters with ordinary desires and foibles. Soon, this resulted in new stereotypes, those of the nagging housewife and of nominally professional women, causing objections to the limited representation of women from all sides—­ producers, directors, actors, critics, and filmgoers. One eloquent filmgoer, Mahkameh Rahimzadeh, summed up these objections in a letter to Mahnameh­ye Sinemai-­ye Film in the following manner: Why is that most women in television serials and movies are depicted in such inactive, unintelligent, mindless, superficial, stupid, and even sometimes destructive roles? Why do writers and directors of these serials and movies regard, and depict, our society’s women with such views? And without realizing it they inject the idea that woman is defective in the head, is less intelligent than man, has no volition, and is incapable of making rational decisions. . . . Although no one denies the existence of such women in society, this does not justify their continued and repeated representation on television. . . . In these serials women are not only not encouraged to engage in social work but also, if one is eager to work outside her home, this often results in the destruction of her family. Indeed, we are led to this erroneous conclusion that the family life of socially active women is a ruin. . . . I suggest that our mass media, instead of showing women who spend their time at home mostly cleaning vegetables, dusting furniture, knitting, gossiping, nagging, and engaging in petty jealousies, concentrate on showing socially active women, for . . . we are witnesses to honorable women who are engaged in social, economic, cultural, and educational affairs of various kinds, women who spend half of their day laboring side by side with men in fields, factories, hospitals, and educational institutions—­and many hold sensitive positions. And they spent the other half of the day at home, supervising the affairs of their home, husbands, and children and have a very successful and strong family life.16 Ironically, one of the results of liberalizing cultural mores was women’s resexualization, causing cultural producers to encounter roadblocks, which could be removed only by appealing to the Supreme Leader. An important impediment governing television and music industries was removed in 1987. In December, the vvir’s supervisory council asked Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa on four issues: on broadcasting an eight-­part television serial, Asadollah Niknejad’s The Fall of Sahra (Paiz-­e Sahra, 1987), in which female characters engaged in “improper veiling” (bad hijabi); on broadcasting sports programs in which men played shirtless or wore only shorts; on watching such television 122

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22 Veil as an article of fashion. Director Niknejad working with veteran actress Jamileh Shaikhi in a scene from The Fall of Sahra, a television series whose broadcast was suspended due to improper veiling. Publicity still courtesy of Asadollah Niknejad.

serials and sports programs; and on the broadcasting of music from radio and television. The Fall of Sahra had technically abided by the veiling rules, but, as Niknejad told me in an interview, he had turned the veil into fashion, an “article of beauty,” for the characters wore their beautiful and colorful veils in unusual ways that made them look less like a curtain that hid the wearer inside a cocoon of anonymity than a fashionable item that beautified the wearer and drew attention to her (Naficy 1987b). The vvir stopped broadcasting the series, pending the result of the inquiry (figure 22). The letter was instigated by complaints the broadcasting authority had received from “respectable families of martyrs, veterans, missing in action, and prisoners of war,” creating a quandary for the vvir. Khomeini not only did not religiously outlaw the broadcasting and viewing of these programs and the airing of music but he also stressed that some of them had “educational values.” 17 Following his ruling, The Fall of Sahra resumed, becoming “one of the most famous and popular television shows after the revolution” (Naficy 2005a). While this fatwa was concerned primarily with the broadcasting and music industries, it affected the movies as well. Yet the government was far from being united on the question of women’s representation. In addition, women’s resexualization alarmed conservative factions, for a year later the Majles approved a one-­item addendum to the Press Law that banned the “instrumental uses” of women (and men).18 Specifically, it banned “the instrumental uses of women in terms of image and content that demean or insult females, encourage lavish ceremonies and luxurious consumption, and create disparity between men and women.” This addendum, passed because of the perceived immodesty that had crept into popular culture, was opposed by many women and men, in public and in parliament, because it increased the fears that any representation of women in the movies, television shows, musical performances, journalism, and consumer industry may henceforth be interpreted as “using women instrumentally.” The foremost women’s periodical, Zanan, expressed this fear concisely by headlining its editorial, which opposed the law, as “The Road You Are Taking Leads to AfghaniWomen’s Ci nema

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23 Veiling of women by shot composition. Mozhdeh Shamsai in Bahram Baizai’s Travelers. Publicity photo.

stan,” by which it meant the repressive Taliban regime.19 A cleric member of the Majles, Majid Ansari, opposed the ambiguously worded law because it would inject “personal taste” and “sectarian politics” into its interpretation, thereby undermining the integrity and authority of the judicial system.20 By now veiling had gone far beyond a cloth that covered women; it had been internalized as film aesthetic and style; still later, it would be mobilized as fashion and criticism. Directors developed creative methods of using framing, composition, and lighting as veil to both mask and reveal women. In Mehrjui’s Leila (1997), for example, the dressing and undressing of the lead female, Leila (Leila Hatami), is shown in a series of close-­ups of her body parts, instead of in medium or long shots, which would have exposed her unveiled body. After her close-­up stripping in a bedroom scene, which is perhaps a first in postrevo­ lutionary cinema, Leila reclines in bed while her husband undresses to join her. However, both are masked by a lighting scheme that strategically covers her supposedly unveiled hair and arms and his undressed body. Although progressive in its visual treatment of the young couple sharing a bed and in its empathic subjective identification with the first wife Leila, the film’s overall gender politics involving polygamy are murky. Likewise, by consistently separating and isolating female characters from the men within the frame in Travelers (Mosaferan, 1991) Baizai achieves a form of veiling by shot composition (figure 23). He chose this strategy to deny the censors the pleasure of censoring his film on account of improper veiling. As recounted in the next chapter, the authorities reciprocated by making the film’s exhibition difficult. To offset the “no touching” rules and to go beyond the use of poetry for expressing male-­female intimacy, directors resorted to ingenious uses of a variety of substitutes, ranging from crass to sophisticated: third parties, doubles, transitional objects, or even animals mediating between the principals and transmitting their charged intimacy. Filming and editing were mobilized to impart impermissible character familiarity. In Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1995) a goat me124

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24–26 A goat as a sexual mediator between Gabbeh and her beloved in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh. Frame enlargements.

diates an intimate scene between a young Gabbeh and her older suitor. In a long shot, Gabbeh is seated behind the goat and milking it vigorously, when the man approaches and positions himself in front of the goat. He then looks at Gabbeh and clearly establishes eye contact with her, gently beginning to caress the goat’s horns. Then, in a close-­up, Gabbeh looks up at him as her hands move to and fro, continuing her milking. In another close-­up, the suitor recites poetry to her while looking down at her with pleasure. The suggestion of intimacy, even of fellatio, is all too clear, but the two principals never touch each other (figures 24–26). Mehrjui’s Hamoon (1990), about an intellectual couple who is splitting up, offers a more sensitive strategy. In it Hamid Hamoon (Khosrow Shakibai) and his wife (Bita Farrahi) go on a religious pilgrimage to save their marriage. Each is filmed in extreme close-­ups as they lovingly kiss the railing of the imam’s mausoleum, as though they are kissing each other. The filming and editing sutures the two lovers kissing a common object that symbolically conWomen’s Ci nema

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nects them. As Jamsheed Akrami pointed out in his film Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema after the Revolution (1999), in a scene in Ebrahim Hatamikia’s From Karkheh to Rhine (Az Karkheh ta Rhine, 1992), where an injured war veteran is hugging his sister, a male double is used for the sister and the scene is filmed in long shot and from a high angle, with the double’s back to the audience. As a result, the audience never knows that these are two men hugging each other. This type of filmic lying suits the Iranian penchant for indirection and negotiated meanings, simultaneously enabling censors to crack down on filmmakers and filmmakers to defy and play with the censors. Some directors chose to stage their movies outside Iran partly to escape the modesty rules. Makhmalbaf filmed his tripartite love triangle A Time to Love (1990) entirely in Turkey, and in Turkish. While this strategy made it possible for him to make his transgressive film, it also resulted in its apparent lifetime banning. The film is transgressive not so much in its violation of the modesty rules as in its story of a love triangle from the viewpoints of the three participants in the film’s three episodes. For his beautiful and poetic Silence (Sokut, 1998), filmed in Tajikistan, Makhmalbaf inserted eroticism into the budding relationship of two prepubescent children, one a blind boy and the other a seeing girl. Perhaps for the first time in postrevolutionary cinema a near pubescent girl dances on camera, but the filmmaker cleverly defuses the sexual charge of the dance by turning it into a dance ritual (despite this strategy, the censors made the release of the film dependent on the removal of this fifty-­second sequence. Because of Makhmalbaf’s refusal, the film remains banned in Iran). However, his filming and editing, which highlight in extreme close-­ups the beauty and luminescence of the girl’s face, lips, cheeks, ears, and skin turn her into at least a sensual object. Ostensibly, the extreme close-­up photography is designed to be synesthetic and haptic, to impart the way the blind boy sees the world by touching the texture of things. In doing this, however, the girl’s isolated body parts are turned into fetish objects for male scopophilia. This creates a complex spectatorial situation: to enjoy themselves, male spectators will either have to assume the position of a pedophile, or they must assume that the little girl is an adult. The situation becomes more complex if we take into consideration that a girl actor played the boy’s part. This introduces homoerotic dimensions as well as the feeling that the director has cheated the viewers by masquerading gender. All these considerations make for an ethically ambivalent and deconstructive spectatorial experience undermining identification. Directors’ attempts to sidestep or subvert the lie that veiling forced on them created other problems: it demanded complexity, obtuseness, and elaborateness where simplicity and directness would have been best. Significantly, not all directors tried to turn the veil into a fashion, to avoid it through framing and mise-­en-­scène, or to evade it by shooting outdoors or outside the country. Some, such as Rakhshan Banietemad and Behrouz Afkhami, employed the veil realistically but pushed the boundaries of what was allowed. Banietemad is dealt 126

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with extensively in a case study later. Afkhami’s chic movie, Bride (Arus, 1990), about the honeymoon of a young, attractive newlywed couple brought joy, color, and beauty to the dark and somber palette of Iranian cinema following the war with Iraq. Afkhami did not shy away from using alluring close-­ups that fetishized the attractive bride (Niki Karimi) gazing with desire at her husband (Abolfazl Purarab). The switch in this film from averted glance to direct gaze might be one significant reason for its popularity. As a pro-­government Islamic filmmaker, Afkhami would soon join the reformists and successfully run for parliament. The phenomenal success of this movie, which showed Iranians’ continued passion for beauty, color, and mirth, assisted the director’s change of career. Filmmakers not only subverted and played with the government’s modesty rules regarding veiling but also engaged in what in the following chapter I call “critical synesthesia,” using color and tone to counter the officially sanctioned monochromatic and monologic culture. Expressing opposition by means of color was what society had engaged in, particularly women and girls, by dying their hair, streaking them, using heavy and colorful makeup, and wearing lighter, or even multicolor, attire and scarves.

Phase 4: Veiling and Modesty as Political Criticism (since the mid-­1990s) If the films of the previous three phases accommodated the rules and aesthetics of veiling and modesty while also resisting them, the films of this phase used them for more direct sociopolitical criticism, which emerged forcefully after Khatami’s ascendancy to the presidency in 1997 and his reelection in 2001—­elections during which women worked widely, enthusiastically, and publicly for Khatami. These movies were part of an emerging cycle of “social-­ problem films” in so far as their narratives tended to be didactic, involving conflicts that went beyond individual characters and entailing social commentary. Directors used the imposition of the veil and other oppressive rules of modesty on women as a form of embodied political critique of the Islamic Republic. These directors tended to offer their critique more at the level of veiling in the content of the film, in terms of what the characters were forced to wear and the social limitations on comportment and relationships imposed on them, than in the film’s form, in terms of inscribing veiling in its aesthetics. This was a reflection of what was happening in society, particularly among the youth. As anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi states, “The Islamic Republic relies on the performance of proper Islamic rituals to produce believing Islamic citizens, and thus continues to attempt to enforce such rituals of Islamic ideology as proper Islamic dress and comportment. In response, many young Tehranis are subverting those rituals in an attempt to reclaim them, as well as their own agency and citizenship vis-­à-­v is the state. Many young adults argue that they are now using their bodies and their sexualities to speak out against what they view as Women’s Ci nema

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a repressive regime” (2009:8). Having been shut out of most avenues of public expression and dissent, particularly those involving speech acts, the youth resorted to the nonverbal, embodied protests, embedded in what they wore or did not wear on their hair, their bodies, and their feet; in their expressions of flamboyance, colors, and sensual delight; and in the display of physicality and intimacy in public places particularly toward members of the opposite sex. These all found expression in the art-­house films made by both men and women. In addition, in the same way that the public display of self and public gazing became more frank and bold, the gaze both of the camera and of the diegetic subjects became more direct and brazen. This shift was particularly true of the slew of social-­problem movies during the relative openness of the Kha­ tami presidency, among which were not only products of the Makhmalbaf Film House (mfh), such as Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (Sib, 1998) and Marziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi keh Zan Shodam, 2000) but also Rasul Sadrameli’s The Girl in Cotton Sneakers (Dokhtari ba Kafshha-­ye Katani, 1998), Alireza Davudnezhad’s Sweet Agony (Masaeb-­e Shirin, 1998), Rasul Sadrameli’s I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen (Man Taraneh Panzdah Sal Daram, 2001), Rasul Mollaqolipur’s The Burnt Generation (Nasl-­e Sukhteh, 2001), Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (Dayereh, 2000), and Tahmineh Milani’s Ceasefire (Atashbas, 2006). These films were the fictional counterparts of the social-­problem documentaries about the plight of the “third generation” youth, with emphasis on women (those involving romance are discussed later in the section on love). In her film The Apple, the teenaged Samira Makhmalbaf (eighteen at the time) critiqued veiling and other impediments, and posited the forbidden fruit, an apple, as a counter to them. Based on a news story, the film is about a father who for eleven years kept his two daughters imprisoned in his house (all playing themselves), until a television program reported about them, creating a sensation. In showing the father’s draconian restrictions, Makhmalbaf turned the system of modesty into an oppressive mise-­en-­scène: The girls are veiled by their imprisonment in the dark and dank rooms; an iron gate closes their access to the yard all day long while their father is out; the mother, who is similarly imprisoned, is completely covered from head to toe by her chador, with barely a small hole open for her sightless eyes. Finally, the high walls surrounding the house veil it from the neighbors (figure 27). As if this was not enough, the outside world intrudes like a panoptic regime: neighbors keep an eye on the house, the social work system intervenes on behalf of the girls, and the media sensationalizes their story. It is the friendship of the girls with a neighboring boy, who tempts them with an apple, which breaks both their imprisonment and the panoptic surveillance over them, liberating not only the girls but also the camera from their sequestered confines. Beyond retelling a real-­life story, the film’s criticism of the oppressive veiling and seclusion of women by its claustrophobic mise-­en-­scène and filming is clear. Meshkini (Samira’s stepmother; her biological mother died in a fire), shot 128

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27 Pervasive veiling by mobilizing elements of mise-en-scène in Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. New Yorker Films Release 1998. Publicity still.

her stylish tripartite film, The Day I Became a Woman, on the Persian Gulf coast. The film charts women’s childhood, adulthood, and old age. In “Havva” (“Eve”), the focus is on a young girl entering womanhood, which according to sharia law begins with menses. The oppressive social rules that suddenly and mercilessly intrude into the child’s carefree life are powerfully depicted. The second episode, “Ahu” (“Deer”), centers on an adolescent girl biking furiously in a race with other women as various suitors pursue her on horseback or bikes. Bicycling in public by women was banned by the Islamic Republic because of its purported potential to sexually arouse men (as well as the women riders). The protagonist while pedaling tries to make up her mind about which suitor to choose. “Houra” (“Nymph”), the third (somewhat surrealistic) episode, deals with an older woman who comes to town to purchase things she has always desired, but she forgets to buy one crucial item. Even though the second and third parts resemble fables, countering the harsh realism of the first part, the overall effect of these films is a critique of women’s treatment and limited social status. Panahi’s The Circle was much more directly political and realistic than these mfh productions, as it focused on the terrible lives of three women prisoners; two are temporarily released from prison, and the third has broken out of jail to seek an abortion. The dead-­end lives of these women, as well as those of an addict mother and a prostitute (who smokes on camera), are interwoven with deft realism into a grim and hopeless tapestry. There is no decent life for any of them, as each is structurally condemned by either her own frailty or by her social circumstance—­prostitution, pregnancy, abortion, crime, male ­oppression—­to live a life on the run in the margins of a society that does not care. Switching to women’s point of view was a radical shift for Panahi, whose previous movies, The White Balloon (Badkonak-­e Sepid, 1995) and The Mirror (Ayeneh, 1997), were about little girls and told from their viewpoints. The tone and ideology of these films changed as well. The former child-­centered movies were sunny; his later adult-­centered The Circle and Crimson Gold (Tala-­ye Sorkh, 2003) were dark and went beyond the plight of individuals to critically comment on society. Like Mohsen Makhmalbaf he had been transformed: initially Women’s Ci nema

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28 In Kiarostami’s Ten the shaved head signifies not only removal of the physical veil but also of other constraints on women’s selfexpression. Frame enlargement.

an Islamist filmmaker and later nonpolitical, his final films became openly critical of the Islamic Republic. This shift had serious repercussions for his movies and career. The Circle was banned inside Iran, and the censors ordered him to cut about a dozen scenes from Crimson Gold, which he refused, stating, “I will not cut a single shot from my films. I won’t let them touch my films. These will not be my works anymore if I do.” Noting that government pressure had made it so difficult for filmmakers that many “have no choice but to leave and make films outside Iran,” Panahi declared he would not leave the country to make movies; instead, “I may have to say goodbye to cinema because I don’t want to make films anywhere except Iran” (Farmani 2004). His dispute with the authorities intensified in the years to come. In 2009 Panahi was arrested and imprisoned preemptively for a film that he was purportedly making of the Green Movement protesting Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection to presidency. After his release, while under house arrest, he made the audacious film This Is Not a Film. Panahi was not singled out for censorship; Kiarostami, whose movies had not been officially screened since 1997, was asked to cut down his movie Ten (Dah, 2002) to such an extent that he joked that, if he complied, he would have to retitle it Six.21 Ten is essentially a nonpolitical film. Unlike the other films discussed in this section, it does not deal directly with political issues. In one scene, however, it offers one of the most searing critiques of the veil by any Iranian director up to that date, a critique that is as powerful as it is subtle. As a female passenger removes her scarf for her driver friend, revealing her shaved head, she is filled with a quiet but compelling surge of emotion, which spills out of her in the form of tears, which she herself admits are both from joy and sorrow—­joy at removing this oppressive cover (by removing the cause for its existence—­her hair) and sorrow perhaps at not having done this earlier (figure 28). Transgender masquerade and passing were among the strategies of critiquing the imposed rules of veiling, while they introduced their own narratives of mistaken gender identity and political complications. In Women’s Prison (Zendan-­e Zanan, 2002), the director Manijeh Hekmat displays the shaved head 130

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29 Semiotics of female power and shaved head in Manijeh Hekmat’s film Women’s Prison. Publicity still.

of her female protagonist Mitra (Roya Nonahali) without any cover throughout the movie, while the other unveiled women are probably wearing wigs. Mitra’s shaved head seems to be part of the semiotics of power relations inside the prison, designed to humiliate or equalize prisoners (figure  29). In Majidi’s Baran (2000), an Afghan girl dressed as a boy attracts an Azeri construction worker in Tehran, who is lured by his effeminacy and androgyny, thus playing into banned Iranian homoerotic sensibilities and gender masquerade. Even their names play into these sensibilities and their politics: she is named Rahmat, a Muslim male name, while he is named Latif, a female name meaning “delicate” or “beautiful.” Maryam Shahriar’s’ grueling Daughters of the Sun (Dokhtaran-­e Khorshid, 2000) centers on Amangol (Altinay Ghelich Taghani), a young girl whose father shaves her hair and sends her to another village to work in a carpet workshop. She successfully passes as a man for most of the film. The director uses several ploys to render more complex Amangol’s sexuality and to critique the dominant notions and structures of gender relations. She shows the protagonist’s long hair at the film’s beginning, violating the modesty rules, however, only when it is detached from her, and in extreme close-­ups as the locks fall to the ground after being cut. With this strategy, Shahriar pointedly noted that the only permissible way to show women’s actual hair is in its disembodied form. Thus shorn of her hair and androgynized, the girl may also reveal the other forbidden feature of a woman: her direct gaze in close-­up, which masculinizes her, since this counters the demure and averted look required of Women’s Ci nema

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women. Moreover, through the first third of the film Amangol remains silent. The absence of voice adds to the absence of hair and the presence of the direct gaze to prolong the protagonist’s gender indeterminacy and sexual ambiguity. Amangol’s female coworkers do not question her gender; some of them find her attractive as a man, and one falls for her, a situation that encourages both homo­ eroticism and the “attractiveness of emotionality, affection, and gentleness,” which gender passing allows (Moallem 2005:147). Unlike most films about gender masquerade, which are serious and portentous, Panahi’s Offside (Ofseid, 2006) features the playful deployment of young female soccer fans masquerading as boys to get into an all-­male stadium to watch a match. This type of masquerade in the movies reflected the social reality in which males were the chief beneficiaries of the state, while it also protested the hetero­ normative modesty rules and censorship regulations that allowed women to appear in public and in movies without the veil and other accoutrements of modesty only as long as the public, the diegetic characters, and the spectators were fooled into thinking they were men. The pass must last, so to speak, for the masquerade to work, if the goal is women imitating men. However, the intention of such filmic masquerades and doubling is often not for the copy to match the original (imitation), but to create opportunities for identity ambiguity, homoeroticism, narrative complications, and a critique of the Islamist construction of gender (mimicry). Significantly, this use of transsexual passing in fictional films was happening at the same time that transgender surgery as a social practice was on the rise among young men and women and dealt with in documentary films.22 However transgressive, subversive, or modern these strategies of gender masquerade and passing may seem, in reality they were not, for as noted in vari­ ous chapters, there is a rich tradition both in taziyeh performances and in the history of modern theater, dance, and cinema in Iran of men playing women’s parts. These modern directors, who were not necessarily well versed in these histories, were not inventing new elements but relying on familiar conventions. That is also why their gender-­bending strategies did not generally raise major questions from either authorities or audiences. Such gender and transgender identity ambiguity and passing, the engines of mistaken identity narratives under the Islamic Republic, had an equivalent in the second Pahlavi period’s genres, such as the stewpot and luti movies. However, these latter movies did not involve so much gender difference and gender passing as class difference and class passing, for the characters from lower classes or from rural regions often aspired to, masqueraded as, or were mistaken for members of the urban upper classes (the reverse also occurred). The Pahlavi-­era movies resembled those from the Islamic Republic in that the narrative drama of both gender and class passing pivoted on the moment that the masquerade would be revealed as false. The removal of both the veil and the hair, and in the cases of Daughters of 132

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the Sun and Baran also of the voice, from women rendered faces sufficiently androgynous and ambiguous in their beauty and sexuality to be read as both male and female, creating doubt about both the sexual orientation and the gender of the characters, a most disturbing and counterhegemonic move under a regime founded on the clear demarcation of sexes and their complete separation. However, this is only a surface reading, for down deep, some of these masquerading movies ended up unwittingly reproducing the dominant Islamicate values and ideology. The narrative in such movies as Majidi’s Baran and Mirbaqeri’s The Snowman (Adam Barfi, 1994–98), relied on the male counterpart and on spectators being either fooled or fascinated by the masquerade, motivating plot twists and complications driven by sexual ambiguity, sexual desire, and gender politics. Yet these were resolved in the end in a way that restored the genderized and heteronormal Islamicate order of things. In addition, by generally failing to present the diegetic world from the point of view of the women and girls, even though as protagonists they were on the screen most of the time, these “feminist” films, particularly Baran, reproduced the director’s and the protagonist’s male gaze. So to the absence of women’s hair and voice must be added the absence of their gaze, one that had been acquired in this phase. Finally, these movies tended to both tap into and play with the Iranian penchant for distrusting manifest meanings, for they proposed that truth is found not in appearances (zaher), in the copy, in the pass, but in the latent layer, in what has been veiled, the original (baten). Ironically, then, in their critique of physical veiling they reinforced deeper forms of veiling. Another strategy for incorporating women, their bodies, and their sensuality without running into censorship was to incorporate the veil openly into the work’s structure and aesthetics. Videomakers and installation artists carried out interesting experiments, among them Neda Razavipour’s Variation (2005), a triptych involving three video screens containing filmed images of the artist. On the left screen, an extreme close-­up of her lips is shown, as her tongue plays with them in a luscious, juicy way. In the center screen, the full body of the artist is seen from behind an opaque glass, playing a kind of hide-­and-­seek game with viewers: as she approaches the frosted glass and touches it with both open hands, her hands come into clear focus; when she retreats, her blurred body comes into view. The right screen shows an extreme close-­up of her body as the camera roams around it, showing sites normally not seen publicly. The strategy of extreme close-­up cinematography acts as a kind of veil that brackets the body parts (like disembodied hair), allowing the exhibition of normally impermissible areas of the body. It also highly sexualizes them as the tight shots, acting like veils, kindle viewers’ imagination about what lies beyond the frame, increasing voyeuristic scopophilia. Finally, such close views heighten haptic vision, strengthening their visceral impact. Not only the tight compositions of the two side screens but also the frosted screen of the center image act both to impede and to mobilize vision. Razavipour rightly notes on her website that VariaWomen’s Ci nema

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tion instigates opposed sentiments in viewers—­eroticism through veiling and revulsion because the images are too close.23 A daring aspect of domestic female avant-­garde video artists such as Razavipour, and of those in exile such as Shirin Neshat and Ghazel Radpay, is their inscription of their autobiography and their own bodies in their works.24 They risk putting not only their art up for display and judgment but also themselves and their bodies, which goes against the dominant ethos of modesty, but they do it through complex strategies of concealing and revealing. Razavipour’s Variation is even bolder, for she shows parts of her own body in sensual, even erotic ways. She has not shown this work in public in Iran (and it is not on her website). She told me, “It is a work with my body. I am sure I can never show it here” (Naficy 2006g). In this fourth phase, under President Khatami and extending into Ahmadinejad’s era, the sartorial rules of representation were relaxed—­and pushed back by women and filmmakers—­and guidelines governing the gaze were loosened. Women were physically freed from the confines of their sequestered and stationary filmic roles. Modernity entered women’s representation in the form of physically active women (Baizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger and Perhaps Another Time [Shayad Vaqti Digar, 1988]; Banietemad’s Nargess [Nargess, 1991] and The May Lady [Banu-­ye Ordibehesht, 1997]; and Milani’s Two Women [Do Zan, 1998]), their mobility in vehicles (Kiarostami’s Ten, Akbari’s Twenty Fingers [20 Angosht, 2004]), and their active narrative agency (kidnapping in Milani’s The Fifth Reaction [Vakonesh-­e Panjom, 2003]) (Khalili Mahani 2006:11–12). Of course, not all filmmakers abided by the Islamicate gaze theory equally, and those who did, evolved. The most radical transformation was that of Abbas Kiarostami, who in his early postrevolutionary films (during phases 1–3) avoided using women altogether, but who in his later films (phase 4), such as in Ten (Dah, 2002), not only used female characters with a loose hijab but also without a hijab (with head shaven), and still later defied the prohibition on direct gaze in his film Shirin (2008), by forcing the spectators to watch for 92 minutes close-­up images of the faces of 140 beautiful Iranian actresses and one French actress (Juliette Binoche) looking directly at the camera while they watched an opera about the famous Persian love story, Khosrow and Shirin. The viewers of Shirin never see the opera; they only hear it on the film’s sound track while watching the faces of the actresses. Not only is the camera’s gaze at each woman direct, close-­up, and sustained for many seconds—­v iolating the modesty rules—­but also it captures its subjects in highly emotional and vulnerable states—­by turn amused, delighted, touched, or weeping—­resulting in a remarkably sensual and haptic spectatorial experience. The film squarely challenged the modesty rules in society and in cinema. A final frontier in expressivity was reached when filmmakers began to address the nonaudiovisual dimensions of filmic texts and spectatorial experiences. The imposition of the veil and of other modesty rules governing the gaze 134

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and behavior heightened the attention of filmmakers, critics, and spectators to the visual register, distorting the way the entire sensorium was engaged in Iranian daily lives. This heightened visuality, along with the curtailment of certain female vocal expressions, turned the veil into a graphic fetish of enormous power and presence, not only in mainstream cinema but also in art-­house and avant-­garde films and videos, such as the works of Neshat and Ghazel (the artist prefers to be known by her first name only). Some filmmakers played with varying the orchestration of sound, voice, and music to recalibrate the filmic and spectatorial sensoriums. Using Vivian Sobchack’s formulation of a “cinesthetic” mode of embodied spectatorship, Michelle Langford identifies the way in which Majidi, in Baran, is able to engage viewers in both synesthesia and coenesthesia through the use of metaphors, which have their origin in concrete experience, and the astute invocation of offscreen sound, such as the sound of hands kneading and slapping dough. In synesthesia one sense provokes the perception of another, such as seeing sounds in terms of colors or experiencing shapes as having taste, while in coenesthesia the equilibrium of aggregate of senses, which form the basis of human awareness, can be disturbed by the intensity or variation of one or another sense. As an example of the latter, Langford astutely suggests that by using metaphors and offscreen sound creatively, Majidi is able “to retain his viewers’ sensorium to privilege sound over or in addition to vision,” thereby injecting a highly “affective and potentially erotic or subversive level of meaning” into the film, “activating the forbidden (haram) sensation of flesh.” As she notes, “Throughout the film, the sounds of wind, rain, thunder, running water, the fluttering of fabric and bird’s wings, human breath, footsteps, voices, laughter and birds singing are all used to heighten the embodied sensory perceptions of the viewers and attune them to what must remain unrepresented, relegated to the space beyond the frame. Even a close­up of Lateef’s finger wiping mud from a coin he finds in the street works to heighten our sense of touch. By the end of the film, our senses and emotions have become so heightened that we are prepared for the emotionally (and sexually) charged scene that closes the film” (Langford 2008:168–69). Thus, what is forbidden—­unveiled vision and unmediated touch—­is synesthetically and coen­esthesterically suggested by the film, and experienced by the spectators, not in the visual register of the film alone but by the astute orchestration of different on-­screen and offscreen audiovisual elements.

The Japanese Oshin as an Islamic Role Model The problems of lacking an Islamic model for women and developing an appropriate homegrown version resurfaced when the Japanese television serial Oshin (1983), with the Persian title of Years Away from Home (Salha-­ye Dur az Khaneh), aired weekly in fifteen-­minute installments on the vvir Channel Two Network Women’s Ci nema

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for more than two years, starting in November 1987. This historical morning soap opera made by nhk (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) focused on the life and times of Oshin and her poor peasant family, tracing their struggles with poverty, hunger, and patriarchal oppression as Japan evolved from a feudal society at the beginning of the twentieth century to a modern industrial state in the 1980s. Throughout, Oshin, a hairdresser, learns to practice self-­sacrifice, perseverance, patience, and endurance and demonstrates personal initiative. Oshin was one of the highest-­rated shows in Japanese television history (65 percent) and an immense export item to many developing and developed countries, where it was also very popular. The vvir broadcast 168 episodes of this 297-­episode serial, all dubbed into Persian, making it the “most popular show in the Islamic Republic,” achieving a rating of 70 percent, which made its female protagonist Oshin the heroine de jour (Kohan 1990:4).25 Indeed, the show was so popular that Tehran streets noticeably emptied out during its broadcasts (Mohammadi 1988b/1367). The popularity was nationwide; a viewer from the religious city of Mashhad complained that he could not get to work just before Oshin’s broadcast time because of people trying to get home to their television sets. High school teachers assigned essays on the serial to their students, and a newspaper advised its readers that the best time to make long-­distance calls was during Oshin’s broadcasts, as phone lines were free (Mowlana and Mohsenian Rad 1992:57). The critics found faults with the serial, including its “contradictory messages” (Mohammadi 1988a/1367). Families found much in common with the character and situation of Oshin, however. Identification and involvement with this Japanese Other was highly cathartic, not othering, as women viewers (61.4 percent in one study) reported strong emotional and psychological reactions, including “anger, weeping, shouting, [and] laughing out of sadness” (Mowlana and Mohsenian Rad 1992:57). In a radio call-­in show, a woman caller stated that Oshin was a more appropriate role model for Iranian women than Fatemeh Zahra, the beloved and sacred daughter of the Prophet Mohammad. That this call was made on the Islamic Republic’s official Women’s Day (28 January 1989/8 Bahman 1367), designed to celebrate and honor Fatemeh Zahra’s birth, made the comment more incendiary. Ayatollah Khomeini shot back an angry fatwa, which resulted in the imprisonment and lashing of four officials at the national radio network for broadcasting that call. Scholars ascribed the women’s intense identification with Oshin to their resistance against government oppression (Najmabadi 1989) and to the “Islamic culture industry” (Kohan 1990:5). These factors may have been at work, but there were many similarities between early twentieth-­century Japanese and late twentieth-­century Iranian societies: the rapid and disruptive transition from tradition to modernity, the traumatic passage from collective identity to individual subjectivity, lingering patriarchy, and the deplorable subservient posi-

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tion of women. The coincidence of certain cultural values between the two societies further sealed identification: the importance of female self-­sacrifice and perseverance, particularly in the difficult period of war after the revolution, demanded a reconfirmation of those values. In fact, as communication researchers Hamid Mowlana and Mehdi Mohsenian Rad noted, “It was believed, from a policy standpoint, that Oshin’s spirit of self-­sacrifice was what Iranian people needed at that moment” (1992:53). Unable to see their own true stories on television screens, which were dominated by war propaganda and war images and by long-­w inded religious sermons, Iranians in general, and women in particular, regardless of education, age, and socioeconomic status, turned to the Japanese serial to find a mirror of their own lives. Another reason for this strong affinity may have been that Iranians consider themselves as Asian as the Japanese, identification with whom allowed them to escape being associated with either of the two former sources of identity, now demonized: the capitalist West and the communist East. A final, related reason may be that, as a Japanese anthropologist who had found Iranians to be open to her and to her research project noted, Iranians generally “think of Japan as a politically peaceful nation” (Suzuki 2004:625), a factor that may have been at the forefront of their thoughts during the war with Iraq when the Oshin series was broadcast in Iran. The viewing of the series was generally collective, fitting the persistence of premodern formations, as immediate families, extended families, and even neighbors gathered to watch and to commiserate together. The tragic tone of the series suited the Iranian psychological preference that associates tragedy with depth. These values were also validated by the Shiite Karbala paradigm of mourning and defiance against oppression, which was in wide circulation due to the war. The show’s serial format made it a cathartic cultural and religious ritual, somewhat akin to a weekly rowzeh (lamentation), popular with practicing Muslims, which both entertained and cleansed the soul. The success of Oshin was not isolated. It occurred in the context of a fundamental reorientation of television programming that accompanied the transition from the Pahlavi state to the Islamic Republic, and also in that of the globalization of Japanese media. If in the former era Iranian television programming had been dominated by American (and some European) fare, in the latter period Japanese programs, including cartoons and serials (not to mention video games), came to the fore as more suitable to Islamicate values and politics. During this period, Japanese media emerged stronger in their competition with Western media, which were criticized for their aggressive practices and morally offensive products. Moreover, the Japanese marketed Oshin through the Japan Foundation as a “goodwill” product to countries that were at war and as a means of softening their own image, humanizing their increasingly militaristic foreign policy, and ensuring the flow of much-­needed oil. Oshin was part and parcel of the Japanese modern public diplomacy.

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The Emergence of Women Feature Directors During the third phase, female directors grew more numerous. The Ninth Fajr International Film Festival in 1990 officially recognized their prominence by devoting a program to the cinema of female filmmakers. Feature directors were most visible, as the festival showcased Marzieh Boroumand’s The City of Mice (Shahr- ­e Mushha, 1985), an animated theatrical feature, as well as the following live-­action features: Derakhshandeh’s two movies Little Bird of Happiness and Lost Time (Zaman-­e az Dast Rafteh, 1990), Banietemad’s two movies Off the Limit and Foreign Currency (Pul- ­e Khareji, 1990), Feryal Behzad’s Kakoli (1990), and Tahmineh Milani’s two movies Children of Divorce (Bachehha-­ye Talaq, 1990) and The Legend of the Sigh (Afsaneh-­ye Ah, 1991). It also showed Amir Qavidel’s feature Delnamak (1990), written by the female screenwriter Aniseh Shahosseini, and fifteen shorts and animated films directed by women.26 Women also occupied other technical and production positions. The statistics for 1988 listed one woman as having directed a feature movie that year, one woman as screenplay writer, two as film editors, one as dubbing director, two as composers, one as titles designer, fifteen as makeup artists, five as costume designers, two as assistant directors, and twenty-­two as script girls.27 Apparently no female director of photography had worked on a film that year. This “women’s cinema” is not homogeneous and does not constitute a genre, as ideologically diverse women are involved in feature, documentary, short subject, and animated films, as well as in television films, serial productions, and video art. And it has rapidly grown, so that by the end of the century a new cadre of more than a dozen feature movie directors were at work, making their mark on cinema and providing powerful role models for other women. These include Mania Akbari, Tahmineh Ardekani (who died in a plane crash in 1995), Feryal Behzad, Rakhshan Banietemad, Marziyeh Boroumand, Puran Derakhshandeh, Zohreh Mahasti Badii, Manijeh Hekmat, Samira Makhmalbaf, Yassamin Maleknasr, Marziyeh Meshkini, Tahmineh Milani, Kobra Saidi, and Maryam Shahriar, all of whom came to the fore since the late 1980s.28 Prior to the revolution, only three women were credited with directing feature movies: Shahla Riahi for Marjan (1956), Marva Nabili for The Sealed Soil (Khak-­e Sar Beh Mohr, 1976–78), and Kobra Saidi (aka Shahrzad, a cabaret singer and dancer) for Maryam and Mani (Maryam va Mani, 1979). Some of these postrevolutionary directors were quite versatile, as they traversed film forms and genres, making documentaries, television soap operas, and feature movies. Increases in the quantity of features by women were not matched by corresponding improvements in quality. During the first two phases, women directors did not present a more radically feminist perspective in their films than did male directors. In the third and fourth phases this changed. That most of the women directors made more than one movie, and some more than half a dozen, demonstrates that during these phases, filmmaking went beyond a one-­ 138

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time shot-­in-­the-­dark endeavor to become a legitimate, professional career for women. This is an important dimension of the ideological repositioning of cinema, which is no longer considered morally corrupting. A cadre of prominent actresses and movie stars also achieved popularity without the stigma of amorality. Two of the most prominent of these, Niki Karimi and Fatemeh Motamed Arya, also ventured into directing documentaries and features. The world of cinema opened up to women as never before, but compared to the men, their numbers remained few. The official statistics that Islamic Republic News Agency released for 1999 show that less than 6 percent of all directors were women and that only 6 of the 120 producers were women. Women constituted 23 percent of all actors, 24 percent of set designers, and 10 percent of scriptwriters (quoted in Zolqadr 2000). They lagged far behind the men in technical fields and were almost nonexistent in the arenas of distribution and exhibition. In the early 2000s, after promoting Farabi Cinema Foundation films for about a decade Katayoun Shahabi established Sheherazad Media International, becoming one of the few female distributors, concentrating on coproduction, distribution, and marketing of Iranian art-­house films to the international market.29 She distributed the films of, among others, Alireza Davud­nezhad, Kiu­mars Purahmad, Hamid Rahmanian, Mohammad Rassoulof, Rakhshan Banietemad, Mania Akbari, Asghar Farhadi, and Niki Karimi. The share of women among technical professions was uneven, partly driven by prestige and gender-­segregation rules. For example, in the most current directories of film professions there are no women directors of cinematography, sound recording, or special effects for feature movies, while one woman is listed as a dubbing director, three as music composers, ten as screenplay writers, thirteen as film editors, and fifty-­five as makeup artists (for their names, see Babagoli 2004/1382). Significantly, several makeup artists listed are family members of the male actors. Both their family relations and their large numbers bespeak the impact of sex-­segregation regulations, which require that female makeup artists work only on female actors or only on actors to whom they are related. These statistics demonstrate that acting, editing, and makeup are the fields most favored by and most open to women.

The Politics and Poetics of Love and Romance The strategies the filmmakers employed to promote, question, or subvert the averted Islamicate gaze, modesty rules, and androgyny produced a fluid cinematic atmosphere and an increasingly transgressive batch of movies in tandem with the political reform movement. The themes of love and romance, which were almost absent in films from phases one and two because of restrictions on dress, gaze, touch, voice, mise-­en-­scène, and shot composition, began to be explored in bold ways in movies of the third and fourth phases. As expected, Women’s Ci nema

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however, this proved a sensitive subject, fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. Fakhreddin Anvar, a deputy director of the mcig in charge of cinema, noted this situation: “In poetry we have had a tremendous amount of experience with this matter [love], but in cinema we have no expertise. Should we close this area off and say that no one can enter it and no one may consider it? . . . We cannot shut the door on this matter, which ranges from love for humankind and for society and extends to love for God almighty. In this arena, the distance between health and salvation and deviation and perversion is as thin as a hair’s breadth.” 3 0 The spiritual love for God, the Prophet Mohammad, Shiite imams and their families, and for humanity was expressed in the war movies, but carnal love, desire, passion, and lust for ordinary individuals were rare. The sensitivity toward this taboo type of love resulted in diverse approaches by the filmmakers and in conflicting reactions to their works. The Pahlavi-­period filmfarsi had successfully separated love from sex by relegating them to the safe polar characters of ethereal houris and sexual whores (Mohammad Kashi 1998/1377:46). In the Islamic Republic the staging of love and sex was considerably more complicated. Love and sex were variously separated by banning sex entirely from cinema; excising women from the screen altogether; turning women (and men) into asexual, androgynous figures; employing metaphors, symbols, and poetry for expressing love; employing love substitutes for women; highlighting only spiritual and mystical love; or combining the binary ethereal and sexual women into a single character, since representing a totally sexualized woman was illegal. In the early years, filmmakers dealt with heterosexual romance indirectly, sometimes by using children as substitutes for adults, particularly for women. Baizai in his Bashu, the Little Stranger reversed the situation by using the young boy Bashu as a substitute for Nai’s missing husband. As in his other movies, here the woman occupies a central position: Nai works her fields, takes care of her children and, in accepting the dislocated boy, defies tradition and the authority of her family and of village elders. What adds to the richness of her textured relationship with Bashu is his ambiguous position both as a boy Nai takes care of and protects and as a young man she nurtures and loves and on whom she depends. When near the beginning of the film her children warn her of the presence of the runaway Bashu among the bushes, Nai is off camera, and the film cuts to a shot showing empty space. Suddenly, she rises into the frame in a surprising close-­up, her hair and chin covered with a white scarf, emphasizing her dramatic beauty and intense eyes, something that the early postrevolutionary censors had warned filmmakers against. With this one shot, which draws attention to the alluring possibilities of unveiled vision, the direct gaze, and scopophilia, Baizai breaks years of entrapment by modesty rules. Defying those rules, Nai gazes directly into the camera in close-­up—­something that she does several times hence (figure 30). Visually addressing both the spectators sitting in their seats and Bashu hiding in the bushes, this shot conflates their points of view. From then on both the spectators and Bashu are the subjects of Nai’s gaze, 140

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30 Triumph of direct gaze and scopophilia. Nai (Susan Taslimi) in Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger. Frame enlargement.

just as Nai is the subject of theirs. In this alignment of gazes, Nai becomes halal to the spectators and Bashu becomes a substitute for them, ensuring their suture into the diegesis. Unlike Makhmalbaf, who in an early position favored veiling at all times, here Baizai clearly favors unveiling, but as he works within the confines of a modesty-­driven society, love enters his film only indirectly, intricately, and ambiguously. That the film’s release was delayed for three years had a lot to do with its scopophilic visuality. As Baizai told me, the censors demanded that he make some eighty-­five changes to the film, including removing that close-­up shot, which he did not do (Naficy 1993a). In Yassamin Maleknasr’s Shared Plight (Dard-­e Moshtarak, 1990), the young Westernized couple masquerade the expression of their feelings by quoting love poems to each other. This is primarily a phase-­one strategy used by Maleknasr, who had graduated in filmmaking from the University of Southern California and who had received the Best Supporting Actress Award from the Fajr International Film Festival for acting in Mehrjui’s Sara (1992). What turns the film into a phase-­three expression is that as modern individuals, the same young couple also express love for one another in their own words by simply uttering “I love you” (dustet daram), words rare in cinema up to that point. Kamal Tabrizi, who had made Islamic movies in the 1980s, made a breakthrough film for the younger, postwar generation. Although centered squarely on heterosexual love, the object is not carnal love but a painful metaphysical love, which is never consummated. In his appropriately titled movie Shayda (1990), an attractive nurse and the young injured soldier she is caring for fall in love.31 He knows her only by her voice, as his eyes are covered with bandages. On the other hand, since he cannot see, she has more liberty to express her feelings to him through touch, voice, and reading. Betraying the director’s Islamist leanings, what she reads is not poetry, but the verses of the Quran, which becomes an object for transmitting spiritual and personal love. She also uses a more mundane mediating object to become intimate with him physically, to metaphorically touch his lips, which are fetishized in close-­up photography: she eats soup with the same spoon with which she has fed him. In this mystical love story, the lovers’ primary means of communication is speech, not vision. Women’s Ci nema

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In the Fajr festival of 1991, for the first time since the revolution, four features dealing directly with heterosexual love and romance were screened: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Nights on the Zayandehrud (Shabha-­ye Zayandehrud, 1991) and A Time to Love, Shahriar Parsipur’s Portrait of Love (Naqsh- ­e Eshq, 1990), and Hosain Dalir’s Shadow of Imagination (Sayeh-­ye Khial, 1990), all of whose directors were male. While some film reviewers considered the latter two to have exhibited attributes of “spiritual and mystical” love, Makhmalbaf’s films were rejected on the grounds that A Time to Love, which explored the possibility of a ménage à trois, encouraged “forbidden love” and “carnal and earthly love” (Kohlari 1991), and that Nights on the Zayandehrud “insulted” the soldiers and the families of war veterans and martyrs (Golmakani 1999/1377:194). It seems that the director, who had begun as an Islamically committed filmmaker, had finally crossed the “hair’s breadth” of the line separating acceptable from unacceptable and achieved a degree of philosophical relativism. No wonder that Morteza Avini was able to accuse him of hypocrisy for overtly supporting the revolution while maintaining a hidden link to its enemies (1991/1370). Even though he defended himself publicly against a campaign launched in opposition to his transformation and to his new movies, which reached as high as the Majles (Makhmalbaf 1990/1369), both films were shelved after their festival premieres. That only a year later Banietemad received the best director award for her film Nargess (1991), involving a love triangle, the psychology of male-­female relationships, and a filming style highlighting the direct gaze, demonstrates the shifting and multilayered contexts within postrevolutionary cinema.32 Makhmalbaf’s two intertextual movies Salaam Cinema (1995) and Gabbeh share both the theme of love and a female actor in an interesting fashion. One of the thousands of would-­be actors who responded to the director’s casting call in Salaam Cinema is Shaqayeq Jowdat, an attractive young woman who tells Makhmalbaf in the film that she has come for auditioning in hopes of being cast in the director’s next movie, which she hopes will win awards from major foreign film festivals, causing them to invite her to travel abroad, where she hopes to meet up with the boy she loves. Her confession of love for the boy and of what she is willing to do to obtain it was apparently so forthright that it caused the censors to erase some of her dialogue before releasing Salaam Cinema. Hers was a convoluted but audacious plan to use love for cinema and for movie acting to activate human romance, an idea that however far-­fetched initially, largely materialized in the end. For Makhmalbaf did, indeed, cast Jowdat as the star in his next movie, Gabbeh, playing the part of Gabbeh who is in love with a faraway young tribal man on horseback. And the film Gabbeh did, indeed, win international acclaim and awards. Yet Jowdat did not travel abroad to reach her love, for apparently the man returned home where, according to Jowdat, everything turned out fine between them (except for him having to first serve his military draft) (Khaksar 1995–96/1374:12). An important dimension of love that Salaam Cinema in particular brought 142

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up was cinephilia, the love of young Iranians for cinema, testified to by their overwhelming response to the film’s casting call and by the passion they displayed during the filmed auditions. Likewise, Makhmalbaf’s Naser al-­Din Shah, the Movie Actor (Naser al-­Din Shah, Aktor-­e Sinema, 1991) inscribes the director’s own post-­Islamist love for cinema, as it celebrates through choice film clips and humor some of the best films in the history of Iranian cinema, films he would have condemned in his previous incarnation. The film’s ending is a joyful bravura ode to cinema’s capacity to evoke love and reconciliation: there are many clips from Iranian movies showing people joyously smiling, shaking hands, and hugging one another—­all actions prohibited in the cinema of the Islamic Republic. Alireza Davudnezhad’s Sweet Agony deals with the contrast between traditional arranged marriages and modern marriages based on individual choice and personal love—­a perennial theme in Iranian cinema. In this film the boy and girl have been betrothed to each other since childhood, a tradition they wish to uphold, as they are fond of each other; however, their families have other plans for them. The film also breaks the usual third-­person narrative, as the boy, Reza, is the self-­reflexive filmer within the film, who recounts his relations with the girl, Mona, to his camera. In addition to the film camera, which brings the two lovers together in the end, Mona’s baby brother, Amir, functions as a mediator between them. He is their chaperone, but one who is manipulated by both sides. The adults who want him to report on Reza and Mona debrief him after each outing; the young lovers attempt to influence him in turn. The child comically mixes things up to delightful effect. The movie addresses the youth and their dilemmas, and it is told from their point of view. In the 1990s, Mehrjui made a quartet of domestic movies, titled Lady (Banu, 1991), Sara (1992), Pari (1994), and Leila (1997), in which women were the protagonists and the subjects were love, marriage, childlessness, and divorce. These followed his groundbreaking Hamoon (1990), which though centered on a male protagonist, explored at least two kinds of love: Hamoon’s carnal, though strained, love for his wife, and his mystical love for his male master.33 So many movies back to back about women by a major filmmaker naturally raised questions, but when pushed by the film critic Omid Ruhani, Mehrjui steadfastly denied a larger social project in them, such as the contradictions between tradition and modernity besetting women in Iran, saying that similar contradictions plagued Western women as well. He also denied that there was a personal project, stating, “This was all by chance, there was no plan. They ask me why four women and what plan did I have. Well, by happenstance four stories came together one after another and each of them had the possibility of being filmed and each of their stories was attractive to me at the time. . . . However, people think that there must be an extratextual reason for this, or that it must have something to do with me, with my personal life or with social causes. I understand why they raise these questions, but there is no extratextual meanWomen’s Ci nema

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ing” (Ruhani 1998/1376:23–24). Despite such denials, as an auteur filmmaker who not only directs but also writes his own screenplays (often based on adaptations), the movies chart his evolving concerns with women and love both in society and in his own life. His most notable treatise on love Iranian style is Leila, about two newly married modern lovers, Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mossafa), whose marital bliss is marred by their inability to conceive a child. The film’s murky politics are such that the movie at once critiques the traditional practice of polygamy and endorses it. The endorsement, which recuperates polygamy, is done out of Leila’s intense love for her husband. She not only agrees to her mother-­in-­law (ably played by Jamileh Shaikhi), who pressures her to let her husband marry a cowife for the purpose of procreation, but also actively and painfully takes the initiative to solicit and vet appropriate candidates herself. Despite her surface modernity she is not a modern individual with her own subjectivity and agency (figure 31). As an appendage to her husband, and as a woman faithful to a patriarchal family structure, she participates in choosing a cowife for her husband despite her inner opposition, with depressing personal consequences for her until nearly the end of the film, when she rebels and apparently leaves him. Her tragedy is that she waits passively and painfully, and ultimately fruitlessly, for Reza to reciprocate her love, to prove his own love for her, by refusing her offer of assistance in finding a new wife. By her offer, Leila in essence engages in Iranian ritual courtesy, expecting Reza, as is customary in such rituals, to politely reject it. That he does not indicates both his modernity (no taarof for a modern man!) and his spinelessness (he could not refuse his mother’s pressure). Leila is a powerful, painful, and emotion-­laden film about love and its dilemmas for women on the verge of modernity. Unfortunately, it consecrates the stereotype of a willful, meddling mother-­in-­law whose “will to power,” as Mehrjui calls it (Ruhani 1998/1376:23), ruins the loving lives of a childless couple.34 After Khatami’s election in 1997, the atmosphere loosened considerably, and some filmmakers dealt more overtly with love. These films generally centered on third-­generation predicaments. Rasul Sadrameli’s The Girl in Cotton Sneakers

31 Love means having to sacrifice your own interests. Leila (Leila Hatami) in a frame enlargement from Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila.

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(aka The Girl in Cotton Sneakers, Dokhtari ba Kafshha-­ye Katani, 1998) focuses on the difficulties of romance between young people and the dangers that await single girls in public places. It begins with a young couple walking in a beautiful park discussing whether each person has a “personal myth” that forms him or her (figure 32). The modesty police interrupt their philosophical discussion and take them into custody, where they make sure she is still a virgin. Angry with her family members who do not understand her love for her boyfriend, she escapes from her home and, while wandering in the underbelly of Tehran, she undergoes a “night journey,” which forces her to reexamine whether this romance is worth alienating her family and facing the dangers that await single girls in the Islamic Republic. Perhaps for the first time in Iranian cinema, the film focuses on a female flâneur as, cell phone in hand, she wanders the streets at night, calls her friends, gazes at shop windows, sells her bangles to a jeweler, buys bread to eat, and goes to the movies alone. Yet this isolated strolling does not bring with it the promised liberation and playfulness; instead, it drives home the point, through a series of macabre adventures, that women alone in public at night are considered whores, and in serious peril. While such critiques of society are germane, the film’s denouement undermines them: having failed to find any place to rest, she returns home. In the social-­problem films of the late 1990s, such as Panahi’s The Circle and Sadrameli’s The Girl in Cotton Sneakers, the radicalism of the grittily realist treatment of women’s lives is marred by the filmmakers’ political agendas (both are male). These are conservative narratives with weak female characters and pedantic, forced endings. Both directors offer critical but pessimistic views of the women’s options—­none. In The Girl in Cotton Sneakers the girl returns home defeated from her night journey, and the women in The Circle are sent back to prison, which is a safer place than external society for them. To be sure, there are massive obstacles in the way of women and women’s representation, as documented throughout this and other chapters—­and in the way of men and, for that matter, of children, as independent architects of their own lives—­but such a one-­dimensional focus on victimization is not only unrealistic

32 Teenage love among the “third generation” in Rasul Sadrameli’s The Girl in Cotton Sneakers. Publicity photo.

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and disempowering but also constitutes bad filmmaking. Ironically, both films received high praise internationally, perhaps because they confirmed the erroneous grand narrative abroad of women in Islamic Iran as passive victims of a ruthless patriarchal system.35 Mania Akbari, the star of Kiarostami’s Ten (Dah, 2002), in 2004 wrote and directed her first feature, Twenty Fingers (Bist Angosht), a transgressive movie involving seven episodes between a couple, played by Akbari herself and her producer Bijan Daneshmand, who was trained in Britain. Though the actors remain the same in all the episodes but one, they play different couples under different circumstances, married or unmarried, carrying on a conversation that sometimes resembles game playing. Each ten-­minute episode, filmed in a single long take, is autonomous, distinguished from the others by a momentary black screen. Each couple is filmed either in a moving vehicle (in a car, on a motorcycle, on a train, in a boat, and in a cable car) or against moving backgrounds like the flow of traffic. Mobility and change are structured in dominance, not only in filming and in the mise-­en-­scène but also in the narrative, for the couples are in constant motion and in unstable relationships teetering on the brink of radical change. Nothing is static. What makes the film transgressive—­and modern yet again—­is its insistence on coupling, a new phenomenon in a predominantly collective society; its combining the sexual and ethereal aspects of women into one sensual woman; highlighting sex and sexual desire as such without metaphorizing them; and its bold narrative, dialogue, and filming of the couples, who break many of the rules of Islamicate modesty in dress, gaze, behavior, and frank conversation and arguments over intimate aspects of their relationships, including sexual play, abortion, adultery, gender crossing, lesbian relations, and threesomes. It is a darideh film (without this term’s usual negative connotations), a no-­holds-­barred sexually bold film with positive connotations; its filming on digital video enhances its provocative intimacy. It is one of the few postrevolutionary films in which the restrictions on the visual representation of sexuality lead to the kind of sexually nuanced verbal play that the Hays Code of the 1940s produced in the United States— ­although the verbal play in this film is not always playful or humorous but sometimes serious and bitter. The film’s opening episode, in which two premarital lovers drive on an isolated country road in the dead of night, is one of the most transgressive and disturbing. As the car’s twin headlights cut the thick darkness of the road ahead, the driver promises the attractive woman next to him that he has a surprise for her. In the meantime, they maintain a sexually charged, flirtatious, and playful conversation about how as children they had played doctors, teachers, and nurses with their friends, with the man pruriently following the woman’s stories with pointed questions, such as “Did you examine each other?” Finally, they arrive at their destination, and at the surprise. The man turns the car engine off, which also turns off the film image. Thus veiled, so to speak, the 146

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soundtrack is open to further frankness: a zipper is opened, they are heard kissing with escalating breathing, and then the woman lets out a murmur of protest, then a sharp cry, and finally: “What did you do that for, what am I going to tell my mom now?” The man callously responds: “I had to know.” The episode ends, and after a moment of darkness, the next one comes on the screen. The film does not spell out what the surprise was and what actually happened. Did he rape her or just examine her with his fingers to determine whether she was a virgin or not, in the process tearing her hymen causing her to bleed (a valued veil to keep)? Veiling has intensified game playing in both society and the movies. In a fascinating game of veiling and unveiling, this episode, and the entire movie for that matter, tantalizes the spectators, encouraging spectatorial voyeurism and speculation. Although the man is the aggressive agent in this episode, it is the woman who consistently takes the more experimental, independent, transgressive, and modern stance. The man is a traditional person on the way to modernity, conflicted about social norms and sexual desires, gender relations, and power relations, while the women has already achieved modernity in her social experimentation, independence, and transgression of collective norms. According to the producer of Twenty Fingers, Daneshmand, the film received script approval, but since it was digitally filmed, no official minder was needed. This allowed for much more freedom during shooting. Pedestrians barely noticed the filming. The absence of a minder allowed Akbari to audaciously shoot a different script from the one that had been approved. When she submitted the completed film to the censors for approval, they ordered cuts, which she refused, preferring to have her film banned in its home country. She succeeded in releasing it internationally instead, because the film’s postproduction was done in London and its release print was already out of the country.36 Akbari followed this film with a bold autobiographical work, a truly modernist enterprise, Ten Plus Four (Dah Be Alaveh-­ye Chahar, 2007), a sequel to Kiaros­ tami’s Ten, in which while driving she reveals her breast cancer. She undergoes invasive treatment that devastates her physical beauty and prevents her from driving but brings out her strong internal core.37 In the 2000s, she also wrote, acted in, and directed a series of art videos called Six Video Arts.38 Finally, she directed (for Sheherazad Media International) a daring episodic film on relationships, One. Two. One (Yek. Do. Yek, 2010), which was similar to Twenty Fingers in its episodic structure, sexual playfulness, and exploration of personal relationships but updated that film to include complications and distrust in intimacy arising from electronic communication, such as by cell phones and text messaging. In this film Akbari confronted head on and broke all the prohibitions against the direct gaze, touching, and expressing sexual desire. When her producer Shahabi was arrested (along with five documentary filmmakers), Akbari released a statement, which asked that they be released, concluding with: “We are hereby requesting from all political organs and their affiliates responWomen’s Ci nema

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sible for this matter to have a cultural view. . . . Historically, artists and cultural people are and have always been the world’s greatest assets. I hope that those responsible in detaining these artists realize that we should not be scared of cultural and artistic people, instead we should embrace and accept them knowingly as national and the world’s treasures who will help sustain all nations.” 39

Women’s Documentaries: Uncovering Social Problems Marriage, divorce, runaway children, adopted children, sexuality, sexual orientation, spousal and children’s abuse, drug abuse, and murder were among important familial and social issues that surfaced because of oppressive Islamicate values and gender-­based discriminatory laws, policies, and institutions. These issues were exacerbated by hot and cold wars with external and internal foes and by increasing inflation, poverty, displacement, unemployment, and official corruption. Women were frequent subjects and directors of documentaries dealing with these topics (most of the directors were Iranians). Mahvash Sheikholeslami, born in Malayer in 1947, studied at the London Film School and produced television serials during the Pahlavi period. She made several notable documentaries on the topics mentioned above after the revolution. Her Murderer or Murdered (Qatel ya Maqtul, 2004), filmed in Tehran’s maximum-­security Evin Prison, depicts a world relentlessly out of ­kilter—­a true Iranian koyaanysqatsi.40 It features half a dozen young and middle-­aged women condemned to long prison terms or to death for murder (usually of their husbands) or for being accessories to such murders. In dead-­on, often tearful interviews, these women tell of their arranged, sometimes forced, marriages to men they did not want and of the violent and constricted marital lives that ensued. Some husbands were addicted to drugs or alcohol and slept with other women, while others beat and abused their wives and children. In one case, Fatemeh’s husband commits incest with his daughter, causing Fatemeh to first strangle him out of fury and then to cut him up into pieces. She describes what caused her savage behavior: “He was naked and on top of her. When he removed her bra and I saw my child’s breasts exposed, I could not tolerate it any longer.” She is executed soon after the filmed interview. Another woman is freed after seventeen years but has difficulties adjusting to her children, who are no more than a few years older than she. Commissioned by Article Z, a French company that inaugurated a series of documentaries on Iran for broadcast by the European cable channel Arté under the general title of The Other Iran,41 Sheikholeslami was allowed only five days to film in Evin Prison. This brief access time may account for the film’s unfinished feeling, underscored by its lack of closure. Yet this incompleteness is emblematic of the intractable social situations in which women still find themselves. No film since Shirdel’s Women’s Prison (Nedamatgah: Zendan-­e Zanan, 1966) 148

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dealt with the subject as openly as Murderer or Murdered; yet their differences are striking. While Shirdel’s film centered primarily on women’s lives inside prison, Sheikoleslami’s film focuses on the conditions and crimes that landed them there. The former film creates a contrast between the official Pahlavi discourse and the dismal reality of women’s lives, while the latter film limits itself to women’s own narratives. By staying with the personal, Sheikholeslami manages to produce a most political film. A year later, she expanded Murderer or Murdered into the seventy-­four-­minute film titled Article 61 (Maddeh-­ye 61, 2005), which contains new cases and a fuller treatment of the previous ones, resulting in a well-­rounded film. For example, in the harrowing case of Fatemeh, the mother who on witnessing the rape of her daughter by her husband kills and dismembers him, we hear about how she stuffed his body parts into garbage bags, which she sent downriver, and we also hear from the daughter. The film’s title refers to the legal article in the criminal code, which both the filmmaker and the women strongly critique as unfair to women because it treats killings committed by women in self-­defense, or in the cause of preserving their dignity, as first-­degree murder, punishable by execution or long imprisonment. No leniency is accorded them. Through deft editing, the film weaves together the tragic stories of several women, including those of Fatemeh and Afsaneh. If Fatemeh’s story is tragic and sad, that of Afsaneh is tragic and delightful. Condemned to death, Afsaneh describes how she was led to the execution arena, where while awaiting her own imminent demise, she watched the execution of two other women. When her turn comes and as she is being readied for hanging, she is saved, as a messenger arrives with the order to cease the execution (the film is silent about Fatemeh eventually being executed). The reason is a moving open letter to the judiciary by her daughter, which newspapers have published. Afsaneh, condemned to death, describes how after a shower she thwarted the sexual attack of her brother-­in-­law, which resulted in her cutting off his penis and killing him. Despite all the beatings she receives in jail to make her confess that her husband killed the man, she remains steadfast in taking responsibility for her action. A campaign by rights activists and journalists leads to her retrial and release. As the film ends, it creates a powerful collective plea by the condemned women about the laws: voices and montaged photos of women create a symphony of grievous sounds and images.42 Neither Murderer or Murdered nor Article 61 has been screened in Iran. The women’s rights activist Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, who was involved in both “Stop Stoning Forever” and “One Million Signature” campaigns to abolish legislation condoning the practice of stoning adulterers to death and to demand changes to Iranian laws that discriminate against women, made the documentary Tunnel: Iranian Women’s Movement (2010). The film offers a history of nearly one decade of the women’s movement during Ahmadinejad’s retrenchment presidency, from 2004 to 2010. The narrative is from the point of view of the director herself who had been incarcerated in March 2007 while demWomen’s Ci nema

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onstrating against the trial of several women activists arrested earlier. She was the founder of a civil society training and capacity building center for nongovernmental organizations in Tehran, and edited the quarterly feminist journal Zanan. This film was supported by hivos (a Dutch development organization) for broadcast on the Zanan tv. That Abbasgholizadeh ran a civil society organization herself and her film was supported by a foreign funded ngo point to the impact of such agencies in supporting opposition to the Islamic republic regime and in contributing to the four-partner public diplomacy involving the Islamic Republic regime, Iranian dissidents at home and in diaspora, and Western governments and ngos.43 Sou Abadi spent five months in health and public service institutions in Tehran to gauge the psychological health of women and families, a topic rarely explored in films. She spent some time at the Committee of the Imam, a charity Ayatollah Khomeini created for the poor; at the Voice of Assistance, a psychology telephone hotline; at the Marriage Foundation, an Islamist matrimonial agency; at the Health Ministry’s mandatory premarital sex education classes; and at a Dr. Majd’s group psychotherapy sessions, which serve Tehran’s elite. What she discovers in these places where people confide in each other and seek help from professionals, as presented in her feature documentary sos in Tehran (2000), is disturbing. The film, judged the best documentary at the Brussels International Film Festival, candidly documents a spectrum of people, from upper to lower classes, literate to illiterate, secular to religious, and adolescent to middle age, who are grappling with personal pain, anxieties, and social problems. The movie and television actress Mahnaz Afzali made a daring film, Ladies’ Room (Zananeh, 2003), principally due to the choice of the filming location—­a women’s public bathroom in Laleh Park, Tehran. As one of the few places where women can let their hair down, literally and metaphorically, a ladies’ room is an intimate arena in which women reveal their inner thoughts, desires, and personal stories to each other. Here gather women of all ages and walks of life, many of them abused in childhood and runaways from home, living in dire poverty and homelessness, or making a living as a prostitute. The film identifies each woman by name and spends several minutes with her narrative. Some of the women are filmed together, interacting, reacting to each other’s stories, accusing each other of lying, making up stories, and putting on airs. Maryam, an epileptic, reveals the brutal circumstances that drove her to heroin addiction and self-­mutilation; Sepideh describes her fraught relationship with her mother and her struggle to get back on her feet; and the old washroom attendant alternately offers tough love to the women or a shoulder to cry on. The choice of the bathroom is astute, as it allows women to engage in various strategies of selfing and self-­fashioning. It constitutes neither the traditional social space of the inside and home nor that of the outside and public, in which women have to play prescribed roles. Rather, it is a third, liminal space, where they can engage 150

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in both physical and psychological self-­fashioning and identity formation—­ putting on makeup, combing hair, organizing their appearances, and telling stories. They can relieve themselves from both their physical wastes and their identity markers; they can freshen up and reconstitute themselves. The film offers a lucid critique of women’s situation under the Islamic Republic, particularly those from the lower classes. If documentarists living in Iran could not handle controversial subjects because of censorship, those living abroad could, and globalization made borders porous. Transnational films, however, suffered from insider-­outsider politics. Foreign filmmakers or Iranians in the diaspora gained more access to Iranian subjects, and they in turn seemed freer in working with them. But outsider status could also work against them, blocking access. When films were released externally, unintended internal repercussions followed. An Iranian social anthropologist with a PhD from Cambridge University, Ziba Mir-­Hosseini, and an award-­w inning British documentarist, Kim Longinotto, made two visits to Iran in the 1990s, resulting in two important collaborative feature documentaries on issues besetting women—­the right of women to seek divorce and the legal rights of runaway girls. Their seminal film Divorce Iranian Style (Talaq Beh Sabk-­e Irani, 1998), inspired by Mir-­Hosseini’s ethnographic book on Islamic family law in Iran and Morocco, Marriage on Trial, is a fascinating cinema vérité documentary that, with humor and a keen eye for empathetic characters, counters the stereotypes of veiled Muslim women as passive victims. It ignores neither the complexity nor the oppressiveness of family law in Islamic Iran. Its strength lies in its attention to the details of actual situations in a sharia court, instead of on its claims to universality. The specificity endows it with universality. The filmmakers spent about twenty difficult months obtaining funding from Britain’s Channel 4 (ca. $125,000), testing and abandoning a collaborative effort with an Iranian film company, which wanted to exert undue influence on the shape of the film, and jumping through bureaucratic hoops to gain permission from Iranian authorities to film in a family court, an ordeal that Mir-­Hosseini documented in a valuable article (Mir-­Hosseini 2002). The presi­ dential election that brought Khatami to power in 1997 and that opened up the public discursive space facilitated the permission process. After obtaining funding and filming permissions, with an all-­women, four-­person crew consisting of Iranian insiders (Mir-­Hosseini and an assistant) and British outsiders (Longinotto and a sound technician), they filmed for four weeks in Judge Deldar’s family court in Tehran, remarkably without any government control or minders. As Longinotto and Mir-­Hosseini told me in a joint interview, the crew all wore the official black hijab (meqna’eh) and no makeup, as mandated for women entering the courts, and they blended in well (figure 33). “After a week, we became part of the court system; we helped the women write their petitions. But our presence during filming neither deterred, nor helped. We respected Women’s Ci nema

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33 Production still from Divorce Iranian Style, showing the crew dressed in the official black hijab. From left: Production assistant Zara (Zahra) Saeidzadeh, anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini, and filmmaker Kim Longinotto. The fourth crewmember, soundperson Christine Felse, took this picture in front of the Judiciary Building in Tehran’s Maidan-e Arg. Courtesy of Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Kim Longinotto.

the people and they respected us. Sometimes, the women would ask us not to film something, and we would respect that. The women made this film possible; they cooperated with us completely. The day that we finished filming and left the courtroom, all of them wept; as did we.” The filmmakers chose 16mm stock instead of video to ensure good prints. The crew followed the cases of ten women, all of whom agreed to be filmed. Six made it into the film, four of them fully (Naficy 1998c). Longinotto gives the credit for the way the women opened up to them to Mir-­Hosseini, herself divorced three times (twice in Iran), who used that experience to gain their trust. That the crew was all-­female reinforced that trust, as Longinotto relates: A society like Iran is two worlds to the extent that you go through different entrances, and when you’re going in the courtroom men ought to give up their mobile phones while the women have to take off their makeup. When this division into two worlds is so extreme, the fact that you’re women means that you’re on the right side. When you’re with women you’re sort of all together and there’s an immediate sense of togetherness; it’s a lovely feeling and makes up in part for the sense of being annoyed at 152

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having to cover yourself up and worry all the time. . . . In Muslim countries, where it’s a men-­women thing, women are very very tactile, so they would touch all the time, they’ll hold your hand, they’ll sort of put their arm through yours. You feel very loved in a way. (quoted in Teasley 1999) Indeed, the relationship between the female filmmakers and their female subjects is so intimate that the subjects interact with the camera, confiding in it in several scenes, transforming the film from an objective, direct-­cinema film, in which the crew acts as a fly on the wall, into a dialogic vérité documentary, in which the subjects and the crew engage together in a single signifying process, which the film honestly acknowledges. Later, Mir-­Hosseini credited her involvement in Divorce Iranian Style and its subsequent public screening with helping her “transition from the detached world of academia to that of a scholar activist” (2004:5). The subjectivity of the filmmaker is an important dimension of ethnographic cinema that is often elided.44 The filmed dailies were sent to Britain for processing (one of the bones of contention with Iranian authorities). The finished film was broadcast by Channel 4’s True Stories series in 1999. The combination of the insider-­outsider film crew with the affability and humanity of Judge Deldar, the court secretary Mrs. Maher, and other staff, along with the creativity and desperation of the women seeking divorce, produced fascinating scenes: Women from all walks of life and ages (including the remarkable sixteen-­year-­old Ziba) fight alternatively with tooth and nail, humor, cunning, threat, deceit, theatricality, and passion for a dignified and equitable divorce. Despite their resilience and artfulness, the law favors the men, allowing women few grounds, such as lying at the time of marriage, madness, sexual dysfunction, and addiction. As the film notes, when women succeed in divorcing their husbands, they often end up giving up their children and their “bride gift” (mehriyeh), which is due them. The latter deprives women of a much-­needed financial safety net after divorce. In the film’s heart-­wrenching last case, Maryam, a mother of two, who has divorced her husband and remarried a man she loves tenderly, is forced to choose between giving up the custody of her last child from the former marriage and divorcing the new husband. She tearfully and alternatively declares that “I will die without her” or “I will kill her before handing her over,” and she engages in all sorts of stratagems, including lying, to win the judge’s approval of her custody. The filmmakers correctly linger on this case, for showing a woman willing to fight to retain her children’s custody counters a dominant view abroad, encouraged by the media in the Islamic Republic, that women in Iran are readily willing to give up their children and to sacrifice them as martyrs. To the filmmakers’ and Deldar’s credit, he does not come off as an oppressive, inflexible, and religious ideologue either. As a judge he does not oppose the dominant sharia system, which he must uphold, but he sees as his first task the humanistic reconciliation of the differing parties. Women’s Ci nema

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The film demonstrates the microeconomics of a disciplinary society from the inside and from women’s point of view—­a rare treat. In a remarkable sequence Panaz, the daughter of the court’s secretary (perhaps six years old), who visits the court regularly after her school and is, therefore, knowledgeable about its operations and the women’s rights, puts on a humorous show during a court recess, when the judge leaves the courtroom. She takes his bench and puts on her wool cap, stating ceremonially, “Let me put my turban on”; then, gesticulating with her little arms and index finger and threatening and cajoling, like the judge, she admonishes or advises her imaginary plaintiffs. In her case knowledge is power, as she tells the judge later that since witnessing the proceedings in his court she has decided not to marry. Divorce Iranian Style was not screened officially, publicly, or in commercial venues in Iran; however, a documentary film festival in Tehran, students at Tehran and Isfahan Universities, and the Anthropology Society of Iran screened it for their specialized audiences. It was widely screened in the United States and Europe in commercial cinemas and on festival circuits, provoking contradictory responses (from largely Iranian spectators) that Mir-­Hosseini documented in her article and I myself witnessed at several screenings. Essentially, these responses ranged from those opposed to the Islamic Republic, who claimed that the filmmakers had been duped and manipulated by the authorities into ignoring women’s oppression and presenting a wholesome picture of Iran, to those upper-­class critics who were defensive about the image of “backward” people, “lower-­class customs,” and “shabby places” shown in the film. Others, however, saw the film as an indictment of the sharia law in action in Iran. The film succeeds in fulfilling its chief goals, namely, “to challenge the simplistic ideas of Iran as a country of fanatics and of Muslim women as helpless victims without any agency” (Mir-­Hosseini 2002:192). The most interesting, novel, ambitious, and well-­documented outreach screening of Divorce Iranian Style was that organized in September 2005 by Shashat (meaning “screens”), a registered ngo in Ramallah, Palestine, whose focus was on “women’s cinema and the social and cultural implications of women’s representations.” 45 Shashat planned an ambitious Women’s Film Festival, which screened this film (subtitled in Arabic) in twenty-­four different locations inside and outside Ramallah, Nablus, and Bethlehem with a lawyer present at each site who led a discussion with viewers about the film and the issues it raised regarding gender inequity, family protection laws, and sharia. The screenings took place in theaters, universities, schools, and cultural and peace centers in various cities, villages, and refugee camps. Alia Arasoughly, the director general of Shashat, said to me that the film festival touring structure fulfilled an important mission of her organization, to reach with film the populations that lie “outside the cultural elite centers of Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem,” adding, “we have gone now into over one hundred villages and refugee camps and shown films. In Gaza, people showed our films on electric 154

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generators. We are surprised by how people feel it is such a treat to watch a film in these areas. It is a big occasion!” (Naficy 2006a). Arasoughly prepared a detailed report about the screenings—­ another unique aspect of this project—­summarizing the project’s implementation and the postscreening discussions, which offers insight into the reception of Divorce Iranian Style outside Iran but within a primarily Muslim society. Among other findings, the report declared the film effective in showing the diversity of Islam in different communities through sharia laws and the civic family laws based on them, highlighting powerfully for audiences the interpretability of Islamic laws, rather than their rigidity, which is the common view, even among Muslims. It challenged Western ideas, endorsed even by activist Arab and Iranian women, that “veiled women are victims who do not know or fight for their rights, . . . that if a Muslim woman is veiled then she has no character or personality” (Arasoughly 2006). Divorce Iranian Style was a good example of an institutional documentary in the tradition established by the great American direct-­cinema filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, focusing entirely on a family court as a key institution of inculcating the values of the Islamic Republic. Only with such transnational and insightful documentaries, which maintain both appropriate distance for objectivity and proper subjectivity and intimacy for insight, can Iranians and their collaborators succeed in taking charge of their own mediawork and representations without the kinds of defensiveness, self-­pity, maudlin sentimentality, or false national pride that dogged their reaction to foreign representations of them throughout the century of cinema. Mir-­Hosseini and Longinotto’s subsequent collaboration on Runaway (2002) focused on a women’s shelter in Tehran for runaway girls, one as young as twelve. Their critique of the patriarchal system in which male family members —­fathers, stepfathers, and brothers—­autocratically rule over the lives of young girls is accurate and compassionate. So is their sensitive portrayal of the girls’ desperate attempts to escape, the joy and camaraderie they find in the shelter and in each other’s company, and the uncertain and miserable future that may await them. However, Runaway is less successful than Divorce Iranian Style mainly because its main characters are less interesting and less honest. Mahbubeh Honarian also made a film about three runaway girls. Called Playing with Life (Bazi ba Zendegi, 2000), the film uses the camera as a good observer, as it not only listens to what the girls say but also lingers when they do not say anything, creating very telling moments. As the filmmaker and critic Pirooz Kalantari noted, the film was made at a time when dealing with such topics required courage (2004/1382:54). Delaram Karkhairan produced, directed, and edited her one-­woman documentary Hell, but Cold (Duzakh, Amma Sard, 2000), about the tawdry side of young peoples’ lives. This fifty-­four-­minute film gazes unblinkingly at the nighttime walking and street life of youth involved in prostitution, drug use, Women’s Ci nema

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child sexual abuse, gambling, and even attempted suicide. The filmmaker shot much of the film clandestinely at considerable risk. Parisa Shahandeh’s disturbing, twenty-­eight-­minute digital documentary, Maryam’s Sin (Gonah-­e Maryam, 2003), centers on a rarely discussed topic: the tradition in certain parts of Iran of honor killing. It deals with the story of a seven-­year-­old girl, Maryam, murdered, her throat cut, by her father because her uncle (the father’s brother-­in-­ law) had raped her. Interviews with the father, the victim’s younger brother and sister, and her mother and grandmother are painfully revealing of this despicable tradition. Because of the tight linkage of documentaries with social reality and the social criticism that they often contain many documentarists and their films became targets of government reaction. Mahnaz Mohammadi, 37, a social issue documentarian and women’s rights activist, was arrested in June 2011 in Tehran by unidentified security officers who “refused to show a warrant for her arrest” and took her to Evin prison (Dehghan 2011b). She had been arrested twice before for her political activities. In 2007, she was arrested with thirty-­t wo other women’s rights activists while protesting the trial of five of her fellow women’s rights activists in front of a Tehran court. Mohammadi was also arrested in 2009 at Behesht-­e Zahra cemetery as she was laying a wreath on the grave of Neda Agha-­Soltan, the young woman who was killed by a sniper during the crackdowns on protests against the reelection of Ahmadinejad (filmmaker Jafar Panahi and documentarian Rokhsareh Qaemmaqami were also arrested). Mohammadi had directed several films including the short Women without Shadows (2003), about homeless and abandoned women inside a state-­r un shelter, and The Soul’s Children (2004), which was banned. She also had made Travel­ ogue (2006), about the massive emigration of Iranians to foreign lands. It shows a train that departs Tehran for Istanbul, Turkey, every Thursday full of passengers, but returns home nearly empty. In addition to this major social issue, the film dealt with the contradictions of Iran’s modern society and its ban of homosexuality. After her most recent arrest, Mohammadi was banned from traveling and her passport seized, preventing her from attending Cannes International Film Festival in 2011 where Reza Serkanian’s fiction movie Temporary Marriage (aka Ephemeral Wedding, 2011), in which she was the lead actress, was being screened. She sent a message to the organizers, starkly stating “I am a woman, I am a filmmaker, two sufficient reasons to be guilty in this country.” 46 Amnesty International issued a statement, correctly stating that “Documentary makers are in direct contact with the society and show what’s out there, sometimes negative, sometimes positive, but in Iran, where the regime thinks it has the right to intrude in all aspects of the citizens’ lives, everything is politicised, and the work of film-­makers can be interpreted as a threat to the so-­called national security” (Dehghan 2011b). Increasingly, the Internet has connected Iranian women within the country and in the diaspora. The Organizing Committee for the International Wom156

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en’s Day in Iran produced in 2007 Stop Women’s Oppression! (Setam-­e bar Zan ­Moquf! ), a rap music video posted on the Internet, which condemns the forced veiling of women in Iran and urges women to join in 8 March (17 Esfand) Women’s Day events and protests.47 A sustained example is offered below in the case study of the career of the foremost Iranian woman director, Rakhshan Banietemad. It demonstrates both the evolution of the poetics and politics of veiling and the range of topics in women’s cinema as inscribed in the works of a director who made both fiction and nonfiction films throughout the four phases.

The Evolution of the Aesthetics of Modesty: Rakhshan Banietemad’s Movies Born in 1954 in Tehran, Banietemad graduated from the College of Dramatic Arts in 1979, just before the purification process—­“Islamic cultural revolution”—­ shut down the universities, and began working as a set designer for the vvir. For the following six years she directed television documentaries and worked as an assistant director on feature films.48 Her first feature film, Off the Limit (Kharej az Mahdudeh, 1987), set the pattern for her social concerns and her social realist style. In it a young middle-­ class couple discovers that their newly acquired house is located in a district that has accidentally been omitted from city zoning maps and is thus not subject to the jurisdiction or protection of any legal or police authority. Thieves and robbers have a field day in this neighborhood called “Chaos City” (Her­ tabad), forcing the frustrated residents to move toward self-­determination: enforcing the laws themselves, capturing the thieves, and reforming them in a makeshift penitentiary. The name of the city is subsequently changed to “New City” (Nowabad). Although the film is a biting social satire that criticizes chaotic postrevolutionary social conditions, which the film labels as belonging to 1972 to avoid censorship, it reproduces the dominant view of women under the Islamic Republic. Paralleling the phase-­two representations of women, Off the Limit portrays the traditional wife uncritically. She is dressed in a chador and scarf inside the home and is so cloistered that her husband does the daily shopping. American and Iranian audiences abroad expressed surprise that the film’s director was a woman. The film is bolder in the political solution it offers to the community’s dilemma of invisibility: take charge, restore order, patrol your own boundaries, and punish and imprison criminals. Ultimately, however, the zealotry of this new order is no less problematic than the lawlessness of the previous one. The wife, Rana (Parvaneh Masumi), is not only confined to her house’s four walls but also deprived of an avenue of women’s expression, poetry recitation. This is evident in a meal scene in which Halimi (Mehdi Hashemi), her husWomen’s Ci nema

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band, recites a famous love ballad by Hafiz to her, as though expressing his own feelings. Such quotations of famous dead poets in postrevolutionary movies are part of the classicist and conservative tendencies of the Iranian arts. In her later, phase-­three movie The May Lady, Banietemad presents a more modern subjectivity in which the male and female characters both quote poetry to each other, some of it apparently their own. The aesthetics of veiling governing films in phase one affect Off the Limit’s mise-­en-­scène and filming. Boundary-­marking features such as fences, walls, and columns constantly obstruct vision. Long tracking shots with these obstacles in the foreground highlight them as visual barriers and as metaphors for modesty. In one of the early shots, before the residents of Chaos City have real­ ized their zoning problem, the camera looks down from above the walls of a house into the adjacent street. In the background, the husband is walking down the street, alongside a wall. In the foreground, a fence made of barbed wire and dry bushes on top of the wall partially obstructs the view of the street below. Toward the film’s end, after the community has taken up the enforcement of the laws, a similarly composed shot is shown, but with a major difference. The foreground is no longer a decrepit fence but a row of beautiful flowers in full bloom, signaling the transformation from Chaos City to New City. The director’s activist vision that beauty and prosperity require political will and independent action is made visible in the barrier that conceals vision. That which veils also unveils. In her next film, Canary Yellow (Zard-­e Qanari, 1989), made in phase two, Banietemad concentrates on the women of a family. The mother in particular is strong, mature, and levelheaded, ruling through the force of her personality and acumen the men who are naive, unscrupulous, or weak. Despite such a strong representation of women, the film’s moral center is a man, who defiantly demonstrates that virtue overpowers vice. This ambivalent configuration of female-­male power relations points to the internal tug-­of-­war in Banietemad’s works between liberalism and conservatism. In Nargess (1991), her groundbreaking film noir that brought her international attention, she continues to focus on the lives of ordinary—­even marginal—­people and transgresses by examining a love triangle involving two women and a man. The film is about a male thief, Adel (Abolfazl Purarab), his first wife and partner in crime, Afagh (Farima Farjami), and his young cowife-­to-­be, Nargess (Atefeh Razavi), who wants him to stop his wayward ways. Casting a woman as an expert thief was something new, pushing casting boundaries. The film also pushed the boundaries of what was permissible in terms of direct eye contact, particularly in the exchanges of desiring gazes between Adel and Nargess. While these features place the film in phase three, the love triangle itself is not as radical as it seems, for polygamy is a traditional practice that the Islamic Republic had revived. This pushes the film into phase two. Banietemad recuperates this practice in the interest of romance, demonstrating again her political balancing act.49 158

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In Nargess, the director employs a mediating object to avoid male-­female touching. In the final sequence, a deadly struggle occurs in the middle of a busy street between Adel and his older cowife over love, jealousy, and money. It is staged so that they wrestle with a bag of money between them, without ever touching each other. Finally, Afagh is hurled across the road and under a fast-­ moving truck, leaving Adel and Nargess, who has been looking on, shocked and grief-­stricken. Banietemad won the first prize in the 1991 Fajr festival for directing Nargess, the first woman to garner the award for a feature film. This recognition corroborated her status not as a woman filmmaker but as a top Iranian filmmaker. In her subsequent movie, The Blue Veiled (Rusari-­ye Abi, 1994), she continued her social-­realist orientation. A proud young peasant woman, Nobar (Fatemeh Motamed Arya), who wears a blue scarf, and an aging owner of a tomato plantation, Rasul (Ezzatollah Entezami), love each other across age and class barriers. They express their secret love in ways that defy social norms and make for an uncertain future. The latter is symbolized in the film’s last shot, a high-­ angle overhead long shot, which shows the lovers walking toward each other on a road, when suddenly a passing freight train splits the frame, separating the two. Spectators are left to surmise whether the two will have a joint future. The modesty rules, which forced directors to continually devise new, ingenious, and sometimes distorted ways of implying heterosexual desires and relations, are everywhere at play in the movie. To suggest that the lovers, who never touch each other, have consummated their relationship, Banietemad employs a remarkably economic and beautiful single close-­up showing Nobar’s bare feet sticking out of her fancy, embroidered white skirt (implying a wedding dress), walking gracefully, rhythmically, and playfully on a richly designed Persian carpet to the tune of extradiegetic dance music. This single shot suggests wedding-­night lovemaking without breaking modesty rules. On other occasions, however, Banietemad does break the rules, which makes The Blue Veiled into a phase-­three product. For example, Nobar is shown as not passive in her body language or in her verbal language. She walks purposefully and assertively, fights for her rights, and in one scene she violates the rule of no physical contact between men and women by beating up her younger brother whom she catches stealing. In another scene, Banietemad resorts to the ploy of using a child as an adult substitute for evading modesty censors. One night, Rasul is affectionately telling a story to Nobar’s young daughter from a previous marriage, whose head is lying on his lap. While Rasul and Nobar’s daughter seem to have genuine affection for one another, this scene is a ruse, for the exchange of glances and smiles between Rasul and Nobar, who is watching this tender scene, strongly suggests that the daughter is a stand-­in for her mother who cannot touch her lover and lay her head on his lap. Banietemad’s next movie, The May Lady (Banu-­ye Ordibehesht, 1997), pushes the boundaries of modesty and tradition further by centering the story entirely Women’s Ci nema

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34 Instead of avoiding the veil like many directors, Banietemad naturalizes it in order to achieve realism in The May Lady. Forugh Kia (Minoo Farshchi) directs a film within a film. Frame enlargement.

on a female documentary film director who is a divorced single mother intent on pursuing her profession, on a liaison with a man to whom she is not married, and on raising her rebellious teenage boy who likes photography and partying. However, the film breaks more taboos than divorce, single motherhood, and unmarried relations. It expands the vocabulary and grammar of veiling in cinema by introducing fascinating mise-­en-­scène, filming, and narrative innovations, making it a fourth-­phase movie. One of these innovations is the way mise-­en-­scène and filming suggest unveiling. In one shot, the diegetic director, Foruq Kia (Minoo Farshchi), arrives home from a day’s hard work filming a documentary. In a medium shot, she walks through a hallway toward her bedroom. The camera pans with her as she walks briskly in that direction. As she gets close to the door, she reaches for her Islamic head scarf and lifts it in a gesture that signals its imminent removal. But just before the scarf is off, she disappears through the door, leaving the unmistakable impression of unveiling without actually having done it on camera. Unlike some male filmmakers, such as Mehrjui in his Leila, who by means of clever mise-­en-­scène and filming distracts spectators from the artificiality of the veil in private spaces, Banietemad ingeniously incorporates it in The May Lady as a natural part of the diegesis (figure 34). As Norma Claire Moruzzi correctly observes, this direct incorporation of veiling as “a cinematic issue may be the most effective way of establishing the film’s realism” (1998). The result is the intensified spectator identification with the diegetic female characters and the heightened naturalism of the movie. It took a woman to own up to the fact of the veil’s existence in cinema, thereby helping, on the one hand, to naturalize it and, on the other, to efface it. One of Banietemad’s narrative innovations is the way in which the male lover is simultaneously both effaced and inscribed in the film by means of a complex game of veiling and unveiling, as well as of voicing and unvoicing. He is visually absent from the entire film (like women were in phase-­one films), but he is simultaneously present throughout by means of telephone, letters, and voice-­over poetry. Using her cordless telephone, the diegetic director Foruq talks with her lover frequently and intimately (he is called Mr. Rahbar).50 They 160

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35 Poetry and epistolarity are vehicles of expressing love and of making present the male lover who is absent throughout the movie in The May Lady. Poster, from author’s collection.

also exchange letters and quote poetry to each other (Foruq’s name is a homage to the great poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad). While throughout these exchanges the woman is the primary speaking subject, from time to time the man’s voice is heard talking to her on the phone or reading his own flowery letters to her (figure 35). Sometimes Foruq’s voice tells of her feelings and thoughts about her son, her career, her films, and her lover. These first-­person musings are inserted in the middle of her phone conversations with her man, deepening the spectators’ access to her subjectivity as a modern woman. The lovers’ voices on the soundtrack reading letters and poems to each other and Foruq’s autobiographical voice-­over musings create a dense tapestry of free indirect discourse braided together by various voices and subjectivities. This is perhaps the first example of this discourse in Iranian feature films. These interweaving male and female voices symbolically substitute for physical contact. They become one vocally. This weaving of the two voices is reminiscent of the echoing and shadowing that take place in Iranian classical music, where a singer and a soloist improvise and call and respond to each other intimately and artfully. None of this would have been possible if the characters were shown together. Veiling rules do not govern vision and voice equally; by cleverly taking advantage of this discrepancy, voice contact more than replaces the missing eye contact between the lovers, which would have been constrained, deflected, and averted by unfulfilled desire and modesty rules. The filmmaker’s expressive use of sound turns the characters’ voices into acoustic Women’s Ci nema

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mirrors in whose grains the spectators recognize not only the lovers’ longing for each other but also our own desires as spectators for such intimacy in the taboo-­ridden cinema of the Islamic Republic. The absence of the male object of desire and female point-­of-­v iew filming and voicing have another felicitous outcome: the film forces the spectators to focus on female desire as such, regardless of its specific object—­and this is a very feminist and radical move in the restrictive Iranian social context. A comparison of The Blue Veiled and The May Lady demonstrates the plasticity of the hermeneutics of male-­female physical contact. It appears that physical contact in situations of violence is permissible, but not in moments of tenderness. In the former film, Nobar beats up her brother by slapping and punching him, while in the latter film, Foruq expresses her concern and love for her son (Mani Kasraian) by touching him only indirectly, through mediating cloths. In one scene she shows tenderness by drying his wet hair with a towel, while in another she caresses him through his covers when after a heated verbal fight he retreats to his bed. These gestures of physical expression may seem innocent and small, but they are significant and signifying in the context of modesty rules that prohibit public heterosexual physical contact. To be sure, the insistence in The May Lady on female representation (Foruq is the sole star), female subjectivity (Foruq’s visual and vocal viewpoints dominate), female autobiography (Foruq provides the film’s first-­person voice-­over narration), female enunciation and authorship (represented by both diegetic and extradiegetic directors—­Foruq and Rakhshan) overdetermines female subjectivity, female agency, and female modernity. At the same time, however, this insistence points to Banietemad’s anxiety about the uncertain and complicated social position of women in Iran, which stems from a burning desire to stake a claim on cinema but also from the profound fear that the ground underneath may shift and crumble. Perhaps it is this fear in Banietemad that drives Foruq to intervene in a dispute between her Westernized son and a young Islamist security agent, urging them to reconcile. In a private screening in Tehran for film critics that I attended, some of those present found fault with this episode. In its urging the two sides to reconcile they saw reactionary appeasement. Whatever the interpretation, it is Banietemad’s attempt to reconcile her own internal tug-­of-­war between rebellion and resignation, progressivism and conservatism, so constitutive of her style, that drives this episode. With each film Banietemad’s balancing act shifted a bit more toward the progressive and radical side, both stylistically and thematically. The May Lady intermingles nicely the two forms of filmmaking that Banietemad has practiced, documentary and fiction. As Foruq films and edits within The May Lady her documentary on “exemplary mothers,” snippets of the documentary are shown. Some of the women are actors playing ordinary women; others are prominent real-­life women (a lawyer, a publisher, a newspaper editor) talking about women’s social conditions. This documentary film within a fictional film functions 162

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in two ways: it embeds Banietemad’s usual concerns for society’s lower depths in the personal, fictional story of Foruq, and it gives The May Lady the self-­ reflexive style popular with art-­cinema directors. However, Banietemad goes beyond formulaic self-­reflexivity with the intertextual deployment, in this film, of the actors and characters of her previous movies. For example, Nargess appears as one of the women in Foruq’s documentary; except this time she is carrying a baby in her arms, updating her story from Nargess, in which she had no baby yet. This suggests that after the untimely demise of Afagh, Adel and Nargess stayed together and produced a child. Nargess further reveals that Adel is now in jail. Thus the stories of characters from a previous movie continue through their iteration in this scene. Tuba, a documentary subject in The May Lady, reappears in Banietemad’s fiction film Under the Skin of the City (­Zir-­e Pust-­e Shahr, 2000) to talk about her fictional son Abbas, thus intensifying Banie­te­mad’s intertextual self-­referentiality. Such a dense intertextuality of a director’s oeuvre and of documentary and fictional modes speaks to both Banie­ temad’s continued social concern and activism and her alternating between fiction films and nonfiction movies. There is another fascinating dynamic between the fictional and nonfictional forms in this film. The documentary segments are spatially open, often filmed in open, public spaces, and involving collective formations, while the fiction segments are spatially closed, often filmed indoors, in dark, claustrophobic places, and involving a single character, Foruq (and her immediate family). The documentary deals with women as social agents; the fictional film deals with woman as a modern individual with autonomous subjectivity. In this “womanist” film, the social role of women is seen through the viewpoint of a woman. The film’s last line, in which the lead character faces the camera and names the unnamed, herself, “I am Foruq,” is the triumph of woman over women, of the individual over the collective, of modernity over premodernity. Banietemad’s fiction movie Under the Skin of the City, about the hard life of a family headed by a female blue-­collar worker named Tuba (Golab Adineh), set during Khatami’s reformist presidency, is a work of phase four, filled with social criticism. Tuba is the family’s lynchpin, and she depends on the deed to her house, perhaps her bride gift, as an anchor for them in times of trouble. However, her disabled husband schemes behind her back with her oldest son, Abbas (Mohammad Reza Forutan), a gofer for a shady firm, who wishes to go to Japan for employment, to sell the house out from under her. Meanwhile, her oldest daughter, Hamideh (Homaira Riazi), is beaten by her own husband, who is frustrated by economic hardship, while her youngest son, Ali (Ebrahim Shaibani), and another daughter, Mahbubeh (Baran Kowsari), both independent-­minded teenagers, are active in the reform movement and in their dramas of individuation. Veiling and unveiling are overdetermined. The movie’s title invites the peeling away of surfaces to understand hidden truths, mobilizing the classic IraWomen’s Ci nema

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nian distrust of the external. Further, like Shahriar in Daughters of the Sun, Banietemad uses in Under the Skin of the City the strategy of disembodied hair to show in close-­up Tuba’s long, flowing wet hair after her bath, as it is being dried over a heater. Her body remains offscreen, thereby authorizing the display of her hair. What may be an inviting scene of intimacy is foreclosed, however, when Tuba rejects her husband’s advances. Although she is not the young beauty of the film, she is its moral center—­simultaneously the aging, sickly factory worker, the mother, the neighbor, and the wife—­who is learning to read from her teenage son. The film tracks her decline into poverty and her defiance. As Jennifer Fey notes, what Banietemad makes us want to see of the woman beneath the veil is “less woman as a sexual body and more as an evidentiary body.” 51 Even the bodies of the younger women are presented primarily for evidentiary purposes, to demonstrate the scars of men’s brutality. When Hamideh takes refuge in her mother’s house to escape her husband’s beating, Tuba tries as before to reconcile her with her husband, since she sees no other option. On the other hand, Abbas, whose male honor is injured by this insult to his sister, insists on seeing her face for the evidence of her husband’s brutality, so he can avenge her. Much of Hamideh’s visit is thus spent on her revealing both her shame and the evidence of violence on her beat-­up face and blackened eyes to her family and, in long shot, to spectators. In another case, the horrible cries of the neighbor’s daughter Masumeh, Mahbubeh’s close friend, are heard offscreen, providing aural evidence for the beating she is receiving from her brother because of some unchaste behavior. The visual evidence of the beating is later confirmed, but the hurt and disfigurement is substantial enough for her to run away from home. The strategy of the authorized breaking of modesty rules in situations of anger and violence, used in The Blue Veiled, is invoked here again, as Mahbubeh, incensed at what her friend’s brother had done to her, walks up to him and slaps his face so hard that he is thrown to the ground. In Under the Skin of the City, rage is not genderized; it is a sentiment open to all. Significantly, Tuba works in a textile factory, where fabrics are made that will be turned into chadors and scarves to cover women’s bodies and hair. Abbas, too, delivers materials to a tailor who makes wedding gowns, white gowns that are smuggled into a truck and in the film’s tragic finale are thrown out of it into the desolate winds of the dark highway. Thus, as Fey notes, “covering and veiling begins to describe not only the cycle of interpersonal relations, but also an entire economy centered on the woman’s labor and body.” However, the men are not shown only as brutes, as some directors such as Milani in Two Women did, for they, too, are under a great deal of pressure, which pushes them into violent and abusive directions authorized by Islamicate values. The men in Banietemad’s films are not emboldened by such authorization, for they lash out at their women not so much out of strength but out of weakness and a sense of emasculation brought on by unemployment, poverty, 164

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addiction, and an unjust economic and political system. In her Gilaneh (2005) Banietemad dealt with the plight of women during the war with Iraq, keeping the focus not only on major social problems—­war’s toll on women and their families—­but also on the cities, and in her Mainline (Khunbazi, 2006), she concentrated on another major social problem, drug addiction. Banietemad also made important documentaries about social issues. Her notable documentaries are essentially “city films,” beginning with The Culture of Consumption (Farhang-­e Masrafi, 1979) and The Occupations of Migrant Peasants in the City (Eshteghal-­e Mohajerin-­e Rustai dar Shahr, 1980), and continuing with Concentration (Tamarkoz, 1982), made for the vvir’s First Channel Network, which examined the inadequacy of public health services in Tehran due to the increasing concentration of internal migrants from the countryside. This is a straightforward television news documentary containing interviews with residents that are buttressed by evidentiary footage. She subsequently made a trilogy on housing problems and poverty in the town of Fatemiyeh, a district of Tehran, which surpassed simple reportage, achieving the status of investigative protest journalism, worthy of a brief discussion. In the spring of 1992, Banietemad was hired by the Tehran municipality, and eventually was aided by the Farabi Cinema Foundation, to document an urban renewal project in Fatemiyeh, an area that housed about 450,000 residents living in terrible conditions. Her feature about housing problems, Off the Limit, may have had something to do with her landing this commission. The residents included honest, respectable people who were priced out of housing elsewhere and had to tolerate living in Fatemiyeh side by side with thieves, prostitutes, and criminals who used the town more for their criminal activities than for their residence (Qukasian 1999/1378:153). People had lived there in “temporary” housing for thirteen years, turning the place into a teeming black hole. The first film, The ’92 Report (Gozaresh- ­e ’71, 1992), focuses on the prevailing conditions in Fatemiyeh, with a bold camera that goes everywhere. Spring to Spring (Bahar Ta Bahar, 1992–93) covers life in the town, the evacuation of its residents, and preparation of the area for a park and a cultural center. The piece de resistance of the trilogy, To Whom Will You Show These Films? (In Filmharo beh ki Neshun Midin?, 1992–93), is a searing investigative documentary on the lives of Fatemiyeh residents before the urban renewal, which Banietemad made in collaboration with the documentarists Manuchehr Moshiri and Pirooz Kalantari. Here, the handheld camera, guided by the director who is either in the frame or heard off-­frame, is inquisitive, entering houses, stopping people on the streets, and asking questions, mostly of women. The director’s own voice-­over, as in Our Times (Ruzegar-­e Ma, 2002), supplies background information and comments on what she sees, thus enriching the harrowing visuals: families live in small, crammed spaces separated from each other only by curtains; one family lives in a tent on the sidewalk; another, consisting of twelve members, lives in a public bathroom no longer in use; sewage runs into Women’s Ci nema

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a public stream from another. The fact that the interlocutor, Banietemad, is a woman often breaks the ice. Women open up, invite her and the cameraman in, shake hands with her, offer her tea, and talk to her frankly, as though with a friend. The cameraman, Moshiri, follows etiquette by taking his shoes off as he enters a room filming. As it turns out, many women are addicted, as are their husbands. One woman’s children pimp for her. Another woman, who claims she was a housekeeper for foreigners, says she was formerly “beautiful” like a “foreign bride.” Ali’s mother shows the marks on her body of the beatings by her deranged son. The film shows the evacuation of some residents to a new development, but the dark, dank, snowy climate dampens their spirits. Ali’s mother is among those moved, but she continues to complain while weeping about the beatings she has received from her son. The film follows the transformations in the lives of several women as they improve, worsen, or die, concluding by stating, “The story of Fatemiyeh shantytown is over, but not that of its residents.” The filmmakers cut down thirty hours of 16mm and vhs video footage into a ninety-­two-­minute film. The film was commissioned by Tehran’s municipality, filmed mostly on nonprofessional formats, and produced by a private, independent production company, Did-­e No, instead of by a government agency (Kalantari 2004/1382:38). As Banietemad told me in an interview, she showed it to the reformist mayor of Tehran, Gholamhosain Karbaschi, who was “very affected by it.” However, some of the visuals and some of the things that the women said in the film were so controversial that To Whom Will You Show These Films? was not broadcast or publicly screened anywhere (Naficy 1998a). Banietemad’s thirty-­five-­minute film Under the Skin of the City is an elegant documentary on youth addiction that obscured the identity of its subjects visually. However, indicative of the rise of direct speech in cinema, it contains highly revealing interviews and telephone conversations with them. As much as the voices are intimate and revealing, the images veil and hide their socially disgraced subjects. Banietemad’s biography of an eighty-­year-­old actress, Last Visit with Iran Daftari (Akharin Didar ba Iran-­e Daftari, 1995), is not only an affectionate homage to the famed theater and movie actor, containing her last interviews, but also reveals telling anecdotes about the social mistreatment of women entertainers. Daftari recounts how during her youth female actors were called “lewd and immodest” (nanajib), and how she began as an actor for women-­only audiences, sometimes playing male and female parts, such as both Khosrow and Shirin in the famous love story. Last Visit with Iran Daftari was not released because it contained images of Pahlavi-­era entertainers who were banned. By the time Ahmadinejad’s retrenchment era kicked into gear, as the state took a hardline position against political reformers, alternative thinkers, and dissident filmmakers, Banietemad’s balancing act had shifted entirely toward progressive and radical causes. She became a leading figure in publicly countering government actions against artists and filmmakers, issuing declara166

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tions and calls for action, and demanding freedom for imprisoned filmmakers. Her documentary on the 2009 election, We Are Half of Iran’s Population (Ma Nimi az Jamiat-­e Iranim, 2009), was a probing work, documenting the emergence of wives of presidential candidates into the public sphere. In the aftermath of the disputed election some of the candidates shown in the film, such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, became prisoners of the state. From the third phase onward, despite the continued oppression of women and draconian censorship, other filmmakers—­ male and female—­ defiantly pushed the boundaries of what was permissible with each of their films. The foregoing provides a case study of one filmmaker throughout the four phases. Not all women directors similarly or equally abided by and resisted the regulations. Tahmineh Rezai Milani fought them more head-­on. In addition, unlike Banietemad, she basked in being called a “feminist” or “militant” filmmaker, and both her personal style and her films were more ideological and brash than those of her colleague. Her later two movies, Two Women and The Hidden Half (Nimeh-­ye Penhan, 2001), by far her best works up to then, were controversial, one of them landing her in jail. Called an Iranian “feminist” film, Two Women centered on the friendship between two architecture students of different class backgrounds during the early days of revolution, who represent actual and potential situations of women. Born in 1960 in Tabriz, Milani studied architecture and practiced in a firm before turning to filmmaking, encouraging an autobiographical reading of the film (although she claims the screenplay is based on the experience of a friend). The film critiques the way love, marriage, and homemaking can become women’s prison, while offering them some security. The upper-­class Roya (Marila Zare’i) manages to finish university, marries the man she loves, and begins work in an architectural firm (echoing Milani’s life). Fereshteh (Niki Karimi), on the other hand, does not finish school and is harassed by a young man, Hasan (Mohammad Reza Forutan), who professes his love to her, stalks her, and threatens to throw acid into her face if she refuses him. While the revolution is unfolding, the two friends draw closer, but Fereshteh continues to fight the unwanted advances of Hasan, which lands both of them in jail due to traffic accidents. When later Fereshteh’s husband finds out about the stalker, he becomes jealous, imprisoning his wife in her own house (figure 36). The film is dismissive of men—­who are stereotyped as entirely boorish and oppressive—­but valorizes female friendship and solidarity as a source of solace and feminist power, a strategy initially undervalued in Iran. While Milani’s critique of the unfair and unequal structures of gendered relations is on target, her binary treatment of women and men is reductive, resulting in male caricatures and female dialogues that devolve into antimale polemi­ cal sloganeering. Milani’s searing portrayal of men’s violence and oppression of women was controversial, as was her depiction of the multiple forces (not just the Islamists) involved in the revolution and her critical stance toward the Islamic cultural revolution that followed, particularly its effect on women and Women’s Ci nema

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36 Violent and abusive men in Milani’s Two Women. Publicity photo.

universities. She explained her reaction to the latter on her website: “At the beginning of April 1980, after a few days of continuous resistance by the students of different parties, and after some of them had been injured and killed, the universities were shut down again. It is my belief that after the universities were shut down our generation became a miserable generation, a generation which underwent all kinds of experiences like laboratory mice.” 52 Milani’s The Hidden Half, about the turbulent political past of the wife of a senior judge, was even more controversial. A wife (Niki Karimi) reveals a secret life to her husband (Atila Pesiani) in a letter. She had been a communist sympathizer and involved with an older intellectual before her marriage. Crediting the involvement of secular forces in the revolution countered the Islamist version, and acknowledging female sexual desires undermined Islamicate values. Thus the film can be considered a fourth-­phase one, making direct social criticism. Before its release, Milani told Holly Morris of Adventure Divas (an independent film company whose films about activist women were aired by pbs in the United States), that while she was making the movie, during Khatami’s reformist presidency, she was worried, “just as I’m a little nervous now that it is about to go on screen.” On the “first night of the filming, 15 publications were shut down, and this really depleted our energy and psychologically affected me.” 53 Even though she had received license to shoot, her worries were justified, for some of the juries of the Fajr International Film Festival were so disturbed by her film that they left the screening and apparently threatened her. According to Milani, her film was “severely boycotted,” as it was not nominated for any awards in any category.54 Soon after its release, Tehran’s Revolutionary Court arrested her in August 2001 and charged her with “acting against national security,” “denying God,” “promoting anti-­Islamic ideas under the guise of art,” and “campaigning in support of counterrevolutionary and mohareb exile groups [those waging war against God].” Mohareb is a code word for non-­Islamist political groups, often derisively called “grouplets,” whose contributions to the revolution Milani has asserted and the regime has consistently minimized. In an 168

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interview with Journeyman Pictures, Milani states that with these four charges she was essentially condemned to “four death sentences.” 55 Her imprisonment and possible death caused great controversy. In Iran, Khatami’s government came to her aid by urging her release on bail, and internationally, NGOs clamored for her freedom. Amnesty International, for example, called her “a prisoner of conscience” and urged people to write letters of protest to the Supreme Leader, the president, and the head of the judiciary in Iran. It provided their addresses to facilitate the letter-­w riting campaign.56 Facets Multimedia, an independent media organization in Chicago and a major distributor of world cinema, spearheaded an impressive petition drive to free her, for which it collected hundreds of signatures from directors, writers, critics, artists, and personalities of the world (by the end of 2001, more than fifteen hundred signatures had been collected).57 After spending a week in jail, Milani was released on bail, pending a trial, and her film was rereleased. Surprisingly, in late 2001 she was able to travel to Egypt and the United States for film screenings. Her brief imprisonment directly fed into her next controversial film, Payback (Tasvieh Hesab, 2010), about four imprisoned women who form a vigilante gang after their release to take physical revenge on their spineless men. Like Banietemad, Milani evolved with each film and now considers it vital for women to stop covering and covering up their feelings, both in their homes and in society at large. In the statement reprinted below she urges women to start speaking up even though there may be a high price for it, reconfirming the message of her film The Hidden Half. The issue is that our women don’t talk at all about themselves, their demands, their ideologies and their thoughts. .  .  . By making that movie [The Hidden Half ], we tell all of them that as long as you remain silent and don’t say anything your problems will remain. Speak and pay the price for it, for it may transform and change your life. . . . One of the most important problems that we are faced with in Iran’s society is that we are unable to express our true personality. . . . For both men and women, their lives inside their homes where it is private is one way and outside of their homes where they have to observe social regulations it is another way. . . . Our women also have two faces inside their homes: the image of what their spouses or their spouses’ families want them to have, and what is inside them.58 Like all experienced directors Milani has learned to behave, she has learned how to negotiate her two faces; she has learned where and when to remain silent at the same time that she has kept pushing the boundaries of what is permissible to see and to say. This is a fine balance, however, with a price tag, as she is aware, “During these 23 years that have passed since the revolution, we have slowly learned what to make and what not to mention and in a way, we have automatically censored ourselves” (Ibid.). Women’s Ci nema

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The harsh treatment of women in the film industry continued despite the overall cultural liberalization under Khatami. For example, in May 2001, the bbc, quoting Entekhab newspaper in Iran, reported that a woman had been stoned to death in Tehran’s Evin Prison, as a “punishment for producing and acting in pornographic films.” The unnamed woman, who had denied the charges, was buried up to her armpits and then stoned by court officers.59

Generational Evolution Women’s involvement in filmmaking is already well into its third postrevolutionary generation. Banietemad belongs to the first generation, whose members were adults at the time of the revolution in 1978–79. Milani belongs to the second generation, which came of age during that upheaval (when Milani was eighteen), and Samira Makhmalbaf, born a year before the revolution (1977), belongs to the third generation. The social concerns and filmic approaches of each of these three filmmakers are both individual and simultaneously emblematic of their respective generations. What kept Banietemad evolving, and not mired in her own generation’s concerns, was partly her own inquisitive personality, her concern with a truthful exploration of her society, and the fact that she had a teenage daughter, Baran, involved in politics and in progressive film and theater, who kept her mother engaged in the young peoples’ issues. Milani strove to keep the memory of what happened during the uprising and the revolution and its aftermath alive against the victorious Islamist factions’ attempts at revisionist historiography. If Milani evolved by maintaining a vertical, diachronic relationship to her society and its history, Makhmalbaf grew by exploring the horizontal, synchronic issues of her society and the larger Persianate cultures in neighboring countries. Her movie about the Kurds, The Blackboard (Takhteh Siah, 2000), and her three films about the Afghans—­God, Construction, Destruction (part of the omnibus film 11’09’’01—­September 11, 2002), At Five in the Afternoon (Panj-­e Asr, 2003), and Two-­Legged Horse (Asb-­e Do Pa, 2008)—­demonstrate this synchronicity and horizontality. These and other films propelled her into international film festival circuits. Milani’s assessment both of the younger generation’s state of “confusion” today and of her own generation as the shipwrecked hanging onto driftwood is not far from reality, particularly for those who have been shut out of the avenues of expression and power: Our kids today don’t know themselves, don’t know their parents, have lost their dreams and are confused. At some places, this confusion has led to arguing and face-­to-­face fighting with their family and society. They even harm themselves, they take refuge in drugs and extreme parties and yes, it can be said that maybe our society is going through a very difficult and 170

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critical phase. My generation was like a ship: all those of my generation were passengers on a ship and we were traveling on the ocean and we had an objective and it was clear where we were going. But all of a sudden they exploded a bomb under this ship and destroyed it. Some died and some found a piece of driftwood and swam.60 In addition to filmmakers like Banietemad and Milani, artists, photographers, poets, anthropologists, journalists, and cultural critics portrayed this shipwrecked life, producing works on the social formations, psychology, and aspirations of the third generation (see Mahdavi 2009; Varzi 2006; Khosravi 2003; Minoui 2001). Women were not alone, as male directors also struggled to bring complex women into representation. Baizai, Mehrjui, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Asghar Farhadi cast women as strong protagonists and explored gender roles in society. While all women directors cast women in key roles, not all male directors did so. This latter group included even some prominent ones, such as Kiaros­ tami, whose film world was until recently without female protagonists. After being criticized for creating a “masculinist cinema,” he cast two daring women as leads in his quietly operatic Ten, which the British film critic Geoff Andrew called “a masterpiece” (2005:79), followed by Shirin (2008) and Certified Copy (Copie Conformé, 2010), also near masterpieces centering on women. Finally, a new generation of women directors of Iranian descent began working outside the geographical borders of Iran. My research on this Iranian “accented cinema” in 2001 showed that of 264 directors of all film types and formats working in the diaspora 69 (26 percent) are women. Significantly, feature movies were among the least-­produced format by women (and men) in the diaspora, because of the complexity and expense of the format. An overwhelming majority of women’s accented films are experimental films, documentaries, and shorts. The experimental films, which include video art and video installations, made a greater mark internationally, especially with the proliferating works of Neshat and Ghazel, both of whom inscribed the veil prominently and controversially. Interestingly, several returned home to make films and a few of those who normally work at home made films abroad for home or global consumption. This crossing of geographical and national boundaries—­which is also occurring with male filmmakers—­is part of the globalization of culture and cinema, including those of Iranians. That this globalization encompasses more than cinema is borne out by more than a dozen books that Iranian women have written in recent years abroad, mostly nonfiction, about their transcultural experiences of otherness and accommodation, some of them best-­sellers, as well as by major theatrical productions, musical performances, and art exhibitions staged in world capitals of art and culture. The veil has become a highly controversial and semiotic element in the works of Iranians abroad, not only in cinema and video but also in the visual arts and in advertising. Women’s Ci nema

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37 Like the movies and movie posters immediately after the 1978–79 Revolution, the bare body parts of female models displaying lingerie were censored with black markers on the lingerie packages on display in a Tehran shopping mall in Tajrish in 2006. From “What I Saw in Tajrish,” a photo essay by “Looker,” posted on 19 November 2006 by Iranian. com: http://www.iranian.com/ Travelers/2006/November/ Tajrish/3.html. Courtesy of Jahanshah Javid of Iranian.com.

The social rules of modesty, the Islamization of culture, cinema, and the film industry, and the filmic aesthetics of veiling and looking served to represent women as modest and chaste, preventing them from becoming sexual fetishes. Yet these representations also replicated the dominant-­subordinate relations of power between men and women in the society at large. Laura Mulvey once declared that, “the unconscious [formed by the dominant order] structures ways of seeing and structures of looking” (1989:25). However, as shown in this chapter, the ways of looking and seeing that the dominant patriarchal and Islamist ethos engendered in Iran were very complex and contradictory: at the same time that they oppressed women, they empowered them. To be sure, the veil and its politics and poetics were a serious imposition and a constraint on women. However, they also served to politicize women by heightening their awareness of other forms of social, religious, and patriarchal repression, helping them to focus their creativity. This veil-­driven politicization complemented their earlier politicization, which their significant participation in the revolution had brought about. The incorporation of modesty at all levels of the motion-­picture industry and of cinematic texts decoupled the previously direct discursive links presumed among the cinema, women, corruption, and pornography. Thus “purified,” the film industry became open to women as a proper profession so long as Islamicate values were observed. Thus there was a trade-­off for the imposition 172

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of the veil, which was that once veiled, ordinary women could appear in the public sphere legitimately and forcefully, where they could engage in professions usually reserved for men. Cinema became the beneficiary of this double-­edged sword. For that reason, while the social and professional roles of women in the film industry became clearer and more forceful, their screen images continued to be fraught with ideological tensions, resulting in censorship of various sorts. These tensions were also on display in the commerce and art of Iranians, not only inside the country but also outside, where additional exilic strains were brought to bear on them (figure 37). While many women directors avoided these tensions, ambiguities, and anxieties by adopting an entirely male and Muslim point of view, an increasing number met these challenges head-­on, creating powerful counterhegemonic documentaries and fiction movies that critiqued the tenets both of the state and of cinema.

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3 A ll Certa in ties Melt in to T hin Air Art-House Cinema, a “Postal” Cinema

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ranian art (or art-­house) cinema deeply impressed Western critics and audiences; there are many reasons for this, some internal and others external. The move from being a corrupting imperialist enterprise to an indigenous industry was a major one. Yet the reorganization and modernization of industry infrastructure; the de facto banning of film imports, particularly those from Hollywood, which could clobber the domestic productions; government financing, production, and wide-­ranging censorship; the rehabilitation of veteran Pahlavi-­era new-­wave directors; and the new cadre of postrevolutionary filmmakers, including women and ethnic directors, were other reasons for the high quality of the films and the new respect. The state’s involvement intensified for a time after the revolution to the point of a de facto takeover of all means of film production and distribution, but privatization muscled in, as did independent filmmakers. The small and humanist topics and the often deceptively simple but innovative styles with which these were treated offered additional reasons for the high quality of and enthusiastic reactions to the art-­house films. Art cinema films augured and celebrated modernity’s individuality, both in their authorship by auteur directors and in their diegeses, which centered on a few individuals and their subjectivities. These were characteristics of their origination. There were certain characteristics of their transnational reception that further contributed to their high recognition and regard. Their simple, quiet stories, told without the gloss and glamour of stars, special effects, violence, and chases—­their smallness—­offered a refreshing contrast to the blockbusters and high-­octane movies that dominated the world markets. Their humanism and smallness were doubly attractive as they seemed to offer a total contrast to

the dominant view abroad of the Islamic Republic, the originating country, as a hotbed of hostility, violence, intolerance, and terrorism. These multiple contrasts made Iranian art-­house films counterhegemonic politically, innovative stylistically, and ethnographically exotic. Arbiters of film culture and taste—­ influential film critics at major periodicals and tv stations, film curators and programmers at film festivals, museums, art galleries, and repertory cinemas, and university professors and students—­celebrated these films, critiqued them, programmed them, analyzed them, wrote about and taught them, and organized conferences about them, paving the way for their wider distribution and deeper penetration by video sale, commercial movie house exhibition, television transmission, cyberspace presence, and spectator reception. The Islamic Republic’s severe censoring and its periodic banning and imprisonment of the filmmakers—­as well as the way its policies and conduct were continually in the news for more than three decades, further whetted the curiosity and appetite for these films. Finally, the large and media-­savvy Iranian population in diaspora (sometimes estimated to be as high as 3 million), residing in major population centers of the world with large film and media industries, provided an enthusiastic and loyal secondary market that helped give these films additional legs. Art-­house cinema and experimental cinema are two of the ten types of films that emerged after the revolution, what may be called “postal cinema.” These films are politically postal, as most have been produced since the late 1980s, surfacing after cinema’s reinstitutionalization, after the Iraq war, and after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. In their humanism they can be regarded as part of a post-­Islamicate but nevertheless spiritual and ethical cinema. The prefix post-­, however, denotes not a complete political and aesthetic break but a movement out of a closed doctrinal milieu toward more expansive thematic and stylistic horizons. The art-­house and experimental cinemas are also “postal” in the way some films reject the exclusionary high culture, authoritarian certainties, and politicized aesthetics of modernism for the more nuanced, open, ambiguous, self-­reflexive, self-­inscriptional, intertextual, pluralist, playful, and humanist ethics and aesthetics of postmodernism. Finally, the art-­house films are postnational and postcinema, in that they exist both outside the originating nation and outside traditional movie houses: they live in transnational, international, and global mediascapes—­film festivals, commercial movie houses, art-­house venues, galleries, museums, television, video distribution, and cyberspace. This chapter deals with art-­house cinema, while experimental films are discussed primarily in the context of the accented films in chapter 5. Art-­house cinema’s emergence was facilitated by both veteran new-­wave filmmakers of the Pahlavi period who were “rehabilitated” in the mid-­1980s, such as Abbas Kiarostami, Amir Naderi, Bahram Baizai, Masud Kimiai, Naser Taqvai, Parviz Kimiavi, Dariush Mehrjui, Khosrow Sinai, Ali Hatami, and Bahman Farmanara, and by newly minted postrevolutionary cineastes such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Banietemad, Tahmineh Milani, Majid Majidi, 176

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Samira Makhmalbaf, Marziyeh Meshkini, Ebrahim Hatamikia, and by a coterie of young filmmakers schooled in Kiarostami’s cinema, such as Ebrahim Foruzesh, Jafar Panahi, Bahman Ghobadi, and Alireza Raisian. While the first group of veteran filmmakers was entirely male, the second was a mixture of female and male as well of Persian and ethnic directors. Because of their roots in secular cinema, even though in the Pahlavi era new-­wave movement, the Islamic regime initially considered the veteran directors, in the parlance of the hijab, “unrelated” (namahram) to the revolution and viewed them with suspicion. On the other hand, the emerging postrevolutionary talent was generally considered to be “related” (mahram), and thus trustworthy.1 “Rehabilitation” took several years and it was limited, for the veteran new-­wave directors were not trusted to cover the sacred defense, and the filmmakers themselves may not have wished to make such films. Those new-­wave directors who made films tangentially about the war, such as Baizai and Naderi, had their films banned as pacifist. It was left to the new cadre of postrevolutionary Islamist directors to make war movies. Both veteran and new directors who made art-­house films are considered auteurs because their vision and personality dominated the process from conception to completion, and because of certain recurring shared features. Key were a neorealist sort of realism, affirming a profilmic Iranian reality; a religiously inflected surrealism, offering a spiritual reality; and a self-­reflexive metarealism, offering a fresh postmodern vision of cinema. The latter two features problematized cinematic realism and modernist aesthetics in the service of rendering a truer, more nuanced, or more contingent take on reality. As a result, if the Pahlavi-­era new-­wave cinema was about realistically rendered subject matter, the art-­house cinema of the era of the Islamic Republic is about its subject matter and cinema itself, rendered metarealistically. Art-­house postcinema films also used what might be called the “short story paradigm.” According to M. H. Abrams, “The short story writer introduces a limited number of persons, cannot afford the space for a leisurely analysis and sustained development of character, and cannot develop as dense and detailed a social milieu as does the novelist. The author often begins the story close to, or even on the verge of, the climax, minimizes both prior exposition and the details of setting, keeps the complications down, and clears up the denouement quickly. . . . The central incident is often selected to manifest as much as possible of the protagonist’s life and character and the details are devised to carry maximum import for the development of the plot” (2005:296). Whether imposed by the exigencies of government censorship, by postrevolutionary limitations, by certain Iranian proclivities, by authorial preferences, by the global postmodernist zeitgeist, or by a combination of all these factors, this short story paradigm exhibits itself most prominently in the films of Kiarostami and his school. Although the art-­house cinema was initially state-­financed and state-supported, like the Pahlavi-­era new-­wave cinema, an increasing number of directors began to make their movies for the private sector, which grew in strength. Art- House Ci nema

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This turn to private-­sector financing, augmented by coproduction with foreign television and cinema concerns, was an important component of postmodernity and globalization. Art-­house directors set their sights on international spectators and box-­office earnings. Many wrote their own screenplays (Kia­rostami, Mehrjui, Baizai, Naderi, Majidi, Banietemad, Milani, and Makhmalbaf), several collaborated with writers on screenplays (Mehrjui, Banietemad), and a few edited their own films (Baizai, Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami), consolidating their authorial control. The art-­house directors’ interests in serious subjects, the limitations imposed by censorship, and the governmental funding of films led to what some critics dismissively characterized as “hothouse cinema” or “festival cinema” (sinema-­ye golkhanehi) (Tahaminejad 2001/1380:85; Sadr 2003/1381:261). The films nurtured in this atmosphere, so went the theory, were shielded from domestic market vagaries and presented as pretty bouquets at international film festivals. To the extent that government funding was instrumental in sustaining this cinema early on, this was true. However, to suggest that the films became ideologically compromised is erroneous, for many art cinema filmmakers, like their predecessors, managed to bite the hands that fed them in various manifest and latent ways. They retained a critical distance from both society and government. This critical edge, encoded in the films’ realism, surrealism, and metarealism, constitutes an important characteristic of this cinema. Government funding and censorship were constitutive both of auteur filmmaking and of art-­house cinema. As Andrew Sarris noted in his classic definition of auteur filmmaking, the interior meaning, which he called the “glory of cinema,” results from the tension between a director’s personality and her or his material and the impediments to its expression (2008). Because of the dominant impact of Kiarostami’s personality, films, and film style on domestic art cinema and its globalization, I present a case study of his style, and of one of his most important films, Close-­Up, which embodies many of the characteristics of postmodernist art-­house cinema. Art cinema under the Islamic Republic, like the Pahlavi-­era new-­wave cinema before it, in both of which Kiarostami participated, is heterogeneous, dynamic, and multifaceted. Neither Kiarostami nor his films fully embody or exhaust all its attributes. Other filmmakers of art cinema are thus discussed throughout.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Authorial and Stylistic Formation There are personal, historical, and institutional reasons for Kiarostami’s prominence and authorial style. His early biography reveals the continuities and the ruptures in Iranian cinema and its quest for (post)modernity, authenticity, and national identity. Stylistic and thematic features that made up his personal style and informed art cinema can also be discerned. His entry both into foreign film 178

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festival circles and into film distribution circuits was emblematic of art cinema as a whole, which placed Iranian cinema on the map of dynamic world cinemas in the 1990s. No Iranian filmmaker received more critical and popular acclaim in the West than Kiarostami, whose picture on the cover of the July-­August issue of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1995 bore the caption, “Kiarostami le magnifique” (Kiarostami the magnificent). Inside, nearly fifty pages were devoted to discussing his work. Akira Kurosawa also said this about him: “The films of Abbas Kiar­os­­tami are extraordinary. Words cannot describe my feelings about them and I simply advise you to see his films. . . . When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place.” 2 If from his experience of making films for advertising agencies he learned brevity and the precision of expression (see volume 2, chapter 6 for his earlier biography), his decades of working at the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (cidcya), under both Pahlavi and Islamic regimes, gave him the continuity and stability of financial and technical resources, as well as the confidence to develop his stylistic individuality and authorial personality. Working for more than two decades at the cidcya made Kiarostami in essence a civil servant–filmmaker on government payroll, an arrangement that most Pahlavi-­period new-­wave filmmakers and art-­cinema directors in the Islamic Republic shunned for fear of being tainted, co-­opted, and censored more heavily. The center was a small version of an American film studio during the “studio system” days, providing creative, technical, financial, personnel, and political support during all phases of filmmaking. Because of his work at the center, some critics dubbed his films, which did not claim to be “politically committed” as was expected of the intellectuals, “official films.” Further, they derided his cinema as a “commissioned cinema” (sinema-­ye sefareshi), for commissioned meant compromised. This was an unfair characterization, for on further scrutiny it becomes clear that his films offered often incisive explication, analysis, and authorial critiques of Iranian culture and society, not in a politically correct or overt way, but slyly. Like studio-­system directors, Kiarostami benefited from the cidcya, but he also contributed greatly to the center’s operation and its training of new filmmakers. The government commissioned his films but did not dictate them. Throughout his long career, Kiarostami thrived on going against the grain. He used limitations of film form and technique, funding, and censorship to test his creativity, discover his individual voice, and hone his style. Some limitations were internal and self-­imposed; some, such as financing and censorship, were external. Improvisation and flexibility became significant assets. For example, as Kiarostami tells Jamsheed Akrami in the interview that accompanies the dvd of his film Close-­Up, he was scheduled to shoot on an upcoming Saturday a film called Pocket Money (Pul-­e Tujibi), when he read an article about Hosain Sabzian impersonating Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an act for which he was imprisArt- House Ci nema

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oned and taken to court. Deeply affected and intrigued by the story, he could not sleep for a few nights. Finally, he decided to drastically change plans and, “instead of taking the camera to the school for Pocket Money, we took it to the prison” for what became Close-­Up. He would not have produced one of his greatest films without radical flexibility. Kiarostami’s cinema, like that of other auteur directors discussed in this chapter, is personally and socially situated. His films generally emanate from the specific social worlds around him and from his own encounters with it, and he himself is usually the screenwriter and editor of the films. This consistent multifunctionality has driven the organic evolution of his style through time. Significantly, his films are not only situated and multifunctional but also, like those of Banietemad, intertextual: earlier films beget later films with which they share physical locations, characters, or story lines, such as his famed Koker Trilogy, consisting of Where Is the Friend’s Home? (Khaneh-­ye Dust Kojast?, 1987), Life and Nothing More . . . (aka And Life Goes On . . . ; Zendehgi va Digar Hich, 1991), and Under the Olive Trees (Zir-­e Derakhtan-­e Zaitun, 1994). This is an extension of cinema vérité aesthetics; not only the camera provokes the reality it records but each film acts as a provocation of another reality and of an additional film. Such multifunctionality and intertextuality give his films what Godfrey Cheshire called “interrelatedness” (2000:9). Few directors—­Mehrjui, Baizai, Kimiavi, Banietemad, and Naderi—­have maintained a style while evolving with it so organically. The drawback is that his films became somewhat hermetic. His films are most emblematic of the short story paradigm: they employ few protagonists, often one to three ordinary people; the plots, usually involving the dogged pursuit of seemingly small goals, are simple; character development is minimal, as characters are generally not transformed by either their own actions or by those of others; and the social milieu is tangential to individual psychology.

Close-­Up (Kelosup: Nama-­ye Nazdik, 1989) Produced under the cidcya’s aegis, Close-­Up is about an ordinary man, an out-­ of-­work print-­shop worker, Hosain Sabzian, who is an extraordinary fan of the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his film The Cyclist.3 His identification with the director is both total and expedient, as he deftly impersonates Makhmalbaf for the entertainment of his friends and to impress strangers, among them Mrs. Ahankhah, whom he meets on a city bus. During this bus encounter, he successfully passes himself off as Makhmalbaf by signing for her her copy of the director’s published screenplay of The Cyclist, thereby gaining access to the heart and hearth of the Ahankhah family—­a middle-­class family of Turkic ethnicity. He visits their home, pretending to be the director reconnoitering it as a possible location for an upcoming movie. The family members, who had never seen the famous director but had heard of him, at first believe his story, wel180

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come him, and agree to act in his film. However, because of certain discrepancies in his story, they begin to suspect that he is an imposter and perhaps a member of a gang of thieves casing their home. And when some time passes without the arrival of a film crew and equipment, a suspicious family member finally reports Sabzian to the authorities and sues him both for operating under false pretenses and for borrowing money without the intention to repay. At this point, a journalist named Hasan Farazmand gets wind of the story and publishes an account of it in the weekly journal Sorush, which reaches Kiarostami.4 In this apparently simple story of the power of cinematic identification and fandom, culled from his social milieu, Kiarostami finds larger social and philosophical meanings, turning it into a sly humanist tale of a man’s desperate search for identity and dignity. If in the Pahlavi era film directors were derided as sleazy entertainers, they are now stars, worthy of making a film about. Both Sabzian’s action and Kiarostami’s seminal film offer an example late in the twentieth century of Iranians’ struggles through the years for individual self-­empowerment and national self-­representation by cinema and mediawork. Sabzian defends his fraud on the grounds of increased “self-­confidence” and increased “respect” for himself from others. Close-­Up begins with Farazmand the journalist accompanied by two policemen in a taxicab on their way to the Ahankhah home to arrest the imposter Sabzian. After much questioning of passersby about directions, a feature of Kiar­ ostami’s road movies and their inquiry structure, the taxi finally arrives at the house.5 Farazmand and the policemen enter it, but the camera remains outside for quite some time with the waiting taxi driver, who wanders about, picks up a few flowers from a pile of cuttings, and inadvertently kicks an aerosol metal can down the steep street. In what has become a hallmark of Kiarostami’s film style, in essence a visual pun or aside, the camera fixates for some time on such a seemingly spontaneous, mundane, and extranarrative event, as here the can rolls noisily down the street until it comes to a stop by a curb. After a while, the narrative resumes as soldiers and Sabzian emerge from the Ahankhah house and speed away in the taxi to the Ozgol police station, while the journalist, in another narrative aside, scours the neighborhood in search of a tape recorder with which to record his interviews. The air of make-­do and improvisation adds to Kiarostami’s visual asides and to what appears to be his unscripted and spontaneous filming style. This is not so much a demonstration of the Iranian artisanal production mode as Kiarostami’s homage to it: his highly planned style is calculated to look unplanned, and it is in fact open to chance and discovery. The accumulation of these whimsical asides and seemingly improvised moments of discovery help constitute not only the philosophical core of the film but also its critique of Iranian society. For example, the can slowly rolling down the hill can be read philosophically, as a poetic symbol of Sabzian’s lowly and aimless life at the mercy of fate. Further, that the policemen have no patrol car and are forced to visit the crime scene by taxi, and that a professional journalArt- House Ci nema

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38 Neorealism as marketing. Poster for Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up advertises some of his film’s Neorealist features. From author’s collection.

ist has no money for the taxi he has hired nor a tape recorder for his interviews may be read as a critique of poverty in Iran and of the lack of professionalism of the police and journalists. However, Farazmand improvises by borrowing money from Mr. Ahankhah to pay for the taxi and someone in the neighborhood finally lends him a tape recorder. The same scenes can thus be read as demonstrating resourcefulness in the face of limited resources, symbolizing how Iranian directors turn limitations into advantages. These uses of symbols and metaphors in Kiarostami’s works are similar to those in Ebrahim Golestan’s films, in which such tropes are not invoked, as is customary, to avoid censorship but to refine artistic expression. If all metaphors were to be driven by fear of censorship, as many Iranian critics, filmmakers, and spectators seem to think, cinema would be vastly impoverished, as it would be forced into a politicized one-­dimensionality.

The Director as Author and Public Intellectual: A Camera-­Pen Cinema Close-­Up demonstrates how Kiarostami finds his film ideas, actors, and locations in ordinary events and in his immediate surroundings (figure  38). But how does he weave these ordinary events into complex philosophical treatises? The French critic Alexander Astruc prophesied the age of the “camera-­pen” (caméra stylo) in 1948. By this he meant a cinema that “would gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from 182

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the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” Only cinema, he thought, could do justice to the contemporary ideas and philosophies of life. According to Astruc, today Descartes would make films (1968:17–18). And his famous dictum would say: “I make films, therefore I am.” 6 This is true for Kiarostami. His films are so intricately and intimately tied to his own existence and subjectivity that it is difficult to conceive of his life without his films and of his films without him. His imitators fail to produce his effect, for his style without him is impossible. This is also true of Kiarostami’s photography (Kiarostami 2000a) and poetry (Kiarostami 2000b), both of which are driven by the same intimate connection between author, autobiography, and the work. Although not strictly speaking autobiographical, his movies are tightly interwoven with his own life story. His first fiction film, The Report (1977), about a disintegrating nuclear family (consisting of parents and two children), echoed the crumbling of his own family, while his later films featuring lone, and in some cases, as in Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-­e Gilas, 1997), very lonely, males echoed his postrevolutionary marital and emotional status. Ontogeny recapitulates filmic phylogeny. He seems to admit as much when in discussing his film Ten (2002) he states, “If anyone were to ask me what I did as a director on the film, I’d say, ‘Nothing and yet if I didn’t exist, this film wouldn’t have existed’” (quoted in Saeed-­Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003:126). Kiarostami is doing what Astruc demanded more than fifty years ago. He writes with his camera-­pen, and he thinks with his films concretely, philosophically, and poetically. He expresses his private obsessions and desires, his “pess­ optimistic” and humanistic philosophy of life, and his sly social criticism with film, the way great writers express themselves with a pen (or with a keyboard).7 Since his feature on hiv/aids in Uganda, a.b.c. Africa (2001), he has used small digital video cameras, which has brought him closer to the intimacy and immediacy of the camera-­pen idea. In fact, in discussing his filming with this flexible and unobtrusive camera, he called it his “fine point drafting pen” (Saeed-­Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003:120). His films became like short stories or poems, even haiku, which offer a glimpse of what it means to be Iranian or human and what constitutes reality or the cinema. His seven-­minute film, Iranian Carpet (Farsh­e Irani, 2007), is a lyrical rendition of what it means to be Iranian. Ostensibly about carpets, the film at once provides a condensation of all the major Iranian arts without once referring to any of them. The camera in tight close-­up moves around a carpet that is filled with garden imagery, giving the impression of a meandering walk, while the voice of Roshanak, of the famous Pahlavi-­era radio program Golha-­ye Rangarang (Colorful Flowers) (who goes by one name), recites mystical poetry about the beloved’s beauty. These verses are accompanied by a sinuous classical Persian musical duo played by a violin and a drum. The carpet itself, too, bears lines of poetry along its margins, which are recited by a male voice. As the camera pulls back from its tight engagement with the carpet Art- House Ci nema

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to reveal its location spread on the grass under the trees, the film ends with Roshanak offering her customary farewell to her audiences. In this lucidly brief film Kiarostami succeeds in weaving, through a judicious orchestration of aesthetic elements, a dense tapestry of many classical and modern Iranian arts: formal gardens, mystical poetry, classical music, carpet weaving, and filmmaking—­a true cine-­poem.8 His cine writing seems effortless, with minimal use of the usual rhetorical devices of art-­cinema films or of the special effects of mainstream cinema. However, his films in general, and Close-­Up in particular, are imbued with authorial artifices of one sort or another. In 2000, the French daily Le Monde and the Cannes International Film Festival held a joint seminar on the future of cinema to which one of the oldest and one of the youngest auteur directors from Iran were invited, Kiarostami and Samira Makhmalbaf. In her presentation, this young female director spoke warmly of a technological, embodied camera-­pen grafted to a human body, extending the experiments of her elder compatriot: “In the near future, the camera could very well turn into the simulacrum of a pen, comfortably put at the disposal of the artist, right in the palm of her hand. . . . I can very easily imagine a camera as light and small as a pair of eye-­glasses, or even a pair of soft-­ lenses comfortably and unnoticeably placed inside the eye and on the cornea. Today with the digital revolution, the camera will bypass all such controls and be placed squarely at the disposal of the artist (Makhmalbaf 2000). This technological concept of the camera-­pen is reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s theorization of the “kino-­eye” (kino-­glaz) almost a century earlier (Vertov 1984). Without authorial vision, of course, embodied cameras do not produce an auteur or a work of art. Auteur cinema is not cyborg cinema. However, in her celebration of a technological solution, Makhmalbaf wisely underscored its potential to liberate filmmakers who have something to say from the political, economic, and technological forces with which mainstream culture industries and governments have stifled authorship everywhere. It is appropriate, therefore, to end this section on her hopeful visualization of a future cinema, which uncannily echoes that of Astruc: “If the camera is turned into a pen, the filmmaker into an author, and the intervening harassment of power, capital, and the means of production are all eliminated, or at least radically compromised, are we not then at the threshold of a whole new technological change in the very essence of cinema as a public media? I tend to believe that because of the increasingly individual nature of cinematic production, as well as spectatorship, the cinema of the twentieth century will become the literature of the twenty-­first century” (2000). Indeed, art-­house filmmakers in twenty-­first-­century Iran have already assumed the mantle of the poets and writers of yore, with stout presences as public, even organic, intellectuals—­and even becoming stars. This elevated status placed auteur directors, such as Baizai, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Panahi, and Ghobadi, on the list of those charged with working for the soft overthrow of the regime, making them targets of its public diplomacy counterattacks. 184

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Director as Star Sabzian’s justification of his fraud points to the widespread cinephilia in Iran and to the power of cinema and film directors, particularly art-­house directors, as stars. He did not impersonate a soccer star, a religious figure, or a war veteran—­the only officially sanctioned heroic models then available in Iran. Instead, he chose a film director who, although widely known, would not have been recognized on the street. In the United States, the names most prominently displayed on theater marquees are often not those of directors but those of movie stars. In prerevolutionary Iran, too, mainstream filmfarsi movies usually needed the drawing power of stars. However, the dismantling of the star system after the revolution meant that the names dominating marquees were primarily those of the directors, particularly art-­cinema directors—­although since the 1990s, actors as stars have reemerged. What is even more remarkable is that these star directors are both popular as entertainers and respected as intellectuals. With each film they offer a new treatise on Iranian history or identity, or on some universal philosophical, existential, moral, or authorial dilemma. They have become public intellectuals. One piece of evidence of directors as stars and public intellectuals is the existence of fans who ruminate on, adore, and emulate them, as Sabzian did with Makhmalbaf. Discourse about a star director and his fans by another star director gives further evidence, as Kiarostami did about Makhmalbaf and Sabzian in Close-­Up. Yet another piece is what Reza Haeri does in his thirty-­minute film Do You Know Mr. Kiarostami? (Shoma Aqa-­ye Kiarostami ra Mishenasid?, 1998), an affectionate investigation of Kiarostami, who is internationally known but “strangely, inside Iran, no one seems to care. I celebrated this moment,” notes Haeri in his e-­mail to me (Naficy 2008c). In impromptu street interviews the director and his crew get a range of responses, many clever and humorous, to the question that forms the film’s title. The educated youth adore Kiarostami and the positive image he has created abroad for himself and for Iran; ordinary people, such as shop owners, managers, and customers, even those who claim they have heard his name, cannot identify who he is and why they have heard of him. The film pokes good-­natured fun at Kiarostami and his contingent fame. It also demonstrates in its own style Kiarostami’s deep influence on young filmmakers such as Haeri, who like Kiarostami takes a seemingly mundane topic as his subject and, before he is through, turns it into a pleasurable examination of cinema itself. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ruminations on cinema fandom in Iran, Cinema, Cinema (Sinema, Sinema, 1995), in which he appears as a pushy and intrusive film director, and his warm homage to the prerevolutionary cinema in Once Upon a Time Cinema (Naser al-­Din Shah, Aktor-­e Sinema, 1992), are also worth noting for their contribution to the discourse of the director as author, star, and intellectual. Jamsheed Akrami has made several revealing documentaries on Art- House Ci nema

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cinema before and after the revolution, Dreams Betrayed (1986) (its updated version), The Lost Cinema: Iranian Political Films in the Seventies (2006), and Friendly Persuasion (2000), as well as those he made on individual filmmakers, A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), Scattered Seeds of Hanareh: A Talk with Bahman Ghobadi (2003), and Kiarostami 101 (2004). All these essay films contain extended excerpts from key films and interviews with filmmakers and experts. However, they are not fan films but films that in their emphasis on the director as author working against an entrenched system of censorship and commercial interests are important in any consideration of authorship in Iranian cinema. Bahman Kiarostami, Abbas’s son, made several films about his father and his filmmaking, among them Journey to the Land of the Traveler (Safar Beh Diar-­e Mosafer, 1992) on Kiarostami’s encounter years later with Hasan Darabi, the protagonist in his film The Traveler, and Sketch (Tarh, 1997), on the making of Taste of Cherry. Hamid Khairoldin and Majid Khabazan made Iranian Women Filmmakers (2002), a fifty-­eight-­minute film, shot primarily in London and Tehran, containing interviews with, and footage of, several women directors and women actors. Several documentaries dealt with Makhmalbaf’s life and films: Houshang Golmakani’s Stardust Stricken—­Mohsen Makhmalbaf: A Portrait (Gong-­e Khabdideh, 1996), Mani Petgar’s Cinema, Cinema (Sinema, Sinema, 1944–96), and Shapur Daneshmand’s Makhmalbaf: Unveiling an Islamic Filmmaker (Makhmalbaf: Bedun-­e Hijab, 1998). Maysam Makhmalbaf also made a film on her sister’s films and career, How Samira Made The Blackboard (Samira Cheguneh Takht-­e Siah ra Sakht, 2000). Two film critics, Robert Safarian and Ahmad Mir Ehsan, made a fifty-­two-­ minute film, Double Six (Joft Shish, 2007), about Kimiai’s film career. It contains a generous sampling of clips from his movies, interviews with critics, production crew, the director Tahmineh Milani, Kimiai’s daughter, and best of all, an extended, revealing interview with the director himself, who talks about how he learned filmmaking by watching movies. In one sequence, Kimiai projects Fred Zinnemann’s film High Noon (1952) and points to various shot compositions and character elements that impressed him, elements that became part of his authorial signature, surfacing in Qaisar (1969) and Dash Akol (1971), among others. In another sequence about his film The Deer (Gavaznha, 1974), he recalls how the ending of the film was inspired by the arrest of the Fadaian­e Eslam member Khalil Tahmasebi, who had assassinated Prime Minister Razmara. The assassin lived next door to his home, and as a child he had watched the entire proceeding from a rooftop. This partly explains the controversial and politically provocative mise-­en-­scène of that film’s ending. French-­born filmmaker Nader Takmil Homayoun’s feature documentary Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution (L’Iran: Une Révolution Cinématographique, 2006) is unusual due to its attempt to cover the entire history of Iranian cinema. But even here, the emphasis is less on historians, critics, or scholars of

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cinema than on the auteur directors, many of whom are interviewed. Another distinguishing feature is the way the evolution of cinema, film genres, and directors is correlated with the events in Iranian history, all of which are visualized with the aid of apt clips from newsreels, documentaries, and fiction movies. Naturally, this film is not encyclopedic, as a century of cinema cannot adequately be dealt with in a single work. Particularly revealing is the thesis in this film that three fiction movies, Baizai’s Downpour (Ragbar, 1972), Faraidun Gole’s Beehive (Kandu, 1975), and Kimiai’s The Journey of Stone (Safar- ­e Sang, 1978), were prescient in the manner in which their stories and character actions foreshadowed the uprising against the Shah and the ensuing revolution. All these documentaries provide insight into Iranian film history and into the lives, times, and authorial signatures of the directors.9 Naturally, these films about directors were not without controversy, receiving criticism not only from the critics but also from their director subjects. Double Six, for example, came under attack by Kimiai, who unfairly characterized it as “a very bad film,” whose camera “drifted about aimlessly,” causing a flurry of responses from Safarian, Mir Ehsan, and others (Safarian 2008). Finally, the concept of the director as author, star, and public intellectual is undergirded by the filmmakers’ textual style, by the way reality is conceived, provoked, recorded, or manipulated on film by realist, surrealist, and metarealist strategies that give their films both their authorial regularities and innovations.

Hybrid Textuality: Subverting Realism and Neorealism The art-­cinema films continued to use a hybrid production mode, consisting of government and private funding and semi-­industrialized and artisanal practices. Textual production was also hybrid, consisting of realist and metarealist narrative strategies. Much has been made of Kiarostami’s admitted debts to Italian neorealism (Lopate 1998:352–53), but this is a complex matter. His career and cinema embody only some neorealist characteristics, discussed here briefly by invoking Georges Sadoul’s definition, one of the first critics to call neorealism a “school,” and one who offered five reasonable prerequisite characteristics for it. —­ Geographically bounded (concentrated in Rome, Italy) —­ Temporally bounded (post–Second World War phenomenon, 1945–51) —­ Existence of masters (e.g., Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Luchino Visconti) —­ Existence of disciples (e.g., Luigi Zampa, Pietro Germi, Renato Castellani, Giuseppe De Santis) —­ Formation of a set of rules (location shooting, long takes, invisible style of filming and editing, predominance of medium and long shots, use Art- House Ci nema

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of contemporary true-­to-­life subjects, open-­ended plots, working-­class protagonists, nonprofessional cast, vernacular dialogue, implied social criticism) (quoted in Marcus 1986:21–22) Applying these criteria in this chapter I hope to make clear both the similarities and differences between Iranian neorealism and its Italian progenitor. In addition, as I have noted elsewhere (Naficy 2011), Iranian-­style neorealism has not been homogenous, exhibiting itself in two different styles under two different political systems, Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic. Further, it has been neither a fully formed film “school” nor a “movement,” but a “moment of convergence” in the social history of Iranian cinema. The stories of Kiarostami’s films are socially and historically bounded: they spring from middle-­and lower-­class milieus within Iran, and they are contemporary (no future-­tense or historical subjects). However, with success Kia­ros­ tami’s works began to exceed this classic tenet, as he began receiving coproduction funding from Europe and started working abroad, with such films as a.b.c. Africa, Tickets (2005), and Certified Copy. Classic neorealism as a school operated within a “master-­disciple” structure. Kia­ros­tami has been a sort of master whose works influenced disciples, either indirectly by the disciples emulating the master, or directly by them working as assistants to him or using his film ideas and screenplays for their own films. Ebrahim Foruzesh, Jafar Panahi, Alireza Raisian, Mohammad Ali Talebi, Iraj Karimi, and Niki Karimi all made films inspired by specific film ideas from Kiarostami or used his screenplays. Others who worked for him as assistants but did not use his screenplays, such as Bahman Ghobadi, were nevertheless influenced by his style. Even actors working with Kiarostami made films in a style inspired by his, such as Mania Akbari with her daring debut directorial film, Twenty Fingers (Bist Angosht, 2004), Ten Plus Four (Dah Be ­Alaveh-­ye Chahar, 2007), and One. Two. One. (Yek. Do. Yek., 2010). However, as the public spat between Kiarostami and Ghobadi over the latter’s film about the vibrant and counterhegemonic underground music scene in Iran, No One Knows about Persian Cats (Kasi az Gorbehha-­ye Irani Khabar Nadareh, 2009), shows, the master-­disciple dyad is not a lasting configuration in the creative arts. The government banned the film inside Iran, partly because it was filmed without official permission, causing Ghobadi to leave the country in protest. When Kia­ros­tami publicly criticized his former protégé on his filming and departure, Ghobadi responded in an unusually emotional public letter: “On what basis do you give yourself permission to ridicule the efforts of filmmakers who stand with the oppressed people using unacceptable words and, worse than that, speak with the same voice as religious dictators?” (quoted in Slackman 2010). Finally, through his films Kiarostami developed a set of “rules,” which both paid homage to the realist aesthetics of Italian neorealism and evolved a new 188

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Iranian and Kiarostamian rendition of neorealism, which was, ironically, a deconstructed version of the original. The spirit and style of neorealism is strongly present in Kiarostami’s early short films, such as Bread and Alley (Nan va Kucheh, 1970) and Traveler (Mosafer, 1974), in which his actors are untrained ordinary people. The protagonists are usually male children on dogged, true-­to-­life quests or on journeys to get something, to redress a wrong, or to prove something. He shows himself to be an artist of the everyday, but not of everydayness, for he does not seek the tediousness, repetitiveness, and degradation of the everyday but instead searches and discovers the moments of rupture, tension, and glory hidden in the quotidian. These early Pahlavi-­era films placed him in the new-­wave category. Inspired by neorealist style and ethos, almost all his films are shot on location—­not in the studio—­and in available light, using a small crew, simple equipment (and now digital cameras), and vernacular dialogue often devised on the spot. The filming style generally consists of long shots and long takes. However, at the same time that his films treat these ordinary social worlds and encounters with the ethos and aesthetics of realism and neorealism, they embody certain deconstructive, metarealist practices that counter or problematize realism and neorealism, resulting in formally rigorous works that are quietly operatic in their humanism and in their celebration of life’s small victories and filmmaking. In his playfulness, expansiveness, indirection, and blurring of reality and fiction he is more like Kimiavi than Sohrab Shahid Saless, whose strict, recessive, closed-­form aesthetics and adherence to codes of realism bordered on superrealism. The mixing of fiction and nonfiction elements has a long history in Iranian cinema that dates back to Ovanes Ohanians’s Mr. Haji the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-­e Sinema, 1933), Kimiavi’s The Stone Garden (Bagh- ­e Sangi, 1976), and Shirdel’s The Night It Rained . . . or the Epic of a Gorgani Peasant (Unshab keh Barun Umad . . . Ya Hamaseh-­ye Rustazadeh-­ye Gorgani, 1967), but one that came into its own only in the 1990s, creating not only crea­ tive vistas but also problems both for the authenticity of the documentary and the reality of the fictional.10 Kiarostami’s deconstructive and counterrealistic practices include self-­referentiality, self-­inscription, and self-­reflexivity, as well as an ironic blending of reality and fiction, forms of distantiation, indirection, and sly humor. By these means, the most well-­known practitioner of neorealism is also the best violator of what Shirdel aptly called “the dictatorship of Neorealism” (quoted in Tahaminejad 2003:37). Other art-­house cinema directors employed some of these neorealist and counterrealist strategies; however, in Kia­r­ os­tami’s uses, the spectators are always kept in an ambiguous position, having to constantly parse the truth of fiction from the fiction of realism. A younger generation of filmmakers introduced an even more radical hybridization of the documentary and the fictional to break down what had become known as the “genre” of Iranian art-­house cinema. For example, in his award-­w inning debut feature, Be Calm and Count to Seven (Aram Bash va ta Art- House Ci nema

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Haft Beshomar, 2008), Ramtin Lavafipour deftly grafted the slow-­paced neorealist tempo of Iranian art-­house “village films”—­emphasizing the integrity of character, place, and time, and an engagement in quotidian activities—­w ith the turbocharged pacing of the new “global films,” which emphasized nervous handheld camerawork, sonic bursts, and dynamic editing and involving place-­ shattering and border-­v iolating activities. The result is a technically audacious film that seamlessly interweaves these seemingly contradictory aesthetics—­as well as fictional and documentary elements—­to tell the story of destitute fishermen and their women smuggling contraband humans to and from Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf. The ambiguity in Iranian art-­house films is partly driven by the filmmakers’ personalities and styles and partly by the Iranian hermeneutics and psychological orientations of veiling, dissimulation, accismus (ritual courtesy), cleverness, inner purity, lyricism, and indirection—­in short, by strategies that demonstrate distrust of manifest surface values and, instead, valorize latent core meanings, which endow authorial cinema and the arts in Iran, in Baizai’s words, with “visual duplicity.” This refers not so much to a lack of morality and truthfulness but to the aforementioned hermeneutics, which manifest themselves in duality, ambiguity, complexity, evasiveness, playfulness, relativity, deferment, and the hedging of bets. These hermeneutics continually defer and problematize realism. Instead of practicing clarity and frankness, which can cause problems in a highly collective, dual, and hierarchical society, Iranians have learned to engage in “saying things without appearing to have said them . . . , but in such a way that those who should, understand that you have said it. Many Iranian filmmakers live this visual duplicity, as they have to follow unerringly the various written and unwritten supervisory [censorship] regulations without believing in a single one of them. And the supervisory office knows this” (Baizai 1996/1375:379). This is another dimension of the Iranian art and style of improvisation, which permeates all the arts. While these strategies of ambiguity and complexity can result in morally and ethically questionable consequences, their artfulness requires that spectators actively participate in producing their meanings. These strategies have particular salience in societies favoring collective and hierarchical formations. As the Lebanese American anthropologist Suad Joseph notes in an autobiographical essay, “I learned many things about indirection. I learned that fulfillment of my desires usually required the active involvement and compliance of others. Desire was not to be satisfied through my autonomous actions. I could hint, imply, and create situations for others to read, interpret, and act upon, but others needed to act for my wishes to be realized. . . . It also taught me that action on my part was a necessary condition of the fulfillment of the desires of significant others” (2002:306–7). Indirection not only fits the ethos of collective formations but also necessitates hyperawareness of one’s surroundings and keen powers of observation, important traits for filmmakers. Kiarostami’s films, as well 190

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as those of his school, are filled with instances of such indirection—­making apparently simple movies with deep meanings, saying things without appearing to say them, not only in the plot and characterization but also in the films’ visuality and aesthetics. The problem is that in less deft hands, everything is made to be hermeneutically too complex and narratively obtuse and slow, to the point that even if a filmmaker engages in clarity and openness, neither the censors nor the spectators believe it. Baizai’s own movies are hermeneutically complex but in a different, historically aware, mythically informed, linguistically eloquent, and pamlimpsestically dense manner. Even when Kiarostami uses the continuity filming and editing schemes of classic realist (and neorealist) cinema, such as shot–reverse shot, he undermines them. Many of his films, particularly his later road movies such as Taste of Cherry, in which a driver and a passenger are filmed in a moving car talking for long periods, contain not only long takes but also shot–reverse shots. However, while using shot–reverse shot exchanges between the two characters in the car, there is no over-­the-­shoulder shot placing both in the same visual space. This is because, as he told me in an interview, these shots are all filmed without the driver and the passenger ever being present together in the car. Each time that one person is on camera, Kiarostami occupies the other front seat (Naficy 2001h). In a sly subversion of the codes of realism and neorealism, the protagonists are forced to react not to each other, as is customary in those styles, but to the director next to them, a presence that insinuates Kiarostami’s authorial control in each profilmic scene, as he coaches the cast and feeds them lines of dialogue. His apparent casualness and improvisation, which consolidate his connection both to Italian neorealism and to the French new-­wave films, is illusory. Nevertheless, the film is to a large extent improvisational, as Kiarostami did not use a traditional screenplay and written dialogue for the actors. The dia­ logues were improvised during filming. As a result, these are manufactured impressions of casualness and realism that he has strived hard to provoke, not innocent recordings of unfolding reality, as many believe. They conceal his considerable planning and tinkering with locations, prop arrangements, acting, dia­logue coaching, and filming. Considered the engine of classical realism, shot–reverse shot filming and editing, often involving over-­the-­shoulder shots, create audience identification with characters by suturing them into the diegesis. The classical realist style is highly psychological and fictional; Kiarostami’s sparing use of these strategies, and their undermining when he uses them, render his films more social and realistic, even didactic. In this manner, his techniques may work against cinema’s identificatory mechanism of individualized subjectivity, a hallmark of modernity. Instead, they favor postmodern distantiation and collective identity. His works tend to be didactic because their understated characters do not appear to discover much in their quests, or seem unaware of any discovery. They are determined, but often they are not transformed by their own discoverArt- House Ci nema

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ies, the way characters in modernist novels and films are. We get this impression because they rarely have subjectivity, which is usually signaled by point-­ of-­v iew filming and shot–reverse shot editing.11 Instead, Kiarostami’s primary filming style, involving long shots and long takes, tells us more about his own subjectivity. This strengthens his authorial grip. It is the audience that discovers something universal, by which it is potentially transformed. Hence the gripping power of his films on spectators, particularly non-­Iranians. In addition, because Kiarostami breaks the fourth wall and self-­reflexively inserts the process of filmmaking into his stories, the focus of inquiry is shifted from the characters to the camera, the cinema, the director, and ultimately the spectators, who become aware of their own act of film watching. His later films, therefore, constitute a trompe l’oeil cinema (Mulvey 1998:26), for they mix illusion and reality and create uncertainty and ambiguity about which is which—­a far cry from classic neorealist concerns and style.

Metarealism: Self-­Reflexivity, Self-­Referentiality, Self-­Inscription, and Intertextuality The constitution of the self as dual, hierarchical, and familial and the semiotics of veiling mean that a series of distances are posited between inside and outside, self and other, core values and surface meanings, related and unrelated, individual and collective, citizen and the state, and male and female—­the kinds of distance, duality, and ambivalence that feed into the strategies of the postrevolutionary art-­house cinema. Dualities and distantiation create ambivalences and desires for the union of subject and object, lover and beloved, master and disciple, spectator and diegesis—­marking a nostalgia for fusion, which also drives some of the filmic narratives of the humanist and mystic genres of art cinema. Thus every art-­house film is not only about its ostensible topic but also about cinema, even if not manifestly so. It is these dualities, distances, ambivalences, and uncertainties, characteristics of late modernity inscribed in both content and form, along with critical humanism, that have propelled Iranian art-­house cinema onto the world stage. It is perhaps the most postmodern of all national cinemas, for it captures and expresses postmodernity’s zeitgeist. Self-­reflexivity in Iranian cinema, and in Kiarostami’s films in particular, takes several forms.12 One is self-­inscription, by which the filmmaker inserts himself into his film diegetically, sometimes as himself, as in Taste of Cherry and a.b.c. Africa, and sometimes by proxy, as in Life and Nothing More . . . and The Wind Will Carry Us . . . (Bad Ma Ra Khahad Bord, 1999). Kiarostami is a diegetic character in Close-­Up, appearing as himself, investigating Sabzian’s story, instigating certain scenes, and in general directing the film. Only glimpses of him are shown from the back, but we hear his voice frequently as the investigative filmmaker just outside the frame researches the magazine story, visits lo192

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39 Counterneorealism in Close-Up. Kiarostami (with back to camera) recruits Hosain Sabzian to play himself and reenact his story on film. Frame enlargement.

cations, interviews players, and re-­creates and directs scenes. He interviews in their home the Ahankhah family members who attempt to save face by pretending not to have been fooled by Sabzian’s impersonation. In the Qasr prison, he interviews Sabzian who confesses to having impersonated Makhmalbaf, an act that, he admits, appears to be fraudulent but deep down is very sincere, since it was motivated by his love for cinema and by his respect and admiration for the director (figure 39). When he asks Sabzian’s permission to film him, the savvy printer immediately and remarkably responds: “Yes, I give you permission because you are my subject, my audience.” Kiarostami also interviews the judge in his chamber to obtain permission to film Sabzian’s trial, whose crime he regards as not worth filming. In addition, he re-­creates many scenes, including Sabzian’s bus encounter with Mrs. Ahankhah and the scene of his arrest. The latter is reenacted twice, once from outside the Ahankhah home and a second time from the inside, once again playing into the Iranian dichotomous orientation involving inside and outside. This investigative structure, a feature of Kiarostami’s research film methodology, inscribes the director as both author and actor who simultaneously records the film and invents it as he goes along, mixing documentary footage with fictional accounts. Such self-­inscription simultaneously heightens filmic realism and undermines it to investigate both reality and cinema. Earlier Kiarostami films beget later films and later films refer to earlier films; his characters, locations, and stories migrate from one film to another, making his films self-­referential and intertextual. By referring to, quoting, or provoking one another the films create an intertextual nexus that require a knowing audience to decipher. Banietemad, too, employs a dense and creative intertextuality in her oeuvre, where characters in earlier films live on and evolve in later films. Self-­reflexively the process of making a film is incorporated into films, breaking the spectatorial illusion of witnessing a seamless and authorless real world. Self-­reflexive structures are usually considered modernist devices and Western tropes of avant-­garde artists. In Kiarostami’s case, though, they originate in Art- House Ci nema

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what he has absorbed from traditional Iranian theatrical performances, particularly the taziyeh, the Shiite passion play. The tragic, grief-­ridden, and justice-­ seeking contents of taziyeh’s Karbala paradigm are less relevant to the director than its self-­reflexive distantiation. In taziyeh the stage apparatus is made visible, the artificiality of acting and the separation of the actor from the part are acknowledged, the actors are stereotypes and do not evolve, and the fourth wall is broken and spectators are addressed directly—­all things Kiarostami does as well.13 He said, when asked about Brechtian distantiation: Yes, but I haven’t taken it from the theory of Brecht only. I came to that through experience. We are never able to construct truth as it is in the reality of our daily lives, and we are always witnessing things from far away while we are trying to depict them as close as we can to reality. So if we distance the audience from the film and even [the] film from itself, it helps to understand the subject matter better. I found distantiation in Taazieh [sic]. . . . Many of the audiences believe my films are documentaries, as if it just happened that there was a camera there to record them. I think if the audience knows they are watching a performance, something which has been constructed, they will understand it more than they would in a documentary film. . . . This year I went to a village near Teheran to watch a Taazieh. In the scene of the Yazid’s and Imam Hossein’s battle, Imam Hossein’s sword suddenly became bent because it was made of very cheap, soft metal. Yazid went to him and took his sword and put it on a big stone and straightened it with another stone and gave it back to him and then they continued fighting. . . . This is exactly the opposite to what at the moment Hollywood is doing, which is brainwashing the audience to such an extent that it strips them of any imagination, decision-­making or intellectual capacity, in order to captivate them for two whole hours. In my films, there are always some breaks—­such as when a prop assistant brings a bowl of water, and hands it to an actor in the film. This gives the audience time to breathe a little and stops them from becoming emotionally involved and reminds them that, “Yes, I’m watching a film.” In Through the Olive Trees I always keep this distance between the reality of the scene and the reality of the subject matter. (Hamid 1997:24) In Close-­Up the imposter Sabzian, the Ahankhah family members, the judge, the journalist, and the film directors Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami are all both themselves and actors self-­consciously playing parts. They re-­create certain scenes (Sabzian impersonating Makhmalbaf in the Ahankhah home or on the bus), act in new scenes (Sabzian and Makhmalbaf meeting for the first time), and sometimes directly address the camera either in interview situations (Sabzian, judge, and Ahankhah family members) or in what amounts to an in194

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ternal monologue (Sabzian speaking to the close-­up camera). In the process, the real, the re-­created, and the fictional are juxtaposed seamlessly. The status of the film is complicated and thrown into doubt; it is neither a documentary faithfully reproducing a profilmic reality nor a fiction film producing a new fictive reality. In Kiarostami’s own words, it represents an attempt to “reach fiction through the documentary” (Doraiswamy 1992:20); it promotes both distantiation and identification, cognition and emotion, and belief and disbelief. The production of doubt and ambiguity at so many different levels is deeply counterhegemonic, to both Hollywood realism and the Islamist politics of certainty. It is also thoroughly postmodern, as doubt and uncertainty are part of postmodernity’s ethos. Significantly, Kiarostami’s attacks on these hegemons are offered at the level of filmic style, not content. Indeed, Close-­Up is entirely about the lie at the heart of cinema, whereby actors pretend to be others, producing a sustained and complex treatise on the morality of the Iranian dichotomy between being and acting. Many other art-­house filmmakers employed self-­reflexivity and other deconstructive devices: Baizai, Mehrjui, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Panahi, Banietemad, and Farmanara. In Baizai’s films self-­reflexivity is clearly influenced by his deep knowledge and appreciation of taziyeh, about which he has written. In his Travelers (Mosaferan, 1991), early on the lead actor announces to the camera that she and her family who are leaving for a wedding in another city will never get there, as they will all die in a car crash (figure 40). As in taziyeh, the spectators know the story’s outcome before the performance begins. The surprise is in how it is told. As in taziyeh the acting in the film is often declamatory, and some of the main characters being mourned are missing. The elaborate wedding ceremony in opulent circular hallways and a stairwell resembles a taziyeh in which guests, bride, and groom mourn the death of their loved ones in the accident. Circularity, an important principle of taziyeh staging, is emphasized not only

40 Taziyeh aesthetics. The poster shows the car crash that dooms the family at the beginning of Baizai’s Travelers. From author’s collection.

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by the film’s circular setting but also by the circular traveling of the camera as it covers the action, and by the characters’ circular movements, particularly the bride as she spins around herself often. In his Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-­ye Kuchak, 1985) Baizai also inscribes taziyeh aesthetics powerfully but subtly. In one sequence Bashu assumes the role of an amanuensis for Nai who dictates a letter to her husband. The scene is outdoors and Nai is hanging her wet clothes on the line, while Bashu is seated nearby. As she takes the wash from a tub, she walks left to hang them on the line while dictating the letter, the camera panning with her; she stops, picks up another piece of wet cloth and continues her dictation as she walks left, eventually making a full circle, the camera following her arc. This circular space described by both protagonist and camera is that of the taziyeh arena, whose narrator is Nai, addressing her audience, her missing husband, through his proxy, Bashu. The shot’s background is inflected by taziyeh, using its capacity for suturing different times and places in the same setting: as the camera pans we see helmeted soldiers among the lush bushes, reminding us of the war front hundreds of miles away on the Iran-­ Iraq border, which may be the cause of the husband’s absence; when the camera continues its pan helmeted construction workers are seen in the background, reminding us of those who were blowing up a tunnel in the mountains earlier, scaring Bashu. In Mehrjui’s family drama Leila (1997), a lead character breaks the fourth wall several times by speaking to the camera, while his The Mix (Miks, 1999) self-­reflexively focuses on filmmaking, particularly on postproduction. This and preproduction script approval are stages in which the influences of both capital and censorship are paramount. Postproduction censorship, which may necessitate new filming, editing, sound recording, and mixing, can sink important premieres. The Mix parodies this chaotic and stressful period in the life of the diegetic film director of a film-­w ithin-­a-­film (Khosrow Shakibai), a stand-­in for Mehrjui, who works with his technicians to conquer crazily proliferating obstacles to their film’s three-­day-­away premiere at the flagship national film festival in Fajr. The entire film takes place inside a studio complex, where voice actors dub the voices of characters, sound effects and music are recorded, various soundtracks are mixed, and an exhibition print is readied for festival screening. To top it all, the censors require that several instances of improper hijab be removed from the film. The postproduction crew and director work against inexorable time, emphasized by the close-­ups of a ticking clock that is frequently intercut into the film. Such time pressures and censorship considerations often force filmmakers to make emergency compromises with which they may not be happy afterward (such as the ending of Mehrjui’s The Tenants). The film-­ within-­a-­film is not fully finished and its screening at the festival is sabotaged by technical problems; in the meantime, the director, who has gone crazy under the pressure and is bound by the crew with ropes to a big piece of sound equipment, collapses. In another homage to self-­reflexivity the lead character goes by 196

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the real-­life name of the actor who plays him, Khosrow, while some of the others are called by the real-­life names of the technical crew whose parts they play, creating confusion or parallels between the actors and the parts. Unfortunately, the chaos of the postproduction permeates not only the diegetic director’s film but also that of the empirical director’s film, The Mix. Mehrjui intercuts the postproduction chaos with clips from the movie in process, creating incoherent intertextual density. This perhaps accounts for the tepid response it received from Iranian spectators and critics. Mehrjui is eloquent, however, in explaining both the personal and political dimensions of the postproduction process: The editing stage represents for me that creative phase when the essence of at least a year of work has to be given its final structure or shape. But as far as I can remember in the past 15 to 20 years—­w ith a few exceptions (The Tenants, and my latest film The Mix)—­this final stage of artistic creation has always been burdened with pressures resulting from the influences of the capital or the government decrees. I have had to finish the film under extremely painful, exhausting and irresponsible mental set­up, and as a result I have never been able to see the finished picture with the serenity of mind, all of the films in a single, continuous screening, instead of viewing different reels at different times, not necessarily in sequential order. Those moments were always accompanied with the hurry and hustle of preparing the final print in time for its screening at Fajr Festival, as otherwise the picture’s public screening would be delayed by a couple of years, resulting in loss of capital while the print gathers dust on the shelf. All this made film editing one of the most enervating, tormenting and at the same time absurd moments of filmmaking for me. The Mix is a reflection of my impressions and experiences of those moments.14 Clearly, The Mix is an intensely personal and authorial film for Mehrjui, indexed by his multifunctionality: he coproduced the film, wrote the screenplay and directed it, and he codesigned the costumes and the sets. In another way, The Mix is a great film: it ably portrays and emblematizes both the speed, pressure, disruptions, and sensory overload of modernity and industrialization and their costs for their subjects, for not only the director of the film-­w ithin-­a-­film but also the chief sound technician collapses in the process. Makhmalbaf used these deconstructive strategies in several of his midcareer and later films, including his trilogy on cinema. Naser al-­Din Shah, the Movie Actor (aka Once Upon a Time Cinema) is his audacious and loving homage to the history of Iranian cinema through the eyes of its first filmmakers. In Salaam Cinema (aka Cinema, Cinema; Salam Sinema, 1994), he inscribes himself as an authoritarian director who puts out a casting call that brings in more than five thousand applicants (figure 41). This enthusiastic group, who will do anything to get into the movies, forces Makhmalbaf to aggressively interview, interArt- House Ci nema

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41 Five thousand fans and would-be actors respond to a casting call in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema. Publicity photo.

rogate, and harass the prospective cast members (some regarded this persona as a true reflection of his personality). The trilogy’s first film deals with the early filmmakers and their relationship to the court, the second deals with Iranian fans’ cinephilia, while the third film, The Actor (Honarpisheh, 1993), deals principally with actors and their cinematic world. His Gabbeh is remarkable for its self-­reflexive structuration and counterhegemonic uses of colors; it applies that recursiveness to one of the oldest arts in Iran, carpet weaving, and to one of the newest arts, filmmaking. As weavers weave not only standardized patterns but also their personal signatures, preferences, and situations into their gabbehs (hand-­woven pile carpet), so does a modernist filmmaker like Makhmalbaf inscribe his own thoughts, concerns, and stylistic signatures into his film carpets, including Gabbeh.15 In Panahi’s The Mirror (Ayeneh, 1997), the child protagonist (Mina Mohammadkhani) stops halfway through the film and, speaking to the camera, declares that she is not going to cooperate with the director. In contrast to Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Mehrjui, other directors’ self-­reflexivity did not involve self-­inscription. Kiarostami’s involvement with his films is so multilayered and intimate that they are about Kiarostami, as well as their nominal subjects and cinema. The following excerpt from an interview in Gozaresh- ­e Film magazine elucidates: Interviewer: Is The Wind Will Carry Us an image of yourself? Kiarostami: Yes, but you have to look for this image in the main character. I also see myself in the little boy. In Close-­Up I find myself in the character of Ali Sabzian and the Ahankhah family who are deceived. I’m like the character who lies, and at the same time I’m similar to the family who’s been lied to. In all films, some characters are like the director, and in The Wind Will Carry Us, the woman in the café is like me, although she’s a woman. (quoted in Saeed-­Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003:4) 198

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Despite associations of characters with the film’s author, these are hardly autobiographical, as Kiarostami’s various deconstructive strategies create uncertainties about their author and authenticity. However, Farmanara’s film Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bu-­ye Kafur, Atr-­e Yas, 2000), made after a twenty-­year hiatus, was a bravura instance of self-­inscription in which, like Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the director did not shy away from casting himself in an unflattering light, taking the truthful but perhaps painful path to biographical self-­representation—­warts and all. As he relates it, Farmanara threw away the “whole vanity part” and decided that the only way that this character was going to be believable was to show him as he himself was: “He smokes, he’s fat, he doesn’t care about himself, and he has a death wish” (quoted in Dabashi 2001:155). He is no longer merely inscribing himself as an actor playing the part of his namesake, Bahman Farjami, but also as an actor who is playing himself in a story that to a large extent is about himself, about a fallow period in Farmanara’s life when he was suffering from depression and unable to make movies. The coincidence of actor, director, and part satisfies Phillipe Lejeune’s classic definition of the autobiographical pact, one in which “the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are identical” (1989:5). Most self-­inscriptional and self-­reflexive movies are not autobiographical, as Iranians’ dual, hierarchical, and collective psychology and attendant social practices create slippery realms in which the three terms of the autobiographical pact cannot reliably coincide. Farmanara’s film is thus rare. In addition, through self-­deprecation and humor, Farmanara engages in both self-­appreciation and self-­criticism, both of which are components of modern subjectivity. Unlike the premodern or early modern Iranians in the Qajar and the first Pahlavi periods, he is not defensive about his own incomplete or unflattering image, nor about the image of his nation, and he does not try to keep up false appearances—­or as the Persian saying goes, he does not try to keep his cheeks rosy by slapping himself. He is a self-­conscious modern subject, with all the uncertainties and dualities that modern subjectivity entails. The traditional firewall between Iranian interior and exterior spheres is dissolved. He is willing to present himself (and by extension his nation) to insiders and outsiders as he is, as an autonomous agent in history, not as a mere subject of history’s effects. He is willing to admit that he is not perfect, and harbors doubts about himself, and he makes fun of and criticizes himself. He is not afraid to hang his dirty individual or national laundry in public. In embodying individual subjectivity and responsibility and in embodying the tenets of the autobiographical pact, Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine is a triumph of modernity in late twentieth-­century cinema. With his haunting debut feature film, Black Tape: The Videotape Fariborz Kamkari Found in the Garbage (Ravayat- ­e Maghshush, 2002), Fariborz Kamkari not only contributes to the rising output of Iranian Kurdish filmmakers but also to the roster of audacious experimental films. The conceit of the film (with dialogue in Persian and Kurdish) is that the director Kamkari (who also wrote Art- House Ci nema

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the screenplay) came across a videotape containing the film. The story the film tells in fits and starts is that of Parviz (Gholamreza Moasesi), an ex-­army sergeant and torturer, and his wife, the beautiful and much younger Goli (Shilan Rahmani), the daughter of a Kurdish rebel. Their relationship is fraught with power imbalances, violent fights, voyeurism, and sadomasochistic sex play, unusual in its candor for the demure art-­house cinema. Goli is both a prized trophy wife and a slave, whom Parviz makes love to but treats like a prisoner. This is because he has acquired her in a manner that Kamkari says he heard about in real testimonies of Kurdish refugees: poor parents sell their young daughters to rich Persians and Arabs as wives. The film dramatizes the violent crumbling of this family relationship with a brutal surprise ending, and it goes beyond the hermetic diegetic story, as there are frequent references to Parviz torturing and killing Kurds, including members of his wife’s family. The story is told with “video diary” handheld clips filmed primarily by the two protagonists, with stops, starts, false starts, and dropped cameras. The camera becomes a third character. The point-­of-­v iew filming replicates the gendered power imbalance: Parviz films inside the couple’s apartment, with frequent intrusive zoom-­ins and claustrophobic framing that seem driven by the desire to “pin down and enclose the subject” (Miller 2003:4). Goli’s filming, on the other hand, is mostly of the exterior, with a looser and wider style allowing freedom of horizon and action. It is unclear if the contrast is due to director’s instructions, the exigencies of women’s representation in cinema (forcing a tighter framing of women, particularly in intimate scenes, to avoid censorship), the demands of the narrative (filmed inside Kamkari’s private apartment) or the real-­life background of the actors (particularly Rahmani, who had been a refugee herself living in camps). Perhaps all of these were factors. That the film was mostly shot inside the director’s apartment, that Rahmani had been a Kurdish refugee herself, that the primary relationship was based on the Kurds’ real-­life stories, that Parviz forbade Goli to speak her own language—­all these anchor the film in reality, preventing it from flying into self-­reflexive and fictionalized netherworlds. The result is an audacious, powerful film told in a fresh style different from commercial movies and art-­house films. One Western film critic compared Black Tape’s unpolished rhythm, rough texture, and self-­reflexive structure favorably to Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1989) (Miller 2003). Another regarded it as an attempt to push the methods of the Danish Dogme 95 group to their “logical extreme,” to make a movie that “comes by its emotional impact by being as uncinematic as possible” (Scott 2003). The film was banned in Iran. A consequence of the strategies of metarealism for the film’s reception is that spectators do not aggregate into a collective. According to Brecht, while the Aristotelian drama creates a collective entity in the movie house “for the duration of the entertainment” on the basis of the “common humanity” that all the 200

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spectators share, self-­reflexive drama is “not interested in the establishment of such an entity. It divides its audience” (quoted in Willet 1964:60). Each spectator presumably responds subjectively and individually to the work of art. While such outcomes of counterhegemonic strategies may be celebrated as an empowering gift of modernity to artists and spectators, allowing both to engage in individualized, even “cellular” resistance against mainstream culture and ideology, they may also be condemned as a disempowering curse, for these textual politics of playfulness, irony, and individuality may undermine the films’ social politics of certainty and collectivity. As the Marxist literary critic Masud Zavarzadeh warned, the danger is that this “ludic postmodernism,” in the name of “paradox, parody, and pastiche—­complexity—­places the most blatant instances of social exploitation and their naturalization in films and other texts of culture under interrogative immunity and grants them free play under the sign of immanent resistance” (1991:64). This is what the best of the dissident exile filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals may be saying in their critique of the Islamic Republic art-­house films that circulate in international film festivals. The damage that “ludic” deconstructive textual strategies can cause in cinema and media exceeds the realm of national cinemas and politics. Strategies that emphasize the endless playfulness of the signifier without being anchored in what Jacques Derrida called a “transcendental signified,” or social reality, favor rapacious global capitalism by masking all social contradictions and oppositions as resistance or mere difference, thus reproducing “the ethos of the democratic pluralism that is the ideological underpinning of stateless corporate capitalism” (Zavarzadeh 1991:34).

Cinema Vérité Aesthetics The use of cinema vérité strategies further undermined classic realism and neorealism, enhancing film’s self-­reflexive structuration. Kiarostami provokes, distorts, and directs the profilmic reality throughout Close-­Up, but most remarkably in the court trial where, alluding to his earlier jailhouse interview in which Sabzian had made a distinction between manifest reality and latent meaning, he explains to him that there are two cameras in the court. The one that is filming in long shots, he tells Sabzian, “belongs to the court,” that is, it is for outsiders, designed to film external reality. On the other hand, he tells Sabzian, the camera that films in close-­up “is for us and not for the court,” that is, it is for the insiders, intended to record the internal reality—­the truth. This point is further driven home when Kiarostami tells him: “If any time during the trial you need to explain something in particular, something that seems unbelievable or unacceptable to the court, then tell it to this close-­up camera.” In linking the Iranian psychological orientation, which distrusts manifest reality and outsiders but highly values inner reality and insiders, to shot size and shot comArt- House Ci nema

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position, Kiarostami deftly visualizes that psychology. It is in this context that Sabzian’s courtroom elaboration and defense of his behavior must be viewed. According to him, his impersonation was not based on fraud. It was driven by Sabzian’s sincere love for Makhmalbaf’s films, which powerfully depicted the terrible social conditions of the downtrodden, including Sabzian’s. As a result, he elaborates: “I loved Makhmalbaf and wanted to be in his place. . . . Playing him gave me self-­confidence and earned me respect.” As a poor, lowly printer, no one had taken him seriously, while as a film director, people recognized him, respected him, and followed what he asked of them (apparently, the Ahankhahs were willing to cut down a large tree in their yard to make a better shot possible). By confessing to his fraud and by justifying it in such deeply personal and cultural terms, he makes himself vulnerable. By displaying intimacy, sincerity, and vulnerability instead of calculation and cleverness, he removes cultural barriers and turns the spectators into insiders. As Kiarostami astutely observes, “his lies reflect his inner reality better than the superficial truth” that the other characters mouth off (quoted in Lopate 1998:359). What Kiarostami says here about Sabzian is also true about his own filming, that he reaches for truth through deception. By setting up the close-­up shot as belonging to “us,” Kiarostami conflates the position of the film’s subject with those of the director and the spectators, creating audience complicity with both Sabzian’s fraud and his own film. By giving his two-­camera filming instructions to Sabzian in the presence of the judge, plaintiffs, and spectators, Kiarostami provokes a new filmic reality different from that of the courtroom, transforming Close-­Up from a univocal direct-­ cinema “work” into a multivocal cinema vérité “text” (Barthes 1974). The spectator is potentially transformed from passive consumer to producer of meaning. Film criticism misses the distinctions between direct cinema and cinema vérité; if direct cinema, as practiced by pioneers like Albert Maysles, Richard Leacock, and Frederick Wiseman, was devoted to recording the unvarnished profilmic reality, cinema vérité, particularly that practiced by trailblazers such as Jean Rouch, Jean-­Luc Godard, and Errol Morris, intends to investigate reality by intervening and provoking it. Close-­Up is neither documentary nor fictional; it is a hybrid of both, made in cinema vérité style. The judge asks Kiarostami, “Are you ready?” before opening court: in cinema vérité, the real court proceedings cannot begin without filming, while in direct cinema, the camera is to have no bearing on the profilmic world. In one, reality cannot take place before filming begins, in the other, filming cannot begin until reality occurs. A key characteristic of cinema vérité that Rouch and Edgar Morin used in their ur-­vérité film Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un Été, 1961) was the use of recording to provoke reality. This is what Kiarostami’s camera does. The court proceedings begin when the camera rolls; Kiarostami interacts with Sabzian, the judge, and the plaintiffs, as well as directing and retaking actual court scenes. The one-­hour scheduled court session was extended into a ten-­ 202

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hour vérité filming, which Kiarostami condensed. He recognizes that provocation is a key filming technique for him, as he states in discussing the emotionally charged shots of Mr. Badii in Taste of Cherry: “These are shots that I do not claim to have created. They deserve better than that. I was able to provoke them and seize them at the right moment. That’s all” (quoted in Saeed-­Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003:125). The distinction that the diegetic Kiarostami makes between the long-­shot camera and the close-­up camera and between external reality and internal meaning is the Iranian figuration of the distinction between direct cinema and cinema vérité. And it is this distinction, this tension between manifest and latent meanings, which informs and propels the drama of Kiarostami’s filmic style in general. His films become subtle, sly treatises on reality, realism, and the human condition. A provocation to get at deeper meanings drives the fascinating sequence that brings the film to a close: Kiarostami arranges a surprise meeting between Sabzian and his idol. As Sabzian is exiting the court and entering a busy street, Makhmalbaf suddenly appears and introduces himself. Taken aback, the lowly fan bends down to kiss the director’s hand in the traditional respectful gesture. Makhmalbaf, in an equally traditional magnanimous gesture, stops him with an embrace, equalizing the status of fan and idol, lover and beloved, whereupon Sabzian breaks into what appear to be heartfelt tears. Significantly, instead of filming this touching scene in a direct-­cinema style, which would have emphasized his own sincerity and humanism, Kiarostami slyly manipulates the soundtrack to create intermittent interruptions. This intervention is made to appear spontaneous: he and his crew seem surprised by Makhmalbaf’s faulty microphone connection. Apparently unaware of the problem, Makhmalbaf and Sabzian proceed to purchase a bouquet of red flowers to take to the Ahankhah family as a gesture of reconciliation now that Sabzian has been acquitted. The ensuing scene that shows Makhmalbaf driving his motorcycle with Sabzian seated behind him with the flowers while holding onto his idol is reminiscent of stereotypical love scenes in which lovers separated have been reunited. They engage in conversation, but the bad connection makes it difficult to understand what they are saying. It is important to point out that the bad connection is in fact only a ruse, deliberately manufactured in post­ production. In doing this, Kiarostami has acted like Sabzian, pretending to have a bad connection. Unlike Sabzian, he does not confess to his fraud on film (the film does not acknowledge that the bad connection is deliberate). Perhaps with this ruse he is telling us that the content of their conversation is not important; what is important is that lover and beloved, fan and star, disciple and master are united—­a classic trope in Persian mystic poetry and philosophy. This most intimate moment of unrehearsed reality is turned into a highly mediated scene about filmmaking, critiquing both film realism and the Iranian valorization of sincerity (figure 42). The spectators, too, are placed in an ambivalent position. Art- House Ci nema

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42 Cinema verité deconstruction. Deliberate sound problems interfere with dialogue during Makhmalbaf and Sabzian’s motorbike ride in Kiarostami’s Close-Up. Frame enlargement.

They sympathize with Sabzian and his cathartic union with his object of desire, but the audacious use of this and other alienation strategies distances them, forcing them to question sincerity: that of realist cinema, and of Kiarostami. Kiarostami makes films of indirection, implication, postponement, and restraint—­a kind of tantric cinema. Iranians in general, and Kiarostami in particular, appear to draw particular pleasure from the tantric arts. Some would call this evasiveness, but I would prefer to characterize it in Homi Bhabha’s words as “sly civility” (1994: 93–102), for in the works of the best poets and filmmakers, such as Kiarostami, indirection, implication, restraint, and limitation become strategies of creative agency, using resistance, criticism, and authorial expression to open hermeneutically rich texts to multiple interpretations.

Third Cinema Research Films Kiarostami is an emblematic art-­house filmmaker who astutely employs the strategies of realism and metarealism to develop what I call “research films,” fusing fact and fiction to deal with the social issues of becoming modern. Authoritarianism, individuality, and communitarianism arise in turn, and cinematic issues like authorship, deception, humanism, and realism inflect them. His research films are different from research-­based documentaries such as Refuge: Housing Crisis, the three-­part films on housing problems that Mokhtari, Tahaminejad, and Javadi made, for in these the documentarists made their films based on the sociological research that their research teams had conducted prior to filming. In their “essay films,” sociological and audiovisual evidence supports an argument. In Kiarostami’s films, on the other hand, the research is simultaneous with filming; the making of the film constitutes the research process, which exposes the filmmaker, the actors, and the spectators not only to the sociological or moral and didactic topics at hand but also to cinematic issues: realism, deception, truthfulness, fictionalization, and imaginative 204

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storytelling. This research dimension of his films connects him to the Third Cinema theories of the 1960s, even though Kiarostami himself does not refer to them. These theories consist of the avant-­gardist manifesto, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” written by the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, along with other revolutionary cinematic manifestos by film collectives in North Africa, the Middle East, France, and the United States. Particularly germane is the famous Latin American manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” and its massive, seminal companion film, The Hour of the Furnaces (La Hora de los Hornos, 1968), both by the Argentinean cineastes Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.16 The manifesto and the 260-­minute film audaciously critiqued the mainstream, capitalist “First Cinema” and the petit bourgeois, authorial “Second Cinema,” and proposed in their place a new research category of “Third Cinema,” a cinema that was not perfect, polished, or professional. In Kiarostami’s research films, as in Third Cinema research films, a curious filmmaker pursues an inquiry, often into power and authoritarianism. Answers accrue as the film progresses; the film serves as motivation for and document of that quest for understanding. But it does not just document, in direct-­cinema fashion; it also provokes in cinema vérité fashion. Answers are not dictated by the filmmaker, researcher, or scriptwriter prior to the film. The films’ aesthetics and narratives are likewise imperfect, inquisitive, open-­ended, meandering, personal, and seemingly ad hoc, even amateurish. Their imperfection critiques the dominant commercial films’ polished styles and professional practices. Finally, the films’ loose structures encourage spectator involvement in their completion, contributing to the emergence of modern subjectivity. Alternatively, those who fail to become engaged in this process (and there are many, particularly in Iran) are frustrated by the films’ ellipses. As will be seen, some of these are genuine imperfections and some are only pretensions of imperfection, which undermine both the social reality of his films and their filmic realism. As part of this authorial style, Kiarostami generally inscribes his social and cinematic criticism in the guise of clever observations, juxtapositions, asides, tantric delays, metaphors, and biting ironies, instead of in the form of direct political commentary, as was popular with the Third Cinema or Iranian new-­wave films in their heyday. Two research films stand out, both of which examine society’s values. They critique authoritarianism, the suppression of individuality, and a group-­think mentality both in Iranian society and in Iranian schools. As such, these are both modern films and films about modernity. His fifty-­three-­minute film Problem, First Case .  .  . Second Case (Qazziyeh Shekl-­e Avval . . . Shekl-­e Dovvom, 1979) presents a classroom in which a teacher is drawing a diagram of an ear on the blackboard, when the sound of a student drumming with his fingers distracts him. When this annoying action is repeated several times despite the teacher’s scolding glances, he is able to narrow the source to two rows of students in the back. He tells those students that he Art- House Ci nema

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is ready to kick them out of the class for one week, giving them two choices. Case one: Snitch on the culprit, turn him in, and return to the class immediately. Case two: Stay united and be collectively punished for one week. In one scenario, a student breaks ranks and turns in a friend. He is gnawed by guilt. In the meantime, Kiarostami interviews prominent religious, political, and cultural figures, psychologists, and parents of the accused students, asking them to comment on the teacher’s dilemma and the two solutions he has offered the students. Through this bifurcated focus (on the school and on national figures), this small classroom dilemma becomes both personal and general, drawing viewers in. In the end, another scenario ensues: the accused students, who had remained united, return to class after a week of absence; drumming resumes. This time, it comes not from the back rows alone, but from all the rows in class. The message seems clear: “united we stand, divided we fall.” The film was made in the throes of the revolution, when unity was essential in the destruction of one regime and in the installation of a new one. The film could have added other alternatives, but as is, it brings up timely questions regarding the ethics of authoritarianism, loyalty, and individuality, creating what a critic called “one of the most important educational films in Iranian cinema. . . . One of the most absorbing and attractive films” (Karimi 1986/1365:66). In the years to come, this film and the questions it raised became more poignant and powerful because viewers could evaluate the sober words the prominent social figures uttered in their filmed interviews against their later sordid or heroic conduct and against their eventual fate. These figures included Nureddin Kianuri, the grandson of the famous Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri and a top leader of the Tudeh Party, dubbed “Communist Ayatollah,” who was later arrested on charges of spying and treason, whereupon he recanted his whole life in an infamous television “confession” in 1983. He subsequently spent years in prisons of the Islamic Republic (Abrahamian 1999:177–98). Ebrahim Yazdi, an early protégé of Ayatollah Khomeini, eventually became a reformist member and leader of the Freedom Front (Nehzat-­e Azadi), a loyal opposition group that has been perennially banned. Sadegh Khalkhali, known as the “hanging judge,” became a notorious executioner for the regime, ordering the summary executions of many Pahlavi-­era leaders and postrevolutionary opposition figures. Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, another early protégé of Khomeini, ran important government agencies such as the vvir and the foreign ministry, but was later executed, having been charged with plotting a coup against his mentor. It is the height of Kiarostami’s ironic prescience to have interviewed these leaders—­who would within a few years be either accused of, or implicated in, various treasonous betrayals or acts of heroic loyalty to the regime—­to comment as moral arbiters on the ethical dilemmas that a lowly school teacher and his students faced. For his eighty-­six-­minute film Homework (Mashq-­e Shab, 1988), Kiarostami distributed eight hundred questionnaires to schoolchildren about how they do, and what they think of, their nightly homework. Subsequently, twenty male 206

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43 Kiarostami’s research film, Homework, investigates authoritarianism, conformity, and regimentation in society. Publicity still.

students were selected for on-­camera interviews, in which the children reveal, and complain of, dysfunctional family relations, parental illiteracy, lack of respect and love from both parents and teachers, the difficulty and high volume of nightly homework assignments, adults’ anger and short tempers, physical punishment, and, finally, authoritarian tendencies everywhere, including in the conduct of the director himself toward his filmic subjects (figure 43). His use of a surveying gaze and a panoptic camera, which voyeuristically scrutinize students and others, reinforces the authoritarianism of the director, causing Le Monde to rightly characterize him as acting “half like a sociologist and half like a policeman” (quoted in Qukasian 1996/1375:260). That is the price that self-­inscription demands: that directors such as Kiarostami in Homework and Makhmalbaf in Salaam Cinema portray themselves honestly, even in negative personae. Made under the auspices of the cidcya, Homework was shot in February 1988 in Tehran’s Shahid Masumi School. Its criticism of the virulent authoritarianism of the educational system, including of the schoolteachers, and of widespread lying and deception by children, was so effective that the Ministry of Education kept the film off public screens. Like many of his films, this one was both a biographical and a self-­inscriptional film, for it begins with Kiarostami responding to a student query by saying that the film was instigated by his own son’s homework problems. He continues: “That’s why I brought the camera here, I thought I would conduct research with it to see if this problem is only my child’s problem, or my own problem, or that of the educational system. . . . It is not film as such, it is a work of research, it is a visual research.” Many of his early “educational” films about children and his later films about social issues can be approached under such a rubric. Narratively, some of his films resemble the search phase of the research process, in that single-­minded characters on some mission frequently ask others for the way to their destination, whether it is the young boy in Where Is the Friend’s Home?, the film director in Life and Nothing More . . . , the journalist Art- House Ci nema

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and the policeman in Close-­Up, the man who seeks an accomplice in his suicide scheme in Taste of Cherry, or the television director and his crew in The Wind Will Carry Us. That some do not reach their goal, and others do not find what they are looking for once they arrive, despite their dogged perseverance, comments on the frustrated wishes of Iranians and of research projects that come to nothing. Finally, shots of the film crew and the director working—­that is, self-­ reflexivity—­underscore the process of research filming.

Humanist Themes and Child Characters The radical humanism of Iranian art-­house movies surprised audiences outside Iran. The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of Kiarostami’s works, “Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized by critics as among the most ethical and humanist” (quoted in Saeed-­Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003:2). The films stood in sharp contrast to the belligerent rhetoric and the violent politics of the Islamist government. Perhaps the very fact that Iranians had undergone a desired but destructive revolution, a devastating war, the hostage-­taking episode that placed Iran among the “pariah” nations, and a massive state-­driven suppression of human and artistic rights made them long for an ideal, harmonious community in which humanistic values ruled—­values that emphasized the commonality of all humans and their basic goodness. Most twentieth-­ century Iranian cinema linked modernity and Westernization, but some films under the Islamic Republic offered modernity with spirituality, modernity with a collective heart. The humanism of the war movies was driven chiefly by this alternative modernity and by the tenets of Shiite Islam and Sufism and their mythologies and iconographies. Art-­house movies had a nontheistic sort of humanism, manifested in a range of stylistic features in small, decent, honest, and optimistic films. The directors of art cinema corroborate this. Mehrjui linked the art-­ house cinema to its predecessor, the Pahlavi-­era new-­wave movement, calling it a “truthful cinema” whose “starting hypothesis” is that “human beings are essentially good.” Baizai labeled it “a naïve, innocent, decent” cinema, while Kiumars Purahmad characterized it as “tiny and modest” (quoted in Akrami 1999). The prominent actress Fatemeh Motamed Aria described it as a “compassionate cinema,” adding, “It is our plea for compassion that is capturing the world, not our advanced technique or our high technology. Our cinema is being presented to the world because of the kindness of a child toward his sister, or the compassion of a mother toward her child.” 17 The films also had an ethics of doggedness, displayed particularly by children, lone figures, and social underdogs, which rendered them triumphant in the end. In fact, the humanist ethos of the art cinema was intimately tied to children and women—­traditional subordinates. The portrayal of women be208

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came less stereotypical and ideological and more realistic and nuanced, even emancipatory, once women began to make films themselves. Children’s prominence in the movies created the erroneous impression that art-­house films constituted a kind of children’s cinema. Their prevalence was driven by film organizations making child-­centered films, such as the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA), which spanned the second Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic periods, and by the new regime’s gender segregation and censorship politics, which encouraged directors to use children as substitutes for females.18 Although scores of features, shorts, documentaries, and animated films were made about children and starred children, these were not homogenous and were generally not films for children. Both Abbas Jahangirian (1988) and Masud Mehrabi (1989) in their filmographies of children’s movies provide a four-­part typology: Films for children, films about children, films in which children are substitutes for adults or a pretext for dealing with adult issues, and films with children acting in them. Some of the best movies made in the first decade of the Islamic Republic fit into one or more of these classifications. The assessment of the anthropologist Erika Friedl, who worked with children and women for several decades in the Pahlavi and Islamic periods, of the social sciences’ neglect of children, is germane to the children’s apparent prevalence but actual neglect in the movies, some exceptions aside. She states that in Iran, “children are so thoroughly dominated by adults that they continue to be dealt with as objects in the social sciences. The few pioneers in child-­ethnography mostly look at how children are organized by adults (in schools, health care, law); at how they are fed, cared for, and socialized; at how they play and acquire language. Hardly anybody is looking at children as makers of culture, as creators of beliefs, and sharing experiences, as evaluators of their surroundings, as making sense of what they experience” (2004:655). Only the best of the films involving children dealt with children as makers of meaning and culture. This dismissive attitude is changing, as children and youth—­ the third and fourth generations after the revolution—­turn to making movies and videos. The attributes of smallness, decency, truthfulness, optimism, compassion, and doggedness, as well as the representation of children as social agents, meaning makers, and the films’ moral center are most emphatically promulgated in Kiarostami’s films and in the films of his coterie of followers. Where Is the Friend’s Home? is an early entry in the humanist genre with children as protagonists, who are both neglected and overprotected by society. Described by a flagship Hollywood trade paper as “agonizingly slow” but ultimately “rewarding,” 19 it depicts the relentless efforts of Ali (Babak Ahmadpur), an honest elementary school boy, to return his friend’s copybook, which he had taken home by mistake (figure 44). Knowing that the stern teacher will expel his friend, Mohammad Reza (Ahmad Ahmadpur), if he returns to school without his homework in the copybook, Ali defies his elders and sets out alone on an arduous and Art- House Ci nema

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44 A self-reflexive poster for Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? The character’s gaze guides attention to the director’s awards at international film festivals. Film poster from author’s collection.

ultimately futile search over the hills for Mohammad Reza’s home in a neighboring village. He is disappointed but not defeated, for he does his friend’s homework for him in his copybook, which he hands over to him the next day, saving him from expulsion. In Panahi’s The White Balloon (Badkonak-­e Sefid, 1995, written by Kiarostami), a young girl named Raziyeh (Aida Mohammadkhani), who dearly wishes to purchase a plump gold fish for the Noruz celebration, loses her hard-­won money in a street grating. She does not give up; she recruits other children to help retrieve the money, with which she obtains the object of beauty she desires. In Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Bachehha-­ye Aseman, 1997), Zohreh’s brother Ali (Amir Farrokh Hashemi) loses her only pair of shoes, without which she cannot appear in public, including going to school. Ali solves the dilemma by sharing his own only pair of shoes with his sister, despite all the gender and other complications that that arrangement entails for both of them. Ghobadi’s touch210

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ing A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani Bara-­ye Masti-­ye Asbha, 2000) focuses on the trials of a family of five Kurds near the Iran-­Iraq border, which is headed by the twelve-­year old Ayub (Ayub Ahmadi). They live through a terrible winter and care for a handicapped brother, Madi (Madi Ekhtiardini). These films exposed not only the oppression of children by adults but also the children’s resilience and creativity in solving adult problems. In The Mirror Panahi critiques adult imposition on children, including that of filmmakers, cleverly, when Mina stops the film’s production, takes off attributes of her character such as her head scarf and her arm cast, and refuses to participate in the film. Her refusal is a self-­reflexive inscription of childhood acts of rebellion against various oppressive forces and institutions in society. The agents of reconciliation vary from film to film: diegetic characters; the self-­inscribed directors; objects; or music, voice, or film itself can all serve. In Close-­Up, for example, it is both the diegetic and the extradiegetic filmmaker, Kiarostami, who helps reconcile Sabzian with Ahankhah family members and who engineers Sabzian’s union with Makhmalbaf in the film’s touching finale. In Makhmalbaf’s Naser al-­Din Shah, the Movie Actor, the agent of reconciliation is the montage of scenes of hugging and kissing from Iranian movies of the past, and in his Silence (Sokut, 1998), it is diegetic music and musicians; in Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (Sib, 1998), it is the diegetic object, an apple—­ ironically the forbidden fruit—­dangled by a neighborhood boy before the two incarcerated girls that lures them into communicating with the outside world. On the other hand, in Banietemad’s The May Lady (Banu-­ye Ordibehesht, 1997), the agents of love that bring Forugh and Mr. Rahbar together are human voices on the telephone, on the answering machine, and in letters. The same attributes of smallness, decency, truthfulness, compassion, communitarianism, optimism, and doggedness involving children are present in Naderi’s The Runner (Davandeh, 1985), symbolized particularly strongly in the powerful finale of the film when Amiro (Majid Nirumand), the eleven-­year-­old scrappy protagonist, is racing both against the other street urchins and against a block of ice that is fast melting away in the heat of a blazing oil-­field fire. The boys push and trip one another to reach the cool reward in that horrific heat. Amiro is the first to reach the small clump of ice that remains. As he joyfully grabs it and raises it to his face to cool off, he glances behind at the boys struggling to reach it. He turns and, as the others arrive, shares the ice with them, which they joyously pass around. Such celebrations of communion offered occasions to assimilate outsiders and strangers. Emblematic here is Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger, in which the Gilaki woman, Nai, adopts the runaway Arab boy, Bashu, and against the advice of her family and village elders assimilates him into her family. In the absence of her husband, at first he functions as a placeholder for him, but gradually he finds his own place, and by the film’s end, when her husband returns from his long absence, Bashu is officially integrated into the newly reformed family. Art- House Ci nema

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45 Critiquing the clergy in Seyyed Reza Mir Karimi’s nuanced movie, Under the Moonlight. Publicity picture.

Compassion for others is tied to a religiously optimistic worldview in which individual efforts for the collective good are rewarded, if not in this world, at least in the hereafter. Surprisingly for a theocratic state, the humanist cinema was largely secular, a quietly counterhegemonic cinema, less concerned with human relations with God than with relations between humans. Moreover, clerics were almost completely absent from art-­house films until the end of the century, when Seyyed Reza Mir Karimi’s nuanced drama Under the Moonlight (Zir-­e Nur-­e Mah, 2001) and Kamal Tabrizi’s deft comedy The Lizard (Marmulak, 2004) offered devastating critiques of the clerics and clerical establishment (figure 45). Both of these riffed on the character of the haji, first promulgated in Ohanians’s Mr. Haji the Movie Actor in the 1930s, which through the years had merged with the character of the mullah into one overarching negative religious, hypocritical, oversexed, and greedy character. Art-­house cinema was not antireligious, since it did not oppose the ruling Islamist ideology and institutions; it just ignored them. An interesting example of nontheistic, humanist, and modernist film, counterhegemonic both to the dominant cinema, even art cinema, and to the dominant Islamic Republic’s theistic ideology was Alireza Rasoulinezhad’s Exteriors (Sahnehha-­ye Khareji, 2004), a seventy-­three-­minute tripartite film essay. Born in 1975 in Sirjan, Rasoulinezhad directed, wrote the screenplay, designed the costumes, and edited this audacious film, whose conceit is that a middle-­aged intellectual leaves his apartment on a trip to “northern territories,” asking his young nephew, Shayan, and niece, Sharlin, to house-­sit for him. In his apartment he leaves them elaborate instructions, numbered envelopes containing letters, a video camera, an unfinished video film, cds of Western classical music, and other objects to be used in time. The film contains two primary discourses. One involves the two teenagers—­computer geeks perennially suffering from cold, as they wrap themselves up in blankets everywhere they go and mount a document-­scanning and e-­mail campaign against friends and family. They read their uncle’s letters, watch his video, and use the digital camera to make their own film within the film. They are Iranian slackers and flâneurs, 212

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or as the director calls them, “stereotypes originating from cartoons” (Rasoulinezhad and Rastin 2006:57), who document and parody their urban spaces in ways unseen in cinema. The second discourse is that of the film itself, guided by an omniscient, intellectual, invisible male narrator who informs the spectators of the uncle’s plans and offers a critical analysis of Iran—­of its architecture, public sphere, middle-­class ethos, and traffic. It posits the country as still in transition to modernity, not having sufficiently internalized its philosophical and psychological tenets: individuality, rationality, and self-­reflexivity. To underscore this point, the film marshals an impressive number of Iranian intellectuals—­all males—­who in lecture and interview situations eloquently cite supportive Western thinkers (such as Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin) and filmmakers (such as Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, and Jean-­Luc Godard).20 While the teenage slacker-­nerds’ discourse is alternately playful, juvenile, mixed-­gender, anarchist, and depressing—­the boy tells someone: “You have a Peugeot 206, therefore you exist”—­the second intellectuals’ discourse is serious, adult, male, formalist, and rational. Significantly, the first discourse, represented by the film-­w ithin-­a-­film, counters the second discourse, for it demonstrates that the young, cartoon-­derived characters are thoroughly modern, exhibiting the individuality, rationality, self-­reflexivity, and angst of modern subjects. Contradictory or not, the two discourses add up to an impressive social and cinematic critique whose content and form are new to Iranian cinema, auguring the emergence of a new personal, experimental digital cinema within the country. The optimism and ethics of humanist movies have a messianic source, which makes the contemporary bad times tolerable because of the hope that the rise of a messiah would make them better. However, this is not strictly speaking a religious or an Islamic form of messianism, for its agent is not a religious figure—­a Mahdi, who is in occlusion—­but often a surprising secular and visible figure, a child. The purported innocence of the children allows revelation to be channeled through them, and the messianic structure permits hope of redemption and salvation to come through their individual actions. This is why Kiarostami was able to call children the embodiment of “the ideal mystic,” about whom one hears much, but whose living examples are few and far between (quoted in Akrami 1999). It was this hope that drove many films’ narratives: Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger, Naderi’s The Runner and Water, Wind, Dust (Ab, Bad, Khak, 1985), Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Ebrahim Foruzesh’s The Key (Kelid, 1986) and The Jar (Khomreh, 1992), Panahi’s The White Balloon (Badkonak-­e Sepid, 1995) and The Mirror, Mohammad Ali Talebi’s The Boots (Chekmeh, 1992), Parviz Shahbazi’s The Traveler from the South (Mosaferi az Jonub, 1996), Majidi’s Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise (Rang-­e Khoda, 1999), and Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses. Children healed wounds, taught adults lessons, or relentlessly forged ahead toward small but morally significant victories. Art- House Ci nema

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In the messianic structure, sightlessness and insight are interlinked. In Majidi’s The Color of Paradise, Mohammad, a blind boy (Mohsen Ramezani), who at the film’s opening saves a sick bird, is endowed with humanistic insight, unlike his seeing father (Hosain Mahjub), who is blinded by his own problems. The boy saves his father from a torrential river through his act of self-­sacrifice, which opens his father’s eyes, in a terrifically powerful finale. The messianic return to origins, or to better days, is coded in these films as humanistic, returning us to the core values of both religious and secular humans—­kindness, compassion, empathy, and self-­sacrifice. These films’ radicalism lay in their secular hope for the future and their spiritual and ethical construction of life’s fundamentals. The humanist films mobilize compassion especially for the disabled. Children are frequently its subjects. Majidi’s The Color of Paradise shows a father’s and grandmother’s compassion for their blind boy, while in Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses children go to great lengths in terrible cold to protect Madi, a disabled boy. Such compassion extends to animals: in The Color of Paradise the blind boy Mohammad returns a sick chick to its nest, while his grandmother Aziz returns a panting fish to the water. While humanist films did not advocate for Islamicate culture—­sometimes they critiqued it—­their emphasis on optimism, ethics, and spirituality implicated them in the dominant ideology, as these values were similar to Islamicate values, which dissident exiled critics derided as the ideology of “sowing kindness and reaping reconciliation” (mehr bekarim va ashti derow konim), to which the regime professed allegiance but which it rarely practiced.21 As a result, the government tolerated, even welcomed, whatever implicit or explicit criticism the films offered since they did not oppose either the ruling doctrine or the regime. With the rise of Ahmadinejad and irgc and the resulting militarization of culture and social spaces the themes and tenor of humanist films, too, hardened, becoming pessimistic and directly political and critical of the regime. These humanist films of art cinema were distinguished from popular films, which relied on sex, violence, action-­driven plots, bigger-­than-­life stars and emotions, and special-­effects wizardry. The moral dilemmas their child protagonists faced involved returning a notebook to a friend, buying a goldfish for the New Year’s table, or having to share one pair of shoes. The choices the youngsters made had practical results as well as moral and philosophical import. As the young characters pursued their goals, the films gradually peeled away differences that distinguish individuals and individual societies to reveal a common moral human core. In the process they offered the wisdom that to be universal it is necessary first to become local, even cellular. It was essential to treat these ordinary people and small events realistically, for realism reinforced at the level of style the thematic humanism of the films. One reason for the wide praise Iranian cinema received abroad is to be found in precisely this marriage of humanism and realism. It countered the corrosive effects of the official culture of violence at home and of the postmodernist culture of cynicism abroad. 214

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However, with international success, humanist filmmakers evolved into independent authors, and these values were nuanced by self-­reflexive and deconstructive narrative strategies. Instances of reality-­busting strategies in the case of Close-­Up have been cited. In Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, ostensibly about suicide, self-­reflexivity enters only at the end, almost as an afterthought or a coda (a scene some suggested was added to avoid censorship). After the protagonist, Mr. Badii (Homayun Ershadi), decides to lie in the grave that throughout the film he strives to have dug for him, and just before the ending credits, the film cuts to a completely different scene in which Kiarostami is seen directing an earlier moment of the film, in which the actor Ershadi, very much alive, walks up to him and offers him a cigarette. This ending suggests that the suicide contemplated throughout the film was not real (although the film leaves that possibility in suspension). Also, Taste of Cherry perpetrates the fiction that it is about suicide and its moral and philosophical dimensions. However, deep down it is less about that than about the desire for human relationships and companionship. It subverts the officially sanctioned notions of companionship, however, by introducing homosexual undertones, as Badii’s recruiting of helpers for his suicide scheme is at times interpreted by the recruits as efforts to pick them up (and his handing of a cigarette to Kiarostami in the coda scene can be read this way). For traditionalists the film became both ethically and morally suspect. Had it not been for the enthusiasm of foreign film festivals, critics, and audiences, and Kiarostami’s international stature, both the film and its maker could have suffered. These deconstructive and evasive strategies that cast doubt on the certainty of reality and on the realness of filmic realism set Kiarostami apart and endeared him to intellectuals abroad, but they made him the object of criticism and envy and spectator disinterest at home. Other secular filmmakers, such as Mehrjui in Hamoon (1990) and The Pear Tree (Derakht- ­e Golabi, 1997), dealt with crises of humanism, particularly that besetting secular intellectuals, in a style at once fantastical, impressionistic, and realistic. Or Baizai who in his eloquent Death of Yazdegerd (Marg-­e Yazdegerd, 1980), made immediately after the revolution, introduces for the first time in cinema the uncertainty of reality and history’s multiplicity. Long before Makhmalbaf’s relativist phase, Baizai was agnostic about life’s certainties, including Iranian history. He cast doubt on the identity of both King Yazdegerd III and his assassin and about the circumstances of his murder on the heels of the Muslim Arab invasion in the seventh century. This went counter to the ruling zeitgeist during the consolidation of the Islamists, which placed a premium on monovocalism, monotheism, and monopoly—­in other words, on certitude. It is not surprising that religiously inspired filmmakers’ struggle with ethical, moral, and humanistic dilemmas would emerge from a religious perspective. The most innovative and radical of these was Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who underwent a multiphase evolution away from his earlier fundamentalist posiArt- House Ci nema

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tion. In the 1980s, he went from being an absolutist Islamicate filmmaker to a socially critical director; in the 1990s he evolved yet again toward a humanist and relativist position; and in the 2000s he became not only a dissident filmmaker but also a political dissident in the aftermath of Ahmadinejad’s disputed second presidency. The remarkable thing about his evolution was that it took place in full public view—­in his movies, interviews, and prolific publications and videos—­w ithout any traditional ritual courtesy or indirectness, that is, without pulling his punches or backpedaling.22 His earlier phases of evolution—­Islamicate and socially critical—­are dealt with in an earlier chapter. Here, I focus briefly on his humanist and relativist phase. He was straightforward about these shifts, stating: “I not only do not exclude myself from this cultural illness of absolutism but also confess to it. My past works and utterances suffered greatly from these absolutist tendencies. I am not offended today that my works are facing criticism, for I consider criticism proper and necessary. Iranian critics still suffer from the illness of absolutism. . . . My sorrow is that Iranian culture is an absolutist culture” (Makhmalbaf 1993c/1372:57). He made many films after his shift to relativism, but one film embodies it: A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun, 1995). Before the revolution, when Makhmalbaf was seventeen years old and a member of an Islamist guerrilla group, Balal-­e Habashi, named in honor of the Prophet Mohammad’s first muezzin, he and two accomplices had attacked a policeman guarding a bank, taking his pistol for their struggle against the Pahlavi regime. In the melee that ensued, Makhmalbaf stabbed the policeman but was shot, arrested, and condemned to five years in prison. Now, some seventeen years later, he used this biographical incident in A Moment of Innocence to re-­create that era, and he cast the same policeman he had attacked years earlier to play his own part. The real policeman acted in a fictionalized account of that historical incident, which ends with an image of bread and a flower, instead of a gun and violence (the title of the film translates as “bread and vase”). In re-­creating that act of revolutionary violence, Makhmalbaf looks at the situation from his changed vantage point, which has discarded religious judgment, absolutism, and dogmatism in the interest of humanism, relativism, and individual subjectivity and responsibility. Instead of violence he sees opportunities for reconciliation. This transformation from certainty to doubt, from intolerance to reconciliation, from collective identity to individual subjectivity means many things, but most of all it means the triumph of modernity in the lifespan of a single artist who is curious about and sensitive to his times. His loving, self-­reflexive movie about Iranian cinema, Naser al-­Din Shah, the Movie Actor, also demonstrates this changed stance. It pays homage to film history, particularly to the despised prerevolutionary cinema and to many of its directors, films, and stars, some previously condemned by the Islamists. This includes Downpour, directed by Baizai, one of the “idolatrous” directors with

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whom Makhmalbaf in his absolutist phase had declared he would not appear in the same shot. In fact, the figure of the teacher, Mr. Hekmati, moving with his belongings stacked on a cart into and out of the neighborhood at the beginning and end of Downpour, provides a key narrative leitmotif for the Chaplinesque cameraman in Naser al-­Din Shah, the Movie Actor (whose history is loosely based on that of Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-­Saltaneh, the official cinematographer of Muzaffar al-­Din Shah’s court). The film’s finale, an exuberant and loving montage sequence of clips of joyous hugging and smiling from various Iranian movies, drove the general point of social and cinematic reconciliation and humanism home. No wonder that it became the most controversial and best-­loved picture of the Tenth Fajr International Film Festival. With this film, an Islamist filmmaker, and by extension the whole cinema establishment, paid their humanist respects, love, and debt to their predecessors, instead of attempting to purify, Islamicize, judge, condemn, exile, or destroy them because of their failure to satisfy Islamicate values.23 Significantly, this reconciliation and compassion was not only cinematic but also deeply personal, for as Makhmalbaf stated, referring to his new evolutionary phase, “When you see everything with relativism, you also become kinder. You allow people to make mistakes, even mental mistakes, to act in response to their personal weaknesses. I ceased judging people in my mind’s court, in that, I allowed them to be who they are” (quoted in Golmakani 1999/1377:193).24 His relativistic stance, integral to modernist and humanist consciousness, became more obvious at the level of style. By incorporating multiple characters’ perspectives filmed through different cameras, he posited that reality or truth was complex and multiple, not simple and singular. In A Moment of Innocence, the spectators see the different viewpoints of the policeman, the teenage revolutionary Makhmalbaf, and the adult, maturing humanist director. A Time to Love (Nobat- ­e Asheqi, 1991), about a passionate love triangle, is told in three epi­ sodes, from the multiple perspectives of three characters who switch places Rashomon-­style to create a morally complex treatise on passion, love, and life. In Nights on the Zayandehrud (Shab-­ha-­ye Zayandehrud, 1991), he provides multiple perspectives on similar situations that occur in different time periods to emphasize the diversity of responses, from indifference to cruelty to self-­sacrifice. In a prerevolutionary episode, a university professor is disabled in a traffic accident; no one helps and his wife dies. In another episode after the revolution, the same disabled professor watches from his window as ordinary people take great risks under flying bullets to save someone who is injured. The third episode takes place sometime after the revolution, in which the same accident as the first occurs with a different response. It was in this phase also that color and synesthetic strategies entered Makhmalbaf’s cinema, strategies that emphasized humans’ autonomy within their phenomenological reality, not their metaphysical and theological imaginings.

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Impressionist Aesthetics, Poetry, and Critical Synesthesia If in their realist and neorealist modes art-­house cinema directors sought to record the present, in their impressionistic mode, they attempted to record and evoke only moments of the present, aestheticized and synesthetic. These moments might be an afternoon spent seeking assistance for suicide as in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, an entire lifetime reviewed retrospectively as in Ebrahimifar’s Pomegranate and Reed (Nar ‘O Nay, 1988) and Mehrjui’s The Pear Tree, or the present time as in Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. The impressionist European paintings of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-­Auguste Renoir incorporated the “qualities of the sketch,” characterized by “abbreviation, speed, and spontaneity” (Gardner 2006:869). Unlike them, the Iranian art cinema impressionists chose the opposite tack by incorporating the qualities of the studied painting, emphasizing detail, deliberateness, planned staging, and contemplation. Like the impressionist painters, however, their works were at the intersection of what the filmmakers objectively saw, what they subjectively felt, and what they imaginatively projected, often on the natural world. They recorded this objective natural world—­flourishing oases or gardens, empty deserts, forlorn ruins, verdant fields, rich architecture, and mountainous countryside—­in ways that underscore Iranians’ love of gardens, so consistently evoked in miniature paintings, carpets and gabbehs, mosques and homes, and in classical music. Backed by centuries of Sufi poetry, love ballads, and philosophy, the impressionist filmmakers captured the fleeting moments of life in the glorious and transcendent play of lights, colors, mirrors, flowers, water, sounds, music, and the aestheticized arrangement of the natural world within the mise-­en-­scène. These evoke the harsh fleeting world, countered by the aestheticized beauty of an oasis or by the seeming permanence of ancient homes and monuments. They also critique the Islamic Republic’s official monochromatic dark palette and shabby-­chic aesthetics, which were the rule for more than a decade after the revolution. In his Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami used the warm autumnal colors of the countryside to create an impressionistic and contemplative tableau as Mr. Badii drives on winding dirt roads looking for accomplices for his suicide plan. As much as the conversation is macabre, the delicate changing colors of leaves and of the mountainside as the day draws toward sunset evoke the profound sadness of the suicidal man. The deepening colors outside can express his darkening mood or the sublime beauty of life that he is about to snuff out.25 The loneliness of many of Kiarostami’s protagonists is a sign of encroaching modernity and of the cost of modern subjectivity. The antidote is companionship and pleasure of the senses. Recall Badii’s desperate attempt to find a companion and the importance of the taste of cherry in the film’s title and in the taxidermist’s tale to Badii about how his own desperation was turned into delight when he tasted sweet mulberries from the tree from which he had planned to hang himself—­making 218

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him surrender the idea of suicide. The idea that the phenomenological world, synesthesia, and aesthetic pleasure are worth living for and making films about is counterhegemonic to the dominant ethos of the Islamic Republic, which emphasizes postponing corporeal pleasure in the here and now over metaphysical pleasures and the reward in the hereafter. Heavenly or forbidden fruits and their restorative, life-­giving effects were central to several key humanist films. If Kiarostami evoked synesthesia by references to the taste of cherries and succulent mulberries, Ebrahimifar in his Pomegranates and Reed evokes it by incorporating pomegranates into his nostalgia-­laden mise-­en-­scène, and Makhmalbaf in her The Apple by narrativizing an apple to bring the two confined sisters out of their claustrophobic prison-­house and into human companionship. Art-­house filmmakers employed the components of the mise-­en-­scène organically to heighten authenticity, spirituality, and transcendence, creating what was called a “mystical cinema” or “religious cinema.” 26 Influenced particularly by the Russian and Armenian-­Georgian cineastes Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, popular after the revolution, art-­house directors used vibrant colors, symbolic objects, colorful props, and elegant traditional settings to suggest austerity, authenticity, and ritualized beauty—­a sort of beatitude. This went against official Islamicate values: frugality, poverty, restraint, drabness, modesty, and informality. Ebrahimifar’s Pomegranate and Reed is a tour de force of impressionist art cinema, revealing a deep appreciation for Iranian cultural and nature-­related sensibilities. Like several postrevolutionary films, it focuses on a photographer as a narrative agent. Here, the photographer comes across an old man who has fallen in the street. He rushes him to a hospital at the same time that a pregnant woman is brought into the maternity ward. While waiting to hear about the old man’s condition, the photographer reads the man’s diary found among his possessions. From here on, the film relives the life of this old school teacher, from childhood to old age, through beautifully detailed and evocative photography, a lyrical narration written by the poet Ahmad Reza Ahmadi, and an economical visual style that borders on the symbolic. For example, one shot symbolizes his wedding (scissors cutting a gauzy material) and four brief shots symbolize the death of his father, who was a calligrapher (an unattended water pipe, a calligraphy pen case without a writer, a prayer mat folded, and a dandelion seed floating in the air). This is a film of profound loss—­of parents, childhood’s innocence, traditions, and the past—­which it evokes and cele­ brates, along with longing for things lost and for a center that once held. The teacher’s childhood home is meticulously re-­created, its traditional doors opening onto a central yard with a water tank in the middle and small plots of garden surrounding it, with reflections of water dancing on the walls. Likewise, the ancient city of Qamsar, the hometown of the dead man, is revived vibrantly, with its pleasant orchards and rose gardens under which water rivulets gurgle mesmerizingly as ruby red pomegranates tumble by. Ebrahimifar and his cinemaArt- House Ci nema

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46 Reaching for metaphysical heights by contemplating the material things in Said Ebrahimifar’s Nar ’O Nay. Poster designed by Ferdos Ebrahimifar. From author’s collection.

tographer, Homayun Paivar, worked synesthetically by paying close attention to colors, sounds, shapes, touch, and smell (the latter invoked by scenes of distilling rosewater from mountains of rose petals) as though each moment and each tingle and glimmer of the phenomenological world must be savored before it is lost. It is a film that reaches for metaphysical heights by contemplating material things; it is a film of considerable haptic visuality (figure 46). In The Pear Tree, Mehrjui uses a stout pear tree that has gone barren as a symbol for a disillusioned middle-­aged writer and poet, Mahmud (Homayun Ershadi), who through recollecting childhood summers spent with family and friends under the tree recalls a tender and unrequited young love for a tomboy girl known only as M (Golshifteh Farahani). The tree acts as a “motivated object,” setting the film’s narrative in motion. Mehrjui creates a loving synesthetic rendition of an ideal Iranian garden, with tree-­lined walkways, a fruit orchard, a large house and veranda, and the snowcapped conical peak of the Damavand as a backdrop. The writer spends his summer months in the company of family and friends, pining for M. These garden scenes, filling more than half the film, are suffused with a warm, orange glow as though tinted by memory. Sounds of rushing water, singing birds, children’s rambunctious play, elaborate kebab lunches, and long afternoon siestas are accompanied by evocative tinkling music. Written by Mehrjui and the writer Goli Taraghi, the film invokes the senses, particularly smell and taste. Mehrjui orchestrates all the 220

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senses and guides them with the writer’s subjective voice-­over narration as he ruminates about his childhood loneliness, his youthful involvement with the leftist opposition to the Shah, and his current crisis of creativity. He uses point-­ of-­v iew filming to place the spectators into his chronotope (as in the boy watching M leave, his vision of her is blurred in a single vertical streak in the middle of the frame, as if seen through tears). His faith in himself as a modern intellectual with something to say is restored not only by these recollections but also by his realization that he is alone but rooted, like the pear tree. Without saying so, this film evokes the synesthesia of being modern—­atomized, isolated, and desperate—­and it may be the director’s autobiographical rumination. Ebrahimifar and Mehrjui explore the personal stories of individuals; Mos­ tafa Razzagh Karimi and Mojalal Varahram’s non-­narrative film Tapestry of Time (Yad O’Yadegar, 2002) offers a larger canvas for contemplating the national. Through the gorgeous photography of archaeological sites, ruins, and landscapes, and an evocative extradiegetic score, it provides insight into “six thousand years of Iranian history” and what was advertised in the United States as “Iran’s culture and soul.” As these elements of the mise-­en-­scène and filming are used to validate historical forms as authentic, they tap into the paradigm of alternative modernity that emphasizes not only routes but roots. In Majidi’s The Color of Paradise the overwhelmingly lush and rugged mountains that form the physical location of the film symbolically externalize the tumultuous psychic world of the villagers who live there. The lush colors, majesty, and altitude of the mountains enhance the beatitude permeating the film. The setting turns this element of the mise-­en-­scène into a signifying player in the film’s discourse of spirituality, not just into a passive backdrop (figure 47). The final shot of the film—­the gentle shaft of sunlight that falls on the hand of the young Mohammad dying in his father’s embrace—­at once symbolizes the light of belated fatherly compassion and love melting his resentful heart, the grace of God that shines on the boy in his short but productive life, and the boy’s soul departing like a fading light. Love for others humanizes both the lover and the beloved and brings both closer to godliness. As the father holds his dying son tightly, the boy’s hand jerks, signaling that perhaps he is not dying but being resurrected by the external shaft of sunlight—­the grace of God—­and the love being transmitted to him by his father. In Gabbeh and Silence Makhmalbaf unleashes two of the subtlest subversive devices available to artists—­colors and aesthetic joy—­both for impressionist purposes, as Kiarostami did in Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, and for expressionist purposes, to critique the officially sanctioned monochromatic culture and cinema. This is borne out by the original title of the screenplay sketch that became the film Gabbeh, which was “Life Is Color” (Makhmalbaf 1997/1376:356). The episode in Gabbeh in which the old tribal man teaches the colors to his students by grabbing a handful of the sky to paint the blue in a painting, a handful of the grass to paint the green, and a flower bouquet to Art- House Ci nema

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47 External landscape of mountains and clouds symbolizes internal character psychology in Majid Majidi’s Color of Paradise. The Persian title actually translates to “The Color of God.” Film poster. From author’s collection.

add to it color is particularly memorable, as are the colorful scenes of the young Tajik children playing music and dancing in Makhmalbaf’s Silence. Instead of resorting to the tired traditional cinematic ploys of oppositional filmmakers, such as subversive dialogue, political symbolism, political plots, or revolutionary character types, Makhmalbaf offers in these movies as an ethical choice the pleasure of the interacting senses—­synesthesia and hapticity. The politics of color were not without a price, however. He had to locate his film Silence abroad and use children as adult stand-­ins. Locating to Tajikistan added colorful exoticism. But the film was banned, supposedly because it showed unveiled young girls dancing. The final and, perhaps, the real cost to the film is that Makhmalbaf’s particular use of children in a haptic manner sexualized them, as explained in a previous chapter, in ways that bordered on the unethical.

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Baizai used costume and color effectively in his Travelers to critique the cult of death, martyrdom, and mourning that had gained prominence during the long war with Iraq. In it a colorful wedding party is transformed into its opposite, a somber taziyeh passion play, as some of the guests (the sister of the bride and her family) die in a car crash on their way to the wedding. The film’s dark mourning structure and the simultaneous celebratory structure of the wedding both inscribe and critique the official policy of public joylessness and the bizarre policy of offering war survivors simultaneous congratulations and condolences (tabrik-­tahniat) on the “martyrdom” of their children for the Islamic Republic’s cause. The dark beauty of the bride (Mozhdeh Shamsai, Baizai’s wife) is emphasized, as her marriage and perhaps her future are almost forgotten in the celebration-­cum-­mourning of the loss. To avoid censorship, Baizai carefully devised his elaborate mise-­en-­scène and framing to avoid showing men and women in the same diegetic space or even in the same shot. Nevertheless, according to him, Travelers, which had received an official production permit, suffered from postproduction censorship, delays in receiving an exhibition permit (of nine months), and a reassignment of its scheduled exhibition order, causing him to ask in a scathing letter to the mcig, “Is it forbidden to be joyous?” (Baizai 1992/1371). Not only fiction filmmakers but also avant-­garde artists used color to critique the official monochrome pallet and to celebrate life and joy. Among them was the installation artist Farideh Shahsavarani’s The Dream of Color (2003), a short film of brightly colored clothes and costumes hanging from trees fluttering in the breeze or placed against the drab backgrounds of the city during sunset. Food preparation and colors were conjoined in many films to create synesthetic situations that celebrated life here and now, communal gatherings, and intimate sharing. In the opening sequence of his film Leila, Mehrjui stages an elaborate and elegant sequence of a community of joyous women preparing colorful dishes of yellow rice pudding (sholeh zard) in the open grounds of a mansion. Other scenes of meals, filmed with rich colors and attention to elegance in the mise-­en-­scène, celebrate the privacy and intimacy of Leila and her husband’s relationship before its disruption by the specter of a cowife. Banietemad also creates in The May Lady an elegant and woman-­centered mise-­en-­scène for the apartment of the documentary filmmaker, Foruq, living with her son, particularly when she prepares a meal and shares it with him, like a lover. In fact, Banietemad’s choices of pleasant and modern locations and her dynamic filming angles in this and some of her other fiction movies, which highlight tall apartment towers, high-­rise glass buildings, multilane freeways, cell phones, and film and video production technology, turn Tehran into an elegant, cosmopolitan, and economically vibrant city (this is the opposite of her documentaries, which focus on the shantytowns and the city’s depths). Similar cosmopolitan and urban elegance is highlighted in Mehrjui’s Leila, which an American

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reviewer described thus: “The world in which Reza and Leila live luxuriously is a land of super-­highways, cellular phones and modern biotechnology” (Holden 1998). These films not only offer the contradictions of modernity and tradition, particularly as they pertain to women, but also provide counterrepresentations of Tehran’s usual image as a dirty, ugly, overcrowded, and backward place overloaded with drab, badly dressed, and disheveled men, and tightly covered, dark, and mysterious or angry women. Finally, what are celebrated in Mehr­ jui’s and Banietemad’s movies are not only colors, beauty, joy, and intimacy but also middle-­and upper-­class values and aesthetics, all of which were suppressed by Islamicate values, the ideology and culture of the dispossessed, and the grubby-­chic aesthetics dominant after the revolution. Unlike almost all art-­ cinema directors, who made movies about lower-­class or rural people, part of the Third World intellectuals’ guilty mission to speak for the subalterns who cannot speak on their own behalf, Mehrjui remained singular in his concern with the life and times of his own class of urbane intellectuals. This was not always so. Before the revolution he, like most new-­wave directors, had made political films such as The Cow (Gav, 1969) and The Cycle (Dayereh-­ye Mina, 1978) that championed the poor, but as he told me, the revolution changed his mind: “I realized that we had made a hideous mistake. So I cut myself off from political issues and attitudes toward cinema. I wanted to get away from it all, from the proletariat and villagers whom at that time we were so keen about saving, for they were not only saved by the revolution but also were now dominating and governing us in a very repressive way. . . . They were being taken care of beautifully by the government. They were part of the martyrs group, this group and that group, all on government payroll. It seemed ridiculous to feel sorry for these people and to portray them as the wretched of the earth” (Naficy 2008b). By the 2000s, mainstream global cinema and television, particularly in Holly­wood, had become so overinvested in visuality that every murder seemed to require a forensically graphic special-­effects elaboration accompanied by over-­the-­top sound effects and music. The best of Iranian art-­house filmmakers, on the other hand, resorted to subtle understatement, reticence, and restraint, and to synesthesia and hapticity, so as not to overpower the senses but to engage the total sensorium. This was one more reason for the attractiveness of their movies to foreign critics and filmgoers. Sound was used as an aid to seeing and comprehension. Kiarostami had conducted such experiments in his early films; in The Chorus (Hamsorayan, 1982), an old man turns off his hearing aid to tune out the annoying noises of the city, so that he fails to hear his granddaughter’s ringing of the doorbell, until a chorus is mobilized outside. In other films, he used sound playfully or with wit to give the visual plane spatial dimension and social depth. Often important details were rendered ambiguously and aurally, forcing spectators to crane their necks to see what lay beyond the frame. In the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us, for example, the frame shows only what the camera can film from inside 224

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the car: the winding country road ahead. However, the dialogue among the passengers, whom we do not see, is expansive; it fills in what lies beyond the frame and what the passengers are looking for on the road to the Kurdish village of Siah Darreh. This film is filled with instances of a game of absence and presence involving sound and vision. Several characters exist only because we hear them offscreen or we hear about them: the gravedigger and the television boss. Behzad, the film crew leader, converses with one through the deep hole he is digging in the ground and with the other by cell phone: he must rush to the hilltop every time the phone rings, for better reception. While we hear both sides of the conversation in the case of the gravedigger, we see and hear only one side of the phone conversation. We neither hear nor see the television boss; for all we know, she may be entirely fictitious. Also, the film crew took the long journey to the remote Kurdish village to film the death ceremonies of an elderly woman whom we never see or directly hear. Only through conversations about her and the gatherings around her home do we deduce her putative existence. Symbolically read, the entire film can be seen as a treatise about waiting (entezar), a concept important in Iranian and twelver Shiite philosophy, which allows the faithful to patiently await the better day that the Mahdi, the twelfth Shiite Imam, will bring with him on his reappearance. However, the old woman dies in the end, extending the waiting period beyond the frame, leaving her relatives (and the spectators) stranded, like the large thighbone afloat on the swift currents of the stream at the film’s end. In this reading the film becomes a Khayyam-­like philosophic quatrain or a Hafiz-­like mystical ballad. Other films also benefit from the Persian poetic tradition, though they do not make it explicit. Taste of Cherry’s depiction of life’s quiet desperation and its delectable moments are in line with Khayyam’s poetry. Like all educated Iranians, Kiar­ ostami is versed in both ancient and contemporary poetry, and several of his films refer directly to contemporary poetry and to specific poems and poets. For example, the title Where Is the Friend’s Home? is taken from a mystic poem, “Neshani” (“Address”), by the modernist poet Sohrab Sepehri, and The Wind Will Carry Us is a reference to Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem, “Bad Ma ra Khahad Bord” (“The Wind Will Take Us”). His short Iranian Carpet is accompanied solely by classic Persian music and Hafiz lyrics. Not all uses of poetry by art-­ cinema filmmakers are enlightening. In a key scene in The Wind Will Carry Us, the protagonist chases a young woman, a friend of the gravedigger, into a cavelike stable, where he quotes aloud an extensive excerpt from Farrokhzad’s poem while she sensually milks a cow, as though she is masturbating before the voyeuristic stranger and equally voyeuristic camera—­an inappropriate and insensitive use of both poetry and filming. Here, Kiarostami’s violation of his own reticent style backfires. Poetry also recalls and activates other senses. The continued power of Farrokhzad’s ur-­lyrical film The House Is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast, 1963) lies not only in her deft uses of poetic realism but also in the synesthesia created by her poArt- House Ci nema

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etic uses of biblical texts and lyrical images of water and gardens, combined with the tragic corporeality of the lepers and her voice-­over. One ancient source of self-reflexivity and self-inscription in Iranian art cinema should be sought in the practice of using pen names (takhallos) by poets composing love ballads (ghazal), the greatest practitioner of which was Mohammad Hafiz. The pen name is generally used in either the poem’s last or the penultimate line. It is usually in the poet’s voice, either addressing him or others; sometimes the beloved or other personified entities address the poet by his pen name. Often, the device is used as a signature, concluding the poem, or it augurs transition to the praise of others or to the praise of the poet’s own skills (J. T. P. de Bruija, “Hafez iii. Hafez’s Poetic Art,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, http:// www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hafez-iii). Applied to cinema, the pen name device informs the self-inscriptional and self-reflexive tendencies of art-house films and their endings (e.g., Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry). It even anticipates the film’s ending credit, naming the director.

Censorship Censorship affected art-­house movies as well. Its most drastic form was outright banning, which befell even grade-­A filmmakers. Films banned immediately after the revolution were Baizai’s two movies Death of Yazdegerd and Ballad of Tara (Cherikeh-­ye Tara, 1980), which remain banned, apparently partly because of their representation of unveiled women protagonists. Baizai has had one of the hardest times making his films, as state censorship and other impediments have lowered his productivity, for sometimes years would pass before he could get official permission to film or raise the necessary funds for his next movie. Mehrjui’s The Yard behind Adl-­e Afaq School, banned on its production, was released nine years later with the changed title of The School We Went To (Madresehi keh Miraftim, 1980–89), apparently more due to changing times than the changes the director made to the film. “By the time the film was finished,” Mehrjui told me, “the political situation in the country had changed so much that the powers that be considered the film a critique of the Pahlavi government, as it dealt with the rise of dictatorship in a school.” His Lady (Banu, 1999) was banned for seven years. Having had his movies banned for long periods by both the Pahlavi regime and that of the Islamic Republic, Mehrjui lived with an active fear of censorship: “After the release of each film, I always worry about what’s going to happen to my next film” (Naficy 2008b). Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s two films A Time to Love and Nights on the Zayandehrud were banned indefinitely; the former on grounds of promoting corruption and fornication, and the latter on account of offending the families of the martyrs. The threat of banning distorted the movies: the ending of Mehrjui’s popu226

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lar comedy on housing problems, The Tenants (Ejarehneshinha, 1990), and that of his praised intellectual-­angst drama, Hamoon, seem to contradict the body of the films. This is because the director gave in to the ideological tenets and political pressures of the Islamic government. Textual contradictions are not always indicative of bad filmmaking; sometimes they signal the process of cultural accommodation, where filmmakers compromise to facilitate the release of their films. Censorship did not affect art-­house directors equally. If Baizai was the one most harassed and affected by it, Kiarostami suffered the least. Kiarostami told me once that the Islamic government had not censored any of his movies, although it curtailed the screening of some of them (Naficy 2001h), while Baizai perennially complained of government censorship, curtailed screenings, and other interferences and impediments. The reasons are complex but worth noting. Baizai’s career was damaged by his confrontational personality; his frank criticism of the government; his openly secular and critical view of religious discourses, particularly of Islam; and his generally complicated, expensive, and somewhat abstruse movies that were difficult to finance and that did not generate sufficient box-­office returns (Bashu, the Little Stranger is an exception). Kiarostami’s indirect and sly personality and movies enabled his criticisms, couched in the guise of irony and humor, to slip under the radar. His willingness to play the system to obtain what he wanted enabled his career; his international fame made him an independent filmmaker, no longer beholden to commercial or government funding. His more accessible, apparently apolitical, and lower-­budgeted films, financially less risky, gave him more room to maneuver. In mid-­1995 a group of 214 “film workers” wrote an open letter to the minister of culture and Islamic guidance demanding a thorough reevaluation of the complex rules and procedures governing film production and exhibition. Noting that both state-­subsidized cinema and commercial cinema were likely to undermine the “national film industry,” the signatories demanded that censorship be reduced and independent professional guilds strengthened to replace government agencies in supervising the industry.27 Like in liberal democracies and industrialized countries, they were demanding that the industry be allowed to move out of the political sphere and into professionalism—­a demand that may take years and a paradigmatic ideological reorientation to fully materialize. Perhaps in response to the open letter, measures were taken to professionalize the movie business, including the adoption of a progressive rating system, which encouraged the production of art-­cinema films. Grade “A” films were awarded the best exhibition sites, optimal opening dates, and longer runs, and the makers of such films were granted higher budgets and lower interest loans. Grade “A” filmmakers were also exempted from having to submit their screenplays for approval before production.28 Filmmakers who filmed in synch sound, instead of using the old-­fashioned, inferior, and unrealistic postdubbing system, were rewarded with extra negative stock and other incentives. These meaArt- House Ci nema

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sures created the unusual situation in which higher-­quality films were sometimes also the most popular films. Films once banned were later released, sometimes due to the changes directors made to them and sometimes due to changes in politics and personnel. Mohsen Makhmalbaf claims on his website the following schedule for censoring his movies and the removal of censorship: Time to Love and Nights on the Zayandehrud (censored from 1980 to the present), A Moment of Innocence (censored from 1995 to 1997), Silence (censored from 1997 to 2000), Once Upon a Time Cinema (censored from 1992 to 1993), Testing Democracy (Test- ­e Demokrasi, censored from 2000 to present), Afghan Alphabet (censored from 2001 to the present), Sex and Philosophy (Seks va Falsafeh, censored from 2003 to the present), and Amnesia (script banned from 2003 to the present).29 That a filmmaker could afford to have so many films banned yet continue to make movies points to the success of the independents phenomenon—­and also to Makhmalbaf’s once-­deep linkage to the ruling strata. Disenchanted with restrictions inside Iran, Makhmalbaf filmed abroad and eventually left for Europe in 2005. Unlike most art-­cinema directors and critics, who complained of the deleterious effects both of rapacious commercial film financiers and of draconian state funders and censors, Kiarostami pointed in interviews to the unexpected positive outcomes of limits, including censorship: limits force filmmakers to be creative, and to think through their films more thoroughly (Rosen 1992:39–40; Akrami’s Friendly Persuasion). Samira Makhmalbaf, too, echoed that sentiment: “The pressure of censorship can be good because it makes you think deeper and find other ways to talk about the reality.” 3 0 Like Kiarostami and her stepdaughter, Meshkini considered positively the role of censorship—­both of domestic and foreign movies—­in the resurgence of Iranian cinema. She explained this in an interview: “The reason our cinema has developed so strongly is because of censorship. Our cinema is very different from Western cinema. American films are not allowed in Tehran and because we don’t see them, we’re not affected by them. We’re not allowed to show sex in movies, and I think that’s good. We can’t show violence either. So we try to show a small corner of real life that can be easily understood. . . . Hollywood has occupied cinemas all over the world. Because we’re not occupied, we can develop a cinema of our own” (quoted in Dupont 2000). Baizai, on the other hand, contended that censorship should never be tolerated, justified, or valorized, because it will result in nothing but “corruption, rancor, and suffering.” 31 Mehrjui argued that it did not follow that if “we had no censorship we would have a creative and prestigious cinema.” Blunting one of the arguments of the critics of censorship, including exiled filmmakers, he elaborated: “What we have learned is that creativity does not have any connection with censorship. If it did, all those writers and artists who emigrated, should have produced extraordinary cultural works, which they did not” (quoted in Allamehzadeh 1991:165).

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All in the Family: The Familial Mode of Production While the film industry moved toward industrialized production with an ever-­ increasing yearly output of all types and genres of movies, there was a counterindustrializing development in this period, which protected filmmakers against the ravages of industrialization, the insecurity of market capitalism, the dearth of reliable personnel, and political and artistic censorship, while allowing them to take advantage of their artisanal and collective capabilities. This was the emergence of a peculiarly Iranian collective production mode, which I call the “familial or lineage mode of production.” This was different from the kind of repertory production practiced by Ingmar Bergman and the early Atom Egoyan, whereby a director works with a specific cast and crew over several films as a way of ensuring artistic and stylistic continuity. Artistic continuity may have been a factor for Iranian directors, but other reasons were more important in a society and time in which social, political, financial, and technological uncertainties were rampant. This production mode worked for a transitional society in which premodern social structures like kinship and nepotism were still meaningful and had not fully given way to autonomous identities and professional social relations. The lineage production mode fit the society in which descent relations (based on blood) still prevailed over consent relations (based on contract). In addition, like all cinematic production modes, this, too, somewhat paralleled the production mode of the society at large. Under the Islamic Republic rich and powerful families, many of them clerical, became highly influential by creating networks and occupying key positions within the country’s businesses, industries, institutions, and politics. Some families were so large and powerful that they could rightly be regarded as political parties (Howard 2002). Among the most prominent families in politics with major influence in the nation’s media were those of Khomeini, Rafsanjani, Beheshti, and Khatami. This family production mode supplied another dimension to the hybrid production mode in cinema, and it was part of the network of relations and maneuvers that kept the film industry afloat, vital, and dynamic.32 Many prominent art-­cinema directors hired their family members as cast and crew. Some of these were professionally qualified, while others were perhaps just trustworthy and fast learners. Family members did not generally participate in key technical areas such as cinematography and sound recording, but they held important positions. Mehrjui’s wife, Faryar Javaherian, an architect, was his art director and production designer, and his sister Zhila Mehrjui served as a set designer. Baizai’s wife, Mozhdeh Shamsai, starred in his movies, starting with Travelers. Kiarostami’s son Bahman worked as an assistant director and an assistant editor on some of his father’s films and, as noted earlier, made several films about their production (he also directed other documentaries). Banietemad’s daughter, Baran Kowsari, acted in her movies, and her hus-

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band, Jahangir Kowsari, produced many of them. Milani’s husband, Mohammad Nikbin, produced her movies and acted in some of them. Purahmad’s brothers, mother, sister, and in-­laws all participated as crew and cast members in his popular television serial The Tales of Majid (Qessehha-­ye Majid, aired by the vvir’s First Channel Network, March 1991–winter 1992). Purahmad relates that his aged father was opposed to his mother’s acting in the serial, even though they needed her earnings from the series in old age. However, he relented on the logic of the family mode of production, for “she was acting not in a stranger’s movie, but in that of his son” (2001/1380:672). Mohsen Makhmalbaf participated in the writing, producing, and editing of his daughter Samira’s films and in those of his second wife, Meshkini.33 Likewise, Samira acted in many of her father’s movies from her childhood on. In fact, the Makhmalbaf Film House (mfh), established in 1996, constitutes a family production house and film school in which the entire family, including the preteen and teenage children (Hana then eight, Samira around seventeen), were taught filmmaking, made their own movies, worked on each other’s films in various capacities, and eventually distributed the resulting works. According to the mfh’s website, Makhmalbaf began the film school to teach Samira. Considering Iranian universities inadequate, he conceived a plan to open a formal film school and hold a nationwide entrance examination to accept one hundred students. When the Ministry of Education denied his application, he opened a small home school at his house with eight family members and friends. For four years faculty and students spent eight hours per day and up to one month each on a specific cinematic, ethnographic, artistic, historical, and musical topic or activity (such as bicycling). During this time many film exercises were conducted and several professional films were made and released, which made a name for their directors. Mohsen directed Silence, Meshkini directed The Day I Became a Woman, Samira directed The Apple and The Blackboard (Takht-­e Siah, 2000), Maysam directed the video film How Samira Made The Blackboard (Samira Cheguneh Takhteh Siah ra Sakht, 2000), and Hana made the short video The Day My Aunt Was Ill (Ruzi keh Khaleham Mariz Bud, 1997) and Joy of Madness (Lezzat-­e Divanegi, 2003), about Samira’s preparations to film her third feature in Afghanistan, At Five in the Afternoon (Panj-­e Asr, 2002). Consolidating the familial, collective, and artisanal spirit of the enterprise, each person worked in different capacities on the others’ films (all worked as “assistant directors” on Silence). After these prominent successes, the mfh faced an existential quandary. At around the time he established the school, Mohsen had taken a loan to direct his autobiographical film, A Moment of Innocence, which the government banned. He explains: The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance “told me to cut out some of the scenes if I wanted the film to go to the screens. I went home and discussed the matter with my family. I asked them if they preferred owning a house, or our own thought and art? One option was to let A Mo230

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ment of Innocence be cut to pieces but for us to remain owners of a house; the other was to sell the house and pay the film’s debt, causing it to be permanently banned but preventing it from being cut up and made senseless. All members of my family, including Hana who was the youngest, said they did not want the house and that owning the name would be sufficient.” 3 4 The quandary was solved. Makhmalbaf states that they sold the physical house in which they had lived and made films for fifteen years to pay the film’s debt, leaving it intact but banned, and instead gained an imprimatur, Makhmalbaf Film House, under which they have released all their subsequent movies. A film production house and a virtual house (on the web) replaced their physical house—­how cinematic. The mfh school training produced one cameraman, one sound technician, one still photographer, one editor, one set designer, and three directors. The mfh acted as a film school, a film production house, and as a film distributor. Its operation extended collective production, which Ayat Film Studio and Jihad Television had begun on grounds of ideological affinity, into ones based on kinship. The individual and group portraits of family members on the mfh’s website and the genealogical lines connecting them further corroborated the importance of kinship in the Islamic Republic. The film scholar and the curator of the Melbourne Cinematheque Adrian Danks (2002), citing the “Coppola clan” as an “arguably inferior” example, states this about the mfh: “In the annals of film history, it is difficult to find an equivalent combination of artisan-­based filmmaking with a family co-­operative, that simultaneously produced such striking and individual works” (2002:2–3). As with any collective production, however, the problem of ascribing credit to members surfaced. It was sometimes laced with virulent sexism and perhaps envy on the part of critics who discounted the creativity and directorial authorship of the two female family members, Marziyeh and her stepdaughter Samira (Maysam and Hana were too young at the time). That some earlier films of Mohsen—­T he Door (1999), part of the Stories of the Island omnibus film, and Testing Democracy (2000)—­seemed to have served as mfh exercises, inspirations, or models for later feature films by Samira (The Blackboard) and by Marziyeh (The Day I Became a Woman), gave credence to some of these accusations.35 That Mohsen Makhmalbaf is a forceful personality is undeniable; so are his minor and major contributions to each of the women’s films. But Danks says that “Mohsen deliberately avoided being on set during the actual filming process,” so as not to influence his family (2002:3–4). Despite his patriarchal leadership, mfh productions may be characterized as “feminine.” They involved three strong female family members and were collective, meaning that they employed less hierarchical (vertical) and more collaborative (horizontal) practices. A closer look at their movies shows the individual authorship of Marziyeh and Samira and their differences from Mohsen.36 Maysam’s documentary How Samira Made The Blackboard, containing home videos and film footage of his sister’s career, demonstrates how Samira developed from a child actor in her faArt- House Ci nema

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ther’s movies into a filmmaker whose directorial panache is clearly on display during the filming of her second feature, The Blackboard, about displaced Kurdish teachers. These personal and authorial qualities brought her international fame and respect, as exemplified by a Sight and Sound critic’s evaluation of her after her third feature, At Five in the Afternoon, which she said “confirms her status as one of the most iconic auteurs of current world cinemas—­bathed in the reflected glory of a prestigious family name, admired as a gifted and original film-­maker in her own right and adored for her rarity as a Middle Eastern female director still shy of her twenty-­fifth birthday” (McGill 2004:32). The impact of the women of Mohsen’s family on his filmmaking, and the credit they deserve, is harder to discuss. But as Danks points out, “One can sense that the experience of working closely with the female members of his family on women-­centered films has given Mohsen’s films a greater urgency in terms of their willingness to address questions and problems of gender” (2002:4–5).37 Critics of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, particularly those in political exile, have, with some justification, pointed to political connections as the reason for the successes of the mfh and its members. Referring to Samira’s Cannes entry in 2003, the exiled film critic Bassir Nassibi cynically states, “Without benefitting from such government connections, it would have been impossible for such a young girl, even if endowed with talent and high capability, to achieve one percent of her status and success. Iranian cinema is dynastic (morusi) and the lucrative situations are divided among the favorites” (2003:3). This is certainly one direction in which the familial production mode can evolve, dynastism. Despite the individuality of family members and the specificity of their authorial signatures, there is an mfh “house style,” a collective signature, which Hannah McGill has defined succinctly: “The conscious politicisation of personal narratives; a poetic symbolism that privileges fleeting moments and physical details almost to the point of surreal fetishisation; moral, political and narrative ambiguities that demand the spectator’s active interpretation; the deployment of non-­professional performers” (2004:34). Intertextuality is another attribute of the familial production mode, whereby family members work on each other’s films and make films about each other’s films and filming, resulting in densely self-­referential, interconnected, and intertextual products. These are no longer autonomous, discrete films but part of a corpus of interconnected works that must be regarded together for their full meanings to emerge. They also require different spectatorial activities, as well as different analytical and critical approaches by film critics and scholars.38 One productive approach to the analysis of such a dense intertextuality of films made in the familial production mode would be to invoke theories of network narratives and multiplex narratives. As the cases of Bahman Kiarostami, Maysam Makhmalbaf, and Hana Makh­ malbaf show, making films about film directors within the family can be the first step in the children becoming filmmakers. The development of a complex, 232

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family-­oriented collective practice side by side with industrialized practices shows how improvised responses to new situations created a hybrid production system suitable to filmmakers’ personal situations and Iranian sociopolitical circumstances.

Imperial Nostalgia and Multiplexity As the Islamic Republic attempted to forge a homogenous Shiite political nation, cultural producers, some of whom opposed the regime, attempted to revive an imagined multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, and multinational nation patterned after the ancient transnational Persian Empire. There were complex impetuses for this revivalist nostalgia, resulting in extraterritorial and multiplex films. The two wars that engulfed Iran in the 1980s and their subsequent social displacements contributed: Iran’s war with Iraq created the massive internal migration of displaced populations, as well as cross-­border traffic and migration into neighboring countries of ethnic Kurds, Arabs, and others; likewise the Afghans’ war against Soviet occupation displaced millions of Afghan refugees into Iranian cities. The rise of Iranian internal ethnics in the revolution’s aftermath agitating for equal rights and political autonomy, such as the Kurds and the Baluchis, and the mistreatment, escape, and emigration of persecuted minorities, such as Jews, Christians, and Baha’is, all heightened minoritarian consciousness.39 The post-­9/11 U.S.-­led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, with their own population displacements and enhanced ethnic, religious, and national awareness, further fed into Iranian cinema’s transnational, extraterritorial, and minoritarian redirection. The dissolution of the Soviet Union opened up several countries in Central Asia that had once been part of the Persian Empire and of the Persianate cultural sphere. Globalization, too, affected Iran, as did Western governments’ punishing boycotts, embargos, and threats against the Islamist regime, and their purported support of the restive minorities inside Iran. Finally, since the revolution, an important ideological shift had emerged in Iranian identity formation, away from the West and toward the East. Films emerged that were multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual, and extraterritorial, a new development in Iranian cinema. These were also part of an evolving global cinema that I have called “multiplex cinema,” and others have called “network films,” ones driven by the fragmentation of nations and the displacements of people and by worldwide financial and media convergences and digitization. Multiplexed and networked films embed multiplicity in production practices, stylistic features, and filming locations and they benefit from globalized, multiplexed, and networked distribution and exhibition (Naficy 2007e, Kerr 2010). Imperial nostalgia is evident in Iranian-­accented and multiplex movies’ multiple cultural, ethnic, and linguistic stories and characters and in Art- House Ci nema

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48 Afghan refugees in Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist, one of the first films in the “Afghan film cycle.” Publicity photo by Aziz Saati.

their extraterritorial geographic reach, for many of them were both filmed in and exported to neighboring nations. Nearly 90 percent of the 3 million refugees in Iran were Afghan. These were granted refugee status prima facie and were issued “blue permits,” confirming them as mohajer, or religious migrants, not political refugees. This status allowed them theoretically to stay, work, and benefit indefinitely from social services in Iran, much like permanent residents. But they were not treated equally, partly because of their poverty and illiteracy, partly because what was to be a temporary stay became an extended or permanent sojourn, and partly because Iran was forced to shoulder the burden of taking care of the displaced population alone. Even the United Nations organization charged with helping the world’s refugees was affected by hostility to Iran from the West.40 The Afghan refugees congregated in shantytowns on the margins of cities. Their meager education and low class capital and their willingness to work cheaply at menial jobs (and sometimes smuggling) created massive social problems, wage deflation, and resentments among Iranians, which made the refugees worthy subjects for socially conscious filmmakers. A veritable “Afghanistani cycle” of movies resulted, dealing with Afghanistani characters and stories (Afghanistani refugees perhaps also supplied audiences for such movies). Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (Bysikelran, 1988) was one of the earliest films dealing with the teeming presence of poor Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities. It centers on a bicycling marathon by an Afghani man to raise funds to pay for his wife’s hospitalization, against the backdrop of Afghani involvement in smuggling (the film was partially shot inside Pakistan) (figure 48). Makhmalbaf’s Afghan Alphabet (Alef ba-­ye Afghan, 2002) is a moving documentary about children in a refugee camp near the Afghanistan border. Such children formed a large displaced population in Iran (reputedly numbering seven hundred thousand), who were not allowed to attend schools due to their illegal status. After its release, however, the movie and its subject became controversial enough for the Iranian parliament to approve a bill removing the 234

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ban and mandating education for Afghani children. This is one of the rare documentaries leading to legislation improving the cause it espoused. Majidi’s contribution to the Afghanistani cycle was Baran (2001), a fiction film about a budding love between a Kurdish construction worker in Tehran and an Afghan refugee girl who is masquerading as a boy, resulting in the usual transgender ambiguities. The film is in Persian and Dari. Young girls masquerading as boys is a widespread practice is Afghanistan, called bacha posh (dressed up as a boy), where boys have a premium value. “Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys,” reports Jenny Nordberg, “including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy” (2010). However, this practice, which transcends class, education, ethnicity, and geography, and which has persisted through Afghanistan’s many wars and governments, generally remains hidden from outsiders. Several Iranian films, involving Afghanis or not, have also resorted to this sort of masquerade and gender passing primarily to get around the Islamic Republic’s censorship. Hassan Yektapanah, a Kiarostami protégé, made Jomeh (aka Djomeh, 2000), on the plight of Jomeh (meaning Friday), a young Afghan refugee in Iran without legal status, who works as a milkman and falls in love with a village girl. When Jalil Nazari, the nonprofessional Afghan actor who played Jomeh—­ himself an illegal alien in Iran—­was invited to the Hamburg Film Festival and then denied reentry into Iran, his story became another film, an Iranian-­ German documentary. Called Heaven’s Path (Der Weg zum Paradies, 2002), it was made by one of the actors of Jomeh, Mahmoud Behraznia, who lives in Germany. Denied permission to enter Iran and unable to return to his home country, Taliban-­r uled Afghanistan, Nazari was a truly a displaced person, sent to an East German detention camp while his official refugee application was processed. These two films point up the dense intertextuality and self-­referentiality of Iranian art movies: one film spawns another. The revolution of 1978–79 and the aforementioned factors also unleashed suppressed ethnic, tribal, and religious differences and nationalist aspirations within the Iranian population, which awaited cinematic representation. Filmmaking as a legitimate profession and artistic expression penetrated society to the point that ethnoreligious minorities hitherto not known for their wide involvement in film production turned to cinema. Masud Jafari Jowzani, a Bakhtiari, made The Stone Lion (Shir-­e Sangi, 1986) about resentment against the forced sedentarization of tribes and the murder of an Englishman. He also made In the Wind’s Eye (Dar Cheshm-­e Tond-­e Bad, 1988) about the impact on the Qashqai tribes of German and British operatives during the Second World War.41 Naser Taqvai, born in Abadan, made Captain Khorshid (Nakhoda Khorshid, 1986), which deals with human smuggling in the Persian Gulf region, whose population are descendants of Arabs and Africans. The film was based on a free adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Even KiaArt- House Ci nema

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rostami’s films, usually not “ethnic,” became ethnically coded by the locations and communities in which they were made (The Wind Will Carry Us is filmed in Kurdistan) or by their ethnic characters and actors (Taste of Cherry uses an Afghanistani religious student, a Kurdish soldier, and a Turkish taxidermist). While Jowzani’s and Taqvai’s films were well made, they did not achieve Kiar­ ostami’s or Ghobadi’s levels of international acclaim. Ghobadi almost single-­ handedly pushed into existence a new, indigenous accented cinema, a Kurdish cinema of diaspora. As with the Afghanistani film cycle, geopolitical displacements and local circumstances favored the production of these movies. That Ghobadi was an Iranian Kurd and that he declared openly and forthrightly his passion for Kurdish people, subjects, history, and national aspirations gave force and legitimacy to Kurdish cinematic aspiration. He took up the challenge to be a spokesman. He had been an assistant to Kiarostami on The Wind Will Carry Us, which was partly filmed in Iranian Kurdistan, and he had played one of the protagonists in Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Blackboard, the teenager’s debut feature about mobile education among the Kurds. Ghobadi’s own celebrated feature films about the Kurds are A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq (Gomgashteh-­i dar Araq, 2002), Turtles Can Also Fly (Lakposhtha ham Parvaz Mikonand, 2004), and Half Moon (Niwemang, 2006).42 These memorable films were shot in and out of Iran and Iraq in a mixture of Persian, Kurdish, and Arabic languages. Rough terrain, beautiful landscapes, harsh borders, perennial displacements, harrowing journeys, and arduous border crossings form Ghobadi’s narrative and stylistic signatures. Kurdish music, language, and other cultural expressions complete the taxonomy. As he notes in Jamsheed Akrami’s revealing documentary, Scattered Seeds of Hanareh—­A Talk with Bahman Ghobadi (2003), filmed in New York, Kurdish life has historically been strewn with tragedy and hardship, with which the Kurds cope, and which they try to transcend, by a combination of infectious humor, lively music, and optimism: “We can survive for a week or so without food or drink but not without music.” It is to depict such hardship and relentless hope that his films are staged in rugged mountains and often in the dead of snowy winters. According to Ghobadi, if these landscapes were filmed during any other season, their breathtaking beauty would work against the sense of tragedy he wants to impart. Through such selective focus, he portrays “one of our biggest enemies—­nature” (figure 49). Because the Kurds in the Middle East, numbering more than 30 million and scattered among several countries, constitute one of the largest ethnic populations in the world without a country, it is natural that Ghobadi’s filmic characters be displaced people, or people on the move, and for the national borders to be represented as vile obstacles—­to be crossed, disregarded, and obliterated. That an indigenous Kurdish cinema—­albeit an accented one—­is on the horizon is indicated by Ghobadi’s comment in Akrami’s documentary that “in the alley that I was born [in Baneh, Iran, in 1968], thirteen filmmakers have flourished.” These tend to work under very artisanal conditions, using video for the most 236

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49 Kurdish life, driven by relentless hardship and persistent hope, in Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses. Publicity card.

part, without official training, and they usually make short films. According to Ghobadi, Kurdish filmmakers have been among the top winners of awards for short films in the country.43 Both the output and the recognition are remarkable achievements. Pahlavi-­era commercial filmmakers had made several films about Iranians in Europe and North America or about Westerners in Iran, commensurate with then current economic and cultural exchanges with the West, as well as with the ideological East-­West binarism. After the revolution, these West-­oriented films were few (among the exceptions are Hatamikia’s The Glass Agency [Azhans-­e Shishehi, 1997] and From Karkheh to Rhine [Az Karkheh ta Rhine, 1992], which he made after he had become disenchanted with the regime). Instead, art-­house filmmakers turned their cameras either inward to make “refugee films” and “ethnic films” or outward to make “transnational films” or “extraterritorial films.” In making the latter they focused on neighboring Muslim countries with Persian cultural and linguistic influences and historical exchanges, where they either filmed Iranian stories or made films about people in those counArt- House Ci nema

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50 Afghani women, aestheticized in their multicolored burqas, in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar. Poster from author’s collection.

tries.44 Again, Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a leading figure, making several films in neighboring countries and in different languages: A Time to Love (Nobat- ­e Asheqi, 1990), a tripartite film about a love triangle, was filmed entirely in Turkey and in Turkish; Silence (Sokut, 1998) was filmed in Tajikistan, in Persian and Tajik; and Kandahar (Safar-­e Qandehar, 2001) was shot in Afghanistan, in Persian, English, and Pashtu. In his A Time to Love and Silence, the social contexts of these countries were at the service of the narrative, while in his Afghan films, the reverse was generally the case. His fiction film Kandahar is about the return to Afghanistan of a Canadian Afghan expatriate, Nafas (Nelofer Pazira playing herself), to search for her roots and to prevent her sister from going through with her planned suicide. It examines the ravages of the wars against the Soviet Union and the Taliban. While doing so, however, the film aestheticizes and exoticizes Afghanistan in visually stunning fashion, particularly the women, who wear confining but colorful burqas, and disabled men and children who have lost limbs (figure 50). Particularly dramatic are scenes of scores of artificial limbs attached to parachutes being dropped from the sky by a plane and of the disabled men and boys running, limping, and crawling toward them. 238

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The film became famous because of its striking and exotic visualization and deft political timing, that is, the coincidence of the release of the film with the American-­led invasion of Afghanistan and the ouster of the Taliban regime. It was also controversial because of its casting, involving an intriguing African American actor, née David Belfield, who in 1980, after assassinating Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian diplomat and press attaché to Iran’s embassy in Washington, who was an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic, had fled to the Islamic Republic. He played the doctor in the movie.45 Samira Makhmalbaf, too, made two extraterritorial Afghan movies: God, Construction, Destruction, a segment of the omnibus film about the 9/11 attack on the United States, 11’09’01—­September 11 (2002), and At Five in the Afternoon, about a young woman, Noqreh, seeking education in Kabul and fascinated by the idea of a woman becoming the first female president of Afghanistan. The first film to be shot there after the nato invasion and ouster of the Taliban regime, it daringly critiques the Quran-­derived male oppression of women by juxtaposing the recitation of iconic verses from the Quran on the sound track about the necessity of female veiling and guarded eye contact between men and women with images of women in full burqa shoehorned into limited and subservient social roles, while old men constantly berate them for their bad hijab, blasphemy, and intransigence. Filmed mostly in the Dari language, the film is able to offer such a biting critique of an Islamic state operating on the basis of sharia laws only because she has displaced the subject and object of her critique, from women in an Islamist Iran to women in an Islamist Afghanistan. In this redirection, she is offering a warning to Iranians, to women in particular, that their situation could get worse, for at the end of the film, nothing and no one fares well: the country is in ruins and backward, there is no water or food or mother’s milk for babies, and the population is massively displaced, homeless, and dying. No humanist optimism here. Unlike most Iranian filmmakers, Yassamin Maleknasr, in her Afghanistan, the Lost Truth (Afghanistan, Haqiqat-­e Gomshodeh, 2002), focuses not on a backward rural place but on modern, urban Afghanistan, and she dispels the primordial, premodern image that many filmmakers have produced of this country and its people, including the Makhmalbafs. Unlike those filmmakers, Malek­nasr also learned one of the non-­Persian languages of Afghanistan to ease her communication with her subjects, which included a woman physician, a female judge, female university students, poets, journalists, a radio announcer, the head of Afghanistan’s human rights organization, the minister of public health, the director of a Kabul radio and television organization, and Siddiq Barmak, the head of Afghan Film. To discover the hidden truth of Afghanistan—­ its rugged people, ancient arts, and beautiful landscape—­she undertook what Women Make Movies, her distributor, characterized as an “unprecedented journey across Afghanistan from Herat to Balkh, becoming the only woman and filmmaker to have traveled such distances since the fall of the Taliban.” 46 Art- House Ci nema

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Alireza Razzazifar forayed into other neighboring countries, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, to stage his Iran-­centric feature movies. The Loneliness of a Passion-­Play Actor (Tanhai-­ye yek Shabih Khan, 2001), a docudrama mostly filmed inside Syria (and partly in Turkey and Iran), deals with a passion-­play actor who goes to Syria to play the role of the archetypal Shiite bad guy Shemr, who murders Imam Hosain. While the film has fictional elements, the lengthy ending sequence is, as the director told me, “completely documentary and we filmed it with two cameras for around five hours” (Naficy 2012b). In this sequence, which reenacts the events of the plain of Karbala among a crowd of highly emotional men, women, and children, ends with a scene that graphically demonstrates the actor’s internal conflict arising from the dichotomy between actor (being) and his part (representing): he loves Imam Hosain in real life but has to play his murderer in the taziyeh, who withholds water from him before killing him in battle. When someone brings him a glass of water after his performance, he bursts into tears, “how can I drink water when Imam Hosain is thirsty.” With this all the other players also begin to weep. Razzazifar also filmed some seventy percent of his drama Arbain (2007) in Shiite dominated parts of Iraq (Basra, Najaf, and Karbala) and the rest inside Iran. This film is about an Iranian former prisoner of war soldier who has returned to Iraq to seek revenge. Razzazifar’s films were made for the Islamic Republic television, VVIR, and as such they are in line with the official extraterritorial ambitions of the Islamic Republic. Cultural similarity and exoticism made Eastern societies attractive to Iranian filmmakers who were stymied at home by Islamicate values and by draconian censorship and found the West unpalatable or inaccessible. That some of the neighboring societies spoke Farsi or its cognate languages and dialects—­the Tajiks and Afghans, for example—­facilitated the production and reception of Iranian movies in those countries. Because of shared Islamic tenets, the populations in these countries exercised modesty, and women practiced some form of veiling, often more restrictive than that in Iran, which made filming there both acceptable, because of similarities, and alluring, because of differences. Iranians turned from their long preoccupation with the West and now faced their Eastern counterparts and the corresponding prejudices and affinities. The vertical binary East versus West shifted, becoming a lateral, multipolar construction of identity among Eastern nations. Films made in these countries allowed Iranians their self-­other dynamics; now the rivalries and friendly relations were with their neighbors. These transnational, multiethnic, multilingual, and multiplex films were made by filmmakers raised in the post-­Western ideological shift eastward. The destruction of the bipolar world order and the triumph of market capitalism further facilitated multilateral and transnational flows of goods, including cultural products and ideas. Filming abroad also opened the central Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African countries to exported Iranian movies, bolstering Iran’s domestic industry. Because some of these countries 240

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had only recently opened up to the noncommunist world, they were fresh, exotic, underexplored, and newsworthy for outsiders. Any film made about them attracted film distributors, festival organizers, policy makers, educational institutions, and spectators, particularly in the West. This created further export markets beyond the region. The huge success of Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar in the United States around the time of the U.S.-­led invasion of Afghanistan points up the newsworthiness of such films. The Islamic government in Iran, bent on influence in the Middle East and on countering Americans there, ironically turned to American-­style Cold War tactics and public diplomacy. In Afghanistan, for example, it built Shiite religious schools, broadcast radio and television programs, and created an “Iran Corner” in libraries: at Kabul University this held computers, books, and magazines about “Iran’s ancient culture and modern achievements.” The Iran Corner was more popular than the American Corner at Kabul University; its most popular feature was free and fast Internet access (Rohde 2006). The wide circulation of transnational films in North American and European festivals and commercial markets fed the contention of Iranian political exiles that they were a “hothouse cinema,” films made for consumption abroad and nurtured by foreign film festivals, with little domestic audience (Nassibi 2003). In the aftermath of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, these multiplex art-­house movies, as well as other socially relevant movies, were sought after by the film programmers of countries that were part of the Western “coalition of the willing,” thought to offer “insider,” “native,” or “near native” windows onto these murky trouble spots, countering dominant Western media representations. To that extent their circulation was politically tinged. Even the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and other government and security agencies took up the project of viewing Iranian (and other Middle Eastern) films as primers on the region and as informal supplements to formal intelligence-­gathering, what some called “strategic listening and looking by way of the movies.” 47 This, too, was part of the emerging and intensifying U.S. public diplomacy involving Iran (discussed extensively in the following chapter). However, these films were counterhegemonic, as they always sided with the plight of the subjects they covered, who were generally poor, displaced, and downtrodden. In addition, they were not national “autoethnographies” or national “allegories,” as described by Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and Fredric Jameson (1986), respectively, or “documentaries” about Muslim societies, as literature and films of the global south is often construed to be. Rather, they were works of art, driven by auteurist ambitions and aesthetics and by modernist and postmodernist individual subjectivity at multiple levels—­authorial, diegetic, and spectatorial. Mohsen Makhmalbaf went further than merely making movies about Afghans for the art houses and festivals. He published a book, The Buddha Was Not Demolished in Afghanistan, It Collapsed from Shame, in which he told of Art- House Ci nema

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“death and displacement” inside Afghanistan (Makhmalbaf 2002/1381). He also issued open letters to President Khatami protesting the government’s forced repatriation of Afghanistani refugees after twenty years of “hospitality” and advocating literacy classes for refugee children (Makhmalbaf 2002/1381:367– 69, 377–80). Finally, he set up a five-­month pilot literacy class for the refugee children himself with the budget of his Kandahar film, helped set up (with approval from Khatami and Iranian and Afghan bureaucracies) a school in Herat, and established the Afghan Children Education Movement in 2001, promoting literacy and culture in Afghanistan, including the training of film personnel, headed by Siddiq Barmak. The reach of the mfh was extended further with the release of Osama (2003), involving a favorite Iranian transgender narrative, a girl dressed as a boy. Afghanistan’s first post-­Taliban feature film, it listed Barmak as the director and Mohsen Makhmalbaf as the executive producer (including other mfh members).

International Film Festivals, Film Distribution Circuits, and the Emergence of a Postnational Cinema Art-­house films’ strong showing in international film festivals fed their subsequent commercial marketing abroad—­thanks initially to Farabi Cinema Foundation’s marketing. This helped enable a new Iranian national cinema and its “postnational” offspring. Domestic commercial studios joined the business of distributing films abroad, as did boutique North American and European distributors, followed by the Internet. National cinemas are sometimes discovered by outsiders more readily than by insiders. In 1992, the director of the New York Film Festival, Richard Peña, said that Iranian cinema was “one of the most exciting in the world today” (Miller 1992). The same year, the Toronto International Film Festival called it “one of the pre-­eminent national cinemas in the world today.” 48 An increasing number of major world film festivals began showing Iranian art-­house films, and these garnered many prizes. In 1986, only two postrevolutionary films were shown in foreign festivals, but in 1990, 230 films were screened in 78 international festivals, winning 11 prizes (Khosrowshahi 1991/1370:28–31). By 1998 Iranian films had been shown on 5,000 screens abroad, winning nearly 330 international prizes.49 A case in point is the history of Iranian cinema’s presence at the Cannes International Film Festival. While Iranian films had been screened at Cannes since 1961, with Mostafa Farzaneh’s Cyrus the Great (Kurosh-­e Kabir, 1961), and had won awards as early as 1963, when Ahmad Faruqi Qajar’s Dawn of the Capricorn (Tolu-­e Fajr) was given the Best Film for Youth award, until 1992 the festival had shown Iranian films only occasionally and only one or two at a time, and no film had won the festival’s top award. In 1992 thirteen Iranian movies appeared at Cannes.50 Since then several Iranian 242

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51 The brochure for the Fifth Anniversary Iranian Film Festival organized by the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Oct. 1994. Courtesy of festival director Barbara Scharess.

films have garnered the festival’s top filmmaking awards,51 with the year 2000, in which they won three major awards, being the most notable.52 In the early 1990s, the Paris-­based journalist Miriam Rosen asked Kiarostami to evaluate the status of Iranian cinema. With a mixture of pride and sly satisfaction, he answered, “I think of it as one of Iran’s major exports: in addition to pistachio nuts, carpets, and oil, now there is cinema” (Rosen 1992:40). Until 2000, when the U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, lifted the sanctions against Iranian caviar, carpets, and pistachio nuts, these traditional export items were barred from the United States (in addition to oil). During these same years, films from Iran rapidly found their way into the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, first through international film festivals and then through touring programs and targeted screenings in ethnic, academic, art-­house, and repertory communities and venues. Finally, they were shown in commercial cinemas and on television. From Iranian film festivals organized by Mohammad Haghighat at Utopia Cinema in Paris in 1988, by Alissa Simon at the Chicago Gene Siskel Film Center in 1989 (and continued later by Barbara Scharres), and by myself and Geoffrey Gilmore at ucla in 1990 (continued later by Shannon Kelley), the screening of Iranian films became a regular, annual event in these venues, continuing to the present (figure 51). Annual festivals cropped up elseArt- House Ci nema

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52 Rice University Cinema’s program for spring 1999, which included the annual monthlong festival of Iranian films. The cover bears an image from Mehrjui’s film Leila. Courtesy of Rice Cinema.

where: New York’s Lincoln Center; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Harvard Film Archive; the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio; and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.53 I started another annual festival in Houston in 1992 in collaboration with Marian Luntz, the film curator at the Museum of Fine Arts there. Held in two art-­house cinemas—­Rice Cinema and the Museum of Fine Arts—­it screened more than 130 features, documentaries, and animated films made both inside and outside Iran. A dozen filmmakers gave presentations (figure 52). In January 2004, the Eleventh Annual Iranian Film Festival included a collection of film

posters from before and after the revolution, along with a sale of Iranian film books. Posters for stewpot movies, tough-­guy movies, and new-­wave films of the Pahlavi era, as well as for exile films and postrevolutionary art-­ house films, made this exhibition the first such event in the United States (figure 53).54 The contrast in the semiotics of gender representation—­from nudity to veiling—­between the eras was graphically on display for astonished spectators unfamiliar with the prerevolutionary history of Iranian cinema. Attendance for each Houston venue ranged between one thousand and twenty-­five hundred.55 In general, in the United States, universities and other public cultural institutions were primary, regular exhibitors of Iranian movies, followed by commercial cinemas; television lagged far behind. 244

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53 Rice Cinema’s lobby, where the Iranian film festival, poster exhibition, and book sale took place in 2004 (the author is in near foreground on the right). Photo by Kelly Edwards. Courtesy of the photographer.

Iranian participation in international film festivals was not just to gain prestige for the film industry, individual filmmakers, the Islamic government, and the Iranian nation. It was also to find a way out of the perennial crisis dogging the domestic industry (since the mid-­1970s): Low domestic turnout for Iranian movies, and the government’s chokehold on the industry through both financing and censorship, reduced productions and channeled the movies that were made into government-­approved topics, disregarding public taste. Government support, which had been instrumental in the transition period, became a major source of the crisis (Ghazian 2002). Art-­house films popular in the West were often not as popular with Iranian domestic audiences. Some commercial movies and art-­cinema films were popular, but the population of the country was not large enough (at 70 million), sufficiently well-­off, or habituated to attending movies (one study reported that Iranians on average attended the movies a mere 0.79 times per year in the 1990s); nor was the domestic exhibition circuit and marketing powerful enough (due to a shortage of movie houses) and open enough (due to government interference) to support an indigenous commercial film industry. To flourish as a viable nongovernmental industry, Iranian cinema needed foreign markets, which would open it to the dynamics of post­ national and extraterritorial filmmaking and film exhibition. International festivals and programs airing on foreign television (particularly in Europe) helped initiate a wider marketing of Iranian films. By the mid-­ 1990s, foreign markets became a reality for art-­house films. In the summer of 1995, for example, when I was on a research trip for another book, Makhmalbaf’s Salaam Cinema was being screened not only at Cannes but also simultaneously in three commercial movie houses in Paris. Ebrahim Foruzesh’s The Jar (Khomreh, 1995) was also on the screen in a Paris commercial theater. The situation was similar in the United States, where Iranian films gradually became regular in commercial movie houses. To accommodate this increased interest in Iranian films, independent and art-­house commercial companies in Art- House Ci nema

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the United States, such as First Run/Icarus, Magnolia Films, Miramax Films, New Yorker Films, October Films, Wellspring, Sony Classic Pictures, Swank, and Zeitgeist Films began distributing art-­house movies nationally (see appendix A). Major video chain stores, such as Blockbuster, and video mail-­order services, such as Facets Multimedia and Netflix, as well as alternative and boutique distributors, such as Arab Film Distribution and Women Make Movies, began renting, selling, and distributing the movies widely, signaling the deeper penetration of Iranian cinema into the world cinema circuits. Ironically, the several million Iranians in diaspora, whom the Islamic Republic had called “escapees” and “traitors,” were a steady audience, instrumental to Iranian cinema’s success abroad, because they not only flocked themselves to these movies but also brought their families and friends to them. The Iranian diaspora press and media, too, contributed to the globalization of Iranian films even when they were critical of the Islamic Republic and its movies. Iranian films became a transnational currency for Iranians’ identity everywhere. All the major annual Iranian film festivals in the United States are in cities with large Iranian populations: Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York. This supports the notion that displaced populations contribute to the creation of national cinemas through their support for their homelands’ films; what is not clear is their exact contribution. They influence what movies Iranians produce and consume at home, and also what first-­generation Iranians and their second-­and third-­generation offspring produce and consume abroad. Because of globalization, national cinemas increasingly leapfrog national borders in peculiar ways, constituted by those at home and by others elsewhere. Festivals and critics grew the commercial market for Iranian films abroad. However, ironically, the availability of these films in commercial venues and on video, dvd, and Internet as well as increased visits by exiles to Iran in the 2000s, particularly during Khatami’s reformist presidency, seemed to lessen the importance of festivals, several of which, such as Houston and Chicago, reported a decrease in box-­office sales, while the ucla festival, now in its twentieth year, saw an increase in theirs, perhaps due to the additional budget from the U.S. State Department that allowed them to bring in more guest speakers and directors.

The Post-­Studio Independents Phenomenon and Globalization Revenues from internationalization somewhat freed art-­cinema filmmakers from their dependence on state sponsorship and its political strings, on commercial producers’ box-­office concerns, and on domestic spectators’ fickleness. An inchoate, independent, and auteurist cinema emerged. These independents were part of the “hothouse cinema” nurtured not only by internal public institutions but also by international film festivals and distribution circuits, which 246

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showcased their products and funded or coproduced some of them. Independent films, a hallmark of Western liberal democracies, had a scant history in the authoritarian Iran of the Qajar, the Pahlavi, or the Islamic Republic. In a fast globalizing world, this phenomenon spawned certain postnational and transnational tendencies among filmmakers. But because of its weak civil society foundations, the independent cinema remains a vulnerable and contingent phenomenon in Iran. The foreign-­currency earnings from this new source were substantial, considering film budgets in Iran—­less than $200,000—­and the lopsided exchange rate, which throughout the 2000s remained around 10,000 Iranian rials to one U.S. dollar. Some films did very well in commercial release abroad. For example, by the end of 1999, Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry had generated a respectable $340,658 in its U.S. distribution, playing in 147 art-­house, university, and commercial cinemas across the country.56 This far exceeded the film’s production cost. Majidi’s Oscar-­nominated film Children of Heaven did even better: more than 1 million U.S. dollars in four months in ten Hong Kong cinemas, taking a position among the top ten box-­office earners of the summer.57 In the United States, too, the film earned nearly 1 million dollars ($933,933). Given the reported production cost of $180,000, these box-­office figures show that the film “had legs” (see table 3). According to Mohammad Atebbai, then the director of international relations at the Farabi Cinema Foundation, this film became the top-­grossing Iranian film of all abroad (1999/1377:26). Majidi’s next film, The Color of Paradise, which received universally positive reviews in the West, became a veritable blockbuster for Iranian movies. It grossed $130,000 in its first two weeks, far ahead of the $50,000 that Majidi’s own widely touted Children of Heaven had earned in the same period (Alinejad 2000:2). According to Yahoo!’s “U.S. Top Box Office Actuals” on 30 May 2000, in its ninth week of exhibition in twenty-­four U.S. theaters nationwide, The Color of Paradise had grossed $714,442. Panahi’s Circle, whose budget was apparently only $10,000 made $673,780 gross in the United States (see table 3). Whatever was the cost of its distribution and advertising, it is likely that this was one of the most profitable Iranian films abroad, helping bolster Panahi’s status as an independent filmmaker. Naturally, politics plays a role in the emergence and success of independent filmmakers and films: Iranian internal politics, exile politics, the host countries’ politics, the politics of film festivals, critics, and distributors—­and geopolitics. A case in point is Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar, a French-­Iranian coproduction. According to the filmmaker and scholar Jamsheed Akrami, who consulted with U.S. film distributors for six months after its release, “no distributor would touch the film” until the September 11 attacks, whereupon ”they competed for it” (Avatar Films distributes it in the United States with subtitles). It soon grossed over $1.5 million dollars. On the other hand, Wellspring Media, which had the rights to distribute Ghobadi’s Marooned in Iraq, did not take advantage Art- House Ci nema

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Table 3 Box-office history for Iranian movies (1996–2000) Released

Movie Name

1/26/1996

White Balloon

9/13/1996

Gabbeh

U.S. Gross

Worldwide Gross

Budget

-

$888,894

-

-

-

$273,967

-

-

1st Weekend

1/22/1999

Children of Heaven

$20,100

$933,933

$1,628,579

$180,000

2/19/1999

Apple

$15,207

$116,758

-

-

5/14/1999

Leila

$5,294

$50,133

-

-

11/10/1999

Silence

$4,672

$1,765,607

-

-

3/9/2001

Circle

$673,780

-

$10,000

-

9/5/2001

Djomeh

$4,948

$19,205

-

-

12/7/2001

Baran

$21,702

$125,900

-

-

12/14/2001

Kandahar

$21,122

$1,418,314

-

-

5/3/2002

a.b.c. Africa

$1,857

$8,886

-

-

5/10/2002

The Blackboard

$1,500

$21,324

-

-

$6,696

$141,216

-

-

$3,093

$27,177

-

-

4/25/2003

Marooned in Iraq

3/31/2006

Iron Island

3/23/2007

Offside

$18,003

$179,948

-

-

8/3/2007

Weeping Willow

$6,048

$25,525

-

-

$1,126

$2,528

-

-

12/14/2007 Half Moon 2/8/2008

Bab’Aziz-The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul

$3,286

$89,672

-

-

4/3/2009

The Song of Sparrows

$7,863

$116,372

-

-

4/16/2010

No One Knows About Persian Cats

$8,843

$81,768

-

-

$6,960,907

$7,655,553

$190,000

$348,045

$382,778

$95,000

Totals Averages

Source: Retrieved from The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com, 5 March 2012. Courtesy of Nash Information Services, LLC

of the U.S.-­led war to oust Saddam Hussein and the short-­lived protest movement against it to publicize the film. As a result, that film did not do well, even though the geopolitics of the war was in its favor (Akrami 2004). Of course, not all of these international earnings go to the Iranian producers and directors. Contractual arrangements for each film are difficult to ascertain, as they often involve complex bank loans and private and public investments. 248

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If the case of the Farabi Cinema Foundation is any indication, however, these earnings were not small. According to Alireza Shojanoori, the former director of Farabi’s international relations department, 25 percent of Farabi-­produced films’ foreign earnings went to the foundation, while the rest was turned over to the film’s producer and director (Naficy 2001i). This capacity to generate box-­office revenues abroad led to a type of coproduction arrangement that was very different from the Pahlavi era. During the second Pahlavi era, the Iranian government had generally provided European and U.S. directors with coproduction funds; the new arrangement during the Islamic Republic, however, involved European and U.S. film companies (such as mk2 Productions in France and Miramax Films in the United States) investing in the production and distribution of films by Iranian directors. The production financing and marketing muscle of these companies helped enable the globalization of Iranian cinema and of certain directors. Multiple transnational audiences, new coproduction arrangements, and the financial independence of art-­house directors resulted in several curious situations. One was that independently produced art-­house films banned in Iran, such as Makhmalbaf’s Silence, made money abroad—­some $1,765,607 in the United States—­money the director did presumably not have to share with anyone, as he had financed the film himself (see table 3). A second situation was the emergence of art-­house films that became box-­office sensations both at home and abroad, such as Majidi’s The Color of Paradise, which not only did well internationally but also drew more than six hundred thousand spectators in Iran, earning $166,394 in Tehran theaters alone. It thus became the seventh-­ranking film in Tehran in box-­office earnings for 1999. Tahmineh Milani’s Two Women (Do Zan, 1999), which also had done well in festival and commercial circuits in the United States, became the second-­ranked film in its Tehran earnings with $390,747 (Beigagha 2000:15). A third situation was the unforeseen social consequences of such transnational exchanges. For example, Khatami was so moved by the story of the blind boy in The Color of Paradise that he gave the lead actor, Mohsen Ramazani, who is blind, a house in Tehran; and an American charity, similarly affected, bought a minibus for the Shahid Mohebbi Institute for the Blind in the Aryashahr district of Tehran (Alinejad 2000; Curiel 2000). International fame and critical reception did not guarantee high foreign earnings, for as table 3 shows the U.S. gross earnings of Kiarostami’s 2002 a.b.c. Africa were a mere $8,886. That Iranian independents are vulnerable is seen even in the case of the most internationally celebrated independent filmmaker, Kiarostami, whose films have been subjected at home, if not to direct censorship, to a kind of official inattention that has prevented them from being screened domestically. He spelled this situation out in a published letter he wrote in support of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rassoulof, other members of the independent cinema after their incarceration in 2009. Art- House Ci nema

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As a filmmaker of the same independent cinema, it has been years since I lost hope of ever screening my films in my country. By making my own low-­budget and personal films, it has also been years since I lost all hope of receiving any kind of aid or assistance from the Ministry of Guidance and Islamic Culture, the custodian of Iranian cinema. In order to make a living, I have turned to photography and use that income to make short and low-­budget films. I don’t even object to their illegal reproduction and distribution because that is my only means of communicating with my own people. For years now I have not even objected to this lack of attention from the ministry and authorities. He complained that the government has for years “differentiated between their own filmmakers (insiders) and independent filmmakers (outsiders),” a situation that has forced this celebrated filmmaker to remain at home and be satisfied with making small, personal films that few see. “I have found my own solutions to the problem,” he stated. “Independent of the conventional and customary support granted to the cinematic community at large, I make my own short and independent films with hopes of gaining some credit for the people I love and a name for the country I come from. Sometimes the necessity to work calls for the making of films beyond the borders of my country, which is ultimately not out of personal choice or taste” (quoted in Mackey 2010a). Finally, independent auteur directors who were no longer able or willing to work at home left to live and work abroad, such as Ghobadi and the Makhmalbafs. From this new position, safe from the coercion and censorship of the Islamic Republic, and from self-­censorship, filmmakers acquired new platforms both for launching their films and for voicing their opinions. In the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his daughter, the filmmaker Hana, became from their base in France prominent spokespeople for the Green Movement, opposing Ahmadinejad’s reelection.58 As exile wears on, these filmmakers will likely become postnational or transnational subjects of one sort or another, making a variety of accented films. To be successful they cannot rely on any government’s largess but will have to compete in a much larger pond in a ferociously competitive, transnational, and capitalist environment. This may prove to be a challenge. Not all the consequences of internationalization were positive. Auteur directors’ relative independence from domestic government and spectators made for local irrelevance, in that their works did not garner much screen time and public attention. Kiarostami tersely explained the negative impact at home of his international success in a brief interview in the New York Times Magazine: “No one criticizes me; no one encourages me. Nobody has anything to do with me. Those who need to know who I am know who I am. . . . They [the government] are very civil, but they don’t allow me to screen my movies. They [Iranian spectators] can buy the dvds on the black market” (quoted in Solomon 2007). Yet 250

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international festivals’ recognition bestowed prestige and, as Kiarostami points out in Akrami’s documentary Friendly Persuasion, offers the filmmakers “endorsement and . . . self-­confidence. With self-­confidence, you become more daring and try new experiments,” something that the domestic industry and even critics sometimes do not tolerate. He denies that such international endorsements have caused him to make films for foreigners or to change his films to fit the “Western critics’ taste.” In the same documentary, Mohsen Makhmalbaf offers the success of Iranian films abroad as an antidote to the centuries-­old Iranian defensiveness vis-­à-­v is Westerners’ Orientalist and negative views of ­Iranians (this interview was before his exile): “My audiences are primarily Iranian. But when non-­Iranians see my films, 50 percent of my feelings have to do with how happy my countrymen would feel about foreigners seeing a good picture of our country and taking our art seriously. I feel like a child who leaves the house to bring back glory to his parent.” The international success of domestic films always involves both personal and national self-­confidence and pride. Even though circumspect, the independent phenomenon was perceived both by Ahmadinejad’s government and by commercial producers as a problem, causing the filmmakers to complain of a “lack of economic and cultural justice” in production and exhibition policies, which could lead to the end of the independent cinema. Some forty-­six independent filmmakers, including Kiar­ ostami, Baizai, Taqvai, and Banietemad, signed a statement complaining about the manner in which money had become the criterion of value for films, not the prestige of films or of filmmakers. They claimed that those who run the film industry “want to eliminate the independent cinema or, at most, to keep it in the hot house.” Ali Akbar Saqafi, a member of the producers’ union, responded by reviving the perennial argument of his sector of the industry, that the independent filmmakers’ problem is their inability to connect with audiences.59 The debate and the problem continue.

Critique of the Globalization of Art-­House Films The majority of films screened in international festivals were art-­house films. Though they constituted a fraction of the films produced, they came to represent the Iranian “national cinema” abroad.60 The problem this posed for national cinema theory was not just the ratio of these films to the total output and their general lack of popularity in Iran. Most critics and cineastes inside Iran celebrated such a global interest in Iranian films; however, globalization opened the independent art-­cinema directors to various charges and countercharges. Inside Iran, some argued that foreign film festivals, by their choices of films, distorted Iranian realities and indigenous cinema. As early as 1992, in the heat of the first wave of the “cultural invasion” debate, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei complained of the international film festivals’ politics, accusing them of beArt- House Ci nema

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ing political in their choice of films and awards. In a speech to mass media representatives, he stated: “How can you ignore what they do to our films, plays, and children’s fare? How can you say that they are not political? If they are not political, why have they not given an award to one revolutionary film? Is it because we don’t have a single revolutionary film? . . . Do these films have no artistic merit? I predict that one day international organizations will award a Nobel Prize to one of these so-­called cultural figures—­anti-­Islam and antirevolution figures—­to raise their status in the world and to isolate the revolutionary figures. Is this not cultural invasion?” (Khamenei 1994/1373:163).61 Some critics argued that since political, pro-­Islamic Republic films (“revolutionary films” in Khamenei’s parlance) had little chance of breaking into international festivals, either apparently apolitical art-­house directors such as Kiarostami flourished or directors tackled only safe topics to ensure their entry into the festival circuit (Farahmand 1999). When, a decade later, social-­problem “political films” were embraced by international festivals, Pezhman Lashgaripur, a pro-­ Islamicate cinema critic for the weekly magazine Sinema Video, objected to the wide screening abroad of Panahi’s The Circle, which painted a harrowing picture of women’s oppressed and miserable lives. He claimed that the film “does not represent the national interest of our cinema” and that its success abroad was due to Panahi “turning his back on our deep beliefs and culture,” “distorting reality,” and “prostituting himself culturally.” He felt that the West’s embrace of such a socially critical, anti-­Islamic Republic film was another way for it to propagate its own version of globalization by “culturally colonizing a segment of our cinema” (Lashgaripur 2002/1381:143, 132). In this manner, independent filmmakers became embroiled in the antagonistic Iran-­West public diplomacy and soft power struggles. The success of films abroad is often interpreted politically inside Iran, even films that may not appear political, as was the case with Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. It was highly praised in Europe and the West as a fresh and realistic look by a precocious teenage woman at her society, particularly at the deprivation of women and children. Its very success in commercial theaters and festival circuits abroad, however, made the film controversial at home. Some domestic critics ascribed the film’s success to the washing of national dirty laundry in public. Others, jealous or misinformed, credited the contributions of Samira’s father for its success, discounting her own talents (Talebinezhad 1998). With the emergence of a seemingly robust reformist movement in late 2000s and the increased output of social problem-­films, underground films, and Internet films, Iranian cinema became more politicized, not only in its production but also in its downstream processes—­domestic and international distribution, exhibition, and reception. It was in this atmosphere that the deputy director for political affairs of the vvir issued a report in which he described international film festivals, such as Cannes and Venice, and Iranian underground films, those made without government authorization and supervision, as “part 252

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and parcel of the ‘soft war’ waged against the Islamic Republic.” He argued that the political underground films, which project a “dark and chaotic image of Iran’s economic and social conditions” are close to the “political thinking” of organizers of major Western film festivals, who seek to promote them. According to him, the reason why domestic filmmakers make films for export is to “attract foreign investments” (Nikzad 2009). He does not mention another important factor for this: the Islamic Republic’s draconian censorship and impediments placed in the way of the free expression of cinematic ideas. The reactions of Iranian exile and diaspora populations to the international successes of art-­house films varied. Middle-­class and upper-­class educated Iranians, who formed the bulk of those abroad, generally celebrated these films and found validation and selfing both in their high quality and in their humanism. Many, however, afflicted by a century of defensiveness toward Western mediawork on Iran, were critical of the lower-­class milieu, poverty, urban marginalia, and rustic rural life so prominent in art-­house movies, in which they could find neither themselves nor their homeland. These spectators felt ashamed of these movies, for the “burden of representation” that they themselves had placed on them was too much. No single Iranian film could represent the entirety of Iranian “national culture.” Since rarely a small body of films is able to fulfill this high expectation, there will always be criticism of their national representation when movies cross national boundaries. There were vociferous criticisms by certain exiled filmmakers such as Parviz Sayyad, Bassir Nassibi, Hosain Mahini, Barbod Taheri, Reza Allamehzadeh, and Moslem Mansouri. These were primarily political. Many of these critics were political refugees from Iran and were openly antagonistic to the Islamist government that had ended their careers and driven them away. With varied degrees of vehemence they objected to film festivals’ showcasing of Iranian films because, they claimed, these events lent political legitimacy to the government, and the government dexterously and politically exploited these apparently nonpolitical films to improve its sorry human rights record and international image (Sayyad 1996, 1996/1376; Allamehzadeh 1995:1991).62 In an uncanny way, such an argument echoed the leftist students and members of the Iranian Students Association in the United States at Michigan State University, who in 1977 had vociferously objected to the production of the Ancient Iran film series by the nirt and the msu (directed by Mohammad Ali Issari) as a cultural project designed to legitimize the Shah’s regime. The Ancient Iran series was paid for by the Shah’s government and it was designed to bolster the pre-­Islamic history of Iran and the role of the monarchy in it, and in that sense it was a pro-­Pahlavi missive, justifying the leftists’ protests against it. However, the postrevolution art-­house movies were not only unsupportive of the Islamic Republic’s government but also were implicitly and explicitly critical of it, making the exiles’ criticism that the films legitimated the regime sound hollow. These films valorized a deeper and a more complex, dynamic, and humane Iranian society than the Art- House Ci nema

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Western or Iranian exile mediaworks allowed but they did not validate the Islamic Republic regime. European and North American cultural organizations, universities, and film festivals became targets of anti-­Islamic Republic protests. Allamehzadeh claimed that the regime manipulated foreign cultural associations, university student societies, and film programmers of good will into becoming, unbeknownst to themselves and without receiving any remuneration, “agents of the regime’s cultural policies” (Allamehzadeh 1991:222–23). As described at length in the preface to volume 1, the vast Iranian exile media in Los Angeles was mobilized and orchestrated against the 1990 ucla Iranian film festival, calling for its boycott. Many prominent exile filmmakers and mediamakers were involved. Sayyad continued to be vitriolic for years thereafter, calling the organizers of that film festival, including myself, members of the pro-­government “cultural militia in exile” and “celebrators of fascism,” among other things (Sayyad 1996:55, 57). Insisting that the current cinema in his homeland should not be called “Iranian cinema” but “Islamic Republic Cinema,” he stated that the “principle problem” was precisely with the art-­house movies because these brought prestige to the government but misled the international public by covering up Iranian realities, instead of uncovering and expressing them (1996/1376:450– 51). “It would have been far more honorable,” he argued, “for Iranian artists and filmmakers to have renounced their profession than to have lent their talents to the promotion of an obvious hoax.” 63 He called the government’s promotion and export of art-­house films “a form of hush money, paid by the religious fascists ruling Iran, with the sole aim of obscuring their crimes,” gaining “legitimacy,” and opening the “doors of friendship for the regime abroad.” Defensive about the general low quality of mainstream films that Iranian exiles had made, he even objected to the festivals that showed Iranian films made both inside Iran and in exile because “this creates a competitive basis for assessing these films which works against the weaker party—­the cinema of exile.” 6 4 Sayyad withdrew the screening of his films at some festivals that showcased films from Iran, as did Moslem Mansouri, the dissident exile underground filmmaker, who claimed he refused to enter his films in the Cannes and Amsterdam film festivals when he was invited to do so, to protest the presence of films from Iran in those festivals (Behrouzian 2005). Both Sayyad and Allamehzadeh complained that major international film festivals shut Iranian exiles out of festivals that showcased films made inside Iran for fear of being boycotted by Iran, depriving them of its valued entries. Many “rejectionist” exiles attributed the awards that even top art-­house films received in premier festivals solely to political considerations. Jaber Kalibi claimed that awarding the Golden Palm at Cannes to Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry in 1997 was due to the French government’s desire to curry favor with the Iranian government. The filmmakers were also evaluated in similarly political and conspiratorial terms. In an article entitled “The ‘Political’ Taste of Cherry,” Kalibi 254

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54 Attending the screening of Tahmineh Milani’s Unwanted Woman at Stanford University on 9 July 2005 is film star Behrooz Vossoughi (center), flanked by two young fans, Sheila Tabrizi (left) and Ariana Kashani. Courtesy of photographer, Talieh Shahrokhi.

accused Kiarostami of being a “perfect model of a compromised and opportunist filmmaker” (1997/1376:23). In a replay of the exile filmmakers’ protest to the 1990 ucla film festival, forty-­one artists, directors, poets, critics, and intellectuals in Europe—­including Niloofar Baizai, Nasim Khaksar, Abbas Samakar, Jila Mosaed, Said Manafi, Hosain Mahini, and Bassir Nassibi—­w rote a protest letter against the specialized film festivals devoted to films made in Iran, which they claimed had increased in tempo since the election of Khatami. Objecting specifically to the week of films slated for screening in 1997 in Stockholm, they contended that European nations’ foreign ministries facilitated these special film festivals, which were “funded and aided” by the Islamic Republic to spread “cultural and political propaganda for the regime.” 65 Calls for boycotting were not uncommon. These views circulated widely, but they belonged to a small faction of politicized, vociferous, and media-­savvy exiles. The majority of those in the diaspora, including key actors such as Behrouz Vossoughi, supported the exhibition of Iranian movies abroad and participated in them (figure 54). Given the neutral or oppositional viewpoints and the high quality of the films shown in these Iranian film festivals in the diaspora and considering the anti-­Islamic Republic public diplomacy of most Western governments, it is clear that the aim of the foreign governments’ partial funding of these festivals was less to uphold the notorious regime in Iran than to bolster its opposition. However, there is some truth to all these positions. Film festivals are highly complex sites for cultural exchange, translation, interpretation, and misinterpretation, even manipulation, and they are lynchpins of the global exchanges and flows of cinema and film culture, participation in which is necessary for any national cinema and/or any ambitious filmmaker. Exclusively political readings of the films and festivals, however, impoverish the discourse and distort the films’ true value, as well as the reality of the situation. Despite these antagonistic sentiments, the quality of art-­house films from Iran in these festivals has been so consistently high, the quantity so numerous, and the critics’ and audiences’ responses abroad so enthusiastic that this minority cinema came to be recognized Art- House Ci nema

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not only as a national cinema but also as postnational and international. The extent of its global success was indicated by the nearly twelve thousand screenings that Iranian movies received in international festivals between 1979 and 2002 (Atebbai 2004/1382:14). Regardless of the arguments, once art-­cinema filmmakers were invited to attend, international festivals offered them forums where they were exposed to other opinions and cinemas and could state with relative impunity their opinions about Iranian society and cinema—­opinions often critical of the Islamic government. For example, Samira Makhmalbaf, on receiving the Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival for The Blackboard, declared, “This prize is to honor the heroic efforts of all the younger generation who are struggling for democracy and a better life in Iran” (McCarthy 2000). Baizai, Mehrjui, Panahi, Ghobadi, Banietemad, Milani, Rassoulof, the Makhmalbaf clan, and many others in their appearances at festivals often expressed critical and candid views about government censorship policies. These festivals raised the prestige of Iran as a nation and countered widespread negative mediawork about it, but they did not whitewash the Islamist regime; in fact, they provided venues in which its practices could be discussed and critiqued. International acclaim for cinema did not translate into legitimacy for the government. A key reason was that Iranians in the diaspora, international audiences, and film-­reviewing and festival-­organizing establishments abroad were sophisticated enough to distinguish the filmmakers—­particularly auteur filmmakers—­from the government. They understood the films—­and the constricted political contexts in which they were made. Unlike political exiles, who focused solely on politics and on governmental sponsorship and the manipulations of filmmakers, these viewers credited the filmmakers’ initiative and artistry for the films’ high quality, humanism, and successes. It is undeniable that international film festivals carried with them certain elements of “film diplomacy,” whereby cultural exchanges could pave the way for diplomatic relations between antagonistic governments. However, despite various efforts at bilateral cinematic and cultural exchanges, recounted by Azadeh Farahmand (2002), no public diplomatic rapprochement between the Iranian and U.S. governments seems to have taken place as a result of film festivals. In fact, as the public diplomacy battle between Iran and the United States heated up after Ahmadinejad’s reelection, large sums of the U.S. State Department’s funding were made available to some major film festivals, such as the one at ucla in the 2000s; this was not to encourage rapprochement with the Islamist regime but to promote opposition to it. Such funding paid for travel and the accommodation of the visiting filmmakers, including their travels to third countries to obtain visas, the rental of film prints, and other expenses associated with managing any major festival. Ironically, while one part of the U.S. government (diplomatic services) and the State of California government (University of California) promoted such cultural exchanges and “people-­to-­people” contacts between Iranians and Americans through funding and visas, other parts of the 256

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federal and state governments (treasury and law enforcement agencies), which monitored and enforced the draconian U.S. financial and business embargos on Iran, impeded them. This placed the film festivals during Bush II and Obama presidencies at the center of the public diplomacy vortex. A weak country’s films may be excluded from international festivals because the country does not matter politically. On the other hand, the political notoriety of “rogue” states, such as Franco’s Spain, Castro’s Cuba, and the Ayatollahs’ Iran, makes them attractive to international festivals. Invitations cause controversies with sending nations’ governments and critics and their political exiles. A case in point is Panahi’s The White Balloon, which was being considered for a foreign-­language Oscar in 1996. It became embroiled in a political skirmish over a recently approved Congressional plan (budgeted at $20 million) directing U.S. intelligence agencies to destabilize the Islamic government in Iran. The mcig announced that in the light of this plan, Iran would withdraw the film from Oscar consideration. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which issues the Oscar, responded that it would not permit a film to be “squeezed out because of politics” (Corliss 1996:n.p.) and, at any rate, the foreign-­language film committee members had already screened the film, nullifying Iran’s withdrawal (Young 1996). The White Balloon remained eligible and was favorably and widely discussed in the U.S. press, and it was later distributed commercially by October Films and repeatedly aired by Bravo cable channel, but it did not win the Oscar (table 3 shows it made nearly US $900,000). This transnational traffic helped independent filmmakers come into their own, financially and stylistically. Kiarostami, for example, made idiosyncratic research films, exploring the world with his camera-­pen, not for profit but for self-­expression (recall the meager box-­office of a.b.c. Africa). The international market’s demand for Iranian films pushed some filmmakers to make films for that market, resulting in a genre of festival movies catering to conventions that soon became routinized and parodied (see the poster for Close-­Up, figure  55, which lists these generic conventions, and see the cartoon by Mahmoud M). With time, the market for Iranian films eroded under these pressures. By the mid-­2000s festival cinema had subsided. A U.S. critic was able to note, “The festival film—­slow, difficult, formally austere—­can be a welcome antidote to the fast-­moving, accessible movies that thrive in the sphere of commercial cinema. But it is also worth remembering . . . that art movies, too, are susceptible to formula and cliché” (Scott 2008). With time, success and genrification eroded the popularity of Iranian films abroad, with the exception of the works of the filmmakers who continued to innovate. In the meantime, these films provided a clear window on the growing discontent brewing inside Iran under the repressive clerical state. Before major distributors began to distribute Iranian films commercially, these films were exhibited in the United States without ratings. Since the late 1990s, they have been classified according to the Motion Picture Association Art- House Ci nema

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55 Parodying international festivals’ impact on genrification of art-cinema films. Titled “How to Become a Candidate for Festivals and an Oscar,” the cartoon by Mahmoud M shows an authority figure (looking like Abbas Kiarostami) listing nine generic features that putatively made Iranian movies a success in international film festivals. These are: presence of the film crew in film; misery, misfortune, poverty; yearning for a pair of shoes, a balloon, an apple, a pear, a fish . . .; exploitation of women and children; suicide due to anomie and boredom; nonprofessional actors; wild nature in villages and countryside; having the film censored; earthquake, flooding, plague, Taliban. Cartoon courtesy of Mahmoud M and Iranian.com.

of America’s rating system. Curiously, Majidi’s two popular films, Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise, were both rated PG (parental guidance required) instead of G (general admittance), even though both involved children and were devoid of violence, sex, and bad language. It is not known whether this classification had a negative bearing on these films’ box-­office earnings. The reason for so classifying Children of Heaven was intriguingly listed as “mild profanity.” The enhanced presence of Iranian films on theater screens and television led to an explosion in the West of publications about Iranian cinema. Several doctoral dissertations have been written on this subject and more are in the works in Europe, Israel, and North America, and the annual Middle Eastern, Iranian, and film and media studies conferences regularly feature presentations on Iranian cinema by scholars—­many of them non-­Iranian.66 Likewise, many books in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and English on Iranian cinema have been published, and Western film journals regularly feature articles on the topic. It has become a subject for film courses at universities in Europe, North America, and Australia. 258

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This surge of interest abroad intensified efforts inside Iran to bolster the international marketing of the films. Two efforts are worth noting. One is the establishment in the early 1990s of Film International in Tehran, an English-­ language quarterly, published by Masud Mehrabi and edited by Houshang Gol­ makani, publisher and editor, respectively, of the respected monthly ­Mahnamehye ­Sinemai-­ye Film, which contains news and information about the latest productions, biographies of directors and stars, film reviews, interviews, scholarly and critical essays, and information and statistics about all aspects of Iranian cinema. It provides international distributors and broadcasters with necessary information on a regular basis and in a well-­designed format. The other is the creation in 1988 of an annual “international film market” in Tehran to facilitate the exchange of information with foreign concerns and to market Iranian films more aggressively. Significantly, the market was designed to be all-­inclusive, involving Iranian public-­sector filmmakers and private-­sector film companies. Exchange with the West changed the character of the domestic film industry, from one that was primarily centralized and government-­financed and -­controlled to one that moved toward a mixed economy and ideological pluralism. Sixteen years after the nomination of The White Balloon, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (Jodai-­ye Nader az Simin, 2011) was nominated for the best foreign language Oscar. More than any other single film this movie helped globalize the Iranian cinema, particularly at a crucial time that the public diplomacy enmity between Iran and the West was at its height. Unlike Panahi’s film, A Separation was not part of the neorealist inflected, child-­centered art-­house “festival films,” that became a veritable genre, even a cliché. A Separation is an adult film about adult issues, a powerful, provocative, and emotionally wrenching work that explores in an unflinching way divorce, child custody, care of Alz­ heimer parents, class division, and deceit and lying in Iranian society. It is an example of the new social issues movies that critically dig below the surfaces, below “the skin of the city” to quote the title of a Banietemad film, to uncover a social cauldron. The film’s closed mise-­en-­scène and tight shot composition enhance the feeling of seething tensions. The switch from the judge’s point of view at the film’s beginning to that of the daughter of the disputing parents toward the end, shifts the film’s center of gravity from the public to the private, where a member of the third generation after the revolution is poised to evaluate and pass judgment on those who made the revolution and built the postrevolutionary society. Astutely, however, Farhadi withholds this judgment, shifting the film’s point of view yet again, to the spectator, who is asked to do the judging. These shifts partly account for the deep engagement of audiences with the film. A Separation had already won a rare triple top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival (Golden Bear for the best film and the best actor and best actress awards for principal cast). When it opened commercially in the United States on 30 December 2011 for Oscar qualification, it received glowing reviews Art- House Ci nema

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from major film critics, and it soon won the 2012 Golden Globe for the best foreign film (often winning this award is a precursor to winning an Oscar). Injecting a mild measure of politics, Farhadi accepted his award, but instead of thanking, as is customary on such occasion, his personal or professional family members, he thanked “my people,” who he said, are “truly peace-­loving people.” This was a clear response to the mutual drumbeat of war between the hard-­liners both in the country in which his film was produced (Iran) and in the country that was bestowing the award on him (United States). Here Farhadi and his film were acting as cultural ambassadors, filling the absence of official ambassadors between the two nations. However, while the film seemed to be performing its ambassadorial role well and was universally reviewed positively by American media and celebrated by Iranians in the diaspora, inside Iran the official reaction to the movie hardened. The official media and critics lambasted it and its popularity abroad, seeing it as part of the orchestrated anti-­Islamic Republic Western public diplomacy. Film critic Masud Farasati is reported to have said that “On one hand they [the U.S.] impose sanctions against us, and on the other they give awards to our film, to send us a positive signal. I think this [the film’s success] is an illusion. This is not a good film,” adding that “The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture westerners are wishing for” (Dehghan 2001c). In the end, the film won the coveted Oscar for the best foreign film, the first Iranian film to achieve this honor. Both the fact of the award and Farhadi’s remarks upon receiving it caused an explosion of empowered selfing and nationalist sentiments on the Internet and the mass media by Iranians at home and in the diaspora. He said: “At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country—­Iran—­is spoken here through her glorious culture—­a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country. A people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.” Even mainstream daily papers inside Iran, such as Ettela’at, celebrated the occasion and Farhadi’s gesture with a front-­page picture of him holding up the Oscar and a supportive editorial. The former minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Mohammad Khatami, who had done much to put Iranian cinema on the map of vital world cinemas, too, congratulated Farhadi, ending his statement by invoking the power of film in national reconciliation and public diplomacy. “We must take this event as a clear signal that art in general, and cinema in particular, are among the most important vehicles in a world that is dominated by insecurity, war, prejudice, injustice, and authoritarianism. They can bring the hearts closer to each other, make humanity and compassion triumph over violence, and replace tensions with the dialogue of cultures and civilizations.” 67 Surprisingly, the hard-­line deputy minister of culture and Islamic 260

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guidance in charge of cinematographic affairs, Javad Shamaghdari, who had advocated a close scrutiny of exported films congratulated Farhadi and his colleagues, while gloating that the voters in the Oscar competition had overcome the “Zionist lobby that is beating the war drum” with Iran and, instead, opted for the humane spiritual and ethical values of Islam.68 That A Separation beat an Israeli film, Joseph Sedar’s Footnote (2011), in the same category may have caused the minister to issue this statement supporting Farhadi’s film. But his film was doing a brisk business inside Israel, garnering an impressive 30,000 filmgoers in the two weeks that it was playing in Jerusalem. The intense political interest in Iran as an enemy state piqued the interest in the film but it surprised the viewers and reviewers alike at humanness, modernity, and democratic tendencies they saw in the film. Yair Raveh, film critic for an Israeli leading entertainment magazine said this about A Separation: “It’s very well acted, exceptionally well written and very moving. Ultimately you don’t think about nuclear bombs or dictators threatening world peace. You see them driving cars and going to movies and they look exactly like us.” 69 If this is any indication, the film seems to have fulfilled Khatami’s hoped for role for cinema as a conciliator.

The International Treatment of Art-­House Filmmakers If the entry of Iranian films into foreign festivals and markets expanded with the turn of the twenty-­first century despite the U.S. government’s characterization of Iran as a “rogue state” and the imposition of draconian economic and diplomatic embargoes on Iran, filmmakers’ travel encountered increased obstacles, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Even though none of the purported al-­Qaeda terrorists perpetrating the attacks were Iranian or linked to Iran, the U.S. government instituted a new rule that required nationals of several Muslim countries believed to be “sponsors of terrorism,” including Iran, to be fingerprinted and photographed on each entry into the country, even if they carried valid passports and visas. This policy, which was expanded later to many other countries, caused much resentment among Iranian intellectuals, filmmakers, and entertainers invited to attend conferences and film festivals. Renowned directors such as Kiarostami, Ghobadi, and Panahi were either refused visas, or they encountered impediments to travel and visas, such as long waits in third countries. In September 2002, the Internet magazine Salon reported that Kiarostami, “an Iranian filmmaker who is widely considered one of the world’s greatest living directors,” was denied a visa to enter the United States to premier his latest film, Ten, at the New York Film Festival and at Harvard University and the University of Ohio. Festival organizers and the two universities tried “very, very hard” to convince officials at the U.S. embassy in Paris, where Kiarostami had applied for a visa, to make an exception for the filmmaker. “It wasn’t that they Art- House Ci nema

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could not make an exception. It was that they did not choose to.” Embassy officials told the festival that they would “require at least 90 days to investigate Kiarostami’s background—­which is well known to film scholars and fans, and contains little in the way of political activity—­and process the visa paperwork” (O’Hehir 2002). Kiarostami decided to forego his trip to the United States. According to the bbc News World Service, in October 2002, Ghobadi handed back the prestigious award that the Chicago Film Festival had bestowed on him for his film The Songs of My Motherland (aka Marooned in Iraq) (Avazha-­ye Sarzamin-­e Madariam, 2002) because U.S. authorities had refused him a visa, although he had filed his application four months earlier and had traveled to Dubai twice for interviews at the U.S. embassy. In a letter to the festival organizers, he said, “a country which rejects the visa application of an artist, better keep the prize of its festival for its own authorities.” 70 In April 2001, Panahi was detained at New York’s jfk airport when he was en route from the Hong Kong Film Festival to the Montevideo and Buenos Aires festivals. He did not have a transit visa and would not acquiesce to be fingerprinted and photographed because of his Iranian nationality. In a public letter to the National Board of Review, which had bestowed its Freedom of Expression award on Panahi for The Circle in December 2000, he claimed that he had been assured by both festival organizers and United Airlines personnel that no visa was necessary to change planes at jfk. He reported that when he refused to be fingerprinted and photographed, U.S. officials “threatened to put me in jail,” and they refused to provide him with an interpreter and a lawyer. Instead, they “chained me like the medieval prisoners” and took him to a detention center, where they “chained my feet and locked my chain to the others, all locked to a very dirty bench.” The ordeal lasted ten hours until morning, when they allowed him to make a phone call to the Iranian American filmmaker and professor Jamsheed Akrami, who interceded on his behalf, alerting Wellspring Media, which was Panahi’s distributor, to call in a lawyer. As Akrami relates, Panahi told him that every time the U.S. immigration officials asked him to allow them to fingerprint him, he had responded in his broken English: “Me artist. Finger, no, no” (Akrami 2004). Soon, Panahi called Akrami back to say that he had agreed to be deported to Hong Kong instead of being photographed, finger­printed, and sent on his way to Buenos Aires. Using his cinematic imagination and flair for storytelling, Panahi ended his letter in a narratively dramatic manner: In the plane and from my window, I could see New York. I knew my film, The Circle, was released there two days before, and I was told the film was very well received too. Perhaps, audiences would understand my film better if they could know the director of the film was chained at the same time. They would accept my belief that circles of human limits exist in all parts of this world, but in different ratios. I saw the Statue of Liberty 262

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in the waters, and I unconsciously smiled. I tried to draw the curtain and there were scars of the chain on my hand. I could not stand the other travelers gazing at me and I just wanted to stand up and cry that I’m not a thief! I’m not a murderer! I’m not a drug dealer! I . . . I am just an Iranian, a filmmaker. But how could I say this? In what language? . . . I had not slept for 16 hours and I had to spend another 15 hours on the way back to Hong Kong. It was just a torture among all those watching eyes. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But I could not. I could just see the images of those sleepless women and men who were still chained.71 In 2008, the Iranian avant-­garde video artist Ghazel Radpay, who lives in France, was unable to attend the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville to which she was invited as a featured artist. As she told me in an e-­mail, the U.S. embassy in Paris had interviewed her extensively, asked “humiliating questions” about her and her family, photographed and fingerprinted her, and forced her to wait for hours without a clear prospect of receiving a visa. This situation, and her recollection of her past humiliating treatments at U.S. airports, caused her to “panic a little, as the last time this happened to me I had told myself I will never return to the U.S., as nothing is worth the humiliation and the way American officials suppose that I’m ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous’ because of my passport” (Naficy 2008d). She abandoned her visa application (within a year received her French passport which would presumably make her future entry into the U.S. easier). Ironically, the Virginia festival’s theme that year was “The Aliens among Us,” and I was a consultant to it that year. Fortunately, we were able to leapfrog the physical U.S. border by my interviewing her live via Skype before the spectators who had gathered in the movie house to see her Home (2008), a film about various Parisian émigrés’ conceptions of home. Even Canadian subjects of Iranian ancestry, such as the famous entertainer Googoosh, encountered difficulties, leading to her canceling a scheduled concert tour of the U.S. West Coast. The documentary filmmaker and journalist Hossein Dehbashi agreed to be fingerprinted and photographed, but even so he was denied entry into the United States after a long detention at Dulles International Airport in Washington. He had been invited by Princeton University’s Department of Iranian Studies to do a television series about U.S. society for Iranian state-­owned television. “I accepted their suggestion and they sent me an invitation letter, upon which I obtained a journalist visa from the U.S. embassy in Dubai together with a press card provided by the press section of the State Department,” Dehbashi said, adding: “I flew . . . from London and was fingerprinted and photographed on my arrival. After 10 hours they sent me, handcuffed, into the airplane and submitted my identity documents to flight attendants and returned me to London” (Rezaian 2002). This latter case caused what the media dubbed a “visa war” between Iran and Art- House Ci nema

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the United States, further fueling the already raging mutual wars of national mediawork and public diplomacy, as the Iranians retaliated by requiring the police to fingerprint U.S. journalists entering Iran and requiring the journalists to fill out forms giving information about “contact addresses and phone numbers in Iran as well as descriptions of Iranian institutes or organizations assisting them” (Amin 2002). Kiarostami’s case had also apparently caused another retaliation by Iran, for soon after it, the Iranian Foreign Ministry denied the visa application of Christiane Amanpour, the chief international correspondent for Cable News Network, who is Iranian British.72 These moves and countermoves became part of the reality of cinematic exchanges and cultural diplomacy of Iranians with the world. Despite the giddy celebration of globalization and of an emerging borderless world, these developments demonstrate that borders remain real, hard, and fast, and that their defense and control have become even stricter and more militarized than before.

Adaptation, Copying, Copyrighting In the 1990s, the globalized flow of Iranian films was forcing more urgently than ever a political decision at home. Iranian copyright laws are supposed to protect the intellectual rights of all artistic and scientific works produced inside the country, including movies and television. However, these do not protect the rights of works from outside Iran because Iran is not a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works or to the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, and it is not a member of the World Trade Organization (wto). In fact, the United States has vetoed nearly two dozen times Iran’s membership in the wto, and Iranians, in turn, have seen it in their interest not to abide by wto or other international copyright conventions (in fact, it is rumored that the Iranian regime is encouraging the piracy of U.S. movies and pop culture in retaliation for American opposition to Iran’s membership in the wto). Such refusals to subscribe to the international copyright norms were once justified, from an Iranian point of view, because the country was not a producer of world-­class knowledge, scientific or artistic, which needed protecting. In addition, globalization and cultural exchange were inchoate. The adaptation, translation, and outright copying of cinematic and other works of foreigners, undertaken without permission from copyright holders, was an economical, accepted, and even necessary strategy. The downside was that this favored adaptation and copying over original creation. In this it favored both premodern formulaic orality and postmodernity’s pastiche over modernity, with its emphasis on originality and uniqueness. Indeed, during the second Pahlavi era it led to a curious hybrid genre of “translation and adaptation” literature, produced by “author-­translators” (Faridi 2011), which blurred the line between what was original and what was adapted, problematizing au264

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thorship and ownership. Filmmakers followed similar practices in adapting and remaking popular foreign movies. By the last decades of the twentieth century, a fundamental revolution had taken place in the global economy. Industrial production and extraction and the control of natural resources were giving way to a globalized, knowledge-­based economy and services, driven by production, processing, and the dissemination of knowledge, information, and media. In such a changed economic environment, international copyright laws could have a profound effect on national economic development. They would ensure that creators have the right to receive remuneration for knowledge, information, and content they produce, and that public interest would also be served by encouraging creation and dissemination of new knowledge. However, the new globalized knowledge economy would require that nations not only have strong domestic copyright laws but also that they bring these into line with international copyright laws and enforce them rigorously (Hollifield, Vlad, and Becker 2003:169–70). This knowledge economy is not equally distributed, with the main beneficiaries being the developed countries, which not only produce the bulk of the knowledge but also control the main channels of distribution and the venues of exhibition. Many argued that developing nations could not pay for the high price of international rights and, like China and Japan, they needed to maintain weak copyrights protections until they became major producers of knowledge. By the last decade of the twentieth century, Iran had become a producer of world-­class cinema, and filmmakers could no longer borrow film ideas with impunity—­as they did when they were invisible to the larger world—­nor could they afford to disregard the damage that copyright violations of their own works could cause them. As long as the country was not a signatory to international copyright conventions, Iranian artists would have no redress. A case in point was Mehrjui’s Pari (1995), whose screening at New York’s Lincoln Center—­as part of a major retrospective of his works—­was canceled in November 1998 after a protest by the writer J. D. Salinger. According to Salinger’s representatives, in loosely adapting their client’s work Franny and Zooey without permission, Mehrjui had breached copyright (McKinley 1998). As a gifted and savvy writer and director, more than any other modernist director Mehrjui had managed a successful career under both the Shah and the Ayatollahs by adapting literary works. If adaptation is to continue to serve Iranian directors, the copyright issues must be resolved at the national level.73 The situation is not much different inside Iran, even though there are laws to protect the arts from unauthorized uses and sales. Filmmakers, writers, poets, translators, songwriters, musicians, visual artists, and cartoonists routinely complain of the unauthorized copying, sale, screening, and broadcasting of their works. The government itself, through its broadcasting arm, the vvir, which uses film clips, poems, songs, music, and visual arts in its programming and advertisements, is accused of being the biggest culprit.74 These practices Art- House Ci nema

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set the wrong model for the nation, and they pit the film industry against the broadcast industry. This “culture of piracy” was so strong and brazen that in 1997 Kiarostami was invited to speak at a packed public screening of a bootleg copy of his movie The Taste of Cherry, which had not yet received an official exhibition permit inside Iran. He refused to attend it and requested the students organizing the event to desist from such practices. That same year, Panahi reacted to an unauthorized private screening of a video copy of his film The Mirror by forbidding its public exhibition until the copyright status of Iranian films was officially settled. To achieve that, the copyright law of 1970 must be updated to accommodate the artists’ legal rights, as well as the technological developments and globalization of cinema and culture.75 The House of Cinema took an initial step in protecting the artists’ legal rights by creating in the late 1990s a “screenplay bank” for all officially registered screenplays. The idea was that registering screenplays and dating them would thwart theft and unauthorized copying and pirating. But there is a long way to go to protect domestic movies. The lack of adherence to the Universal Copyright Conventions means that published works that originate in Iran are not copyrighted in the United States (although unpublished works benefit from copyright protection). This has added to the ambiguous legal status of Pahlavi-­era movies, for prints of many of these turned up after the revolution abroad, where they were screened, often without authorization and without sharing box-­office earnings with film owners. In some cases, the 35mm film prints of feature movies were already abroad at the time of the revolution, circulating in the Persian Gulf region. Sometimes the original producers, who had themselves escaped Iran, or other Iranian exhibitors, were able to retrieve these now orphan and homeless prints, bearing Arabic subtitles, which they then exhibited in New York and Los Angeles movie houses to Iranian exiles. One major exhibitor of Iranian movies in the United States, Bahman Maghsoudlou, told me that he had paid for the rights of the films he showed in movie houses and sold on video (Naficy 2006e). Some docu­ mentaries also turned up abroad, because film owners had prints with them in exile or because prints had been “liberated” from Iranian consulates and embassies in the chaotic takeover of the Pahlavi regime’s offices (Maghsoudlou claims he paid for his films thus obtained). Many Pahlavi-­era movies eventually found their way into video distribution, but the prints were of poor quality. Such transnational leakage of unauthorized films poses problems for both prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary films. There have been several public disputes about screenings of prerevolutionary films, among them that involving Ebrahim Golestan over the reported unauthorized screening of his The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley in Los Angeles and the subtitling and screening of Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black in New York. The productions of Iranian exiles found their ways into Iran, most successfully the pop music recorded in Los Angeles, but also some of the television programs and films. These were sold in music and video stores and on sidewalks; 266

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it is not clear whether any of the profits were returned to the exiles. With the availability of exile satellite tv channels in Iran in the 2000s, there is less need to bootleg and copy such programs. And as exile has continued, fewer filmmakers have made films abroad that would be of interest to audiences inside Iran. So, while traffic in music is two-­way, that in film has become basically one-­way, from Iran to the United States and elsewhere. Pushed off into exile partly because his films were banned inside the country, Ghobadi took a new tact by announcing a plan to release all his movies on dvd free of charge to those inside Iran. How this strategy will fare in practice remains to be seen. Iran’s refusal to join the Universal Copyright Convention also facilitated the culture of piracy in Iranian exile television in Los Angeles. Many Pahlavi-­period feature movies and television shows, series, concerts, and variety shows were used without authorization to fill hours of exile television, often in mutilated form to fit them into commercial breaks. Because the original programs were largely free of commercials, as they were produced by noncommercial state television, there were no “natural” breaks in them, and exile producers inserted many commercials. In 1987, these commercials reached an all-­time high of forty minutes in an hour (Naficy 1993b:71). The screening of Taqvai’s famed My Uncle Napoleon television serial (made in Iran), Albert Lamorisse’s documentary on Iran, The Lovers’ Wind (Bad-­e Saba, 1969), and Akrami’s documentary on Iranian prerevolutionary cinema, Friendly Persuasion, were subject to commercialized interruptions. This unbridled use of commercials, the fear of politicized uses of the airwaves, and the rampant piracy of materials made inside the United States forced officials of ksci-­t v, the station that aired most Iranian exile programs in the 1980s and early 1990s, to institute a rigorous monitoring system exclusively for Iranian television producers. This monitoring system had an educational component also, designed to inculcate the values of professionalism and of the ethical and legal uses of copyrighted material by producers, who were used to Iran’s freewheeling culture of piracy (Naficy 1993b:121–24). In the 2000s, the transnational copyright of movies became an important financial and legal issue for the Iranian film industry, as exile satellite television stations, starving for programming, aired not only old prerevolutionary movies but also new postrevolutionary ones, apparently without permission from their producers and rights-­holders in Iran, causing a steep slump in the sale of videos of the screened movies inside Iran. Iranian film producers and video distributors complained to the government, and their professional associations threatened to hire American attorneys to prosecute the alleged violators in the United States. In addition, the producers were forced to change their contracts with video distributors, which generally prohibited them from distributing videos of films to television stations until eighteen months after they were released on video. Until this controversy arose, the contracts had covered only domestic television stations, creating a loophole for violations. Iranians inside and outside Iran have been producing high-­quality film, Art- House Ci nema

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video, literature, poetry, arts, music, and photography. The two-­way exchange of these was stymied not only by sanctions imposed by the U.S. government against Iran for more than three decades but also by the fear of Iranian authorities about the “cultural invasion” of the country by Western pop culture and by Iran’s refusal to join the international copyright conventions. By 2000, however, Iranian officials were taking note of the situation, as Ataollah Mohajerani, the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, advocated in March that Iran sign the copyright convention so as to protect the rights of its artists at home and abroad.76 The lack of copyright protection of foreign intellectual materials in Iran means that the latest movies and most sophisticated computer software are cheaply available (and foreign books are translated repeatedly and chaotically by various translators), and the lax enforcement of domestic laws enables cheap pirating of Iranian films. A final feature of achieving modernity in cinema involves the recognition not only of the filmmaker as an autonomous artist whose vision permeates the work—­an auteur—­but recognition also of the work of art, the film, as a unique product worthy of protection. Each country’s modernity and moral authority is judged not only by the status and rights of its citizens but also by those accorded its creative products. This step still remains to be taken in Iran. Until then, film authors are at risk and their movies remain, in the parlance of film archivists, orphans.

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4 Emergen t Con t es tat ory Fil ms, Medi a C u lt u r e, a n d Pu bl ic Diplomac y

T

he consolidation of the Islamic Republic theocratic state was both reflected in and shaped the consolidation of the new Islamicate cinema and film culture. However, as suggested in previous chapters, neither of these political and cinematic consolidations was pro forma and static, for much contestation and many contradictions and evolutions surfaced at all levels. This chapter focuses on the deepening sociopolitical and cultural struggles over cinema, media, and culture, and ultimately over the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, that gathered momentum since Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, intensified during Kha­tami’s presidency, and came to a head during Ahmadinejad’s second presidential term. Specifically, it deals with the way modern public diplomacy, particularly its film and media components, which I am calling mediawork, were recruited in both Iran and the West, particularly in the United States, to serve the political interests of four different parties. On the one hand, there was the Islamic Republic’s mediawork targeting the West, the United States, and Iranian dissidents at home and abroad; on the other hand, there were the tripartite oppositional mediaworks of the United States, Iranian people at home, and Iranian exiles, most of which operated against the Islamic Republic. This historical, ethnographic, and theoretical examination of this four-­way mediawork provides the necessary context for the appreciation and analysis of the Internet cinema dealt with in this chapter and of the documentary cinema, underground cinema, women’s cinema, art-­house cinema, and accented cinema discussed elsewhere in this volume.

The New Public Diplomacy Traditionally, “public diplomacy” has been widely regarded as the “transparent means by which a sovereign country communicates with publics in other countries aimed at informing and influencing audiences overseas for the purpose of promoting the national interest and advancing its foreign policy goals.” 1 This is the sense that could be applied to the activities of the cultural attachés of the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union and the civil society institutions they established in Iran during the first Pahlavi period through the 1940s through which they engaged in film screening, film criticism, language teaching, and theatrical and musical performances designed to enlighten and influence Iranians and to win their hearts and minds. It can also be applied to the activities of the United States Information Agency (usia) and its branch, the United States Information Service (usis), which operated in Iran during the second Pahlavi period, primarily since the 1950s (Dizard 2004). The public diplomacy projects of usis in Iran was extensive and it consisted of educational exchange and visitor programs for scholars, students, musicians, and artists; American cultural centers that provided language training, library services, cultural events, and film and television screenings; the production, management, and dissemination of international and domestic press and radio and television programs; and the production and exhibition of pro-­A merican and pro-­Shah educational films and newsreels inside Iran. The rivalry among the former Second World War allies, United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union, over the public screening of their films in Iranian cinemas and the newsreel and documentary film production, distribution, and exhibition of the usis are extensively examined in volume 2.2 With the technological and digital communication revolutions of the past four decades, the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the triumph of global capitalism, the rise of militant Islam and global terrorism, and the American declaration of what amounted to a perpetual “global war on terror,” the standard definition of public diplomacy, which applied mainly to relations between sovereign states, no longer sufficed. Instead a “new public diplomacy” was formulated that applied to emerging trends in international relations, “where a range of non-­state actors with some standing in world politics—­supranational organizations, sub-­national actors, non-­governmental organizations, and (in the view of some) even private companies—­communicate and engage meaningfully with foreign publics and thereby develop and promote public diplomacy policies and practices of their own.” 3 This new public diplomacy is still largely guided by sovereign states, but by sanctioning a multilateral public diplomacy to occur with multiple publics through diplomacy, culture, news media, cinema, technology, and advertising the new public diplomacy is potentially more democratic, empowering, and effective than the binary, hierarchical state-­to-­ state public diplomacy of the past. By the same token this new public diplo270

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macy is more insidious to detect, more open to government manipulation, and more difficult to counter, for it insinuates itself rhizomatically and panoptically throughout the formal and informal as well as the public and private institutions and formations of society, politicizing, instrumentalizing, and even militarizing, them all. In the absence of official diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States soon after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, this new public diplomacy served as an important substitute and conduit for both public and private communications between the two countries. This new public diplomacy also opened the way for the U.S. government to tap into the nongovernmental exile press and pop culture to convey its values not only to the Iranian diaspora population but also to Iranians at home. The Iranian government, too, developed its own extraterritorial media to address both the foreign populations and governments and the Iranians in the diaspora. It is thus that the diaspora media and pop culture became a third player in the bilateral relations and public diplomacy between the United States and Iran. Finally, due to the digital media revolution and the rise of the Internet as a primary venue for organizing social protests and for documenting, producing, disseminating, and exhibiting both professional and amateur media, a new form of “people’s media­work” emerged, what I am calling the “Internet cinema,” which gave global voice and vision as well as empowerment to Iranian dissidents both at home and abroad. The strong presence of emerging dissidents both in the social space of the streets and in the virtual space of the Internet, particularly after the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to presidency in 2009, conjoined these into potent signifying formations of protest and opposition—­ the street and the Internet—­against both an authoritarian and theocratic state at home and a nexus of imperialist and neoconservative states abroad. The joint mediawork of the Iranian street and cyberspace, one reflecting and shaping the other, was augmented by other components of the quartet of public diplomacy mediaworks, which circulated, echoed, reiterated, reused, remixed, and repurposed them. This Internet people’s mediawork and Internet cinema became the fourth component of the new public diplomacy. This quartet of mediaworks—­of American and Iranian governments, of Iranian dissidents at home, and of Iranians in the diaspora—­became a significant and signifying force in the light of the way Joseph Nye refined the definition of public diplomacy to mean using “soft power,” not only to promote the national interest of one’s own country abroad but also to achieve political and diplomatic change in other countries, instead of using the hard power of military force and weaponry. Soft power is supposed to co-­opt and attract people of other states by values, instead of coercing or repelling them by force (Nye 2002:8). However, such diplomacy is not always engaged in by the practitioners, nor received by its targets, with equal equanimity and, at any rate, the threat of using “hard power” always lurks in the background in case soft power fails, undermining—­or reinforcing—­the latter’s democratic potentiality (the famous “carrot-­and-­stick” A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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metaphor that successive U.S. administrations invoked vis-­à-­v is the Islamic Republic refers to this distinction between soft and hard powers).4 When in March 2001 the secretary of state Colin Powell appointed Charlotte Beers, a former chairperson of the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson and a former head of the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mathers, as the new undersecretary of public diplomacy, in “the hopes that she could apply her successes in the private sector to the public sector to enhance the U.S. image abroad,” it was because he “believed the U.S. needed someone who knows how to sell American ideas and values to the world” (Tiedeman 2004). This appointment underscored the tight imbrication of state and private sectors in the new public diplomacy under capitalism, as well as the way soft power was to be used. To sell “Brand America,” Beers developed what she called the Shared Values Initiative, which went into effect in October 2002. “The whole idea of building a brand,” she said, “is to create a relationship between the product and its user. We’re going to have to communicate the intangible assets of the United States—­things like our belief systems and our values” (quoted in Fullerton and Kendrick 2006:25–26). The principal idea was to convince the Muslim and Arab worlds that the United States was not hostile to, or was not waging a war on, Islam or Muslims. This initiative, constituting a major public diplomacy campaign, included speeches by diplomats and American Muslims to international audiences, a glossy color magazine, Muslim Life in America, town hall– style events in different countries, newspaper ads, and television commercials offered to Muslim countries. These commercials, which the State Department preferred to call “minidocumentaries,” used a slice-­of-­life approach to highlight the good life of five practicing Arab Muslims in the United States: a baker, a doctor, a teacher, a journalist, and a firefighter.5 The Islamic Republic reacted with alarm and alacrity to the exercise of this new, improved Western public diplomacy and its mediawork, which was very different from the previous eras, for this mediawork was no longer discrete and temporary; rather, it was widespread, global, multimedia, multinational, multilingual, multiplexed, and sustained for decades and intensifying—­from the formation of the Islamic Republic and hostage taking onward—­and its aim seemed not just to sell “brand American” but also to foment democratic “color” or “soft” revolutions and regime changes in authoritarian states, like Iran. Moreover, this mediawork involved not only United States governmental agencies but also commercial, nongovernmental, and dissident and amateur film and media organizations and individuals both inside Iran and abroad. And, of course, the Islamic Republic engaged in its own versions of public diplomacy and mediawork to counter the Western mediawork and to bolster its own image and influence at home and abroad, not only among foreigners and Muslims (Maltzahn 2009) but also among Iranians in the diaspora. This narrative on the mutual public diplomacies and mediaworks of Iran and

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the United States begins with the onset of the revolution in 1978 and the hostage taking in 1979, and it ends with the aftermath of the disputed presidential election in 2009 that reinstalled Ahmadinejad as president.

Mediawork: The War of National Perception and Representation In an earlier work, I coined the term mediawork to go beyond the limited sociopolitical studies of individual films and television programs and the scholarship of national and ethnic “image studies” that have focused on identifying negative and othering stereotyping of Iranians and Muslims so as to theorize the “work” of the totality of the film, media, and consciousness-­shaping industries, which operates somewhat like Freud’s concept of “dreamwork” (Naficy 1995b). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud posited dreamwork as the process by which latent dream thoughts, residing in the unconscious and shielded from direct observation during waking, are transformed during sleep into manifest dreams (1965:544). To accomplish this task, dreamwork gets around the censorship of secondary processes by means of displacement, condensation, representability, and secondary revision, resulting in dreams and their uncanny distortions and elaborations. Like dreamwork, which produces dreams from latent urges, mediawork—­the combined effects of all the mass media and conscious-­shaping industries—­taps into latent collective desires, fears, and prejudices to produce national projections and distortions of the world. If dreamwork is driven by the libidinal and political economies of individuals, mediawork under globalization and advanced capitalism is motivated by the libidinal, political, public diplomacy, and commercial economies of collectivities, such as nations, in this case Iran and the United States. These mediawork projections and representations—­ the mediascape, in Arjun Appadurai’s words (1996)—­are not neutral, rational, or equal in import; rather, they are as cathected with affect and as powerfully irrational or motivated as dreams, for they inscribe, and are driven by, human and collective desires, fantasies, fears, politics, ideologies, and commercial interests and by the psychosocial distortions, displacements, and prohibitions—­ laws, regulations, policies, and customs—­that are similar to dreamwork’s secondary processes. As such, the formal public diplomacy institutions of Iranian and U.S. governments need not have actually produced their respective mediaworks for them to be perceived as a component of their public diplomacies. Rather, the political economy of capitalist mediawork acts much like the libidinal economy of dreamwork, recruiting the commercial television programs, series, newscasts, and documentaries; commercial movies, music videos, independent films, video games, and community-­generated Internet films; and exile-­produced films and videos and satellite television into expressing hegemonic national values—­thereby sup-

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porting directly or indirectly national or collective public diplomacy. As will be seen, formal governmental public diplomacy institutions of the United States and Iran produced some of these components of mediawork outright, and they partially funded or supported in different ways some of the other components. However, these government-­supported media remained a small part of the total mediawork. The ideological “work” of mediawork lies precisely in the way nongovernmental, commercial, and apparently nonpolitical components partake of and buttress, as well as are perceived as partaking of and buttressing, the dominant ideologies, including the tenets of government-­sanctioned public diplomacy. To be sure, there were independent and oppositional formations and mediaworks that fell outside the hegemonic mediawork, but these were few, small, and localized. While the prerevolution Western mediawork was driven chiefly by the master narrative of modernity (Ganjaei 2010), positing Iran as a country on a fast track to becoming modern and Westernized, in the postrevolutionary era it was Iranophobia that became the Western mediawork’s master narrative. In the early twentieth century many Iranians had considered the West their Other, with which and against which they had formed or performed their modernizing subjectivities and national identities. After diplomatic relations ended when Iranians took U.S. diplomats hostage in their own embassy in Tehran in 1979, much of the national dialogue between Iran and the United States (and Israel) took place either in deep secrecy, as borne out by the Iran-­Contra Affair during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, or in public mediawork, much of the latter driven by what Haggai Ram calls Israeli-­ instigated “Iranophobia” (2009). The hostage taking was a key event that produced a profound identity crisis not only among Iranian exiles in the United States but also among American neoconservatives who came to regard not only Islamic Iran but also Islam, Islamism, and Islamic terrorism as nemeses against which it constructed its own new, post-­bipolar Cold War identity as the sole global superpower in a state of perpetual war. In Iran, the hostage taking bolstered the position of the hard-­liners, transforming the government from a moderate provisional Islamic government, headed by Mehdi Bazargan, into a militant Islamist regime.

U.S. Mediawork’s Treatment of the Islamic Republic as a Threat The power of the negative U.S. mediawork on Iran lay not in manufacturing lies about the Islamic Republic, as many of the atrocities attributed to the regime were verifiable. Rather, its influence stemmed from its multimedia construction and the global circulation and commodification of only selected, atypical, and cathected partial truths and (mis)representations of the Islamic Republic, which were made to stand for the totality of Iran, mistakenly conflating the na274

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tion with its regime. In no small measure were these mediawork representations affected by the antagonistic mutual nomenclatures with which Iranian and American governments demonized one another, and by proxy their other’s nationals. The Islamic Republic’s national mediawork alternately labeled the United States “world-­devouring imperialism” (estekbar-­e jahankhar) or the “Great Satan”; called the latter’s regional ally Israel, the “Zionist State”; and labeled the exiles abroad and the disaffected secular intellectuals at home its “fifth column.” The nomenclature of the American presidents for Iran was no less inflammatory than that which the Iranian regime mobilized for the U.S.: President Carter called Iran (and by extension Iranians) “hostage-­takers,” Reagan called them “barbarians,” and George W. Bush labeled them an “axis of evil.” The mutually antagonistic mediawork affected, or even replaced, the political relations of Iran and the United States and traumatized exiled Iranians, most of whom had escaped the Islamist government but were now being tarred by American politicians and by a segment of the U.S. media with the same brush as the despised government, while they were being accused by the government-­controlled mediawork inside Iran as betrayers of their homeland in times of difficulty. It was only years later, in 2008, that in a nuanced move the new President Barack Obama for the first time called Iran by its official name, the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” which separated the nation from the state, reversing the previous American administrations’ conflation of the two. Now the Islamic Republic regime could be singled out and dealt with separately from the Iranian people; it could be critiqued and attacked without victimizing the Iranian people either at home or in diaspora. This coincided with, or perhaps was instigated by, the gradual rise of a multifaceted public opposition inside Iran, which surfaced fully as the Green Movement in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election. These political developments informed and drove the quartet of mediaworks by the United States, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iranian dissidents at home, and Iranian dissidents in diaspora.6

The Hostage Crisis and Its Televisual Representation The U.S. mediawork’s treatment of Islamic Iran as a threat began modestly with the emergence of revolutionary struggles there, but it grew explosively with the hostage crisis and ebbed, flowed, evolved, and consolidated with subsequent political events. The coverage of the “Iran story” by flagship newscasts of the three commercial U.S. television networks was negligible in the early 1970s. In the entire year 1972, the coverage of Iran news added up to only 4.6 minutes; in 1973, it was 2.2 minutes; in 1974, 5.2 minutes; in 1975, 5.5; and in 1976, 4.0. However, during the uprising and its buildup to the revolution, the coverage shot up more than twofold in 1977, to 9.8 minutes; and in the year of the revolution, 1978, it escalated by another five times to reach 54.7 minutes. Despite this increase, the coverage tended to disavow the revolution’s emancipatory motivaA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tions and its complex sociocultural and politicoeconomic causes. With the ascendancy of the clerics to power in 1979, when the regime barricaded itself and much of the West shunned it, Islamic Iran faded from certain regular departments of major U.S. newspapers, such as tourism, travel, and weather forecasts. This both reflected and confirmed the international isolation of Iran. The hostage crisis, begun on 4 November 1979, lasted 444 days, ending on 20 January 1980, the day Ronald Reagan took office as president. This long ordeal caused the coverage of the Iran story to peak at an all-­time high of 381.7 minutes in 1979 and 368.9 in 1980 (Adams and Heyl 1981:9). Nightly news reports on the hostages occupied the largest share of this time: between November 1979 (the taking of hostages) until the end of 1980 (long after their release), abc News devoted an average of 4.1 minutes nightly to the hostage story, cbs News 3.9 minutes, and nbc News 3.1 minutes (28). These figures are even more remarkable in the context of the half-­hour national newscasts on these networks, which lasted little more than twenty-­t wo minutes (the rest was taken by commercials, bumpers, and network promos). If the U.S. mediawork about the revolution largely ignored its root causes, in the hostage crisis it created the perception of both Iran and Islam as threats to Western ideology, epistemology, and even ontology. As Edward Said noted, “It seemed that ‘we’ were at bay, and with us the normal, democratic, rational order of things. Out there, writhing in self-­provoked frenzy, was ‘Islam’ in general, whose manifestation of the hour was a disturbingly neurotic Iran” (1981:77). Iranians abroad were glad at the increased daily coverage of their homeland’s events, but many were chagrined at the one-­sided, biased, stereotyped, and initially mostly pro-­Shah and antirevolution and anti-­Islam coverage (Dorman and Omeed 1979; Naficy 1984a; Dorman and Farhang 1987). The rise of militant Islam, exemplified by the Islamists in Iran, it was feared, might force Middle Eastern and North African countries (forming in the words of President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski an “arch of crisis”) to revise their relations with the United States. A sort of “crisis journalism” developed, borne out by the titles on U.S. television news specials, such as Iran: The Desperate Dilemma (cbs), America Held Hostage (abc), Crisis in Iran: The Turmoil Spreads (nbc), Crisis in Iran: Where Do We Go From Here? (nbc), Day of Crisis (cbs), The Failure of American Rescue Mission in Iran (cbs), A Year in Captivity (cbs), Families Held Hostage (abc), The Ordeal (cbs), Heroes (nbc), Homeward Bound (cbs), and Home at Last (cbs). These titles also demonstrate another development. Like dreamwork, which transforms deeply latent dream elements into dreams, the hostage crisis mediawork tapped into deeply held American “captivity narratives,” going back to colonial times, when Puritans confronted Native Americans (figure 56). This narrative was now updated by Iranophobia to include a civilizational conflict between Christianity and Islam, driving public perception and foreign policy (Scott 2000). Not only these

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56 Feeding the American captivity narrative. U.S. hostages on nightly television: abc Evening News, anchored by Frank Reynolds, 31 December 1979, 58th day of hostage taking. Frame grab.

television programs but also some notable movies, such as Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter (1991), invoked aspects of the captivity narratives. During the hostage period Iran was perceived as a real national threat, but the military option seemed improbable (and the one that Jimmy Carter as president attempted failed for technical reasons). However, the U.S. mediawork was busy harnessing ideologically and economically both Iran and its threat. Ideological containment involved the ahistoricizing, demonizing, and caricaturing of Iran and of Islam. What mattered was the immediate release of the hostages and the appearance of “not giving in to blackmail,” not the history of neocolonialist relations between the United States and Iran since the coup against Mosaddeq’s elected government in 1953, engineered by the United States and Great Britain. That history lurked behind Iranians’ fear that admitting the Shah to the United States for cancer treatment might be a ruse to engineer another coup, resulting in the taking hostage of Americans. From an economic standpoint, U.S. mediawork converted Iran into a limited repertoire of discrete and disembodied audiovisual signs, repeated ad nauseam: bearded and turbaned “mad mullahs”; the thick frown of Ayatollah Khomeini; veiled women with raised fists; frantic mobs shouting “Death to the Shah,” “Death to America,” “Death to Carter”; and finally the image of the blindfolded American hostages that opened abc’s America Held Hostage and Nightline newscasts and similar captivity imagery on other networks throughout the hostage crisis. Further, it converted Iran from a sign system into a commodity. To increase their audience, the press and television news competed for the juiciest scoops on Iran. Khomeini became so newsworthy that in 1979 Time magazine designated him “Man of the Year” and placed him on its cover, as it had done with Mosaddeq in 1952 (where he was called the “Iranian George Washington”). Television networks vied to obtain an interview with the ayatollah, who had learned to play them against each other and who now was playing hard to get, causing the Los Angeles Herald Examiner to run the following headline: “Ayatollah, Please Say Yes,” 7 while Variety, in its usu-

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ally colorful lingo, chimed in with “Webs Vie for Ayatollah Gabs.” 8 In fact, one exclusive interview with Khomeini placed cbs’s Sixty Minutes at the top of the rating chart, where it stayed for years.9 The economic rewards of high television ratings after “Iran stories” were enormous and cannot be discounted as a significant force behind the mediawork’s particular representational and ideological practices. For example, Sixty Minutes generated a $70 million profit for cbs, causing the program’s executive producer to call it “perhaps the most profitable broadcast of any kind ever on the air” (Plotskin 1985; Shales 1985; Weisman 1985). The crisis became so ensconced in the political economy of television news and media, as well as in the American consciousness, that abc took a fortuitous gamble and inaugurated, four days after the hostages had been taken, a nightly news program anchored by Ted Koppel: Crisis in Iran: America Held Hostage: Day. . . . This method of the daily accounting of captivity, reiterated by Walter Cronkite’s verbal tagline at the end of his daily cbs Evening News, provided a continual reminder of the outrageous action of Iranians, tapping into Americans’ archetypal captivity narrative and fanning their national humiliation and rage.10 abc’s Crisis in Iran: America Held Hostage: Day . . . was aired opposite The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (nbc), where it soon drew a 30 percent audience share, surpassing the network’s previous entertainment programs in that time slot and frequently beating The Tonight Show. This led the Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg to write, “Abc has finally found someone who can beat Johnny Carson: Khomeini” (1980b). Iran and Khomeini had reached the peak of their popularity—­notoriety, really. That the mullahs seemed to dominate not only Iranian television but also U.S. television accounted for the uncanny similarity of the satirical terms popularly applied to the medium in both countries. If Iranian pundits called their state-­controlled television “Mullah Vision” or “Glass Wool,” in the United States, Rosenberg dubbed the U.S. commercial networks “Ayatollah Television” (1980a). Media-­ circulated mutual demonization continued for years: the Iranian ayatollahs and media regularly called the United States the “Great Satan,” while American media pundits often called the ayatollahs “Mad Mullahs” (Beeman 2005). Meanwhile, due to its success and the continuing political crisis, Crisis in Iran: America Held Hostage: Day . . . became a regularly scheduled nightly newscast renamed Nightline (abc), garnering high acclaim for its in-­depth coverage of hard news. As a national threat, the crisis in Iran also set schedules for previously produced entertainment programs and feature movies. My unscientific review of television broadcast schedules in the Los Angeles market printed in tv Guide bore this out. It showed that during the week prior to the hostage taking (the week of 20 October 1979), there were six feature films on tv dealing with kidnapping or hostage taking in general. At one of the high points of the hostage drama (the week of 13 December 1979), ten fiction movies featured hostages 278

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and kidnappings (unrelated to Iran). Long after the end of the Iranian hostage affair (the week of 19 October 1985) this number was down to five such films. This relationship between national and international crises and the scheduling of television programs and movies, part of mediawork’s agenda-­setting function, deserves fuller investigation by media scholars.11 The containment and commodification of the Iranian threat was not restricted to television news or to the scheduling of movies. The other components of mediawork—­including talk radio, music, and jokes—­featuring Iran and Iranians proliferated, and consumer products such as bumper stickers, buttons, dartboards, T-­shirts, and toilet-­paper rolls continued to sell well, constructing totalizing representations that caricaturized and demonized Iranians in general and Khomeini in particular. T-­shirts bore slogans such as “Don’t Waste Gas / Waste Khomeini” (Simross 1980) and “Nuke Iran” (Schrag 1980). Demonstrators, many in Los Angeles, carried banners declaring “Camel Jockeys, Go Home,” “Fuck Iran,” and “Down with Iranians” (Kelley, Friedlander, and Colby 1993). In Houston, one thousand anti-­Iranian demonstrators gathered outside the Iranian consulate for two days, carrying signs reading “Give Americans Liberty or give Iranians death,” “Kill Khomeini,” and “ 10 Iranians equal a worm” (Mobasher Mostafavi 2006). Political buttons urged “Nuke Iran” and dartboards and toilet-­paper rolls carried images of Khomeini. Even tv ads for political candidates, such as those for Senator Howard Baker, used anti-­Iranian rhetoric heavily (Van Dyck 1980), not to mention political cartoons, which had a field day with Iran and Khomeini. Soon after the hostages had spent their first Christmas in captivity, and their celebration, filmed by Kamran Shirdel, was broadcast—­ and particularly after the Shah’s departure from the United States—­“joke work” commenced. Iran-­related jokes started cropping up on Saturday Night Live (nbc); Mark Russell’s comedy program (pbs); Johnny Carson’s monologues; at comedy clubs, improvisational theaters, and Las Vegas acts; and finally on radio (Brown 1980a, 1980b). As the folklorist Alan Dundes documented, Iranians were incorporated into the frequently cited joke cycle “How many . . . [Iranians] does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “One hundred. One to screw it in and ninety-­ nine to hold the house hostage” (1981:266). The music business propelled this commodified vilification even further. Barely one month after the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, twenty anti-­Iran songs had been produced, mostly by little-­known artists eager to capitalize on the crisis. Two of these, “They Can Take Their Oil and Shove It” and “A Message to Khomeini,” became national hits on the radio (Stewart 1979). With the release of the hostages, the “hostage crisis” was transformed into a “hostage industry,” what a reporter in a fictionalized account in Penthouse magazine called “hostagemania” (Wiedner 1981). Iranian ayatollahs would have been aghast to see their names and pictures in a porn magazine. Overnight, the ex-­hostages became figureheads, celebrities, spokespersons, writers of widely touted books, and guests on numerous radio and television talk shows. New A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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songs continued to be recorded, and the popular song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ol’ Oak Tree,” was rerecorded on the hostages’ release to take advantage of the new patriotism (Hilburn 1981).12 Years later, the Iran-­Contra arms scandal, too, generated its own share of jokes and humorous songs.13 As late as 1987, long after the hostage crisis was over, National Enquirer was pitting two national symbols against each other, Khomeini versus Rambo, with its cover-­ story title “Ayatollah Orders Iran Terrorists to Kidnap Stallone as He Films Rambo III in Israel.” The actor himself rose to the occasion by saying, “They’d love to see Rambo run—­but that’s not going to happen.” 14 During its evolution, and in responding to the presence of sizable and well-­ to-­do Iranian émigré and diaspora populations, U.S. mediawork’s production of Iran became more multilateral, sophisticated, and nuanced. In this way mediawork could presumably satisfy both pro-­Iran and anti-­Iran customers. If U.S. mediawork was hegemonic, it was not homogeneous. Many critics, particularly in the smaller alternative press, lambasted its ideological demonization and economic commodification practices by condemning both Iranian manipulations of the U.S. media and the latter’s complicity in the process. One critic called the whole thing “Fascism without Swastikas” (Bordewich 1980), while another pointed to “Media Manipulating Mulla[s].” 15 The conservative Wall Street Journal condemned the television coverage of Iran as a “soap opera” and a “freak show” that featured “self-­flagellants and fist-­wavers.” 16 More liberal media and programs offered counterhegemonic shows that dispassionately examined and questioned the U.S. foreign policy and the media’s role in it. These included Bill Moyers’s Journal (pbs), which aired “An Interview with President Carter” (1978), “Iran Answers” (1980), “Voices on Iran” (1980), and “Reflections on Iran” (1981), cbs’s Sixty Minutes program which aired “The Iran File” (1980), and abc’s America Held Hostage program which aired “Secret Negotiations” (1981).17 However, these alternative materials were few, and the preferred encoding and decoding of the mediawork’s products were such as to tame the threat of Islamic Iran by tapping into the latent structures of captivity narratives and Orientalist beliefs prevalent in the United States, which made little differentiation between Iranians, Arabs, and Muslims of different nations, ethnicity, and sectarian affiliations. One consequence, to borrow from Hal Foster, was that the Other—­ Iran—­was “socially subjected as a sign and made commercially productive as a commodity.” In this way, it was at once “controlled in its recognition and dispersed in its commodification” (1985:167). This is how in capitalist societies popular culture and mediawork tend to “reproduce hegemonic ideology,” such as supporting a government’s public diplomacy (Kellner 1979:26). Significantly, this mediawork was also not hermetic, for these efforts at neutralizing, demonizing, commodifying, and appropriating Iran and Iranians led to an enlargement of the repertoire of characterizations and stereotypes, thereby allowing Iranians, particularly those Westernized or in exile, to be recast with different, more subtle nuances, facilitating their eventual as280

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similation. In the meantime, it continued to act hegemonically by disallowing its displaced subjects—­Iranian exile actors—­from participating in non-­Iranian movies, instead recruiting their participation in films opposing the Islamic Republic that wittingly or unwittingly othered Iranians. Behrouz Vossoughi relates that Israeli and Jewish producers in Hollywood auditioned him for the part of an Arab terrorist who hijacks an airplane, for which he was short-­listed; however, he did not get the part because he was a Muslim and an Iranian (Zeraati 2004:371–74). Those exile filmmakers and actors who participated in anti– Islamic Republic movies justified their action on grounds of opposition to the Islamic regime, upholding their own status as political exiles. Ironically, their participation was othering to Iranians, for it perpetuated the wrongheaded association of Islam with violence (helped by the violent conduct of the Iranian regime). These movies stereotyped the clerical regime as homogeneous, backward, inept, and corrupt, and they constructed Iran as a fetishized motherland, victimized by the mullahs’ ruinous politics (Naficy 1993b) and disallowing any kind of domestic opposition.

“The Iron Sheik” Performs Iranianness in the Wrestling Ring The U.S. mediawork’s othering of Iranians and Iranian exiles’ self-­othering dynamics can be seen in the case of an Iranian wrestler, demonstrating the elasticity of the concept of mediawork as a component of public diplomacy in which not only governments and private enterprises but also individuals are invested. During the contentious decade of the 1980s, professional wrestling offered a rich cultural arena for female wrestlers named Palestina, Hollywood, Vine, Matilda the Hun, and Little Egypt—­all members of glow, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling—­and for males such as Texas Outlaw, Sergeant Slaughter, Hulk Hogan, Nikolai Volkoff, and the Iron Sheik. Geopolitical and Cold War conflicts between the United States and other countries, and the domestic politics of race, ethnicity, and class, played out in the ring. The Iran-­born wrestler Hossein Khosrow Vaziri, who had reportedly served in the Iranian army, had won the Olympic gold medal in Greco-­Roman wrestling in 1968, and had been one of the Shah’s bodyguards, stormed into the professional wrestling world in the early 1980s. Adopting first the stage name “the Great Hossein” and later “the Iron Sheik,” he became the World Wrestling Federation’s champion in 1983, thanks to his general showmanship and his crippling “camel clutch” maneuver. His success depended on the confluence of international politics and mediawork. The Sheik held his world title for only one month, losing it to Hollywood Hogan (later “Hulk Hogan”). 18 Subsequently, the Iron Sheik moved to the tag-­ team division, where he often teamed up with another perennial Cold War bad guy, a Soviet wrestler named Nikolai Volkoff, forming what was called a “foreign legion.” Together, the pair usually fought blond wrestlers, such as Sergeant Slaughter and Hulk Hogan, who represented Western and American ideals in A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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57 The Iron Sheik action figure.

the soon-­to-­end Cold War. The foreign-­legion pair went on to win the World Tag Team Championship in 1985 at WrestleMania.19 During his matches, the Iron Sheik wore an Arab kaffiyeh on his head and a specially designed, curved-­toe, metal-­spiked pair of boots, and sometimes he brought a camel onto the stage. He waved a large Iranian flag and often spouted off chauvinistic Iranian slogans, goading and inciting stadium crowds—consisting mostly of young males—­to rhythmically chant and hold up signs reading, “Iran Sucks.” These wrestling exhibitions were syndicated and aired regularly by television stations in Los Angeles and elsewhere, enlarging the fan base tremendously and contributing to the mainstreaming of both professional wrestling and the threat from Iran. A plastic action figure of the Iron Sheik circulated his popularity in downstream markets (figure 57). Both the Iron Sheik and Volkoff were complicit with U.S. mediawork, as they capitalized not only on the negative images of their respective home regimes but also on the villainous personae they played, called “heels,” which reinforced both Orientalist and Cold War politics—­all for the wrestlers’ personal financial benefit and for the fans’ entertainment. That this was understood to be both an economic and a semiotic enterprise was borne out by the fact that during the 282

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first U.S.-­led invasion of Iraq in 1991, the Iron Sheik changed nationality and appeared in the ring as an Iraqi officer, Colonel Mustafa, without revealing either his true identity or his former Iron Sheik persona to the camera. In this new persona the Iranian wrestler embodied a villainous Iraqi bad guy, looking much like Saddam Hussein, who employed unfair tactics, such as beating up the Hispanic tag-­team partner of a blond wrestler with the butt of his Iraqi flag, causing the blond to come to his rescue. Soon, an Iraqi wrestler with the stage name of General Adnan (Adnan El Kassey) also entered the foreign-­legion wrestling exhibitions, which astutely and entertainingly replicated the larger wars and ethnic flare-­ups within the United States and the Middle East.20

Feature Movies and Commercial Television Represent Iran and Iranians Another case of Iranian exiles’ complicity in U.S. mediawork against the Islamic Republic involved their participation in feature movies and television films about Iran. Some early, abortive attempts at making fictional movies about the revolution and the fate of the Shah and his family were reported in Hollywood. For example, in 1979 one film with the working title Kill the Shah was to have starred Gilbert Roland as the Shah and Linda Cristal as Empress Farah (Mann 1979a). Another film was to have been based on Paul Erdman’s best-­selling thriller The Crash of ’79 (Mann 1979b). In 1980 yet another film, apparently to be produced by Carlo Ponti, was to have had Sophia Loren playing the part of Empress Farah (Saltzman 1980). None of these projects seem to have been realized. According to Vossoughi, he was offered the part of General ­Fardoust—­a close childhood friend of the Shah and the head of one of his security agencies who betrayed him in the end—­in a six-­hour television serial called The Shah, but on reading the script he turned it down due to its inaccuracies. He informed the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf, about it, and she was able to squash the project (Zeraati 2004:262–63). After the hostages’ release, however, several feature films and television movies were released dealing not only with the Shah but also with Americans in Iran and with Iranians in the United States. Some of these, such as Ian Sharp’s The Final Option (aka Who Dares Win, 1982), Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984), Roger Young’s Under Siege (1986), and Menahem Golan’s The Delta Force (1986), were antiterrorism and anti–nuclear weapons movies that did not focus on Iran specifically, but Iran figured in them as a threat and a spark of one kind or another. For example, the nuclear war in Threads starts over Iran. Although the bit about Iran is by itself very small in terms of the film’s narrative, it is significant politically, for it played into the U.S. and Israel public diplomacy narratives that the Islamic Republic was involved in nuclear weaponry. Most of these movies reproduced the earlier, rather limited politicized and Orientalist representations of Iran as a rogue terrorist state, but there were other theatrical films and made-­ for-­t v movies that drew on a larger cultural repertoire. A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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Of the features, John Landis’s Into the Night (1984), Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), and David Zucker’s The Naked Gun (1988) were comedies, the first two showing Iranians in the United States. Into the Night is about a dope-­and jewelry-­smuggling ring in the United States, spearheaded by the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf (without naming her), whose agents are a gang of bumbling, incompetent, and cruel Iranians. Although very funny in parts and politically astute in its depiction of the Shah’s sister, who allegedly had been involved in heroin smuggling, the film engages in broad and stereotypical anti-­ Iranism. A Los Angeles critic aptly assessed the film this way: “Into the Night spews its own kind of nastiness. Not only does it seek laughs from the murder of women and animals, but it uses racist stereotypes as the tactic. One gets sick of watching Iranians wear stupid expressions, cop feels from their female victims, slaughter everything that moves, and have four-­man pile-­ups from running into closed doors” (Powers 1985). Down and Out in Beverly Hills did not focus on Iranians, but it graphically articulated the Orientalist stereotype of rich, bigamous, and backward Muslim Iranians living in a mansion in Beverly Hills. However, the mere fact that Iranians were shown living among Americans, instead of residing half a globe away in a crazy, out-­of-­control country, was a significant toning down of earlier representations. David Zucker’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) lampooned many enemy world leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat. It also featured a Khomeini-­like figure as a terrorist ringleader with punkish orange hair under his turban who gets punched numerous times. Iranian authorities, who interpreted this as part of U.S. public diplomacy, saw no humor in this depiction and urged Middle Eastern governments to ban the movie in public cinemas.21 Apparently, Turkey conceded.22 When Cyrus Nowrasteh’s mediocre anti–Islamic Republic film The Veiled Threat (1989) was broadcast in Turkey, the Iranian government objected to it as well (Zeraati 2004:419). Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter was rushed to the movie houses after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, just days before the attack of the U.S.-­led United Nations forces on Iraq in January 1991, to take advantage of the war’s timing to increase sales, linking the libidinal economy of Orientalism with the political economy of Hollywood and U.S. public diplomacy. The film is based on a real-­life story of a modern expatriate Iranian physician, who, on his return to Iran after the revolution, undergoes a crisis of faith and becomes an ardent “fundamentalist” Muslim who confines his American wife and daughter to his family home in Tehran. The story is told from the viewpoint of his wife, Betty Mahmoody, whose book about the affair became a best-­seller (Mahmoody and Hoffer 1987). “From the first day that he told me I couldn’t come back, I considered myself a hostage,” Mahmoody writes on her website, invoking both hostage-­crisis and colonial-­era captivity narratives.23 In the film, after being beaten and threatened, she eventually escapes her husband’s house and 284

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country, along with her daughter, thanks to help from a sympathetic Westernized Iranian. Against this one positive representation, the film presents a catalog of stereotypes popularized by a decade of mediawork on postrevolutionary Iran and militant Islam: religiously fanatical, dirty, primitive, irrational, unreliable, intolerant, and violent; there are many hostage-­takers and terrorists among them. The high profile of the film’s stars (Sally Field playing Mahmoody and Alfred Molina playing her husband), wide publicity, savvy marketing, and a timely release all helped make this rather pedestrian movie an international success. Not only the film but also Mahmoody were turned into commodities and financially rewarded. She became a media star, a lecturer, a State Department “consultant,” and as she claims on her website, “an expert in the field of international kidnaping [sic].” Her best-­selling book was translated into multiple languages, and a nationally syndicated tv talk program, the Sally Jesse Rafael Show, devoted an entire show to Western women (including Mahmoody) who had been mistreated by their Middle Eastern husbands. Both the movie and the book of Not Without My Daughter created a widespread Iranian backlash in exile and inside Iran. The exiles, most of whom were either non-­Muslims or secular Muslims, were outraged that the film homogenized all Iranians into its backward, miserable, fanatical Muslim stereotypes. However, the film’s toll went beyond mere bad images; real-­life adverse consequences arose. The anthropologist Janet Bauer, who studied Iranian women in communities in the diaspora, reported that the film had produced “many tales of . . . ‘broken engagements or marriages’ experienced by Iranians in their relations to Germans and Canadians” (2000:188). There were some positive consequences as well: Iranian women, torn between speaking out against travesties of patriarchy and against cultural biases about Islam and Iran, raised public discourse about these issues. Some sought to educate European society and “correct” the film’s misperceptions. Remarkably, this discourse resulted in five published books by Iranian and other foreign women in Germany (197). The Iranian regime considered the film part of the U.S. public diplomacy, what it called “cultural invasion,” orchestrated against the Islamic Republic, and it banned it from Iran and attempted to stop its exhibition in other countries. Mahmoody’s book was translated into a hefty 631-­page Persian version in Iran, bearing a 71-­page critical introduction, extensive annotations countering points in the book, and an epilogue containing further section-­by-­section critiques (Mahmoody 1998/1379). Others used this public diplomacy signifier to make other points. A French television network broadcast Not Without My Daughter in 1998 just prior to the scheduled soccer match between the United States and Iran for the World Cup. Some interpreted this action to be motivated by a desire to “humiliate and demoralize the Iranian soccer team and its supporters” (Kamalipour 1998). However, from the French television executive’s viewpoint, the film screening may be interpreted as her desire to garner a larger audience to deliver to its adverA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tiser; this would mean higher ratings and higher advertising fees, once again linking the libidinal and political economies of Orientalism and capitalism to promote sales. The Iranian Finnish film director and physician Alexis Kouros (also spelled Couros) and Kari Tervo made a moving documentary, Without My Daughter (Ilman Tytärtäni, 2002), which presented the father’s, Seyyed Bozorg Mahmoody, version of the story. Funded by Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and French television, it was filmed in Iran, the United States, and Finland and documented Mahmoody’s desperate attempts to be reunited with his daughter, Mahtab, for fifteen years without success, against the backdrop of bilateral personal animosity between Mahmoody and his wife and of national hostility between Iran and the United States. Variety called Without My Daughter “a must for media studies programs,” a film that “raises pertinent cross-­cultural issues and will be a dynamite conversation-­starter wherever it’s shown, preferably in tandem with the Brian Gilbert–helmed movie” (Nesselson 2003). The 1990s saw the continuation of similar tawdry representations of Iran and Iranians, with lowbrow movie quickies such as Tom Ropelewski’s Madhouse (1990), Aaron Norris’s The Hitman (1991), and Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1997). In the first film, an American wife in the process of divorcing her Iranian husband calls him ”You goddamn towel-­heads,” and “sand rats,” among other insults. In the second film, the city of Seattle, beset by criminal gangs, attempts to clean them out by hiring a detective who incognito engages in fighting “the Italian mafia, the French-­Canadian gangsters and the Persian fanatics.” 24 The narrative trigger for the high-­octane third film, the hijacking of nuclear weapons from Russia during the Bosnian war, is their destination, Iran. It remains for the stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman to prevent the weapons from falling into the hands of Iranians, and when they recapture all but one, which is diverted to New York, to save New York. Even though no Iranian was implicated in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, The Peacemaker clearly envisioned Iran as the architect of a future nuclear attack on the United States, making up for the Iranian failure in 2001 and playing into the Israeli and U.S. public diplomacy narratives. Anti-­Iranian and anti–Islamic Republic features kicked into high gear in the 2000s when the diplomatic relations between Iran and the West worsened and the neoconservatives’ drumming for war with Iran in the United States and Israel intensified, necessitating the revisiting of the ancient Greco-­Persian wars. Perceived as the emblematic first “conflict between east and west,” instrumental in Western self-­perception and self-­definition, these wars were invariably told from the Greek/Western point of view (Ball 2011). Old, Orientalist stereotypes of ancient Persia and Iran were revived and revised to fit the new threat (Modaqeq 2007/1386). Historical movies such as Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) and Zack Snyder’s Three Hundred (2006) massively misrepresented ancient Persia’s battles against the Greeks by representing them from a Western Orientalist perspective—­an “Orientalist opera,” Hamid Dabashi called them 286

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(2007b). The timing of these historically inaccurate and revisionist movies which thoroughly manipulated ancient history to fit the needs of the contemporary history made them more potent and alarming because they could justify to a public ignorant of ancient history the belligerent public diplomacy and military campaign of the United States (read Greek, Sparta) against Iran (read Persia) (Daryaee 2007). Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), on the other hand, staged its battle between Iran and the West inside a professional wrestling ring, between the aging protagonist Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) and a wrestler named Ayatollah (Ernest Miller). The government of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad accused Hollywood of “psychological warfare” over the depiction of Iranians in Three Hundred, and Iran’s representative to unesco filed a complaint in 2007, accusing the film of “racial stereotyping” (Tait 2008). Later, when a delegation from the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences visited Iran in early 2009 on an invitation from the House of Cinema, Javad Shamaghdari, Ahmadinejad’s advisor on the arts, opposed it, saying: “Representatives of Iran’s film industry should only have an official meeting with representatives of the Academy and Hollywood if they apologize for the insults and accusations against the Iranian nation during the past 30 years.” Noting that “the Iranian nation and its revolution have repeatedly and undeservedly been attacked by Hollywood movies,” he singled out Not Without My Daughter and Three Hundred as “two clear examples of total lies.” 25 Despite such official pronouncements this visit seemed a significant gesture toward possible reconciliation between the two thriving film industries. As part of their contribution to U.S. mediawork, commercial television networks also broadcast several original docudramas and miniseries about postrevolutionary politics inside Iran. Despite the participation of Iranian actors, these films were limited to recreating the hostage-­taking events or to the escape of the hostages from Iran with little attempt to understand the social and historical contexts. Lamont Johnson’s two-­hour Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper (1981) deals with six Americans who escaped from the captured embassy in Tehran, were given refuge by Canadian embassy staff, and ultimately were spirited out of the country. Andrew McLaglen’s five-­hour miniseries On Wings of Eagles (1986), which was intensively promoted by nbc for two weeks before its airdate and was rebroadcast several times, as late as 1994, deals with the operation launched by the Texas billionaire Ross Perot, then head of Electronic Data Systems, to rescue two of his employees from Iranian jails during the revolution. The process of narratively assimilating Iranians was pushed further in this movie when an Iranian employee of Perot not only is portrayed as ingenious, resourceful, and loyal but also as critically important to the success of the rescue mission. Like the secular helper in Not Without My Daughter, this employee has narrative agency, an important feature of mediawork’s assimilation of Iranians into mainstream society. The reward for his services is his entry into the United States without a passport but with the approval of U.S. auA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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thorities. On Wings of Eagles demonstrates that in its later phases, mediawork allowed multiple representations of Iranians to coexist. The Iranian community and media in the United States, however, heavily criticized these series for their jingoism and for showing Iranians as U.S. operatives and “spies.” Several actors opposing the Islamic Republic participated in these movies to work and to score a point against the regime: Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick played Hosain Dadgar and Mrs. Nourbakhsh in On Wings of Eagles, while Farzaneh Taidi played Shahin Khanom in Not Without My Daughter. These attempts at political opposition to the regime in Iran and at assimilation into Western film industries came at the expense of national representation, and the actors were justifiably criticized, for these films were Orientalist and insulting to all Iranians, representing them as fanatical, irrational, violent, and backward. There was not much difference between these actors and the Iron Sheik’s self-­serving performances. Vossoughi was among those actors who refused to collaborate in his own national self-­othering. The casting director for On Wings of Eagles had apparently first offered the part of Dadgar to him; he declined, saying, “This story is about my country, my nation, and it is an ugly and humiliating story . . . that insults the Iranian nation that has several thousands years of culture” (quoted in Zeraati 2004:365). That Not Without My Daughter was filmed partly in Israel gave the Islamic Republic additional ammunition to condemn it as Zionist-­imperialist propaganda (Menahem Golan, director of The Delta Force, is also Israeli). The sad fact is that the participation of capable but politicized Iranian actors in anti-­Islamic Republic Western mediawork did not much advance either their U.S. careers or their oppositional efficacy. The exception was Shohreh Aghdashloo, who for her strong performance in Vadim Perelman’s The House of Sand and Fog (2003) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, the first Iranian to achieve this honor. This distinction was celebrated both by Iranian exile media and by the media inside Iran. The latter printed both her name and her pictures without the veil, something they had not done before due to her being banned.26 The banned actress’s nomination, which followed the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi in 2003, the first prize awarded to a Muslim woman and to an Iranian, brought Iranians international respect and became a source of national and gender pride.27 Perhaps due to her newly acquired fame, Aghdashloo found herself in a strong enough position morally and professionally to refuse to act in more episodes of Fox Television’s top-­rated counterterrorism show Twenty-­ Four, in which she had played the part of the matriarch of a terrorist “sleeper cell.” She was responding to the criticism that she was “advancing the stereotype of Middle Easterners as terrorists and Islamist extremists” (Hakarimoran 2005). However, she soon backtracked from that lofty position by lending her support to a highly sensationalistic and inaccurate, fear-­mongering anti-­ Islamic Republic agitprop film Iranium (2011), directed by first-­time director and a former “radio personality” Alex Traiman, by narrating the film and giv288

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ing it some credibility. The film was part of the increasingly integrated public diplomacy campaign by right wing Israelis, Israeli lobby in the United States, American Jewish neocons, certain Iranian opposition members, defectors from the Iranian regime, and evangelical Christians and their supporters’ against Islam and the Islamic Republic regime and its alleged nuclear weapon program. As historian Touraj Daryaee notes, the film is funded mainly by Clarion Fund, whose president Ralph Shore, a coproducer of the film, is a Canadian-­Israeli film producer and Rabbi who belongs to the Jewish-­Orthodox nonprofit organization Aish HaTorah. This organization “seeks to amplify the danger of Islam to the world” (Daryaee 2011) and has produced two other agitprop films along those lines: Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (2005) and The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America (2008). Director Traiman apparently lives in the Israeli West Bank settlement of Beit El and many of those interviewed in the film are likewise part of the rightwing Israeli-­A merican lobbies and organizations. As if the film’s title, combining “Iran” and “uranium” was not sensational enough, a mushroom nuclear cloud is shown jutting out of the second “i” of Iranium. The film which promiscuously ascribes almost all the major terrorist attacks against Western interests in the world to the Islamic Republic, including the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., and claims that the Obama administration is “infiltrated” by Islamists, argues that the U.S. has been soft on the Islamic Republic. The time has come for the U.S. to strike Iran before Israel does, the logic being that the U.S. will be blamed anyway. The film’s extensive website (http://www.iraniumthemovie.com/) carries the campaign to dislodge the regime into multimedia hysteria. Aghdashloo’s voiceover narration of this film and her acting in the sensationalist film The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008), about the Islamic Republic’s barbarous practice of stoning of adulterous women (and men), directed by Iranian American Cyrus Nowrasteh and apparently funded by right-­w ing Christian zealots discredits her vow not to play in films that stereotype Middle Easterners, including Iranians, as prone to terrorism and Islamist extremism. As with time memories of revolution and hostage taking gradually faded, as exile was transformed into diaspora and emigration, and as a new generation of hyphenated Iranians rose, the various spheres of the film industry and the filmic representation of Iranians became less stereotypical and more nuanced. Despite diplomatic wrangling of one sort or another between Iran and the United States, television series such as jag (1997–2005), in which the Iranian British American actress Catherine Bell starred, dealt from time to time with Iranian, Arab, or Muslim peoples and topics with a greater degree of sympathy.28 In some episodes of jag, cultural specificity was upheld: Bell’s character spoke Persian when called for by her part, instead of Persian-­or Arabic-­ sounding gibberish, as was the case in Hollywood before. However, cultural specificity apparently had its limits, for in one episode, aired by cbs on 9 May 1997, Palestinian Hamas members, who had taken over a Washington hospiA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tal, were heard speaking Persian instead of the Arabic that would have been their native tongue (Kamalipour 1998:5). Significantly, it was left to Perelman, a Ukrainian Russian exile director, a man sympathetic to Iranians’ exilic conditions and issues of dignity and loss, but also one sufficiently distant from Iranian politics, to create an emotionally sensitive and nuanced portrayal of a pro-­Shah exile family and of exilic homelessness without descending into the political binarism and grandstanding typical of Iranian exile directors. Early in 2006, the U.S. public diplomacy mediawork against the Islamic Republic received a major boost in funding, thanks to the new public diplomacy. Locked in a bellicose stalemate with the Islamic Republic over various issues, the Bush administration under the secretary of state Condoleezza Rice made an emergency request to Congress for $75 million on top of the already allocated $10 million in funding to “mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign” against the Islamic Republic (MacAskill and Borger 2006). The ostensible reason was to destabilize the regime headed by the new president, Ahmadinejad, and to promote democracy. Of this amount the “independent-­appearing ‘surrogate’ news media” would receive about $20 million. About another $30 million would be given to Iranian exiles to “bolster existing Persian-­language tv and radio programs,” as well as to the U.S. government’s Persian-­language external media outlets, such as Radio Farda and Voice of America (voa). This would involve upgrading voa’s Persian-­language television service from a few hours a day to round-­the-­clock, improving Persian-­language radio transmission capabilities, and adding much new programming, such as Luna Shad’s thirty-­ minute show Next Chapter, aired by voa, which dealt with Iranian youths’ issues and was aimed at this large, disaffected stratum (Simpson 2006). This concerted governmental effort at public diplomacy through mediawork bled into U.S. commercial mediawork as well, creating a powerful and concerted global mediascape against the Islamic Republic. Iranian opposition, particularly the monarchists and the pmoi, which historically had relied on radio and television broadcasting and print media and who lobbied inside the U.S. public space as well as in Congress for legitimacy, were likely to benefit from government largess to foment a “velvet revolution” inside Iran. However, the strings attached to the funding will lose them journalistic credibility, political independence, and public legitimacy.29 In early 2011, in the face of a 16 percent cut in the annual budget of the bbc World Service, the U.S. government took the unusual step of offering financial assistance to another country’s public diplomacy. It offered a “significant” sum of money (in low six figures) to help combat the blocking and jamming of bbc World Service tv and Internet services in countries like Iran and China (Dowell 2011). By 2012, the hyphenated Iranians had arrived, an arrival and assimilation that was driven by their high class capital. This occurred when the American cable network Bravo TV, which specializes in reality TV programming, inaugurated a reality show, Shahs of Sunset, about a group of Iranian-­A merican nou290

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veau riche living in Beverly Hills, California, who while leading the glitzy, materialistic life of the super rich have to negotiate their new identities with the older parental generation’s values of the old country in relationship, marriage, and career. This assimilation was made possible not only by its high class capital but also thanks to the transformation of the population from exilic to diasporic and by its penchant increasingly to call itself “Persian,” which distanced its members from “Iran,” the name that the Islamic Republic regime had so sullied. By this means the hyphenated Iranians were invoking a strategy that Iranians have time and again used when under attack, rearchaizing themselves by attaching themselves to, and reviving, a previous era of glory in Iranian history, when Iran was Persia—­before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and even before the arrival of Islam in Iran in the seventh century a.d. The preview of Shahs of Sunset has one of the characters proudly boasting “We are Persians.” 3 0

A Videogame War on Iran Videogames became an important component of the U.S. mediawork against the Islamic Republic, in whose production both the private and public sectors participated. Some of the games involved tapping into the United States’ foreign policy and military missions abroad, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, naturalizing them. Kuma Reality Games, based in New York, was one company which built re-­creations of real-­world events using advanced gaming tools, many of them involving U.S. military missions in foreign lands. Kuma\ War was its first game, which the company’s website describes as “a first and third-­person tactical squad-­based game that provides multiple updates monthly to the consumer’s computer to reflect unfolding events in the real world.” These updates included “playable game missions, video news shows, extensive intelligence gathered from news sources around the world, and insight from a decorated team of military veterans.” The company marketed recreations of nearly sixty playable missions, including successful U.S. military missions resulting in the assassinations of Saddam Hussein’s sons and Osama bin Laden. Of the sixty, three dealt directly with Iran.31 Mission 7—­Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Part 1 game re-­creates the American military and intelligence operation in April 1980 to land planes in an Iranian desert to rescue the American hostages, a mission that went badly awry and cancelled when a helicopter crashed into a C-­130 full of fuel. The Kuma website described the game this way: “You are a highly-­trained Delta Force operator carrying out the Pentagon’s actual plan to rescue 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran. Storm the besieged American embassy, free the hostages from the radical ‘students,’ and make it out of Tehran—­a city swarming with anti-­A merican militants—­any way you can.” 32 A second game, Mission 8—­Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Part 2, is based on the assumption that “you and your fellow Delta Force operators” have successfully freed the U.S. hostages from the American emA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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bassy in Tehran, and are now having to fight through “waves of anti-­American militants” to get the hostages safely across the street to the Amjadieh soccer stadium where rescue helicopters are waiting. This scenario allowed the videogame player to accomplish virtually what the American military had failed to do actually: the successful rescue of the American hostages from Iran. This was, in essence, a wish fulfillment game. Keeping up with Iranophobia and the unfolding news and controversy about Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons which had caused an escalating drumbeat of war on Iran by American and Israeli interests,33 Kuma issued in late 2005 a new game, Mission 58—­A ssault on Iran, which offered players “the most plausible scenario to delaying or destroying Iran’s nuclear arms capabilities.” The game player is put in the position of a Special Forces soldier, who infiltrates the well-­protected nuclear facility at Natanz in central Iran. What makes his mission more risky and delicate is that he must rescue “a man on the inside,” a scientist friendly to the West, who if not rescued will be killed after the raid. “Breech the perimeter and secure the evidence,” exhorts the website, addressing the player. “Beat back the security forces and destroy the centrifuges. Never before has so much hung in the balance; never have we been so close to preventing world tragedy.” 3 4 Clearly, the game is designed to prepare the videogame players and the public for an incipient war on Iran. An alliance of military, intelligence, and private sector interests created these military-­inspired videogames. Not only former military and intelligence personnel worked to design and implement the Kuma\War videogames, but also the company received, according to the New York Times, CIA funding to “design and make specific films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mind-­ set in the Middle East and to distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge” (Gladstone and Yaccino 2012). However, what the newspaper did not mention was that these games were designed not only to align the Middle Eastern public opinion with that of the U.S. foreign policy and public diplomacy, but also, and more importantly, to align the U.S. public opinion with its own government’s diplomacy and prepare it for future wars. These military videogames created a closed financial and ideological circuit between the playing public, the state, and the private sector, providing a clear example of the operation of hegemony in a liberal democracy. By playing these first-­person shooter games the players are entertained but also interpellated into thinking alongside the American foreign policy, public diplomacy, and military aims. By adopting the points-­of-­v iew, physical positions, and identities of the U.S. military and intelligence personnel (“putting players in their boots” says the Kuma website) the players are persuaded to identify with the military and intelligence personnel psychologically and to become ideologically complicit with their missions. By rehearsing a virtual attack on Iran they are prepared for an actual future war with Iran. This benefits the U.S. foreign policy and military strategies, as the military can presumably more readily recruit the players thus prepared into the 292

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armed forces. The commercial company Kuma Reality Games, too, benefits financially by selling its products, which were designed by the returning war veterans and intelligence personnel and funded by the CIA. That these games were not just for entertainment purposes but were part of the American global war on terror is clear, for the Kuma\War website states: “Kuma\War missions allow subscribers to experience first-­hand some of the toughest fighting in the global war on terror because each mission is based on real-­world events.” 35 In this case, Kuma became part of the state ideological apparatuses of the United States, and part of the privatization trend in the U.S. military. Here, the private and public sectors collaborated to serve the needs and interests of the state and its public diplomacy by competing in the marketplace, in the process presumably winning the consent of the governed and achieving a moment of hegemony, instead of having to exercise direct propaganda, coercion, and violence, which are the tactics that authoritarian regimes like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran use to subdue their own citizens to become hegemonic. Of course, videogames do not accomplish this hegemonic effect on their own; rather, they act in concert with the other components of the mediawork described here. When in August 2011 Iran arrested a twenty-­eight-­year-­old American-­born male of Iranian heritage, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, a former Marine from Flint, Michigan, and later in January 2012 convicted him of espionage and moharebeh (warring against God) and condemned him to death, the circuit of collaboration between the U.S. military and intelligence personnel, warfare videogame manufacturers, and Iran acquired another layer of complexity and connectivity. The Iranian regime claimed that Hekmati had been sent to Iran on an “infiltration mission” to enter the intelligence services there for the purpose of spying for the U.S., airing a “confession” of Hekmati on Iranian state TV to that effect.36 According to his family, however, Hekmati had gone to Iran not to spy but innocently to visit with his relatives.37 High-­ranking American diplomats, including secretary of state Hillary Clinton, also vehemently denied the charge and condemned the verdict. Whatever his reason for traveling to Iran, it appears that Hekmati’s background made him a person of interest to the Iranian intelligence services. He had worked for Kuma on their $95,920 contract with the Pentagon to develop Arabic and Persian language training, but he was apparently not involved in designing the Assault on Iran videogame. The fact that he had worked for Kuma made him a suspect because according to the New York Times, Kuma was well known in Iran as the maker of Assault on Iran. Hekmati’s work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in developing speech translation technologies for U.S. troop may have been another factor. His entrepreneurial efforts through his own company, Lucid Linguistics, which since 2006 had been involved in document translation of “military-­ related matters,” specializing in Arabic and Persian, may have offered an additional reason for suspicion against him. He may not have been a spy but his company’s website clearly shows his involvement in the war on terror industry, A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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one of whose targets was Iran: “Our main goal is to assist organizations whose focus is on the current Global War on Terrorism and who are working to bridge the language barrier for our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan” (quoted in Gladstone and Yaccino 2012). The Islamic Republic, too, was active in creating a war-related public diplomacy videogame involving its nemeses. Apparently, in retaliation for Assault on Iran, the Association of Islamic Unions of Students created a first-person shooter videogame called Special Operation Eighty-­Five: Hostage Rescue (Amaliat­e Vizheh 85: Azadi-­ye Geroganha, 2007), in which the players, taking the position of an Iranian agent, would work to free two Iranian nuclear scientists who while on a pilgrimage to a Shiite site in Karbala, Iraq, had been kidnapped and jailed by the Americans. The players not only would be able to free the Iranian scientists but also to capture an Israeli spy who had leaked to the West classified Iranian nuclear secrets (Mackey 2012).38 In January 2012 the Israel cable TV company Hot released a video ad that offered a Samsung Galaxy Tab to those who sign up for a premium service. To sell Hot’s commercial service, the humorous video mobilizes in a tongue-­in-­cheek manner Israel’s public diplomacy campaign against IRI, reiterated repeatedly by Israeli and American officials and mediaworks, to bomb the Iranian nuclear and missile facilities if the Iranian regime did not stop developing its alleged nuclear weapons. In the ad the four Israeli men, badly disguised as chador-­clad women with heavy makeup, enter Isfahan, Iran, a major industrial city with military industrial complexes, including the Natanz nuclear site nearby (these characters are from a Hot tv series called Asfur). After joking about where they can find kosher food in Isfahan they spot a fellow Mossad agent who tells them that he has obtained a fancy Samsung computer tablet as a reward for subscribing to the premium cable tv service, a tablet that is loaded with applications. The four curious cross-­dressing agents disregard his explanation of his mission and grab the tablet to examine it. “What is this app?” asks one of them, and touches the screen, accidentally setting off a massive explosion in the industrial plant that is the background of the shot (presumably a nuclear weapon development site). This ad brings up all sorts of interpretations. It could be read as part and parcel of Israel’s aggressive and militarized public diplomacy against Iran, showing Iran to be a primitive, weak, and vulnerable society, or it could be read as gloating at the supposed efficiency and bravura of the Israeli military-­ intelligence apparatuses. This latter reading is underscored by the recent assassination campaign allegedly spearheaded by American and Israeli intelligence services or their contractors that has resulted in the killing of five nuclear scientists inside Iran (The U.S. government has denied its complicity and the Israeli government has played its usual coy game of denial with a wink and nod). The ad can also be read as an effort by the commercial cable tv provider Hot and the computer manufacturer Samsung to take advantage of this widespread anti-­IRI public diplomacy to sell their products by associating themselves with 294

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the presumed winner of this public diplomacy and its military aims. The well-­ executed tongue-­in-­cheek humor works hegemonically, as it both makes light of the Israeli blustering on Iran and naturalizes it.39 This ad seems to be the Israeli’s logical follow-­up to the Israeli war-­mongering film Iranium.

Exilic Mediawork’s Treatment of the Islamic Republic and of Exile Media-­savvy Iranians produced a dynamic exilic and ethnic mediawork of their own, chiefly in Los Angeles, consisting of Persian-­language television shows, radio programs, newspapers, magazines, telephonic newscasts, art exhibitions, public film screenings, Internet sites and businesses, bookstores, social and intellectual salons, and pop and classical music performances, lecture series, nightclub shows, records, and music videos. The leading edge of this globe-­ spanning mediawork was provided by scores of television programs. Produced by various leftist, Islamist (pmoi), nationalist, monarchist, Baha’i, and Christian factions and individuals, almost all these exile media opposed the Islamic Republic, for which a few of them paid the ultimate price by what was called state-­sponsored terrorism by the Islamic Republic.

The Evolution of Exile Television’s Public Diplomacy and Technology Almost immediately after their massive exile in 1978–79, Iranians became part of the public diplomacy discursive struggles between the United States and Iran. They brought a third player into the mix. As I documented in earlier studies, those in Southern California created a massive Persian-­language pop culture, driven by commercial television programs, some of which were transmitted to other regions in the United States and exported to foreign countries, including Iran. Interethnicity, religious diversity, commercial interests, and anti-­i ri politics were hallmarks of these programs, which underwent a four-­phase evolution. In addition to Los Angeles, Iranians originated television programs in other cities with large émigré populations, among them London (Sreberny 2000) and Washington (Limbert 2002), but at a much smaller scale. Phase 1: Broadcast, Cablecast, and Public-­Access tv Bet Naharin, produced in 1974 by Iranian Christians called Assyrians or Chaldeans, can be credited with being the first Iranian television program in the United States (or perhaps in the diaspora). It inaugurated the first generation of exile television, which consisted of over-­the-­air broadcasting of individual programs. The first postrevolutionary tv program aired in the United States was the thirty-­minute Pars Weekly tv (Televizion-­e Haftegi-­ye Pars), only one episode of which was aired in Los Angeles in 1978 by channel 52 (kvea-­t v). It took several years for the first regularly scheduled weekly program to be aired. That was A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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Iranian tv, produced by Ali Limonadi, which began in March 1981 as a thirty-­ minute show and was later expanded to a one-­hour Sunday show. In the decade since Iranian tv began, sixty-­two regularly scheduled programs were aired in Los Angeles, with the number of shows in 1993 standing at twenty-­six, adding up to more than seventeen hours of programming per week (Naficy 1993b). Three of these programs were aired daily, the rest weekly. With the evolution of television technology the transmission of these individual programs, too, evolved, so that by the early 1990s, these were aired by broadcast, cablecast, and public-­access channels in Los Angeles. These were artisanal, small-­scale operations in which late twentieth-­century tv producers, like their early film counterparts in Qajar Iran, performed multiple ­functions—­as producers, directors, hosts, reporters, researchers, camerapeople, and sometimes as advertising salespersons and film editors. In some cases the producers’ homes served as their production studios, such as in the cases of Homa Ehsan’s Visit tv (Televizion-­e Didar) and Hamid Shabkhiz’s Iran tv (Televizion-­e Iran). The aesthetics and politics of these homemade television shows were, however, far from those of “home movies,” for these shows did not deal with the private lives of the producers but with their public political stances. Nevertheless, since they were made at home and the producers performed multiple functions in them, television thoroughly infested their private lives. They lived and breathed television. All the first-­phase tv programs vehemently opposed the Islamic Republic. There were many reasons for this. The high level of secularism among the exiles and the producers, particularly the Muslims, was one. It is as if tasting personally the bitter fruits of the incoming theocracy in Iran had transformed them overnight in exile into modern, secular individuals who now believed in the necessity of the separation of mosque and state. This secularism and the religious composition of program makers, many of whom belonged to minorities persecuted in Iran, created a structural bias against the Islamic Republic (and against Islam). Many of these exile television shows were not only against the Islamic Republic but also secular, and some were ethnoreligious shows by and for Iranian minorities. For example, among the regularly scheduled shows aired from 1980 to 1992, Atoor was Assyrian; Cheshmandaz, Donia-­ye Yahud, Farman-­e Panjom, Jonbesh-­e Irani-­ye Banitorah, Payman, and Shofar were Jewish; Kajnazar was Armenian; and Shakhsar and The Spiritual Revolution (a twenty-­six-­part series) were Baha’i. There were no shows in favor of the Islamic Republic or of political Islam; the two Islamic shows, Elm va Erfan and Sufi, focused on Islamic mysticism. The influence of Iranian ethnoreligious minorities went beyond producing ethnoreligious shows, however. For one thing, their population in exile was proportionally larger than that of the Muslims; for another, many minorities had been skilled professionals in the entertainment fields before their exodus, and they put these skills to good use as producers, hosts, sales agents, musicians, singers, and crews of other nonreligious shows. Of forty-­six televi296

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sion producers I tabulated, twenty-­eight were Muslim (ca. 60 percent), twelve Christian (26 percent: six Armenians, five Assyrians, one Protestant), two Jewish (4 percent), and four Baha’is (8 percent) (Naficy 1993b:82). Compared to the Muslim population in Iran, which was about 98 percent Muslim at the time, these figures show the high percentage of religious minorities among Los Angeles television producers in 1993. These mediamakers’ tendencies reflected the personal histories, mind-­sets, politics, and economic interests of the first wave of wealthy secular Muslim and ethnoreligious exiles, who were driven out of the country by the revolution. These tendencies by and large corroborated the U.S. mediawork’s skewed views of Iran. It is not surprising, therefore, that the majority of producers had a political mission for their programs. In the words of Manuchehr Bibian, the Jewish Iranian producer of Jam-­e Jam tv, (who also ran Pars Video, the first major video service that rented and sold Iranian films, TV series, and music videos on video) this mission was to “wage a campaign against the current government in Iran and to offer the public political information” (Naficy 1993b:82). Because of such a politicized project and their previous training in the authoritarian Pahlavi media, these exile tv producers neither appreciated nor practiced the Western liberal values of journalistic “objectivity” and “fairness.” Interethnicity—­ the presence of ethnic subgroups within an immigrant group—­was not only operative in television but also in Iranian pop music, resulting in the cross-­fertilization of cultural productions. For example, Jewish businessmen were generally the producers and distributors of the music that Muslim singers and Armenian performers produced in Los Angeles. In addition, the Jews were apparently the most active music-­buying, concert-­going, and party-­giving group among Iranians, perhaps partly due to cultural factors and partly due to their financial success as a result of their high self-­employment rate (Naficy 2002a). While these tv programs grew in number and broadcast frequency, Iranians made hundreds of films in the diaspora, which created a variegated “accented cinema.” These focused on the drama and trauma of deterritorialization while maintaining the diaspora-­w ide front against the Iranian regime (Naficy 2002b, 2001a), examined at length in the following chapter. The largest concentration of Iranian mediamakers outside Iran turned Los Angles into what was sometimes called “Irangeles” or “Persian Motown” (Kelley, Friedlander, and Colby 1993; Shay 2000). It even spawned a comedy movie, irangeles (2004), directed by Michael Keller. Exile-­produced television and pop music in phase 1 were imported into Iran on videocassettes, cds, and dvds, often clandestinely. Initially, smugglers of tv show videos sometimes removed the tapes from their casings until they entered Iran, where they reassembled them into cassettes, removed their California ads, and then sold them in the black market. These television shows did not have a major impact, as they were politically suspect, difficult to access generally, lagged behind the homeland populace, and their A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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news was dated by the time they arrived in Iran. However, the exile pop music and the recycled Pahlavi-­era pop music found an eager audience there, as both had been banned and were easy and economical to duplicate and to purchase. These items were sold on the streets of major Iranian cities, and the loud, showy playing of exiles’ pop songs from homes and passing cars defiantly broke the strict segregation of private from public spaces and the separation of Iran from exile. After demonizing the exiles as worthless runaways and traitorous turncoats, the Iranian government attempted to use its own public diplomacy to reach and influence them. It created its own two-­hour weekly program, Sunshine tv (Televizion-­e Aftab, 1992), and later, its own twenty-­four-­hour international television channel, Jam-­e Jam Television. To attract the exiles, the contents of Sunshine tv programs were carefully attenuated so as not to be too religious to be off-­putting for those who had rejected the Islamic Republic; the programs were culturally Iranian and Islamic, not so much religiously so. It was an Islamicate tv show. More such efforts to reach the ever-­increasing diaspora populations followed. Phase 2: Twenty-­Four-­Hour Satellite tv By March 2000, things had changed in favor of the penetration of exile television into Iran’s national space and of its becoming a factor in the new mutually antagonistic public diplomacy between Iran and the United States. This began as Iranian exiles turned away from phase 1’s limited-­impact individual broadcast, cablecast, and public-­access television shows toward producing twenty-­ four-­hour satellite television channels. The satellite era began with National Iranian tv (nitv), operated by a former pop singer Zia Atabay, and it quickly grew to over two-­dozen channels. Some of the same people who in the 1980s and 1990s had produced and hosted television programs were now involved in these new ventures. The satellite television channels airing from the United States were Apadana International tv, Channel Two tv, Didar tv, Iran tv, IranX tv, Jam-­e Jam International tv, Lahze tv, Markazi tv, National Iranian Television (nitv), Omid-­e Iran tv, Pars tv, Payam tv, pen tv, Persian News Network (pnn, the Voice of America’s Persian service), Rangarang tv, Salaam tv, Sima-­ye Azadi tv (a pmoi channel), Tamasha tv, Tapesh tv, Tasvir-­Iran tv, and International Persian Network (ipn) (Kamalipour 2005:2). The satellite channel Your tv (Televizion-­e Shoma) aired from London. All these provided anti–­ Islamic Republic propaganda, information, talk, news, fortune-­telling, comedy, music (classic and pop), movies, and tv serials. Most were commercial stations. Ethnic minorities within Iran, too, joined these diaspora satellites in voicing their opposition to the Islamic Republic. In 2004, Al-­A hwaz tv began airing on an Assyrian Television channel to what its website called “the Ahwazi homeland in Iran.” The website further stated that Al-­A hwaz tv “promotes non-­ violent opposition to the Iranian regime and advocates democratic change, focusing on the Ahwazi Arabs, who are indigenous to south-­west Iran. Al-­A hwaz 298

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tv seeks to hand the media back to the Ahwazis, who are oppressed, marginalised and discriminated against.” As an indication of the complicated politics of televisual public diplomacy, the site claimed that “the station and its journalists are supported by a number of Ahwazi non-­governmental organisations and their supporters, including the Democratic Solidarity Party of Al-­A hwaz and the British Ahwazi Friendship Society,” immediately adding that “Al-­A hwaz tv is not supported by any government or government-­funded institution. It is run, staffed and owned by Ahwazi Arabs and run by a democratic editorial collective.”40 By 2006, Al-­A hwaz went online (www.ahwazmedia.tv.) The Islamic Republic, too, created its own twenty-­four-­hour satellite channels to combat these, among which were Jam-­e Jam (irib2), Khabar (irinn), and Press tv. Phase 3: Internet and Satellite-­Convergent tv With rapidly increasingly globalization, population displacement, technological change, and media convergence, exile and diaspora television entered their third phase. Bebin tv was perhaps the first Iranian Internet Protocol Television station (iptv), which started in 2006, targeting second-­generation Iranian Americans. As it became popular inside Iran, Bebin tv established the Marjan Television Network in London in January 2009 to reach Iranians in the homeland through satellite television, demonstrating that media convergence was not characteristic only of mainstream media. From March 2009 Marjan began programming for two new satellite channels to augment its online tv. Me and You tv (Manoto tv) targeted the young generation inside Iran with reality tv– style programming, such as the cooking show, Welcome to Dinner (Befarmaid Sham) and the talent show Googoosh’s Music Academy (Akademi-­ye Musiqi-­ye Googoosh). Discovery channel (Kavosh), on the other hand, aimed to serve Iranian adults with dubbed foreign documentaries.41 The idea was for each channel to have its own webpage, which would include a blog in Persian. In addition, there was to be a social networking feature on the websites for viewer interactions with program hosts, as well as a text messaging service such as sms web polls and other Web 2.0 functionalities. The case of Bebin tv and its satellite channels also demonstrates that in deterritorialized environments it is very difficult to sustain media convergence due to limitations on resources and personnel and financial and political insecurities. Bebin online went off the air in December 2009 to prepare for its satellite channel offshoots (Rohani 2009:12). Once again, the Islamic Republic, or financing from Muslims in Iran and elsewhere, supported the creation of Islamic satellite and Internet tv channels that attempted to counter the antiregime exile and Western mediaworks. These channels included Salaam tv, Family tv (Ahl-­e Bait tv), and Homeland tv (Velayat tv, in the Dari language).42 In the 2000s, a new satellite/Internet movie channel in California, Iranian Cinema Channel (Shabakeh Sinemai-­ye Iranian), carried by a subscription television called Jump tv, started screening Iranian and foreign movies made both before and after the revolution.43 A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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Phase 4: Internet tv—­Green tv The political opposition inside Iran that formed after the presidential elections of 2009, known as the Green Movement, which protested against Ahmadinejad’s reelection due to vote rigging and other irregularities, soon spread to, and was vociferously supported by, Iranians in diaspora. This movement spawned its own “green television,” auguring the emergence of a fourth phase of exile tv—­secularist, pro-­democracy, nonsectarian Internet television. In October 2009, the Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi and a twelve-­ member production team began a ten-­minute weekly television talk show, The Week in Green (Hafteh-­ye Sabz), hosted by Dabashi, in support of what he called “the civil rights movement in Iran.” The brief program set lofty and rather self-­ important aims for itself: “We hope to keep the information channels open, sustain international focus on the struggles of the Iranian people, increase international understanding of Iranian society, encourage and unite those struggling for meaningful change, provide a platform for prominent intellectuals to address the movement, and, ultimately, realize the dream of a truly democratic Iran.” 4 4 Filmed at a makeshift studio at the Ethical Society of New York in northwest Manhattan, The Week in Green was broadcast in Persian with English and Persian subtitles. Its production team members said they worked “pro bono in support of the Green cause,” with their broadcasts distributed online on the show’s website, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (Mahtafar 2009). By August 2010, two new television channels sprung up in the diaspora in support of the Green Movement, clamoring for political change and democratization inside Iran. These began as Internet efforts, with the provision of becoming satellite television as well. Rasa tv (Rasaneh-­ye Sabz-­e Iran) began as an Internet television channel in Belgium, promoting a form of democratic Islam inside Iran, while the IraNeda Foundation stated its plan to start what it claimed was a “people-­based,” “modernist,” and an “anti-­discriminatory” television, “to reflect and display the ideals and opinions of those who have been suppressed in the past three decades and those who have been continuously and systematically discriminated against.” Among the founders of the latter group were Iranian intellectuals and mediamakers, including the exiled filmmaker Reza Allameh­zadeh.45 In early 2012, a new iptv service, Mehr tv, came online in Southern California, which characterized itself as a “political, cultural, and social” network for all Iranians around the world (mehrtv.tv). It remains to be seen how effective and enduring these extraterritorial countermedia television channels can become as agents of reform, change, evolution, or revo­lution inside Iran. By tapping into the vast potential of the Internet, they avoid the technical problems and limited reach of the first two phases and have become truly global and interactive. They can effectively reach not only Iranians in the diaspora but also those protesters inside Iran whom Ahmadinejad called “a few specks of dust and dirt” and Khamenei labeled “political microbes.” 46 If properly and reliably archived on the Internet, their programs will 300

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be available for access at all times and everywhere, countering the ephemerality and limited access of broadcast and satellite television. So their problem will no longer be one of technology or reach, but one of financial resources, political acumen, and audience interest. As the number of the exilic and diasporic satellite tv and Internet tv channels increased, and as they began to exhort Iranians to rise up in the streets against the Islamic Republic, they became controversial and politically influential inside Iran for the first time (Lewis 2002; Netherby 2000). For example, they fanned the rumors in 2002 that the regime had ordered the Iranian national football team to lose to Bahrain in World Cup qualifying matches so as not to repeat the riotous nationwide jubilations that followed Iran’s qualification for the World Cup in France in 1998—­a jubilation that had been dubbed a “football revolution” against the regime (Basmanji 2005:12). This “revolution” resulted in upbeat documentaries, such as Saifollah Samadian’s Tehran, The Twenty-­Fifth Hour (Tehran, Sa’at-­e Bistopanj, 1999) and Maziar Bahari’s Football Iranian Style (Futbal Beh Sabk-­e Irani, 2001), and in narrative films, such as Jafar Panahi’s insightful Offside (Ofseid, 2006), which celebrated not only the Iranian football team’s victorious performances on the pitch but also the triumph of ordinary men and women to defy the official gender segregation of spaces and joyfully pour into and occupy the streets. Their proponents praised the power of these satellite channels to mobilize protests. Their opponents criticized them for either opportunistically riding the crest of an existing wave of domestic discontent and taking credit for it, or for engaging in unethical advocacy journalism that enticed young demonstrators in Iran to take risky actions that landed them in trouble, leaving the television propagandists in distant lands out of trouble. In addition to these exilic and diasporic television channels, there were Middle Eastern regional channels that engaged in their own national public diplomacies by addressing Persian-­speaking audiences in Iran and in the larger Middle Eastern and Central Asia regions. mbc Persia, a Saudi Arabian concern, whose website boasts that it is the “first Free-­to-­A ir entertainment channel subtitled in Farsi,” made an entry. This was a twenty-­four-­hour satellite movie channel whose films were generally action-­packed American B-­movies, from which nudity, sexual situation, and bad language were obsessively removed and whose Persian subtitles contained many inaccuracies and downright mistakes. In 2011, the channel began to run Iranian art films, such as Mehrjui’s Pari (1995), and popular Turkish tv serials. Began in 2008, mbc Persia was one of several channels operated by the mbc Group, serving mostly the Middle East and the Arab world. The channel claimed that it is “one of the most watched channels amongst its Farsi speaking audience, a result of broadcasting popular, top rated movies.” 47 mbc Persia, along with its sister satellite movie channels, mbc 2, mbc Action, and mbc max (all subtitled in Arabic), brought Hollywood onto the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea—­a highly demure HolA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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lywood at that. Begun with one channel in 1991 after the first Persian Gulf war between the West and Iraq, mbc (Middle East Broadcasting Center) grew to become a “regional media empire with eight free-­to-­air channels, two radio channels, a documentary production house, a news service and a multilingual news and video portal” (Kraidy and Khalil 2009:35–36). Another regional television was Farsi1 tv, a satellite channel operated by the Dubai-­based Broadcast Middle East, a fifty-­fifty joint venture between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Afghanistan’s moby Group. This channel, begun in August 2009, became popular with Iranians because it aired recent popular, mostly American, soap operas (Beautiful but Unlucky, The Mask of Analia, White Lies), sitcoms (Dharma and Greg, Malcolm in the Middle, Reba), and terrorism and action series (Twenty-­Four, Prison Break), dubbed into Persian, for a potential 100 million audience. However, in early December 2010, the Tehran prose­ cutor general, Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi, shut down the Farsi1 office in Tehran, which he said had been dubbing television series apparently clandestinely, and arrested five people on the charge of “helping the anti-­revolutionary movement.” There were “advanced machines and equipment in this office and we wonder how this equipment was imported and installed there,” he said.48 Farsi1 denied having any offices or operations in Tehran. mbc Persia and Farsi1 are part of, respectively, Saudi Arabia’s and Dubai’s public diplomacies with Iran and the Persianate world, demonstrating that public diplomacy is not limited to vertical relations between the East and the West and their exiles but extends to multilateral relations among neighboring countries and regions within the global south and north. The Iranian regime believed that Iranians who installed satellite dishes to receive foreign and exile television programs were basically inviting not only a political but also a cultural enemy into their homes. It was no surprise, therefore, when the vvir official Ezzatollah Zarghami wrote to Ban Ki-­moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, in January 2011, complaining that ninety satellite stations are “beaming indecent and unethical programs into Iran, in breach of an international code of broadcasting conduct” (Amiri 2011). To these antagonistic Iranian exilic, diasporic, governmental, and commercial television efforts should be added an impressive number of Persian-­ language radio and television programs and stations operating abroad, some clandestinely, many funded by Western governments, but many also operating commercially as arms of anti–Islamic Republic political factions, agitating for the regime’s overthrow. The bbc’s Persian-­language radio and television have been regarded as the most influential of these channels, the gold standard, hated and feared by both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic. While in the run-­up to the revolution the Shah called the bbc his “number one enemy,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Britain, in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential elections, the “most malicious” of Western powers, which had attempted to instigate “demonstrations and create political crisis through the use 302

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of the bbc” (quoted in Tofreh and Sreberny 2010:217–19).49 Nevertheless, the bbc Persian tv, radio, and website remained popular and trusted by Iranians inside the Islamic Republic, causing the government to crack down. Prior to January 2006, when the government began blocking the bbc Persian website, some 40 percent of its users were inside Iran; by February 2009, only 5 percent were in Iran using proxies, the rest were outside (Andersson, Gillespie, and Mackay 2010:265–26). The U.S. government-­funded Voice of America radio and television in Washington, as well as the Prague-­based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farda Radio, also funded by the United States, provided increasingly valuable programming, but their programming was not as high quality and as trustworthy at those of the bbc‘s Persian programs. In addition to these, many clandestine radio stations as well as other government-­supported radio stations aimed at the Islamic Republic and Iranians were in operation.50 Together, all these television, Internet, and radio channels provided a formidable collective, multilateral, multisited, multinational, Persian-­language public diplomacy mediawork, perhaps one of the largest electronic mediaworks in the world aimed at a single country and its national and diasporic subjects. Significantly, in their programming, the foreign-­based satellite channels were not entirely extraterritorial, for Iranians inside the homeland also contributed to them not only as spectators and listeners but also as sources of programming, news, information, and media, as their frequent letters, e-­mails, telephone calls, photographs, and Internet videos were incorporated into the numerous mixed-­genre shows. The talk format was particularly powerful, for it was cheap to produce and it allowed Iranians from anywhere, from the remotest villages in Iran to an upscale neighborhood in Chicago, to call and talk to the hosts and guests about their lives and troubles or to comment on issues, creat­ ing a glocal Iranian chronotope. Such a glocal mediawork helped construct a new synchronous, multisited, multiaccented imagined nation for Iranians who were dispersed across different continents and time zones. In addition, and importantly, this mediawork helped transform the identity of the dispersed population of Iranians from binary exiles into multisited diasporic subjects.

The Risks of Making Exile Television All forms of critical film-­, television-­, and videomaking entail risk taking. As I have shown elsewhere, such risks intensify and multiply when making media under oppressive conditions at home or under deterritorialization in exile (Naficy 2012). The new public diplomacy mediamaking, too, entailed some real risks and dangers both in their production and reception. Those involving reception are dealt with later in this chapter, as well as those involving filmmaking. The risks of making exile television are noted here. The direst of these were politically motivated murders, ascribed to state terrorism by the Islamic Republic. Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a vociferous and public anti–Islamic Republic A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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campaigner, and the producer and host of popular variety shows such as Silver Carnation (Mikhak-­e Noqrehi), paid with his life purportedly because of his political activism against the Iranian regime. Fereydoun, the brother of the famed poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad, was himself a poet, pop singer, and talk-­show host during the Pahlavi period, who in his exile following the revolution became increasingly political and outspoken against the rule of the mullahs, using tv and radio shows and public gatherings as his platforms. But he was no fan of Iranian exiles’ Los Angeles media world either, which he accused of being one of the “most savage human communities,” or of the mediamakers there, whom he charged with being “rapacious beasts” who “adorn themselves with newspapers, magazines, radio, and television shows but are worse than the Revolutionary Guards who oppress the people in Iran” (quoted in Asgari 2005:131). He also starred in Austria-­based Houchang Allahyari’s comic film I Love Vienna (1991), which critiqued Iranian exiles. Soon after the film’s release, in August 1992, Farrokhzad was murdered gruesomely when two people he knew, allegedly agents of the Islamic Republic, stabbed him twenty-­seven times in his own apartment in Bonn, Germany.51 Another allegedly government-­sponsored terrorist incident involving opposition entertainers occurred in Britain. In the 1980s, Iranian exiles staged protest rallies on Sundays in London’s Hyde Park Corner and in front of the Iranian embassy. In August 1986, a bomb exploded in the Iranian video store kvc in Kensington, killing Bijan Fazeli, the twenty-­two-­year-­old son of Reza Fazeli, an opponent of the Islamic Republic and a producer, director, and actor of filmfarsi movies during the Pahlavi era and of an anti–Islamic Republic comic video in exile, The Mullah Variety Show (Varieteh-­ye Akhundi), which made fun of and criticized the regime and the mullahs. A monarchist website claimed both Farrokhzad and Fazeli among the supporters of restoration of monarchy in Iran.52 Reza Fazeli, the father of the slain Bijan, moved to Los Angeles and began one of the oppositional satellite channels, Azadi tv (Freedom tv), which fomented demonstrations inside Iran. In a cnn interview Fazeli claimed that his channel had 20 million viewers, many of whom were dedicated and politically active. As evidence, he stated that during his own two-­hour block of hosting a daily morning program he receives on average of between 150 and 250 faxes from inside Iran, and when the news was hot, 500.53 In the aftermath of the enthusiastic protests against the disputed presidential election of 2009, Iranian exile mediawork assumed, or was assigned, a more powerful political role inside Iran. Perhaps for the first time exile television channels were directly implicated in fomenting antiregime activities inside the country, resulting in the execution of dissidents inside Iran. Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani (thirty-­seven years old) and Arash Rahmanipour (nineteen), both of whom had been arrested before the election, were condemned to death and executed in late January 2010. Zamani was charged with moharebeh (taking up arms against God) by working with the “terrorist 304

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group” the Iranian Association for Monarchy (Anjoman-­e Padeshahi-­e Iran), insulting the sacred Islamic beliefs, propaganda against the sacred system of the Islamic Republic, conspiracy and assembly with the aim of acting against national security, and illegal exit from the country. According to the indictment issued by the public prosecutor Said Mortazavi, the defendant had become familiar with the Iranian Association for Monarchy through its London-­based satellite channel Your tv.54 Zamani and Rahmanipour were both put on television show trials, aired by the Islamic Republic’s English-­language Press tv, during which they “confessed” to their wrongdoings and to membership in the same monarchist association. On that show Zamani explained that “after watching the channel for a considerable amount of time, I decided to contact the society in their London office,” offering to join it abroad to overthrow the regime. However, his contact, Dordaneh Fouladvand (pseudonym), told him that, before leaving the country he should “carry out a mission for the society.” She “ordered” him to distribute in the capital Tehran a large number of cds containing antireligious material in addition to Salman Rushdie’s illegal book The Satanic Verses, after which he and his cohorts headed to northern Iraq, illegally exiting Iran.55 In addition to this agitprop action Zamani collaborated with Radio Tondar, the radio voice of the Iranian Association for Monarchy, passing on news and making broadcast packages for it (Tait 2009; also, see https://tondar.org). That the defendants were tied to this monarchist group was to discredit the reformist movement by showing that it was directed from outside and by reactionary forces; that they had been arrested before the presidential election and were nevertheless executed was apparently aimed at frightening the opposition, particularly those working with foreign and exile media. The foregoing demonstrates both the personal stakes and the dangers that are involved in both producing and watching exile-­made political television. Producing regularly scheduled television programs and operating twenty-­four-­ hour tv channels in the diaspora are also risky and costly businesses. Remarkably, most Iranian mediaworks in exile, particularly broadcast media, were commercially run, driven primarily by advertisements from Iranian businesses in the diaspora or from others who wanted to reach Iranians. In some cases, financing from political organizations, such as the pmoi or a monarchist faction, helped sustain them. Funding by the U.S. public diplomacy program or by other governments (reportedly Israel and Saudi Arabia) played an undocumented part in the sustenance of the four generations of exile television. However, the rapid appearance and disappearance of exile tv programs and channels show the riskiness of these ventures and the inadequacy of these sources of funding to sustain these ventures over the long haul. Houshang Touzie’s play, Via Satellite tv with Love (Az Mahvareh ba Eshg, 2004) offered a comic but revealing portrait of the political economy of exile television. He wrote and directed the play, starring himself and Vossoughi, which satirized an upstart exile television producer who attempts to upgrade A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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by hook or crook his tv program to a twenty-­four-­hour channel on the promise of toppling the Islamic government in Iran and bringing about democracy. The play toured to several cities in the United States.

Public Diplomacy and Mediawork in the Style of the Islamic Republic If the term soft power is usually applied to government efforts to use culture and mediawork to attract and co-­opt foreigners, the Islamic Republic expanded this definition by launching a combination of soft and hard powers not only against foreigners but also against its own people, inside the country and in the diaspora. Some aspects of the government’s uses of soft and hard powers against Iranian exiles have already been noted; other aspects follow later. Here, I focus on the application of these powers against its citizens at home. Surprisingly, this assault began during the Khatami era and intensified during the emergence of the “cultural imperialism” or “cultural invasion” debate in the early 1990s, but it extended to far beyond his presidency. This debate may have occurred in response to external forces, such as the Israeli instigated “Iranophobia” in the West, the virulent anti-­Islamist discourse of American intellectual and diplomatic neoconservatives, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which resulted in the first invasion of Iraq under President George H. W. Bush’s leadership. But it also occurred in the context of a century of internal discourse among Iranians about the nefarious impact of Western culture and media on Iranians, requiring a bit of historicization. As detailed in volumes 1 and 2, during the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, Iranian official public diplomacy was at first primarily reactive, responding to what Iranian officials, media, and citizens considered to be the negative portrayal in Western mediawork about Iran and Iranians, including about the shahs. This consisted of public reactions to individual documentaries, such as to the American film Grass (1925), the British film In the Land of the Shah (1926), the German film Iran Railway (1930), the French film The Yellow Cruise (1931–34), and the American film Weaving a Persian Rug (1947). It also involved reactions to groups of films, such as the usia and usis films and newsreels (1950s), and to major media-­covered political events, such as the murder of the U.S. consul Robert Imbrie (1924), the coup against Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq (1953), and the twenty-­five-­hundredth anniversary celebrations of the Iranian monarchy (1971). These Western mediaworks and the reactions they provoked in Iran were discrete and limited at first, but they grew in size and import. During the Qajar and the first Pahlavi period, first Western movies and then Western popular culture, including dandyism, caused an epistemic violence among Iranians, resulting in a powerful attraction to the West and alienation from the self, on the one hand, and a profound repulsion toward the West and a nostalgia to return to the self, on the other. During the second Pahlavi period this epistemic violence and the dynamics it set into 306

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motion along with other sociopolitical issues became a prominent topic of debate among the intelligentsia, under different rubrics, eventually fuelling the revolution of 1978–79. In the late 1940s, Seyyed Fakhr al-­Din Shadman posited that Western civilization was not only about to conquer the Iranian civilization but also that it was more devastating than the earlier Arab and Mongol military invasions because it “seduced” its subjects instead of defeating them militar­ ily. Without so naming it, Shadman had identified the working of the Western soft power in Iran. Over a decade later, Jalal Al-­e Ahmad pathologized this seduction by asserting that Westernized Iranians were suffering from “Occidentosis,” a disease that infected and destroyed susceptible natives from inside. Still another decade later, Ali Shariati, agreeing with the diagnosis, advised that the way to combat this alienating pathology was for Iranians to “return to the self,” a self that he construed to be shaped by Shiism. Ehsan Naraghi, Da­ ryush Shayegan, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, among other thinkers, provided other secular and religious treatises on diagnosis of the Iranians’ defeat by Western culture and civilization. The new postrevolution’s thesis of Western “cultural invasion” of Iran and Islam promulgated by the Islamic Republic intellectuals in the 1990s should be seen in the context of this historical discourse, which was updated and militarized. In the summer of 1991, the governing right-­w ing faction in Iran charged that “global imperialism” (estekbar-­e jahani, another code word for the West, particularly the United States) was spearheading an organized, multifaceted “cultural invasion” (tahajom-­e farhangi) of Iran. The external enemy and its domestic collaborators were targeting the country and its Islamicate values, not directly by political and military means, but by the more potent and hidden weapon of “cultural transmogrification” (Khorrami 1997/1376:publisher’s preface). This was the reverse side of the “clash-­of-­civilizations” thesis, first promulgated by Bernard Lewis around the same time in his article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1990), later developed by Samuel Huntington, which argued that fundamental sources of conflict in the post– Cold War world would not be primarily ideological or economic but cultural and civilizational, with Islamic resurgence forming a major foe (Huntington 1996). While this discourse fed in the West the fear of Islam, the “cultural imperialism” and “cultural invasion” theses nurtured in Iran the fear of the West. The first nourished the West’s so-­called global war on terror, the latter the Islamic Republic’s battle against the Great Satan. The foremost theorist of “Islamic cinema,” the filmmaker Morteza Avini, dated the emergence of these theses in Iran to the end of the war with Iraq and to the realization that the end of this hot war was not the end of attack on the Islamic Republic; rather, it was followed by a pernicious, nonmilitary cold war, waged not by the ostensible enemy, the Iraqi regime, supported by the West during Iran’s long war with it, but by the hidden archenemy, the West itself, headed by the Great Satan (1992a). Many high-­ranking political figures, including the nation’s religious leader, A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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58 Cover of Gardun magazine that started the debate on the West’s “cultural invasion.” The image symbolizes traditional Iranians as the dying woman in a veil lying supine, while Westernized Iranians are abandoning the country and flying off to the West. The caption reads: “Will our émigré citizens return?”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (who replaced Khomeini), President Rafsanjani, and the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Mohammad Khatami, as well as most of the mainline and specialist press, participated in debating the cultural invasion and imperialism theses. The language was strident and alarmist. Khamenei, for example, analogized Western cultural invasion to a new weapon, a chemical bomb, launched by the West to undermine the Islamic regime and its values, a weapon that worked silently, invisibly, and imperceptibly (Khamenei 1994/1373:12). He elaborated in an increasingly alarming manner: “What the enemy is doing is not only a cultural invasion [tahajom] but also a cultural surprise attack [shabikhun], a cultural plunder [gharat], a cultural massacre [qatl-­e am]” (156). The upstart literary journal Gardun, whose cover about Iranian exiles had sparked the cultural invasion debate and had come under strong attack, was shut down a few months later, and its editor prosecuted, forcing him to flee into exile (figure 58).56 After the al-­Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001, the United States under Presi308

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dent George W. Bush, launched what it called a “global war on terror” against selective Muslim nation-­states and nonstate actors, which included Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq, the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan, and the al-­Qaeda network and cells in various countries. This war consisted not only of hot military wars but also of a new post-­Soviet cold war, the new public diplomacy. The most public salvo in this war, as far as Iran and Iranians were concerned, was fired, ironically, at the time that the Islamic Republic under President Khatami was assisting the United States in toppling the Taliban regime. It was then that President Bush declared Iran a member of an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea, and unleashed the full force of his country’s military, political, commercial, diplomatic, and media might against the axes. Predictably, this rhetoric and concomitant actions served to undermine the Khatami government and its reformist supporters, instead, strengthening the anti-­Western hard-­liners who gradually muscled themselves into the public sphere and public office. It was during this period that the Iranian regime attempted to fight against the international isolation that Western powers had imposed on it. Starting in March 2001, it renewed its contact with the British Council (severed since the cultural revolution in 1980) and developed a partnership with it to collaborate in scientific, academic, and cultural areas to not only move out of isolation but also to improve the quality of public education in the country. During the second Pahlavi period, the British Council had been a significant center for education of Iranians and of mutual cultural exchanges. As Maryam Borjian shows, this postrevolution attempt at improving public education, public relations, and cultural exchanges with a major Western government arose during the terms of the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, one of whose mottos was “dialogue among civilizations.” But it did not last long, for a year after the election of Ahmadinejad to presidency, in December 2006, the Ministry of Intelligence began accusing the British Council of conducting “unauthorized” cultural, social, and educational activities in Iran, causing the Majles to investigate it and the government to ban all the state-­r un bodies from collaborating with it (Borjian 2011:558–59). This was part of what became known as the Second Cultural Revolution, designed to purge remnants, or emergent forms, of cultural imperialism influences in Iran and to inculcate a more strident anti-­imperialist discourse in their place. With Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009 the last nails were driven into the council’s coffin, when it was asked to suspend all its activities, lay off its local staff, and shut its doors.

The Internal Culture War Begins Attacks on writers, publishers, and the press, who were thought to oppose the regime or to be giving aid to Western soft diplomacy, increased; many authors and editors were jailed, and publishing and printing houses were shut down A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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(Siavoshi 1997:514). The newly reconstituted Writers’ Association of Iran issued an open letter in 1994 titled “We Are Writers,” signed by 134 intellectuals, protesting the mistreatments of writers and insisting on the civil rights of writers of all kinds, including screenplay writers, and their right to be recognized as professionals: “We state once again that we are writers. Consider us writers and recognize our collective presence and our professional formation,” which “guarantees our independence individually” (quoted in Sepanloo 2002:375–77). This proved ineffective. In fact, it seems to have instigated what became known as the “serial murders case,” which took dozens of intellectuals’ lives, including that of Ahmad Miralai in Isfahan in October 1995, the translator of the works of V. S. Naipaul and others, when Naipaul was visiting Iran.

The Identity tv Show Soon the category “intellectual” was dragged through the mud. A notorious weekly television series called Identity (Hoviyat), apparently produced under Ministry of Intelligence supervision, inflamed the cultural invasion debate by charging that Iranian intellectuals—­inside and outside the country—­were witting or unwitting instruments of the foreign cultural invasion on Islamic Iran. It depicted prominent secular thinkers as anti-­Islamic, morally corrupt traitors, Freemasons, Zionists, Baha’is, and foreign spies. It employed interviews, documents, innuendos, accusatory narration, clips from Iranian exile television in Los Angeles, which it routinely identified as “antirevolution television,” and clips of prison “confessions.” 57 More sophisticated than the televisual “Savak shows” of the Pahlavi period and of the Islamic Republic’s tv show trials, Identity in its many programs not only attacked individual authors but also cultural foundations outside the country (principally in the United States) that promoted and celebrated Iranian and Persian history, culture, and arts, such as the Foundation for Iranian Studies, the Mahvi Foundation, the Kian Foundation, and the Par Foundation. Certain fields of study, such as Iranian studies, historiography, and narrative literature; topics such as secular nationalism; associations of Iranian scholars such as the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis (cira); and respected intellectual and academic publications such as Iran Nameh and Encyclopaedia Iranica, also came under fire. Long before Bush in his State of the Union address of 2002 had called Iran participant in an “axis of evil” and launched his program to destabilize the Islamic government using public diplomacy channels and the funding of disaffected Iranians at home and abroad to foment a “soft” or “velvet” revolution, Identity repeatedly insinuated and directly charged that world imperialism and Zionism, headed by the United States and Israel, were secretly financing and otherwise assisting a hidden network of individuals and organizations in the fields of culture and the arts to undermine and distort Iranian history and culture, particularly the contributions of Shiite Islam both historically and in the recent Islamic Revolution.58 In 310

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the parlance of the Bush administration, the Islamic Republic was accusing the United States and Israel of having formed an “axis of arrogance and imperialism” against it.

Sacking, Impeachment, Arrests, Banning, Murders This mobilization of public sentiment over Western cultural imperialism took its toll not only on those directly accused of collaboration but also on the high-­ ranking officials who were regarded as too liberal. Khatami, who as minister of culture and Islamic guidance had been one of the most enduring and liberal public leaders in the country, presiding over the flourishing of the arts and cinema since the revolution, resigned in mid-­1992. In February 1994, President Rafsanjani’s brother Mohammad, who had headed the broadcasting networks for many years, was ousted. Soon after, Mohammad Beheshti, who as the director of the Farabi Cinema Foundation had built it up into a formidable film institution, was also removed. These changes followed the earlier dismissal of the prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, during whose reign these and other liberal officials had created the nucleus of an Islamicate cinema, culture, and broadcasting. With their removals, a new post-­K homeini, postwar cultural era began, one that would eventually bring Khatami back to power as president. The immediate impact of the struggle about cultural imperialism on the film industry was to set in motion a period of anxious uncertainty, from which the industry emerged relatively unscathed. The reasons for this endurance may be sought partly in the foundations laid, which had institutionalized and industrialized cinema and the film industry, with the result that it now appeared both less subject to direct ideological manipulation and less dependent on the presence of sympathetic officials—­although radical Islamist ideology and influence continued to be important factors. The destructive campaign against U.S. public diplomacy and cultural imperialism resurfaced once more in the waning years of the twentieth century. The lightning rod for this was Seyyed Ataollah Mohajerani, then the minister of culture and Islamic guidance. Detailed documentation provides an unusually clear window onto this campaign and its impact on cinema. When in 1997 the former minister of culture and Islamic guidance Khatami ran for the nation’s presidency, many film-­industry professionals in an unprecedented move campaigned publicly for him, and when he was elected in a landslide on a platform of social reform and cultural liberalization within the tenets of the Islamic Republic, celebrations broke out near many movie houses in Tehran (Golmakani 2002:203). One of his important appointments was Mohajerani as the cultural czar, charged with running the mcig. The first sign of cultural thaw under the new leadership was the granting of exhibition permits to films that had been banned from two to sixteen years, among them Ali Hatami’s Haji Washington (1982), Dariush Mehrjui’s Lady (Banu, 1992), Mohammad Reza Honarmand’s A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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The Visit (Didar, 1995), Davud Mirbaqeri’s Snowman (Adam Barfi, 1995), and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun, 1996). Almost immediately, however, a rumble of discontent about the new mcig minister’s liberal tendencies and insufficient Islamic credentials spread throughout the hard-­line members of the Majles and the right-­w ing press, which culminated two years later in a contentious, public, and protracted parliamentary impeachment proceeding against him. Newspapers and radio broadcasts circulated nationwide the arguments and interviews, including man-­on-­the-­street interviews, for and against Mohajerani’s policies. Opposition parliamentarians and periodicals considered the mcig the most essential of all the republic’s institutions, responsible for preserving the Is­ lami­cate culture and values from both internal deterioration and external invasion by “enemy cultures” (Etemadi et al. 1999/1378:24–25). They charged that during his short tenure, Mohajerani and the mcig had engaged in a variety of practices—­a long list of them, in fact—­that countered Islamicate values: they charged him with insulting sacred “Islamic values”; propagating corruption and immorality; distorting and violating Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideas, including advocating the separation of religion from the state (violating the rule of supreme jurist); praising the Pahlavi culture of idolatry and rewarding its artists; organizing a Noruz celebration in Persepolis, reminiscent of the Shah’s twenty-­five-­hundredth-­year anniversary celebration of monarchy there; fanning the reemergence of the star system in the movie industry, including allowing pictures of the star of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio, to be printed on scores of magazine covers; advocating direct negotiation with the United Sates; revitalizing the banned Writers’ Association of Iran and allowing free reign to counterhegemonic or “alternative thinking” (degar andish) writers; releasing banned books and films; supporting Islamically incorrect publications and banal movies; and failing to support movies that were Islamically valuable, particularly those dealing with the war of “sacred defense” (ibid.:652–53). Mohajerani defended himself in a lengthy and provocative public session of the Majles that was broadcast nationwide. The transcript is more than forty-­ pages long. In that speech and in subsequent press interviews he answered the specific charges against him, and he also argued generally that culture cannot be preserved by banning art but only by protecting artists and cultural producers and by providing a safe and secure environment for their expressions. In this manner, he noted, both artists and people will become “immune” to unwanted ideas, without having to ban them. In the age of globalization, the Internet, and myriad global satellite television channels, he said, banning was no longer tenable (ibid.:411). The impeachment was an internecine debate between two Islamicate camps: one was traditional, autocratic, and univocal; the other was modernist, democratic, and multivocal—­both within the framework of an Islamicate state. Mohajerani, an advocate of dialogism, defended the mcig and the Farabi Cinema 312

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Foundation’s financial support of the film industry as something that was “vital” to both the survival and the successes of the industry, whose filmic output was recognized internationally for its high quality and outstripped in quantity the national cinemas of advanced industrial nations, such as Germany, Italy, and France (ibid.:276). He took pride in not “purifying” distinguished Pahlavi-­ era filmmakers such as Bahram Baizai and Parviz Kimiavi and actors such as Davud Rashidi, Ezzatollah Entezami, and Jamshid Mashayekhi (ibid.:730). At the same time, he noted that both the mcig and he had supported important pro-­war and Islamically committed movies, among them Ebrahim Hatamikia’s From Karkheh to Rhine (Az Karkheh ta Rhine, 1992) and Saifollah Dad’s Kanimanga Heights (Kanimanga, 1997). In addition, war-­related and Islamicate movies such as Hatamikia’s The Glass Agency (Azhans-­e Shishehi, 1997) and Red Ribbon (Ruban- ­e Qermez, 1998), Rasul Mollaqolipur’s Haiva (1998), and Majid Majidi’s The Color of Paradise (Rang-­e Khoda, 1999), produced under his tutelage, had received top film awards domestically and internationally (ibid.:788– 89). To further expand the cultural fare by providing a diversity of voices, the works of leftist, secular, and anti-­Shah writers, such as Samad Behrangi, Gho­ lamhosain Saedi, and Khosrow Golsorkhi, were republished, and movies banned for their controversial and perceived anti-­Islamicate values were released. Several filmmakers supported the effort to impeach Mohajerani. However, a much larger group, consisting of 150 artists, musicians, and filmmakers, published a declaration in support of the minister and against his impeachment.59 Meanwhile, a poll conducted by the Public Opinion Research Institute of twelve hundred men and women over the age of fifteen in Tehran showed that among all the government ministries, the mcig was the most popular with 29 percent of the sample approving its performance, while other major ministries received the following lower, indeed, dismal, rankings: the Ministry of Education, 14 percent; the Ministry of the Interior, 13 percent; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13 percent; the Ministry of Oil, 8 percent; the Ministry of Public Health, 6 percent; the Ministry of Labor, 3 percent; the Ministry of Information, 2 percent; the Ministry of Defense, 2 percent; the Ministry of Justice, 1 percent; and the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir), 1 percent. In addition, more than 53 percent of the sample recognized Mohajerani by name as the minister of culture and Islamic guidance (Etemadi et al. 1999/1378:319). All these pointed to the public’s high recognition of, and perhaps even high opinion of, both the mcig and Mohajerani (the opposition charged the poll was rigged). In the end, the impeachment effort in the Majles failed, voted down by 135 to 121, with 7 abstentions (ibid.:784). However, Mohajerani resigned in April 2000 with a fifty-­page letter to Supreme Leader Khamenei, and he left the country for exile in London, along with his wife, a former parliamentarian, Jamileh Kadivar, where they became vocal advocates of the Green Movement.60 The cultural imperialism issue was quelled for the time being, and Khatami instead proposed a “Dialogue among Civilizations” thesis at the un in SeptemA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ber 2000 to counter the forces of xenophobia and intolerance both at home and abroad; however, cultural imperialism and the clash of civilization are hydra-­ headed monsters, fueled by the exigencies of mutually antagonistic public diplomacies, which seem to resurface in Iran and the West whenever the going gets tough for the hard-­liners on both sides. Khatami’s reformist rhetoric, with its emphasis on the rule of law, equality, democracy, transparency, civil society, tolerance, and dialogue, and slogans such as “Iran for all Iranians,” was a marked departure from the previously articulated exclusivist Islamicate values. He claimed with some justification that the postrevolutionary cinema’s high quality and international success had managed to “transform the inferiority that had gripped Iranian intellectuals into self-­confidence.” 61 This was the first time that the production and export of a large number of domestic movies had contributed to selfing. In addition, he appointed two women to cabinet positions and nurtured a lively independent press. However, not all was rosy during Khatami’s presidency and Mohaj­ erani’s leadership of the mcig. Both the female ministers and the press were persecuted by a legal system that was under the authority of the conservative Supreme Leader, Khamenei. In the long run, Khatami was unable to deliver on the larger political and structural promises of his new concepts and reforms against formidable entrenched Islamist opposition and a conservative structure, consisting of unelected bodies and a supreme leader who controlled the judiciary, the armed forces, the security apparatuses, and the broadcast media. In fairness, however, it must be acknowledged that he admirably succeeded in opening up a dynamic, multifaceted, and multilateral public sphere inside the country, which contributed to the efflorescence of all cultural formations—­ cinema, media, music, and performing and visual arts. But, soon, this public sphere began to come under relentless and wide-­ranging attacks. Everywhere there were signs of a deadly power struggle and indeed, an assault on culture, such as the assassination in 1998 of the democratic and secular activists Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar and the writers and opposition figures Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, and Majid Sharif. These and other murders became known as the “serial murders” cases, apparently undertaken by rogue elements within the state security apparatus. Incredibly enough, these elements were arrested, thanks to Khatami’s transparency doctrine. Muslim reformist intellectuals, who were spearheading the reformist press, took these murders as ominous warnings, as Payam-­e Emruz newspaper noted, “Some writers refused to walk out of their homes alone. Many writers would not sleep in the same place at night. Every intellectual in the country felt that a noose was hanging around his neck” (quoted in Sciolino 2000:240).62 The muckraking Muslim journalist Said Hajjarian, the editor of Sobh- ­e Emruz and a leading advisor to Khatami, who had revealed the behind-­the-­scenes security service’s involvement in the extrajudicial serial murders of dissident intellectuals, was badly injured in an attempted assassination. 314

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These developments heightened the sense of fear and outrage, as did the security forces’ attack on a Tehran University dorm in the summer of 1999. As Human Rights Watch reported, by December 2000, more than fifty reformist daily and weekly newspapers had been shut down and more than twenty “reform-­minded journalists, editors, and publishers” were jailed, including Akbar Ganji, another leading muckraking journalist working at Fath newspaper.63 Despite the atmosphere of fear, public intellectuals, including reformist clerics such as Hasan Yusefi Eshkevari, remained creative and bold in their improvised oppositional tactics. In a cat-­and-­mouse game with the hard-­line courts, for example, some of the reformist newspapers resurfaced as soon as they were shut down as differently named clones. Having obtained several licenses for different publications in anticipation of such a situation, when Jame‘eh was banned, the publisher Hamid Reza Jalaeipour and the editor Mashallah Shamsolvaezin put out Tous, looking exactly like its predecessor in typeface, layout, editorial policy, and some of the same personnel; when Tous was shut down, they issued Neshat, similarly echoing its predecessor; and when that was closed, Asr-­e Azadegan was published bearing a similar design.

The ”Iran After the Elections” Conference in Berlin A three-­day conference in April 2000 in Berlin, held by the Heinrich Böll Institut at the House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), designed to evaluate political reforms, revived the cultural invasion debate inside Iran. More than a dozen reformist and independent intellectuals from Iran and the diaspora spoke to about two thousand attendees. On its second day, the conference became an object of tumultuous protest by the exiles, particularly by members of the Communist Workers Party of Iran, who shouted down the speakers, calling them “mercenaries” of the Islamist regime, and prevented them from speaking. There were other less traditional forms of protests as well. A woman reputedly hired by the Islamic government’s embassy in Germany kept dancing around despite the objections of the attendees, disturbing the proceedings; another woman stripped down to her one-­piece swimming suit to protest the imposition of the hijab in Iran; and a former prisoner took off his clothes to show the scars left on his back and buttocks by the whipping and torture he had received in prisons of the Islamic Republic. To avoid further disturbances on the third day, only those invited were allowed in, which resulted in orderly presentations and discussions. The amateur videos of the conference, particularly those showing the actions of the members of the Communist Workers Party, the female dancer, the swimsuit wearer, and the torture victim, were spun by the conservative press and the vvir inside Iran into a weapon to discredit the domestic reform movement, justifying (and/or precipitating) the arrest, interrogation, mistreatment, A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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and imprisonment of all of the participants on their return to the country (two did not return: Changiz Pahlevan and Kazem Kardavani).64 One of the conference participants imprisoned, the respected publisher Shahla Lahiji, later correctly characterized the vvir exposé of the Berlin conference as another version of the Identity show, designed to undermine oppositional thinkers (Zakariai 2000/1379:342–34). In a classic Gramscian manner, the cultural imperialism campaign continued to change shape to remain relevant, ensuring that the hard-­liners remained in power. This discourse is sure to evolve and to resurface periodically to vanquish whatever opposition manages to survive. Ironically, in this latest twist to this ideological process the left in exile and the right at home worked on the same side to weaken the middle—­the reformists in Iran. Within a month of the Berlin event, the Ministry of Justice had banned eleven dailies and five weeklies.

U.S. Public Diplomacy and Iran’s Internal Culture War Intensify To thwart the rising tide of global anti-­American sentiments and terrorism, stoked partly by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and partly by the country’s failures to bring the promised peace, prosperity, and democracy to these occupied countries in the aftermath of toppling the dictatorial regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government invigorated its public diplomacy efforts and its collection of intelligence from foreign sources. This included the traditional methods of creating and strengthening foreign-­language radio and television stations to explain U.S. ideology, ways of life, and policies to outsiders, such as the voa Persian service radio and television channels, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farda Radio, and Iranian exile broadcast and Internet media. Of course, these government media did more than explaining American views to the world, for they also provided venues for U.S. propaganda and public diplomacy, as well as for the production and dissemination of Iranian alternative and oppositional views that could not find an outlet inside Iran.65 The new public diplomacy also included a novel method, which involved the creation in 2005 of the Open Source Center, a new intelligence unit that keeps an eye on the global flow of nonsecret information. The center’s officers, stationed within the cia, scan not only the scholarly publications of target countries but also government-­run and commercially produced broadcast media, newspapers, blogs, geospatial data, and other informal and open sources (such as T-­shirts) to get at the pulse of public sentiments and opinions regarding the United States. It also screens Iranian movies, widely available in the U.S. marketplace, for what insight they reveal about Iranian society, peoples’ way of life, their grievances against the Islamist regime, and their opinions about a range of topics. Scanning the Internet, the officers found that Persian was among the 316

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top five languages that bloggers used and that these blogs were highly informative not only because of their texts but also because of their accompanying images. Snapshots posted on Iranian blogs, for example, showed “how young women are following or flouting ruling clerics’ strictures on head covering and skirt lengths” (Shane 2005). In an indication of the intensification of the cultural war between the two countries, in early 2011, the U.S. Army for many months placed prominent ads in the popular Internet magazine Iranian, managed by Jahanshah Javid from San Francisco, looking for Persian-­language cultural interpreters and translators. The Persian-­language ad copy, which clearly pointed to this cultural war subtext, read as follows: “Words are powerful. Their use for building a bright future is as powerful as an army. Learn about the power of your voice. Choose the profession of army cultural expert/translator in the United States Army. Learn more about it.” 66 The shift from gathering secret information from enemy countries through espionage to collecting and translating information from public sources—­ engaged in by both the U.S. and Iranian governments—­is highly significant in terms of its negative implications for politicizing journalism and cultural exchanges, as well as transnational mediawork.

Public Diplomacy or a Cultural nato? The U.S. government’s allocation in 2006 of $85 million for public diplomacy to destabilize the Islamic Republic unleashed a sudden infusion of funding for media campaigns, which appear to have bolstered democratic and oppositional efforts outside and inside Iran. However, this also validated and strengthened the clerical regime’s charge that the protest movement against it was part of the foreign-­funded cultural invasion, which, following the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan involving nato nations, it dubbed a “cultural nato.” The aim of this cultural nato was to topple the Islamist regime by a “velvet revolution” (Akhavan 2010/1389). The Iranian hard-­line press and government broadcasters hammered on this new nomenclature. According to these, the agents of this new cultural assault were Western enemies, members of the nato, and their fifth-­column domestic supporters and clients—­intellectuals, civil society ngos, media organizations, and professors and students of the humanities and social sciences at home and in the diaspora (Naficy 2010b).

Targeting the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Iranians with Dual Nationalities Khamenei considered the increasing popularity in Iran of the social sciences and humanities theories and theorists, who advocated an autonomous public sphere as a site for democratic struggle, a “worrisome trend,” resulting in A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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the condemnation of leading Western thinkers, among them Jürgen Habermas, John Kean, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rorty, and Max Weber. He also called university professors “commanders” on the front lines of “soft warfare” (Kurzman 2009). Such remarks may have expedited the removal of five social science professors from Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University from teaching in 2009 and the jailing, solitary confinement, interrogation, and charges of espionage against others. Many university sociology students were deprived of education for one or more terms. The serious espionage charge was lodged particularly against Iranian professors with dual nationality and scholars traveling to Iran, such as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Kian Tajbakhsh, and Haleh Esfandiari, and against reporters and filmmakers with dual nationality, such as Roxana Saberi and Maziar Bahari. At least a dozen intellectuals in these fields were forced to appear in show trials, making televisual or other media “confessions” and “interviews,” about their alleged involvements with the U.S. government and civil society organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Open Society Institute, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and the Dutch ngo hivos, and about the revolving door between the U.S. government personnel and such organizations. Ironically and ominously, Esfandiari claims that some of her interrogators were themselves university professors (2009:77). These confessions were not recorded live and nonstop in one session, as they had to be “produced” for maximum effect. Saberi, an American reporter of Iranian Japanese heritage, who states that she was coerced into falsely confessing to spying for the United States to gain her freedom, describes the way her televisual confession was manufactured. The interrogators returned her own clothes to her for her tv appearance and they rehearsed her confession with her by having her use a crib sheet of points that she had to cover. The recording was stopped several times to improve her performance and to cover points she had failed to mention, resulting in three thirty-­minute tapes. Once the higher security officials viewed those tapes, they found other faults, necessitating altogether four recording sessions. “Try to smile once in a while, and use hand gestures,” the interrogators instructed her after the first session. “Look like you’re having a good time,” they advised. When she complained that she had not been released as promised after her confession, she was warned: “Miss Saberi, if you get this right, you’ll be freed very soon. If not, you’ll have to stay for a long time” (2010:99). After a while, deeply ashamed for the way she had tried to win her freedom, Saberi recanted her jailhouse confession. As she told me in an interview, her television confession was not aired in the end because her two-­ week hunger strike, widespread global media reporting on her plight, and wide-­ ranging support from human rights groups, Iranian American and other ngos, and governments (particularly those of the United States and Japan) resulted in her freedom (Naficy 2010c). 318

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If the reformist Green Movement persists, the aforementioned attacks on intellectuals and academic fields of study will likely be transformed into another “cultural revolution” campaign, reminiscent of the one immediately following the revolution of 1978–79, which resulted in the wholesale purification, revision, and Islamization of university and school curricula, textbooks, students, and teaching staff nationwide. Already there are signs of a “rolling” Islamizing at work to combat the new public diplomacy’s threat of soft revolution and the increasing secularization and disenchantment of the public with the regime. For example, in October 2010, high-­ranking officials of the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology declared that the contents of twelve social science and humanities fields would be reevaluated because they are based on materialist Western models that do not accord with “Islamic principles.” This reevalua­tion campaign would include fields such as law, women’s studies, human rights, management, cultural and artistic management, sociology, philosophy, psychology, education, and political science.67 In another crippling development that extended the Islamist regime’s censorship to far beyond its own borders, in March 2011 the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology declared that “writing theses on Iran is forbidden for students outside Iran.” 68 This is the obverse of George W. Bush’s policy that discouraged Iranian graduate students in U.S. universities from conducting their PhD dissertation research inside Iran by issuing them only single-­entry visas, which meant that if they returned to Iran to conduct research, they would have to apply for a new visa to enter the United States, with no guarantee that it would be forthcoming. This forced some students, including one of my own, to change their dissertation topics from Iranian culture and society inside Iran to the culture and society of Iranians in the diaspora. Graduate students were not the only ones under attack inside Iran, for the deputy minister of higher education, Mohammad Mehdynejad Nuri, charged that Iranian professors engaged in “spying under the guise of research.” The process of academic spying as he explained it was as follows: Western universities invite Iranian professors to conferences abroad, where they are “debriefed” from an intelligence viewpoint (takhliyeh ettelaati). There they are paid a “trifle” honorarium, which makes these professors indebted to their sponsors and the Western intelligent services, so that they would continue to feed them information about Iran once they returned home.69 Such mutual politicized and militarized conceptions of academic research and of cross-­cultural exchanges of scholarship are alarming, for they can skew academic research and scholarship and endanger not only the integrity of the academic research but also the lives of the researchers. Since the disputed presidential election of 2009, more protesting intellectuals, academics, journalists, students, bloggers, artists, filmmakers, political activists, and even former officials have been arrested and charged, whether they were beneficiaries of U.S. public diplomacy funding or not, while others were released (Jahanbegloo, Esfandiari, Saberi, and Bahari were released; Tajbakhsh A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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59–60 Embodied protest to government’s silencing of its opponents after the disputed 2009 presidential election. 59 Frame grab from People & Power— Iran: Inside the Protests—10 July 09, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=LSITy_taD3E. 60 Frame grab from Iranian Green Movement, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CMD6KMdrJkk.

was not).70 The taping of mouths, and in some cases the sewing shut of lips, became emblems and forms of embodied protest against the government’s silencing of its opponents (figures 59–60). Iranian intelligence officials claimed that “expatriates function as liaisons between foreign governments and the opposition inside Iran.” These included the former mcig minister Mohajerani and the prominent cleric Mohsen Kadivar, both of whom now live in the United States (Slackman and Kulish 2010). Several political activists were executed. At the same time, President Ahmadinejad who, although a devout Muslim, was the only top leader among the regime who was not a cleric, put on a charm offensive to appeal to Iranian nationalism and undermine the opposition. This was a significant and signifying move, as both Iranian nationalism (historically) and antigovernment opposition (under the IRI) have been secular, even antireligious. To now invoke Iranian nationalism against his internal enemies seemed to the clerical establishment a sacrilegious and treasonous act. He began to admiringly talk about the Achaemenid King Kurosh (Cyrus), and he spoke about an “Iranian school of Islam” or of an “Iranian understanding of Islam,” and he praised the contributions of Iranians to Islam. For the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history he planned to hold a splashy Noruz celebration for the year 1390/2011—­in Persepolis. Many took offense at this cynical, or shrewd, nationalist strategy, which seemed inimical to the Islamic Republic’s Islamic monovocalism and universalism ideologies. The sources of the offense become more clear if we recall that in the initial phase of Islamization 320

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after the revolution there was serious talk among revolutionary leaders about destroying the Persepolis as a symbol of corrupt monarchical regimes (which also happened to be Zoroastrian not Muslim). In addition, Persepolis as the site of the infamous anniversary celebration of the Iranian monarchy under the Shah had acquired a bad name among Islamic hard-­liners, and staging a Noruz celebration there was interpreted as a clear affront to Islam and a clear appeasement of its enemies.71 That many world leaders, including twenty presidents and the Jordanian king, had been invited to it made the new strategy even more controversial.72

Instrumentalizing and Militarizing Culture and the Media In the 2000s, the Americans instrumentalized, even militarized, culture and the media as part of their public diplomacy and global war on terror by embedding journalists, anthropologists, and psychologists into their fighting forces, security agencies, and military prisons, by intervening in the design and launch of telecommunication services such as those offered by telephone and broadband companies to ensure court-­approved wiretapping in criminal and terrorism cases (Savage 2010), and by privatizing and outsourcing many of the functions of the military, security, and intelligence complexes to create what the Washington Post in a special report dubbed “Top Secret America” (Priest and Arkin 2010). The Iranian government, too, reached deeply and widely into the cultural fields to use and abuse them, to bolster itself, and to discredit its opposition at home and abroad. It did this by what seemed to be a reverse of the U.S. approach, but one that achieved the same result: militarizing culture. Instead of privatizing some of the government’s functions through outsourcing as the U.S. government had done, the Iranian government and military took on new, nonmilitary functions, including those in cultural and media fields, and established new private institutes and enterprises to conduct research and produce intellectual capital to counter the cultural nato. This was achieved partly by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (irgc) deepening penetration into cultural and media fields under Ahmadinejad, to whose volunteer Basij Militia Force he had once belonged. It was under his leadership that former irgc commanders, Ali Larijani, Ezzatollah Zarghami, and Mohammad Hosain Saffar-­ Harrandi, were appointed to the highest television and cinema offices in the land, where they installed hard-­line Islamist policies, personnel, and practices in their respective institutions.73 Another notable step in militarizing culture and the media came when in the 2009 postelection period the irgc took over a majority share in the nation’s telecommunication monopoly (to the tune of US $8 billion). This was partially driven by the desire to prevent another massive postelection campaign by protesters who had inventively used the country’s telecommunication and Internet infrastructures to transmit their oppositional videos, pictures, blogs, sloA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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gans, text messages, phone calls, and news clips to the world. These had proved highly influential globally, for they were in turn picked up, echoed, repurposed, and retransmitted widely by the mainstream foreign presses, U.S.-­funded anti– Islamic Republic media, and democratic forces in the diaspora whose own access to Iran was denied by the regime. This takeover allowed the irgc to enhance its monitoring, filtering, and countering of the influx of “foreign ideas and antiregime propaganda” through the Internet (Wehrey et al. 2009:53). Soon the Basij division of the irgc was charged with creating a “cyber army” to counter the soft revolution attacks on the Islamic Republic, allocating the high sum of 5 trillion rials as a budget for that purpose for the Iranian year falling on 2011–12.74 The irgc and the Basij militia also penetrated the most popular national sport in Iran, soccer, causing Radio Farda to state that “these days in whatever corner of Iranian football that you look, you will find a Revolutionary Guard commander’s name, commanders who are either director generals of football clubs, are directors of football organizations in provinces, or are selling and purchasing football teams” (Veisi 2010). By placing military and paramilitary personnel in these pivotal positions, the regime hoped not only to prevent the hijacking of pro-­soccer sentiments by the regime’s opponents—­something they had done years earlier in what was dubbed as an antiregime soccer revolution—­ but also to channel those sentiments into pro-­regime directions. In a further step toward militarizing and Islamizing culture, the commander of the Basij force, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, demanded the Ministry of Education to “enliven” elementary and high school textbooks by “cultivating the culture of martyrdom” among students, while Hamid Reza Hajibabai, the minister of education, declared that the ideological topics of self-­sacrifice and martyrdom would be inserted into school textbooks. As part of this ideological retrenchment, the ministry also ordered that any mention of kings be removed from the history textbooks and that the presence of clerics in the schools become “constant and permanent” to ensure adherence to Islamicate values.75 However, this sort of Islamization of educational institutions and their staff, faculty, curricula, textbooks, and syllabi was an old solution, which had worked in simpler times, immediately after the revolution. In the age of globalization, the Internet, and a new public diplomacy, more imaginative and all-­encompassing measures were needed. It was not sufficient to Islamize knowledge; rather, it was necessary to produce new forms of knowledge and to instrumentalize them in an all-­out effort to neutralize and subdue all internal and external soft oppositions. It was thus that during Ahmadinejad’s presidency the regime’s security apparatuses took over most of the governmental research institutions, seconded to them security agents and interrogators as researchers, and formed scores of new governmental and semigovernmental private research institutions and think tanks, many of them attached to the security, intelligence, and military apparatuses. One of these was the Soft Security Strategic Think Tank (Andish322

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kadeh-­ye Rahbordi-­ye Amniat-­e Narm), which issued studies on the theories of “soft revolution,” “color revolution,” and “velvet revolution,” undertaken in authoritarian states by opposition groups receiving aid from Western countries, particularly from U.S. public diplomacy sources and agents. It published analytical position monographs on these topics, such as the three-­volume Passing through Sedition (Obur az Fetneh) and The Colored Whispers (Zemzemehha-­ye rangi). The latter volume named publishers and writers who it accused of publishing seditious works with the aim of overthrowing the regime using soft power. Several auteur filmmakers were named, such as Baizai, Makhmalbaf, and Golestan.76 Because of their tight imbrication, these apparatuses of security, intelligence, and coercion were in the powerful position of determining the topics of major studies, the personnel to conduct them, and the institutions to be commissioned to carry them out. Budgets were no object. According to the sociologist Majid Mohammadi, “This is precisely what Islamic Republic officials call ‘indigenization of humanities,’ ‘instrumentalization of the results of humanities research,’ or ‘government investment and support for the scientific activities of the private sector’” (2010). One option had been to marginalize the humanities and social sciences hitherto taught and practiced in Iran. This new option was to redefine them and instrumentalize them, the way the U.S. had attempted. To do so in the Iranian context, the results of these commissioned studies were sent up the chains of command for government and military decision making. Some of them were published and disseminated via the same interlocking links and devoted personnel to universities and colleges, many of them under the aegis of these coercive organs, for inclusion in their curricula. They were also disseminated to the general public by means of the mass media, as news, commentary, and editorials, and as topics and materials for television and radio programs, feature films and documentaries, and exhibitions. The fields of the humanities and the social sciences were thus narrowed, channeled, and instrumentalized to serve the propaganda, security, intelligence, and military needs of the regime. The researchers in these governmental and semigovernmental research centers and think tanks, like their counterparts in the cia Open Source Center, scanned the public media to gather information on people’s sentiments and political actions, feeding the results to interrogators and judiciary officials who used them to prosecute dissidents and to obtain “confessions” (many of them false). Some of these confessions were later broadcast on radio and television in what amounted to show trials. At the same time, the interrogators apparently fed the information they thus obtained from their political prisoners back to the appropriate think tanks, whose researchers used them for publications supporting the regime (Mohammadi 2010). Soon the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran took an action that corroborated these contentions. It charged that the state-­r un television and radio, the vvir, had “acted as an arm of intelA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ligence and security agencies implicated in gross human rights violations since the disputed presidential election of June 2009.” Using interviews with former detainees, such as the documentarian Maziar Bahari, and the families of protesters killed by security forces, as well as examining in detail tv programs, the campaign charged that producers and reporters for the vvir, for Press tv, and for the Fars News Agency—­all government owned—­“worked hand in hand with interrogators, intelligence officials, and judiciary officials to obtain false confessions.” They assisted these figures in interrogating and preparing the stage for television “show trials.” Bahari claimed that in the film of his forced confession aired by the vvir, he and the representatives of these state agencies “were reading from scripts” that interrogators had prepared for them.77 This echoes Saberi’s rehearsals and scripted taping of her forced confession. Bahari later sued Press TV in Britain for broadcasting his jailhouse interview, which resulted in Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulating agency, to levy a $155,700 judgment against the network, a fee the network refused to pay. Charging that Press tv not only conducted the interview with Bahari under duress but also that editorially the network was not independent but beholden to the Islamic Republic regime, Ofcom suspended Press tv’s license to broadcast in Britain. Press tv responded that France 24 and Russia tv operated in a similar fashion without license suspension and that Ofcom’s action was due to Press tv’s unflinching coverage of the public discontent in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, “Israeli crimes” in Palestine, and anti-­poverty demonstrations and strikes in Britain.78 The irgc and the Basij Corps were not the only military and security bodies involved in culture and media fields. The Ministry of Intelligence’s actions since Ali Fallahian and Hojjatoleslam Haidar Moslehi took the ministry’s helm offer examples of how it set the agenda and determined the contents of public discourse and film and television programs. It was to combat Western governments’ public diplomacy campaigns against it, to counter the Western predominance of global news flows, and to promote an Iran-­centric perspective on the world, that the regime launched in the late 2000s two television news networks, Shabakeh Khabar (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, irinn) in Persian and Press tv in English. The vision statement of Press tv, the channel that addresses a worldwide audience, hides such political motives under altruistic wording. It places its emphasis on giving voice to the “often neglected voices and perspectives of a great portion of the world” and on “building bridges of cultural understanding.” 79 However, the irinn is openly a government mouthpiece. One major multipart television series that was purportedly produced under Ministry of Intelligence supervision was Secret of Armageddon (Raz-­e Armagedon), written and directed by Said Mostaghasi and produced by Reza Jafarian. As the title and the accompanying ominous music underscored, Secret of Armageddon was an updated and a more menacing version of the Identity program, attacking the new U.S. public diplomacy program and its various domestic and international agents who were supposedly working for a soft overthrow of the 324

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Iranian regime. From 2008 to 2011, each series, consisting of many programs, was produced and aired on a daily basis both on the news channel irinn and on the domestic vvir First Channel. These series were Secret of Armageddon 1 (Raz-­e Armagedon 1), Secret of Armageddon 2: The Army of Shadows (­Raz-­e Armagedon 2: Artesh-­e Sayehha), Secret of Armageddon 3: Temple of Darkness (­Raz-­e Armageddon  3: Ma’bad-­e Tariki), and Secret of Armageddon  4: The Ghosts Project (­Raz-­e Armagedon  4: Prozheh-­ye Ashbah). Featuring interviews with pro-­ government social science scholars, journalists, and various “experts” and “researchers,” and showing stills, films, and news clips from around the world of anti-­Muslim and anti–Islamic Republic incidents, the second series, The Army of Shadows, attempted to establish the existence of a new “Crusade” against Islam and the Islamic Republic, waged with weapons of culture and media. Referring frequently to this as “cultural nato,” various speakers claimed that this crusade was organized by Zionists, Jews, Baha’is, and evangelical Christians who, inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Freemasonry, and other ideologies, are conspiring to destroy Islam and take over Iran and the world.80 The third series, Temple of Darkness, carried such sensationalistic program titles as “Chevaliers of the Temple,” “Masonic Manifesto,” “Malkam’s House of Forgetfulness,” “On the Service and Treason of Intellectuals,” “Oppression by Media,” “Antiquarian Racism,” “Enlightened Dictatorship,” and “Iranian Lawrence.” This series focused primarily on the penetration of Freemasonry into Iran from the Qajar era until the end of the Pahlavi regime, choosing for particular condemnation the role of “pseudo” intellectuals, universities, and publishers as its primary agents.81 The fourth series, The Ghosts Project, not only attacked Freemasonry as the source of Western Enlightenment threatening Islam and the East but also humanism, globalization, digitization, and the Internet as imperialistic tools and projects. Program titles included “Invasion by Electronic Waves,” “Shock Corridor,” “Digital Cold War,” and “Now Armageddon.” This attack on humanism and its cognates occurred just a little more than a century after a similar assault on the tenets of humanism spearheaded by Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri in 1907 during the Constitutional Revolution. The medium and form of delivery of the attack had changed, from locally printed pamphlets to globally distributed television, but the target had remained the same. Although a century apart, both assaults were driven by the crises of legitimacy that internal dissent in Iran had forced on the Islamic clerical order and by the modernism and colonialism rampant in one epoch and the postmodernism and imperialism dominant in another. The critic and journalist Pejman Karimi hosted The Ghosts Project’s programs on the history of Iranian cinema, which presented this history as peopled with non-­Muslim ethnoreligious minorities and secular Muslims bent on bringing humanism and its secular neocolonial values to Iran. Thus one of the assets of the Iranian cinema, the role of ethnoreligious minorities, was turned into a liability, as these minorities were accused of being agents of A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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Zionism, Freemasonry, and Western colonialism. The programs attacked top filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Ghobadi, and Jafar Panahi, as well as international film festivals that bestowed their awards on these directors’ films, as the latest culprits in this project to rob Iran of its indigenous Islamic culture. “These filmmakers,” he charged, “make films inside Iran, but these have nothing to do with Iran and they are not seen in Iran,” conveniently ignoring the effects of widespread government censorship on what people may see on the screens. The Ministry of Intelligence’s influence went beyond producing such television series as Identity and Secret of Armageddon and extended to promoting the view that film and the media should be regarded from a security vantage point. This was another new, but ominous, ideological repositioning of cinema because of its micropolitics of oppression, to be fully unfolded in the future. One expression of this microphysics soon emerged: the production of films and television serials with characters and story lines that favored the government line and cast aspersion on the opposition. For example, the television serial Where To So Fast (Beh Koja Chenin Shetaban) suggested that the bad guys were deviants or that dissidents were spying for the British and in touch with oppositional Internet bloggers and journalists, and the Black Intelligence (Hush-­e Siah) serial posited that Internet journalists were spying on Iranians. In these television serials and such feature movies as Parisa Bakhtavar’s Tambourine (Dayereh Zangi, 2007), these shady characters are tracked down and punished by efficient and sophisticated police and security services. In this way, audiences are encouraged not only to read the serials and movies from military and security viewpoints but also to draw a political and practical lesson about the cost of aberrant and oppositional readings and practices. In its instrumentalization and militarization of culture the regime took a multidimensional and multinational approach; it tried to influence not only political and news programming but also entertainment programming, and it aimed to reach not only domestic audiences but also international viewers. All this was part of a calculated effort to dominate without appearing to be dictatorial, to become hegemonic, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, by means of recruiting the consent of the governed—­through persuasion, not coercion (1988a). Soon after establishing irinn and Press tv, in September 2010, the government started a new movie channel for Arabic speakers, iFilm, a satellite channel designed to air twenty-­four hours a day “live quizzes on arts, backstage docu­ mentaries on films and ongoing productions, film reviews, short-­length films and documentaries.” It estimated its target viewers to be “around 300 million across the globe.” 82 The channel’s programs were to be dubbed into Arabic in Syria, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. The idea was to present a positive view of the primarily Shiite Iran to restive Arab and Muslim worlds, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslims and fear the rise of Shiite Iran as a regional power, and to emphasize similarities and friendship. As a public diplomacy ef326

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fort, the iFilm channel shrewdly combined IRI’s political and commercial interests, for its aim was also to create a larger market for Iranian movies and television serials, which because of their Islamic moral values and segregated gendered spaces, aesthetics, and dress codes could be profitably screened without fear, or necessity, of state censorship in the Arab and Muslim worlds. In early 2012, the Iranian regime opened another front in its televisual public diplomacy. It inaugurated Hispantv, a Spanish language satellite channel that was to offer news, documentaries, and other types of programming. While the ostensible reason for it was to increase understanding between a Muslim Iran and a Christian Latin America, the real aim was to undermine American hegemony in its own hemisphere, where there existed sufficient grievances vis-­à-­v is the U.S. meddling in national internal affairs. As a reporter for Tehran Bureau noted, “By projecting Iran’s worldview into countries where the main player has been the United States for more than a century, Hispantv reflects Iran’s desire to build upon a narrative it shares with Latin American leftists: triumph over the unjust American global bully (Taj 2012). That this televisual front was opened soon after visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Cuba of Iranian president Ahmadinejad corroborated the tight imbrication of realpolitik with public diplomacy. As the cultural war at home wore on and persuasion faltered, the government took another ominous step in turning the heat up on oppositional filmmakers whose movies were exhibited internationally, treating them the same way as it had the dual nationals and social science and humanities researchers. In August 2010, Javad Shamaghdari, the deputy director of the mcig for cinema and audiovisual affairs, declared that by “identifying and aggrandizing dark points” of society to “receive prizes abroad” Iranian filmmakers were committing something “worse than spying.” Echoing the charge against social scientists and humanities thinkers, he called this “cultural treason” and announced that films that painted a dark and critical picture of Iran would henceforth be refused foreign exhibition permits. If their makers exhibited them abroad without mcig permission, their minimum punishment would be deprivation from work for one year. This was tantamount to forcing dissident filmmakers into an internal exile, where they were deprived of their livelihood, association, and expression.83 This could hamstring and stifle creativity and either push cinema toward cheap entertainment or overly politicize the remaining alternative cinema and even push it into the underground.84 Signs of both trends have emerged.

Filmmakers Strike Back at Home In 2009, many filmmakers came out in support of the reform movement and its presidential candidates, one of whom, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was a former Ayat Film member and prime minister, producing lively campaign tv spots and A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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films, and many boldly supported the postelection protests. Some filmmakers were arrested, while others, such as Majid Majidi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, and Fatemeh Motamed Aria, were banned from leaving the country as they were about to board planes. These and other forms of internal exile did not deter the filmmakers and their supporters, however. Many launched discursive campaigns of their own using the media and the Internet. As a jury member at the Montreal Film Festival in 2009, Jafar Panahi wore green to signal his support for the emerging Green Movement and held up a photograph of Neda Agha-­Soltan, whose on-­camera shooting death in Tehran streets, propagated via the Internet and news media, had made her a powerful symbol of protest and freedom seeking.85 Soon after the election Panahi was shooting, without official permission, a social-­protest film with Mohammad Rassoulof, which led to their arrest in Panahi’s home—­as a preemptive measure, a new censorship tactic (fourteen others were also arrested there, but these were released later). Panahi was imprisoned for some months and all his films were banned and his personal film collection confiscated. These arrests caused fifty prominent filmmakers, actors, and artists to write a public letter to the mcig and the judiciary, asking for the release of Panahi and Rassoulof, correctly reminding the authorities that “in the past thirty years it was the filmmakers who as cultural ambassadors brought worldwide prestige to the name of Iran.” 86 The prestigious Cannes International Film Festival retaliated in 2010 by choosing Panahi as a jury member, perhaps the first instance in the festival’s history in which a sitting jury member was held in prison. His empty seat on the stage where the jury gathered and the prominent display of his name were sharp reminders of his absence. After seventy-­seven days of incarceration, Panahi went on a hunger strike in Evin Prison and in a public letter, via the French periodical La Règle du Jeu, dramatically declared that “I swear upon what I believe in, the cinema,” that “I will not cease my hunger strike until my wishes are satisfied.” These included being allowed to retain an attorney, visits with family members, and freedom until sentenced.87 For a filmmaker who, like Makhmalbaf, had begun as a Muslim believer, to now swear allegiance not to Islam but to cinema was another indication of the changing mood of the filmmakers and the intelligentsia toward modernity and secular reformation. For the first time Kiarostami also published an open letter, condemning Panahi and Rassoulof’s arrest. It stated, “Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rassoulof are two filmmakers of the Iranian independent cinema, a cinema that for the past quarter of a century has served as an essential cultural element in expanding the name of this country across the globe. They belong to an expanded world culture, and are a part of international cinematic culture. I wish for their immediate release from prison knowing that the impossible is possible.” He emphasized that “filmmaking is not a crime. It is our sole means of making a living and thus not a choice, but a vital necessity” (Mackey 2010a). When his highly nuanced film Certified Copy (Copie Conformé, 2010) won the Best Actress 328

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award at Cannes for Juliette Binoche, Kiarostami called Panahi’s treatment “intolerable” (Dargis 2010). The mcig promptly banned the public screening of Certified Copy in Iran, ostensibly due to the “improper attire” of Binoche (she wears a low-­cut outfit in the film). This was not unusual, as Kiarostami’s films had suffered from deliberate government inattention, a form of censorship tantamount to banning. On 11 November 2010 Panahi released the text of his defense to the court, which because of its explanatory power is noted here. “My case is a perfect example of being punished before committing a crime,” he began. “You are putting me on trial for making a film that at the time of our arrest was only 30 percent shot.” Then he responded in details to the various macro and micro charges brought against him. He denied that he was making a film to “incite chaos and protest,” and somewhat disingenuously added, “I am a socially committed filmmaker not a political one” (his later films are highly political). On being charged with “participating in demonstrations,” he stated, “no Iranian filmmaker was allowed to use his camera to capture the events but you cannot forbid an artist to observe!” He responded to the charge of “making a film without a permit” by correctly pointing out that the parliament had passed no laws “regarding the need for a permit to make a film. There are only some internal memos [about this] that change every time the deputy minister changes.” On the charge of “not giving a screenplay to actors,” he replied that in his type of films, which involve working mostly with nonprofessional actors, “this is a very routine way of filmmaking practiced by myself and many of my colleagues.” He admitted that he had signed a public declaration, but reminded the court that this was “signed by thirty-­seven prominent filmmakers to express our concern about the turn of the actual events in the country.” “Unfortunately,” he declared, “instead of listening to our concerns we were accused of treachery.” He denied that he had masterminded an antiregime demonstration at the opening of the Montreal Film Festival and, finally, against the charge of giving interviews to Persian-­language media abroad, he sarcastically intoned that “I know for fact that there are no laws forbidding us from giving interviews.” He offered this background for his attempt at making a film without authorization: For five years he has been prevented from making films, two years earlier he was refused permission to start his film Return (Bazgasht), about the war with Iraq, and his completed films were denied exhibition permits. Near the end, he reminded the court of another irony about his imprisonment and the acclaim his films—­and by proxy Iranian art-­cinema films—­had received internationally: “The space given to Jafar Panahi’s festival awards in Tehran’s Museum of Cinema is much larger than his prison cell.” He closed his letter by expressing his fears about divisions and divisiveness in the country, which are rooted in “hatred and malice,” offering, instead, “tolerance, reconciliation, and compassion” as the only “honorable solution” for the crisis bedeviling the nation.88 The judiciary’s response to Panahi’s call for tolerance and reconciliation was A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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an unprecedented combination of a stiff prison term and other measures that consigned him to a veritable internal exile. According to his lawyer, Farideh Gheyrat, he was sentenced to an additional six years in prison and was “banned from making films, writing any kind of scripts, traveling abroad and talking to local and foreign media for twenty years.” Rassoulof was also sentenced to the same six-­year prison term (Mackey 2010b). These stiff sentences are reminiscent of what the prosecutor of Antonio Gramsci, the renowned Italian communist theoretician and party leader, had said upon convicting him in 1928 to a long prison term. Apparently echoing Mussolini, the prosecutor said: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years” (quoted in Gramsci 1988:10). The Iranian authorities can prevent the brains of independent filmmakers from functioning only if they imprison them for a long period or turn the country itself into a vast prison; but in the latter case they may not succeed, for there will always be underground and interstitial filming or external exile, from where other types of filmmaking can be initiated. Panahi and Mirtahmasb produced one such audacious underground film This Is not a Film (In Film Nist, 2010), discussed in another chapter in this volume. Let out of Iran to attend Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival in September 2009 where his allegorical film, The White Meadows (Keshtzarha-­ye Sepid, 2009), was being screened in competition, Rassoulof lashed out at the Iranian regime. “I come from a country full of contradictions and suffering, where there is a dictatorship,” where, he told a news conference, “censorship does not allow me to talk openly about what happens in my country.” In his film, shot in the picturesque and eerie landscape near Lake Urumiyeh, a man is tortured for refusing to say that the lake is blue. He sees the lake in different colors, depending on the time of day and light quality. Clearly this is a reference to widespread torture practiced by the regime to force false confessions. Rassoulof stated, “In Iran we must see things as the government wants us to see them,” adding that the film was “a clandestine, underground film” (Grognou 2009). Another ardent Muslim journalist-­filmmaker who went from making documentaries and tv films supporting the Islamic Republic to becoming a regime critic was Mohammad Nurizadeh. He resorted to an oppositional tactic, so effectively used against the Shah, of writing public letters to government officials. He wrote six letters in a short span of time to the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, whom he addressed affectionately and respectfully as “Dear Father,” signing them as “Your Offspring.” In the first lengthy letter, he critiqued government violence against peaceful demonstrators opposing Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection. He began by recounting how he had been a zealous supporter. “Perhaps more than any other writer and filmmaker during the years you led the country, I wrote materials and made documentaries supporting you. . . . We were so united with you that we did not see ourselves.” He further stated that he and other regime supporters had agreed with silencing opposition papers and writers because they “feared that criticism might reduce the regime’s popular330

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ity.” Then he took Khamenei to task and chastised him: “Dear one, during all these years I never saw or heard you, as the top official of this imperiled glorious country, to even once personally accept the responsibility of a mistake, delay, or inaction.” He asked him to get down from his high leadership horse and admit that the election and its aftermath had not been handled with the justice and fairness of the first Islamic Caliphate under Imam Ali, with which the Islamic Republic liked to compare itself and to which it aspired. “Apologize to the people,“ he urged him, “for your apology can cool down the people’s anger and give them hope.” He ended the letter in a warning: “A regime that has no supporters, what does it have?” Each letter became more passionate, more personal, and more pointed in its criticism, identifying specific clerical and leading figures, ideological tenets, institutions, or conducts for criticism. These public letters, which bore such lofty greetings as “In the Name of the Creator of Beauty,” “In the Name of the Creator of Freedom,” or “In the Name of the Creator of Justice,” instead of the usual Islamic moniker, “In the Name of God,” resulted in a rather heavy price for the filmmaker. The first three letters (along with a note about the head of the judiciary, Sadeq Larijani) landed him in trouble: he was charged with propaganda against the regime, insulting the Supreme Leader, the head of judiciary, the president, and Mashhad’s Friday prayer leader, and he was condemned to three and a half years of imprisonment and fifty lashes. He wrote the others from solitary confinement.89 Perhaps as an indication that his criticism had hit the target, on 10 December 2011, the government struck back in a novel tactic—­using the filmmaker’s own unedited footage to make a film to discredit and incriminate him. Released on YouTube, the film contained Nurizadeh’s family pictures, home movies, and other footage such as that showing him praising the Supreme Leader, all mobilized against the filmmaker. According to Nurizadeh, some ten security and intelligence officials of the IRGC had visited his father’s home, where he was making what he called a “confidential film” about the Supreme Leader, arrested him and confiscated his personal footage and films, and then used these to fabricate a self-­incriminating video against him. He elaborated: “This is stolen footage from a confidential film. They can use the materials of the film to build a case against me as a spy and a traitor but it is not permissible to take my personal computer and use my family photos and videos against me. I am not speaking from a religious point of view but from a societal and legal perspective. This is part of the most essential ethical and legal rights of human beings.” He was unmoved by the government tactic, for in speaking to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Nurizadeh promised to continue public letters campaign: “I certainly will continue writing my letters, I will write my weekly letters until the presidential elections.” 9 0 Within a few weeks the number of letters had reached 19. Another novel protest approach emerged when prominent filmmakers refused to sit on the jury of the country’s premiere film festival, the Fajr InternaA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tional Film Festival, which occurs every February. The actress Fatemeh Gudarzi, the veteran actor Ezzatollah Entezami, the screenwriters Minoo Farshchi and Farhad Tohidi, and the directors Asghar Farhadi and Kiarostami brought various excuses, such as foreign travel and illness, for not accepting jury duty for 2010. The leading directors Banietemad and Rasul Sadrameli, supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Mousavi, refused to enter their films in the festival. And some directors, whose films were screened at the festival, refused to appear in postscreening press conferences and interviews. Many prominent foreign filmmakers in sympathy with their Iranian counterparts refused to attend or to enter their works. Among these were Ken Loach (Britain), Philippe Lioret (France), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Elia Suleiman (Palestine). Festival organizers countered by slating for screening some previously banned films, hoping this action would neutralize the protesters’ boycott.91 The action on Fajr followed an earlier important move in October 2009 by initially 136 Iranian filmmakers to shun the Cinema Vérité festival in Tehran, the premiere new national festival of documentary films, organized annually by the mcig’s Documentary and Experimental Film Center (the number increased to 142). This was to object to the impediments the government had placed on covering the street protests. They wrote: “We can see so many films that potentially could have been made these days, but we are not allowed to make them. Therefore, due to our commitment and respect for the truth and the reality, we have come to the decision to not take part in the forthcoming festival, either as documentary filmmakers, critics or viewers.” 92 The Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers also issued a public letter protesting both the detention of two of its members, Maziar Bahari and Hosain Delbar, and the government’s ban on covering the demonstrations. As borne out by these statements, one opposition tactic the filmmakers used was to publicly critique the government ban on independent documentarists’ coverage of social events. Another was to publicly critique the state-­r un media’s coverage that the government did allow. On behalf of the documentary filmmakers’ society, Banietemad released a video letter containing such a critique, which because of its nuanced presentation and the multiple issues it raised and the warnings it sounded is quoted here in full: We are documentary filmmakers. Our work is to discover and tell the truth. Truth can only be found when all aspects of reality are told. In the course of recent events in our country, our national media, by deliberately hiding the realities, is making it impossible for the public to access the truth. We are documentary filmmakers. Our work is through media. The National Iranian Television belongs to the entire Iranian society and should be committed to represent social events truthfully and different points of view in their diversity. It should not be the mouthpiece of a specific faction and ignore a vast part of society. 332

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We are documentary filmmakers. Our work is art and we are committed to the culture, art, and language of our country. The language of journalism should respect the dignity and honor of a society. The National Iranian Television, by distorting and suppressing the news and with the use of degrading rhetoric, makes lying and slander acceptable. It also addresses people with degrading and abusive vocabulary and thus provokes the people into confrontation and uproar. We warn: Under the present tense circumstances depriving the society of a peaceful and respectful discourse can result in violent reactions; a society whose people up to the Election Day were promoting their diverse views peacefully and respectfully. We warn: This kind of action means sharing the responsibility for any kind of violence, terror, social disruption, and human tragedies. It divides and antagonizes a society that is able to create unity by justice. In the last 30 years, each and every citizen of this country has shared happiness and sorrow. They have fought side-­by-­side, brought sacrifices and lost loved ones. We are a people with a history of several thousand years. We all belong together and share this history and this country. Do not tear us apart.93 In the escalating internal public diplomacy struggles between filmmakers and the government, the latter not only retaliated against individual filmmakers but also against their professional associations. The House of Cinema, foremost among such associations, which had consistently come to the aid of the filmmakers who are its members, defending their right of free coverage of social events and the release of incarcerated filmmakers and was involved in the boycott attempts of state-­sanctioned film festivals, came under increasing attack both from the mcig officials charged with running the film industry and from the state media, such as Fars News Agency, which derided it as “House of BBC.” Public diplomacy war with Britain and the BBC intensified. In September 2011, Katayoun Shahabi, whose company, Sheherazad Media International, coproduced, distributed, and marketed Iranian art-­house films to the international markets, became embroiled in the soft power public diplomacy struggles between Iran and Britain, as she along with five independent filmmakers were arrested. She and Mohsen Shahrnazdar, Hadi Afarideh, Nasser Saffarian, Shahram Bazdar, and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb were all charged with “collaborating” with BBC Television. “This network of anti-­Iran people were collaborating with the BBC in a cover-­up to fulfill the needs of the British secret service in exchange for big sums of money,” stated the state-­r un Young Journalists’ Club, quoting a source involved in the arrests (Dehghan 2011). However, Sadeq Saba, head of BBC Persian, denied that the detainees were working for the channel. “The people said to be arrested have no connection with the BBC Persian. . . . They are independent documentary film-­makers and we have shown films belonging to A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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some of them after buying rights to broadcast them in the past but these films were never commissioned by BBC Persian and were produced independently” (ibid.). The arrests were apparently in retaliation to Bozorgmehr Sharafeddin’s film, The Ayatollah’s Seal (Khat O Neshan-­e Rahbar, 2011), which the bbc Persian had broadcast. This was an analytical film that examined dramatically and critically the rise of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from a lower rank moderate cleric to the position of the Supreme Leader spearheading crackdown on political dissent, whose reception in Iran the Islamic Republic began jamming only moments after it had started.94 Saba stated that, “the film was a result of our own research and no one from those who appear to have been arrested were involved in making it” (Dehghan 2011). Indeed, Sharafeddin is employed by the BBC Persian in London. Shahabi was released two months later. Finally, in the early January 2012 the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammed Hosseini, declared that he was closing down the House of Cinema. The ostensible reason was a technicality—­not having the necessary operating permit. The real reason was the intensifying internal public diplomacy warfare. The House of Cinema organizers responded by promising to sue the ministry, stating: “It is surprising that after nearly 20 years of operation under this name, a name that has been used in all ministry directives, suddenly the House of Cinema is said to lack the legal permit to exist.” 95 By shutting down the House of Cinema the state silenced one more professional, independent civil society institution, reflecting “the near-­complete ascendance of hard-­line political operatives through all segments of the Iranian government” (Gladstone and Afkhami 2012).

Filmmakers Strike Back in Exile Given these domestic difficulties and the government’s militarization of culture and the tightening censorship noose, the dreaded and simultaneously alluring external exile increasingly became a viable option for some filmmakers. Bahman Ghobadi, whose No One Knows about Persian Cats (Kasi az Gorbehha­ye Irani Khabar Nadareh, 2009), about the explosive underground music scene, cowritten with his friend Roxana Saberi and completed five months before the June elections, presciently depicted Tehran as a powder keg ready to go off, was arrested and his film banned. He was eventually allowed to leave the country; he now lives in exile in different places, Iraqi Kurdistan and Germany among them, an exile he has characterized as involuntary. “I was not willing to leave my homeland. They practically threw me out,” Ghobadi told Radio Farda. “Several times they called me into the Ministry of Intelligence, . . . and several times they told me it is best that you pick up your suitcase and leave the country. . . . It was only after Roxana Saberi’s story that I felt my life is in danger; that’s why I left the country” (quoted in Qasemfar 2009). Another push factor for his ex334

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ile was that he was suffering from a “serious depression” because his films either were banned or released on the black market.96 For artists, writers, and filmmakers such conditions of deprivation from self-­expression and livelihood are tantamount to internal exile, with its own economic and psychic traumas. To escape these oppressive measures and their depressing results, he not only chose exile but also decided on a novel distribution method. He henceforth offered all his films on dvd “to the Iranian people free of charge and with pride” (quoted in Qasemfar 2009). How this strategy will work out in practice remains to be seen. Makhmalbaf, residing since 2005 in exile in Europe with other members of his filmmaking family, became a spokesman for the Green Movement, issuing Internet videos critical of the restoration of Ahmadinejad and fruitlessly urging foreign governments not to recognize his presidency. He later dedicated his lifetime achievement award from the Nuremberg Human Rights Film Festival to the cleric Mehdi Karroubi, a presidential candidate in the election of 2009, who had boldly charged Tehran prison authorities of sodomizing young girls and boys arrested during the postelection protests. In 2009 Makhmalbaf dedicated his Freedom to Create award to Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, once heir apparent to Khomeini, who fell into disfavor for his critique of his mentor, including of his rule of the jurisprudent concept, and donated his prize money of 50,000 British pounds to help victims of the postelection crackdown. Makhmalbaf also called for “smarter” international sanctions against the Islamic Republic (Black 2009). The actress Golshifteh Farahani told a panel discussion on Iranian exile filmmaking at the British Museum in London that I had helped organize that she was harassed by both Iranians and Americans: she was blacklisted by the Iranian government for acting without permission and without proper hair cover in Ridley Scott’s film Body of Lies (2008), and she faced difficulties signing an acting contract in the United States due to a government embargo against doing business with Iran, forcing her to sign with a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Pictures, which produced the film. When she returned home, Iranian authorities confiscated her passport for seven months and accused her of being “hired by the cia to engage in prostitution in Hollywood” (Mostofi 2010). Not at home either in Iran or in the United States, she chose exile in a third country, France, from where she recorded a dramatic protest music video about freedom, Silence (Sokut), with the exiled composer Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh. (One lyrical refrain goes, “Don’t believe my silence, I am a powder keg.”) 97 After screening her film The Rake (Darkhish, 2008), based on Franz Kafka’s short story about prison torture, “In the Penal Colony,” at the Nuremberg Human Rights Film Festival, the young filmmaker Narges Kalhor applied for political asylum in Germany. Made before the 2009 election protests, the ten-­ minute antitorture film is about a machine that brutally punishes criminals by carving the commandments they have violated into their flesh. Because she made the film without permission, and in part inspired by the rising opposiA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tion movement in Iran, Kalhor felt the publicity about it would land her in jail if she returned home. Her case is newsworthy, because her father, Mahdi Kalhor, himself an artist, is Ahmadinejad’s close adviser on media affairs. In a YouTube interview with Hana Makhmalbaf, Narges Kalhor states that she is not alone, that there are other children of government officials and millions of others who are in the Green Movement. Her father responded from Iran that “she is duped by the enemies,” advising her not to become their “tool against her own country.” 98 This case illustrates the complexity and intimacy of the cultural struggles, which pit not only citizens against the state but also children against parents. It also demonstrates the evolution of the Internet cinema, whereby one film breeds other films, interviews, and reactions, creating a multilateral global echo chamber of voices and countervoices. Babak Payami, whose earlier fiction film about Iranian elections, Secret Ballot (Ra’y-­e Makhfi, 2001), had made a name for him, also chose exile in Canada after being harassed by Iranian security agents over his film Silence between Two Thoughts (Sokut Bein-­e Do Fekr, 2003). The film dealt with the crisis of faith of an executioner who must marry a female victim and remove her virginity before executing her so as to prevent her from going to heaven. In exile, Payami made a fourteen-­minute agitprop film about the most recent elections, called Iran: A Struggle for Freedom (2010). According to its ending credits, the film was “commissioned and coproduced in cooperation with the National Endowment for Democracy for its 2010 Democracy Award honoring the Green Movement for Democracy in Iran.” 99 Payami coproduced, wrote, and directed the film, while two other Iranian dissidents abroad, Azar Nafisi and Mohsen Namjoo, narrated and scored it, respectively. Using iconic images from Iranian community journalists and Internet videos and interviews with foreign dissidents, the film attempts to contextualize the current Green Movement diachronically, in the history of Iranians’ drive toward modernization and democratization in the past two centuries, and synchronically, within the worldwide democratic ­movements—­from Cuba to Nigeria and from Pakistan to Poland. This was one of the first films to openly acknowledge receiving funding and assistance from U.S. public diplomacy sources.100 Clearly, this was one salvo in the war of new public diplomacy between United States and Iran, motivated by both political and personal grievances of its maker against the Iranian regime. The Iranian British director and actor Rafi Pitts engaged in a kind of wish-­ fulfillment fictional narrative in his taut Hunter (Shekarchi, 2009), using the Iranian presidential elections as its context. In it an Iranian night watchman named Ali (played by Pitts) discovers that his wife and child have accidentally been killed in the reelection crossfire between dissidents and security forces. Enraged, he goes on a revenge shooting with his hunting rifle, firing down onto a highway from a nearby hill, killing the policemen who had killed his family. What Ali accomplishes is perhaps the wish of myriad Iranians who lost their loved ones in the postelection violence without recourse to justice—­or violence. 336

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However, as Peter Brunette wrote, although the film is “impeccable on a purely formal level . . . audiences will wait in vain for a satisfying emotional, political or thematic payoff” (2010). In what has become a practice by Iranian exile directors—­dedicating their awards to directors who are under attack at home—­Hana Makhmalbaf dedicated to the imprisoned director Mohammad Nurizadeh the Best Director award she received for her film Green Days (Ruzha-­ye Sabz, 2010) at the Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. “He ignored his own interests and expediencies for the sake of the people of our country,” she said forcefully. “He taught us that you could not stand by the river and watch the flood sweep people, contending that I am an artist and my job is only to admire the river’s beauty. Nurizadeh could have stood by power and achieve wealth and prestige and be recognized by the regime as a great national artist on the condition of closing his eyes to so much blood, so many prisoners, and so much injustice. However, he chose to forego power, wealth, freedom, and even his art, so as to remain human. . . . This prize is honored to be presented to him.” 101 Likewise, Shirin Neshat added the following caption to the beginning of her first fictional feature film, Women Without Men (Zanan-­e Bedun-­e Mardan, 2009), which dealt with another politically tumultuous time in recent Iranian history, the toppling of Premier Mosaddeq in 1953: “This film is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran, from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009.” Because of globalization, new public diplomacy, and the militarization of culture everywhere, living and working in exile does not make the filmmakers and artists and their works immune to the political and other machinations of national governments and their allies. Iran’s official film organs, such as the Farabi Cinema Foundation and the National Film Archive of Iran, which own the negatives, or have the distribution and exhibition rights, to certain Iranian movies, hesitate, or sometimes refuse, to send to international film festivals the prints of opposition filmmakers who have gone into exile and who work against the Islamic Republic. Thus blackballed, the exiles’ filmic presence in international film festivals is reduced, even if they may be personally present there (unless they have smuggled their film prints abroad). Sometimes, even the screening of an exile-­made film by a domestically blackballed filmmaker becomes hostage to national and public diplomacy politics. For example, the slated screening at the Beirut International Film Festival of Hana Makhmalbaf’s Green Days, set during the protests that followed Ahmadinejad’s reelection, which mixed the fictional drama of a young woman who joins the protest with amateur documentary footage from the protests, became entangled in the politics of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Beirut in October 2010. To spare Ahmadinejad’s feelings, the Lebanese government pressed festival organizers to postpone the screenings until his visit was over (Mackey 2010a). In response, Makhmalbaf posted from her exile an English-­language letter on her family website, adA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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dressed to “Cinema Lovers of Lebanon,” which began with this statement: “I was happy to think that by watching the film Green Days, you will see a realistic tale of Iran’s elections. A green election which the Iranian regime turned into blood red after they killed tens and arrested thousands.” She warned the Lebanese that “Ahmadinejad stole our votes yesterday and will steal your trust today,” ending by urging them to “turn your homes into a [film] festival to combat censorship,” the way Iranians had done.102 Another interesting but murky case of the consequences of exilic risk taking is that of the fifty-­five-­year old filmmaker Daryush Shokof living in Germany, whose seventy-­five-­minute film, Iran Prison (Iran Zendan, 2009), strongly critiques the maltreatment, torture, and rape of political prisoners after the disputed Ahmadinejad reelection. The film’s screenplay is based on Shokof’s interviews with sixteen former prisoners, and some of the former prisoners appear and reenact scenes in it. In late May 2009, before going to Paris to screen his film, while sitting on a bench in one of Cologne’s central squares, the Friesenplatz, he was abducted by four Arabic-­speaking men. They blindfolded, gagged, handcuffed, and drove the filmmaker to an apartment, where they stowed him in the basement. While he was not hurt there, he was threatened by one of the abductors who, accusing him of “blasphemy,” told him in English with a heavy Arabic accent: “You have insulted Islam, you have insulted the regime, we’re going to kill you, you have to stop the release of your film.” Shokof had been a public critic of the Iranian movies screened in international festivals, but he claimed he was not against Islam but against the Islamic Republic. Two weeks later, he was found near the Rhine River wet and disoriented. “I am convinced that there is a connection between my kidnapping and the Iranian regime,” Shokof said from Cologne, where he remained under police protection (Grieshaber 2010). This case feeds into widespread reports among Iranians that the Iranian regime has been enlisting friendly foreign agents and mercenaries, allegedly Palestinian Hamas members and Lebanese Hezbollah militia, to carry out some of its dirty deeds against its opposition, both inside and outside Iran. Former high-­ranking Revolutionary Guard officers and intelligence agents of the regime who recently defected to the West corroborated such reports in interviews with the Guardian.103 While the Iranian embassy in Berlin did not respond to requests for comment on Shokof’s case, in Geneva Iran’s top human rights official, Mohammad Javad Larijani, denied that his country had any involvement in his abduction, suggesting the filmmaker had fabricated the story. “My general guess is that he tried to promote his film by making these allegations” (Grieshaber 2010). In addition to such harassment, the real risk of living in exile for filmmakers is irrelevancy and despondency. As I have shown in my earlier work, with some exceptions, writers, poets, artists, and filmmakers risk losing their audience when they go into exile, where their native cultural, linguistic, and artistic 338

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mastery and fluency are severely compromised (Naficy 1993b). The result, after a period of furious but ultimately futile political activism, is often depression, despondency, and doubt. A New York Times reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, had it right when he noted this about the recent postelection exiles: “They may be linked in and active for a while, but gradually as the months, and years, go by, many exiles battle depression, the gnawing sense that removed from the fray, they no longer matter. Some focus on winning the small battles—­like loosening sanctions and banning sales to Iran of certain software applications, a goal they recently achieved—­that they hope will lead to bigger victories” (2010). Also, Iranians in the diaspora are not homogenous and united; each émigré wave has its own attributes and politics. Those born and bred in the diaspora often distrust the older political exiles, and the latter do not appreciate the youngsters’ issues, which are not necessarily with Iran, or at least with regime change in Iran. If these historical and contextual accounts are any indications, the civilizational clash and the clash of soft-­cum-­hard public diplomacy between the Islamic Republic and Western nations and between the Islamist regime and its opponents at home and abroad will continue to evolve, shape-­shift, multiply, and intensify in the future. At the same time, if the regime loses legitimacy among not only its opponents but also its proponents, as is indicated by the continued acts of dissent from those who once were its supporters, more than its soul will be at stake.

The Public’s Role in Public Diplomacy Set either against the state, or for it, Iranians were the fourth force in the public diplomacy discursive formations, by playing, negotiating, and haggling with the two sovereign states, Iran and the United States, and with the exiles and their mediaworks. They were not passive and hapless consumers, unproblematically hailed by any one of these forces and their persuasive mediaworks targeting them, without exerting some meaningful or resistive discursive labor of their own, playing one against the other to achieve moments or pockets of personal and communal hegemony, that is, temporary agency. It was in media consumption and reception that the public diplomacy tire hit the road, turning video, satellite tv, and the Internet into powerful agents of both assimilation and resistance.

Videos, Video Shops, and Video Clubs Video posed a vexing problem early on for the Islamist regime because it threatened the monopolistic ownership of the broadcast media by the state and its monologic discourses. From the beginning, the government displayed a love-­ hate relationship with video, fascinated by its pedagogic and entertaining powA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ers yet fearing its subversive cultural and political potentials. It vacillated, alternately banning, curtailing, ignoring, or grudgingly allowing videocassettes (and later dvds) and videocassette players (and dvd players). This in turn encouraged burgeoning black and gray markets for these products in major cities that ebbed and flowed. The overall lack of variety on movie screens and television sets, particularly in the transition and Iraqi war years, helped nurture video and turn homes into countercultural centers and veritable film festivals. Initially, about 4 percent of those earning $2,000 or more a month owned a vcr, and 27 percent owned a color television set. These were expensive items. The standard videocassette player, the Sony Betamax, was very expensive, selling for more than $11,000 (Ardekani 1981/1360); color television sets sold for around $6,000 each (Hankey 1982).104 Low-­income people often shared a vcr. Friends and relatives viewed tapes at gatherings during or after dinner. Rental and sale video agencies sprang up in Tehran and major cities. A review of the classified advertisements in one issue of the daily newspaper Kayhan (4 May 1983/14 Ordibehesht 1362) yielded forty phone numbers for organizations and individuals offering videocassettes for rent or sale. These operated on the basis of membership, which cost around $200, a rather steep fee. Movies could be rented per night for three or four dollars (20–30 tomans at the time). Some family members assumed the job of film programmers for home festivals by lining up a series of tapes for the entire family for the night: cartoons in the early evening for children, followed by adult tapes after the children were asleep. For well-­to-­do families during the transition and war years, when schools and universities were closed and work hard to find, video became the hearth and heart of home. The video agents and clubs offered, as well as Western films, Pahlavi-­era movies of Nosrat Karimi, Carriage Driver (Doroshgehchi, 1971) and The Go-­ Between (Mohallel, 1971), which contained strong traditional themes as well as humor, both desired during this period. Exilic movies occasionally circulated, such as Parviz Sayyad’s anti–Islamic Republic movie The Mission (Ma’muriat, 1983). International mainstream and soft-­ core pornographic movies, some dubbed into Persian, were more typical. Early on, some video agencies delivered tapes to their clients in suitcases. There was a sense of a brewing counterculture and dual culture. American movies available included a mixture of old and new titles, among them Earthquake, Towering Inferno, Kramer vs. Kramer, Cromwell, Rocky I, Rocky II, Rocky III, Ben Hur, El Cid, Gone with the Wind, Marathon Man, The Exorcist, Omen, E. T., Never Say Never Again, Octopussy, Forty-­ Eight Hours, Rambo—­First Blood II, Return of the Jedi, and the abc tv’s docudrama The Day After. Among the sexual genre were Emanuel, Madame Claude, and Melody Love. Famous American tv soaps (Dallas), raunchy British comedies (Benny Hill), and cutting-­edge music videos (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) were also popular. The Tehran University Video Club issued a printed list of its holdings in 340

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1988. It contained videos of Quran recitations, classical music concerts by Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Mohammad Reza Lotfi, and Shahram Nazeri, soccer games by the Iranian national team—­and many Disney movies, including cartoons, mostly in English. The majority of the offerings were American features, from classics like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane to current releases like James Cameron’s Titanic, all banned from public screens. Jackie Chan’s movies were heavily represented, as well as those featuring male action stars such as Mel Gibson, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone, and Clint Eastwood. Both violent and male-­dominated movies fit the postrevolutionary and war eras’ ethos. Iranian postrevolutionary movies were also well represented, but no prerevolutionary ones were listed. The films cost seventy tomans per night, and weekends were half price. By the mid-­1980s, Islamicate culture was harder to maintain because of the inflow of Western culture and media, the arrival of culture and media from Iranian exiles, resilient domestic opposition to the regime’s monocultural policies, and continued exchange relations of Iranians with the world. Western pop music videos spawned a colorful, anti-­Islamist movement among the young, dubbed “punkism” by the local press.105 Iranian punks, and later heavy metal and hip-­hop fans, emulated the dress and makeup of their Western counterparts, infusing their drab existence with life, color, excitement, and creativity. While a proponent of the punk movement asserted that “our goal is to love life instead of death and martyrdom,” a government official accused them of being “yet another face of the Satan, imported from the West to corrupt Islam.” 106 Despite government interference, the fusion of Persian and foreign elements produced many new and original musical forms, both in the classical and contemporary fields, some of them underground, which filmmakers documented, such as Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s Off-­Beat (Seda-­ye Mokhalef, 2003) and Back Vocal (Seda-­ye Dovvom, 2003), Amir Hamz and Mark Lazarz’s Sounds of Silence (2006), and Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats. Hamz, a German of Iranian descent, and Lazarz both live in Germany, but they traveled to Iran to make their film, while Ghobadi was forced to leave the country after his film, shot clandestinely, was banned. Mirtahmasb was prevented from leaving the country because he supported the Green Movement. Such background information shows the complexity of the microphysics of power relations among the four forces involved in public diplomacy. To impede their “corrupting” influences, in mid-­1982 the government curtailed the video clubs by requiring them to carry only licensed films and, later, by banning the sale of cassettes altogether on the grounds that they helped spread the “culture of idolatry” and that their “trite” films prevented people from watching “the news and educational programs” that the vvir aired.107 By this time, most of their clientele had exhausted the video clubs’ then limited supply of tapes, which could not be easily replenished due to the ban on imports A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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(many clubs had only about five hundred titles). Throughout the 1980s, the authorities raided both the clubs that rented tapes and the houses where video-­ screening parties were in progress, confiscating the offending materials and arresting the culprits.108 Behruz Behnejad and two partners opened Kino Video, a shop that ostensibly sold classical music, instrumental music, and publications, but behind the scenes it was actually copying, renting, and selling films and videos. In 1984, authorities discovered the clandestine operation, shutting it down, and confiscated all its 35mm film and video dubbing equipment and cassettes (Rusta et al. 2008:396). However, demand for non-­Islamicate movies was so great that, in spite of raids, confiscations, and threats of incarceration, the thriving black market and informal network of tape exchanges survived, even thrived, and not only clandestinely but also openly. Throughout the 1990 and 2000s, the latest American feature movies and television serials, such as Lost, Heroes, Vampire Diaries, and Twenty-­Four, and even risqué serials, such as hbo’s Sex and the City, or banned films, such as the anti-­Persian film Three Hundred, were readily available in video and music stores and from mobile street vendors at traffic lights. These stores did not display any signs indicating they carried or handled clandestine or black-­market videos. In fact, most did not, they acted as middlemen. Their patrons would place their orders for films from a published list in person or via telephone, and the Internet and the store would transmit the orders to a third party who would fulfill it. The customers then received their dvds via a courier, or they could pick them up in person from the store. Many Internet stores emerged for ordering dvds of documentaries, feature movies, television serials, animated films, and even 3-­d movies (with glasses). Most of these were made in Hollywood, although art-­house films from Europe and elsewhere were also included. Some stores specialized in Bollywood movies and Korean serials, and many also offered sports programming, music videos, and musical concerts.109 Their film and program offerings were generally subtitled in Persian (not dubbed), but the subtitling, like those on mbc Persia’s movies, was inaccurate and goofy, as if it had been done using automatic translation software. From their large lists (one company’s list contains 4,466 titles) and their terms of service it appears that these Internet stores are doing a brisk business, underscored by Beh Film’s slogan, which pithily states, “Don’t go to the movies, bring the movies home.” 110 According to some, the government tolerated this thriving media black market for the same reasons that it tolerated black markets for other essential commodities: high public demand and its inability to meet it. The case of a Los Angeles–based, Iranian American gay male cabaret dancer and the director of the Saba dance troupe, Mohammad Khordadian, who returned to Iran for a visit, provides one of the few examples of the consequences to the makers of Iranian exile videos distributed illegally in Iran and the contingent microphysics of power involved. In addition to his sexually provocative cabaret costumes and dance numbers with male and female dancers in Los 342

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Angeles and elsewhere, Khordadian had produced a dance instruction video, which was “widely distributed in Iran’s banned video black market and watched by families” (Papan-­Matin 2009:131). When he returned to Iran in 2002 after twenty years of absence, he posed a dilemma for the Khatami government. Recognizing him at Tehran’s international airport, security agents accosted him but allowed him to enter the country provided that he kept a low profile, did not participate in any parties or public performances, and kept in regular touch with a security handler. Soon, however, they urged him to leave the country quickly and quietly. He did not. Apparently, the government wanted to keep his arrival in Iran out of the public eye for domestic and international reasons. However, the domestic news media got wind of his presence and wrote about it widely, causing his arrest and solitary confinement for sixty-­one days (during which he was well treated). It appears that Khordadian’s confinement was a way of hiding him from the public and the media; and the charges subsequently brought against him did not include homosexuality, whose punishment would have included execution. This was because the authorities did not want the inevitably negative publicity about the serious charge of homosexuality against a well-­known personality and a U.S. citizen to add to their roster of human rights violations and torpedo the sensitive trade negotiations then underway with the European Union. At the same time, they did not want to arouse the militant wing of their own regime, which would have demanded the maximum penalty for his sexual orientation, were that to come to light. As a result, both his prose­ cutor and the defense attorney took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on his sexual orientation and instead “concentrated on Khordadian’s style of dancing and his instructional video tapes which were banned as ‘morally corrupt’” (Papan-­ Matin 2009:132). He was given a suspended jail term of ten years and eventually allowed to leave the country. Early on, by means of instituting an “Islamic cultural revolution,” the state enforced Islamicate values in education, in the workplace, in law, and in the media. It colonized every available ideological space, leaving almost no public space outside of dominant ideology. This intrusion fanned a “culture of duality” fed by Iranians’ insider-­outsider double consciousness, dual private-­public spatial perspectives, and tradition-­modernity formations. The public culture for outsiders and government informers was Islamicate, while the private home and family culture was contingent and hybridized. Private, even secret, groups and classes, such as the literary class that Azar Nafisi formed at her home with her students in Tehran when she was no longer able to teach at Allameh Tabatabai University, described in her international best-­seller, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), were not uncommon. In time, various artistic oppositional underground formations, such as those involving music, art production, and filmmaking, emerged, which were driven by imagination—­the power of imagining new possibilities. True believers maintained a more or less singular Islamicate culture both publicly and privately. But those who quesA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tioned the Islamic Republic were Islamicate publicly while maintaining private countercultural and modernist values to which underground social formations and media formations such as video clubs, satellite television, exile-­produced television, and the Internet contributed. To erase this duality and to extend their ideological occupation of Iran to the private sphere as well, the authorities encouraged schoolchildren to inform on their families’ private behavior to their teachers. They, in turn, were to report these to other authorities. The information sought included whether or not alcohol was consumed at home, foreign videos viewed, daily prayers performed, women followed proper modesty rules, mixed-­gender parties were held, or dance music was played. Children and women, the most vulnerable members of the patriarchal, patrilineal, Is­ lamicate society, were under greater pressure to reconcile the public and private worlds. Often they were forced to dissimulate and obfuscate, with negative psychological consequences. It took several years before this pernicious state intrusion into private space was defeated by the population’s resistance and eventually abandoned. The home thus remained a “state-­free” site, a “release valve for public tensions” (Rouhani 2004:690). Without it, accumulating tensions could have resulted in a social explosion. It is worth noting, however, that not only government officials and clerics but also many ordinary citizens objected to the deep penetration into the family circles of foreign videos, particularly those considered to be immoral and “sleazy.” Some were forced to demonstrate their objections in drastic and unusual manners, as ordinary methods proved ineffective. For example, in 1994, in a town near Shiraz, Fatemeh Hashemi, a twenty-­year-­old pregnant wife and the mother of a four-­year-­old girl set herself, her daughter, and her husband’s “sleazy” videos on fire to protest his frequent gatherings with friends to drink alcohol and watch videos at home, where he required her to serve his friends.111

The Reception of Satellite Television The public also challenged the government monopoly on broadcast media and their monologic discourses by engaging in a cat-­and-­mouse game with it over satellite television. The pervasiveness of the global satellite networks, their popularity with Iranians, and the cultural invasion debate forced the government in early 1992 to create an alternative by becoming a distributor of authorized feature films and television movies and serials on video. To that end, it established the Visual Media Institute (Moaseseh-­ye Rasanehha-­ye Tasviri). Other authorized video stores also cropped up (Muzeh-­ye Sinema-­ye Iran 2004b:63–80). The hope was that the wide release of authorized domestic films on video would dull the public desire for black-­market foreign imports. However, the quantity, quality, and variety of officially allowed videos fell short, losing 1,200 million tomans in four years (Tahaminejad 2001/1380:90). The black markets in foreign and exile videos remained triumphant. 344

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61 Turning the home front into a cultural war front: illegal satellite dishes dot Tehran’s rooftops, camouflaged by low concrete walls (shot in Punak neighborhood). Courtesy of Kajaik Safarian.

After much debate in the Majles and among ruling circles, in 1994 the Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Araki issued a fatwa banning satellite tv, declaring, “Installing satellite antennae, which open the Islamic society to inroads of decadent foreign culture and spread of ruinous Western diseases to Moslems, is haram [religiously forbidden].” 112 It is interesting to note that Araki’s language—­foreign tv and pop culture as “disease”—­was in line with Nuri’s, Navabsafavi’s, and Khomeini’s pathological metaphors of decades past. Finally, in August 1994, the Majles passed a nine-­point legislation that banned the production, importation, distribution, and use of satellite television equipment, designating stiff penalties for violators.113 The government first urged owners of satellite equipment to “voluntarily” remove their dishes, and then it threatened both to fine the violators up to $750 and to confiscate their equipment. Those who were found to be importing, selling, or installing dishes would be jailed and fined the very steep sum of $25,000.114 Despite some arrests and fines, the ban was not entirely successful, as equipment owners found creative ways of camouflaging or miniaturizing their satellite dishes, and the authorities were not consistent with their inspections. This failure, and regulation loopholes that exempted government officials and foreign consulates and embassies from the ban, created a fluid cultural space in which all kinds of transgressions and subversion were possible. Satellite dishes cropped up everywhere and this banned item became the public’s obsession (figure 61). The government responded sensibly by planning a massive effort to increase film production, build new cinema complexes, and create new television networks aimed at satisfying the largest segments of the population: young adults and city dwellers.115 Despite these efforts, the infusion into Iran of American media and pop culture, Iranian exilic satellite television and media, and the Internet continued. Some Iranians considered these products necessary for a modern life, and some were attracted by the lure of the forbidden fruit and by their dynamism A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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and modernity. However, there were others who condemned satellite channels as deleterious to Islamic and national identities and part of the cultural invasion against the Islamic Republic. Pop culture products have become an integral component of the infrastructure of U.S. industrial, financial, and intellectual power; in recent years they have surpassed tangible goods such as grain and automobiles as the United States’ “most important and valuable” global products (Lancaster 1998). They have become a potent part of the country’s public diplomacy. The leaders of the Islamic Republic were keenly aware of the efficacy of this discursive power, which far exceeded that of military power in its impact on hearts and minds. Khamenei said: “Audio and video waves that are worse than warships and warplanes are being used to disseminate a rogue culture aimed at the imposition of unethical values and Westernized ideas in order to captivate and humiliate Muslims” (quoted in Khosravi 2003:34). But this culture was less imposed on than embraced by its subjects. Khamenei was correct to the extent that Iranians’ attraction to Western pop culture benefited producing nations both financially and politically. But he was incorrect in assuming that Iranian users of satellites were mere dupes of the Western media and culture industries. During Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the attack on ownership of satellite dishes intensified as they were rebranded as “exemplars of the soft war” against the Islamist Republic. Claiming that satellite television “acts like narcotics,” Bahman Kargar, a high-­ranking police official stated that “using satellite television is a crime like using narcotics. Narcotics endanger physical and psychological health, while satellite television causes the decline, weakening, and disintegration of families. Both are equally dangerous.” He also equated the dangers of drug addiction and divorce in destroying families with the dangers of the virtual world of cyberspace, “Virtual space is a double-­edged sword; if it is not used properly it will be a threat to society.” Noting that the sale and purchase of satellite dishes was illegal, he promised that security forces would react with severity when encountering them.116 How serious and successful the government will be in this new campaign remains to be seen. Because of its ubiquity and powerful attraction, the movies dealt with the conundrum of satellite television, praising or condemning it. Iranians were intensely attracted to foreign satellite television’s news and information, hemmed in as they were by the government monopoly on broadcast news. Ghobadi’s touching film Turtles Can Also Fly (Lakposhtha Parvaz Mikonand, 2003) dramatized this need of the Kurdish population for news during the U.S.-­led war on Hussein’s Iraq. In it a boy named Satellite provides through ingenious means various essential services to rural Kurds, among them the installation of satellite dishes and television antennas to obtain news of the world. No central authority is able to prevent the Kurds from reaching their goal of receiving satellite transmission. Likewise Mohammad Rassoulof’s The Dish (Bad-­e Dabur, 2007), in a typical art cinema style, which mixes fictional and nonfictional ele346

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ments, deals with the arrival of Satellite television into the small village of Makhunik in eastern Iran. The electrification of the village, thanks to the Ministry of Reconstruction Crusade, has brought with it national television and foreign television via satellite (tent-­dwelling nomads use a portable generator to power their dishes and TV sets). In the film, the dish installer and villagers are interviewed about the impact of television in their lives, which reveal that people watch the satellite channels not only for entertainment but also for news, information, education, and worldliness. Tired of morality police’s harassments in the public some women find that staying home is a good option if they can be in touch with the world via satellite TV. They also talk about the way it has brought the villagers together for group viewing and the manner in which it has fascinated the children and frightened some of the parents about its corrupting influences. One man says that a village elder (a mullah?) called the antenna installed in the village for receiving the Iranian state television networks “the mother of all the satans” (umm al-­shayatin). Rassoulof’s endorsement of satellite TV and its cosmopolitan impact is summarized in a caption with which the film begins: “Once upon a time, they believed that the earth was flat. Then, it was proved to be round. Now, it’s a certainty that it’s a network!” The desire to be in touch with the world and to defy the Islamic Republic’s isolation and censorship seems to be a key reason for Iranians’ love affair with satellite TV. On the other hand, unlike the films of Ghobadi and Rassoulof, Parisa Bakhtavar’s feature comedy Tambourine (Dayereh Zangi, 2008) poked broad fun at the absurdities of the cat-­and-­mouse game between urban satellite lovers and the police in Tehran, and took the side of the police. Residents of an apartment complex hire an installer of satellite dishes to clandestinely set up a forest of dishes on their rooftop, causing all sorts of chaotic and comic internecine arguments and fights among themselves and of escapades with the police. In the meantime, an aspiring filmmaker in one of the apartments makes a film in which he casts his own sister as a prostitute, due to a dearth of actors; to avoid recognition he blocks her face, but not her voice, causing his parents, who recognize her voice, a great deal of anger and angst. To right the wrong, he hires the girlfriend of the dish installer, who is a thief, to dub his sister’s voice. The film pays homage to the militarization of the media under Ahmadinejad by subscribing to the government security and moralist views on film and cinema. The director casts the installer and most of the satellite lovers as either immoral or criminal and the police as supremely efficient who, equipped with the latest modern panoptic surveillance technology, from cell-­phone taps to street cameras, nab the culprits in the end. The message seems to be that the government may have failed to stop satellite lovers from installing dishes on every rooftop, but that these aficionados are not heroes but morally corrupt villains. In this way, the film underscored both the popularity of satellite television channels and the militarization of Iranian society and of the mediascape. Another anti-­satellite salvo was launched by the prolific television producer A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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and personality Mehran Modiri and his hour-­long tv show, Satellite (Mahvareh, 2011), which is also available on YouTube and on dvd in neighborhood stores in Iran. It pokes broad fun at Iranians in the United States, who are reduced to cartoonish stereotypes as “drug-­addicted, promiscuous, amoral loons”—­a real Ugly Iranian-­A merican (Moaveni 2011). The show also makes fun of the Iranian Americans who use diaspora-­based satellite channels to try and foment a revolution inside Iran against the clerics from their comfortable West Los Angeles homes. A new reality television series that Ryan Seacrest and Bravo television developed, Shahs of Sunset (2012), which centers on a group of young, rich Persian-­A mericans living and working in Los Angeles, may provide further tawdry fodder for Satellite’s humor and confirm some of its stereotypes and arguments.

Internet Cinema: A Cinema of Embodied Protest Internet cinema was the third mechanism and process—­after video and satellite tv—­by which Iranians challenged the state’s broadcasting monopoly and monologism inside the country. It was a new legitimate, artistic, and expressive form beside, regardless of its political uses. Iranian cosmopolitanism, the financial wealth of the country, and the widespread penetration of the Internet and its various modalities of connectivity and interactivity drove the emergence of the Internet cinema. As noted earlier, in 2005 cia officers at the Open Source Center trolling the Internet discovered that Persian was among the top five languages in the blogosphere, offering valuable textual and audiovisual information and insight about Iranian people and their sentiments (Shane 2005). In 2008, a Harvard University study further showed that the Persian (or Farsi) blogosphere is “a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers”; it includes both President Ahmadinejad and lowly students (Kelly and Etling 2008). Still later studies showed that Iran has “the most internet users in the Middle East, approaching 30 million” (Shahab and Mousoli 2010). However, as Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany rightly note, these figures are ambiguous, as it is not clear how the number of bloggers are calculated and what constitutes an Iranian blog. If the physical location of the bloggers is the criteria (counting only those inside Iran), the calculation would ignore the large number of bloggers in the diaspora; if the language of blogging is considered (Persian), then all those Iranians who write in other languages are ignored (2010:35–36). However they are counted, Iranian bloggers form a formidable presence in the blogosphere in particular and in the cyberspace in general. Because of this presence and because of the strangling of other forms of journalism, the Internet became a vital source of information and activism in the 2000s for all sides and a highly contested public diplomacy sphere. The twenty-­five-­minute film Iran: The Cyber-­Dissidents (2006), produced by Vivien Altman and reported by Mark 348

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Corcoran for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, deals with this burgeoning phenomenon. The emergence of blogging and similar practices such as community reporting, social networking, and video sharing turned the Internet’s virtual space into a vast online public sphere, which in turn encouraged discursive formations and political activism in society. The Internet thus became social not only in its virtuality but also in its actuality. The streets, in turn, became virtual, both in their powerful representations on the Internet and in their power to represent. One of these discursive formations was the emergence of Internet cinema, and the social formation that it helped mobilize was the opposition Green Movement that emerged after the disputed presidential election in 2009, which demanded government accountability and democracy. This movement posed the biggest challenge in the life span of the Islamic Republic, not only to its legitimacy but also to its existence. The power of this new virtual and discursive space was lauded ad infinitum by mainstream Western media and exile media, which prematurely and erroneously dubbed the new protests a “Twitter Revolution,” ignoring that technology and media by themselves do not make a revolution (Acuff 2010) and that Twitter actually played a small role inside Iran. It played a larger role outside in publicizing the events, partly because of government censorship at home (Esfandiari 2010). While Twitter and Facebook were used admirably to exchange information, file news reports and images, and organize protests domestically and internationally (Hashem and Najjar 2010), social space and the physical place remained high on the agenda of the protesters, emblematized by a street placard carrying the following slogan, addressed to the regime: “We’ll give you back the websites and mobile phones, but we won’t give you the country,“ referring, on the one hand, to the power of the government to shut down the Internet and mobile phones and, on the other hand, to the power of citizens to withhold support from it and to fight back for the country.117 This power of the social formations in the streets prior to, and in tandem with, the use of the Internet as mobilizer and sustainer of oppositional sentiments in authoritarian states has been borne out by the numerous uprisings in the so-­called Arab Awakening or Arab Spring, which emerged two years later in 2011. The negative consequences of the shift in the U.S. and Iranian public diplomacies from gathering secret information from enemy countries through espionage to collecting information from public sources in those countries were that it politicized, even militarized, all public spheres, including the streets and the Internet. Both people and the government in Iran became camera shy in public places in major cities; if someone took out a camera to take a picture in the streets, both government agents and passersby would harass the person, one fearing that the image would be uploaded to social networking sites or to oppositional sites, feeding gathering antiregime dissent, the other fearing govA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ernment surveillance and future arrests. As a result, some of the early protest videos were filmed almost clandestinely, from private places like balconies and from inside apartments and offices, where the filmers were not exposed. Nevertheless, the government attempted to remove, impede, or block these public sources of information and to survey, track down, imprison, and severely punish the Internet operators and users it considered aiding the dissidents. Ironically, U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic, too, initially contributed to suppressing the digital uprising of Iranians. Although the sanctions law, dating from President Clinton’s time, prohibited Americans from exporting goods and services to Iran, it allowed certain exceptions, among them “information and informational materials” (Parsi, Elliot, and Disney 2010:164). The problem was that Internet technology, or any technology developed in the 1990s, was apparently not covered under this exception, with the result that companies such as Microsoft and Google denied their instant messaging to Iranians (msn Messenger and Google Chat) because these depended on user downloads, which were interpreted as constituting not information but prohibited service. Even Twitter’s legal status came under question until the Obama administration removed the doubt, when in the aftermath of the 2009 elections it asked Twitter to “forego routine maintenance in order to continue providing uninterrupted service to Iranians” (ibid.:165). Six months later the Iranian Digital Empowerment Act, spearheaded by Representative Jim Moran, was passed by the U.S. Congress, which “authorized downloads of free mass market software by companies such as Microsoft and Google to Iran necessary for exchange of personal communications and/or sharing of information over the internet such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking” (ibid.:166). The regime’s impediments and censorship efforts did not deter the opposition; instead, they encouraged a creative but sometimes deadly and violent cat-­ and-­mouse game, both on the Internet and in the streets (figures 62–64). Protesters found ever more ingenuous alternatives to stay in touch, reconnect, and coordinate, and they sought new strategies, internal and international, to create an alternative nongovernmental mediascape to publicize their own activities and grievances, to organize their protests, and to pressure and punish the regime. Many resorted to proxies, which redirected them to banned sites, or used anonymizers, which concealed the identities of senders and recipients. Foremost among these anticensorship software tools were Tor, Psiphon, Mixminion, Incognito, Freegate, and the purportedly more ingenuous program Haystack, designed especially for Iran by the American hacktivist Austin Heap (Dobson 2010). Many, too, took to the streets to agitate and to record. One placard in a street demonstration around the time of the disputed 2009 election carried the pithy slogan, “My [cell] phone, my medium,” which summarized the defiance of the protesters against the state and its centralized big media, the broadcast media. Amplifying that message, another said: “Every Iranian, a historiographer.” 118 A cartoon echoed these sentiments by depicting an Iranian woman 350

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62 People at the barricades, frame grab from Bella ciao, Iran, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=SNocyz1NRjA&feature=related. 63 A bloodied protester. Frame grab from Mirror: Support the Iran Green Movement, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SYvsn9qLZv0. 64 A dead man in the street, frame grab from People & Power— Iran: Inside the Protests—10 July 09, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LSITy_taD3E.

wearing a crown of light and posing as the U.S. statue of liberty, but instead of holding a lit torch she holds up a cell phone emanating waves. This was the moment for the efflorescence of a new “little medium,” the “Internet cinema,” with its simple equipment—­a mobile phone or a consumer-­ model digital camera or recorder—­to replace the formerly powerful little medium of the analogue audiocassette, which Ayatollah Khomeini had used so effectively to energize the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s. This was a new era, necessitating a new medium, for a new cause. Each protester became a digital medium and a historiographer by taking to the streets, digital camera, cell phone, or recorder in hand, defying the government’s threats of force and terror and its monopoly on the big media. Oppositional filmmaking against the Islamic Republic took varied forms: underground documentaries and fiction A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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65–66 Community videos of protest are recorded with digital cameras and cell phone cameras. Frame grabs from hbo documentary, For Neda.

films, agitprop films, animated films, Internet films, and music videos. In this section the latter two are discussed. Emboldened by their initial successes in publicizing the protests, Internet cinema filmers began to record their videos of the turmoil in the streets at ground level, instead of from the safety of the high-­rise buildings and from behind windows and curtains as before (figures 65–66). With this shift from private to public space and from a distant view to a close-­up view of the subjects came other fundamental political and aesthetic changes in what was recorded. Social barriers and divisions, such as those separating the sexes, crumbled. That is why women were such a strong and defiant presence both in the streets and in Internet cinema’s community videos. Hamed Yusefi’s twenty-­ five-­ minute film, The Aesthetics of Political Protest in Iran (Zibashenasi-­ye E’terazat­e Siasi dar Iran), aired by bbc Persian on 22 July 2010, provides an insightful analysis of these points.119 In addition, instead of recording from the point of view of an outsider observing events, community videographers began to record from the point of view of insiders, of people engaged in action. Their recording mode thus shifted from direct cinema’s fly-­on-­the-­wall observation of outside events to cinema vérité’s provocation-­cum-­recording of events (Nichols 2001:chap. 6). As such, theirs was not a simple recording of protests that someone else had organized, but an embodied form of protest in whose organization they themselves participated, with all the subjectivity, ambiguity, and hapticity—­roughness, shakiness, and out-­of-­focus and chaotic aiming and muffled sounds—­that they entailed. 352

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The result was unedited, raw footage of affect, not edited films of a polished presentation. These proved to be very powerful when uploaded onto Internet video-­ sharing and social networking sites, bypassing government control and censorship. However, the affective power of these Internet films was often diluted when Western media broadcast them, for they often suppressed the soundtrack, replacing it with their own voice-­over narrations or commentary. To be sure, the video of Neda Agha-­Soltan’s on-­camera death as broadcast by Western news media was very powerful, but this power came from its tragic content, timing, brief length (forty seconds), and the semiotics of Agha-­Soltan’s youth, beauty, fair skin, and Westernized veil and attire (Sabety 2010; Afshar 2010). Its power also came from the video’s visuality, the way it clearly witnessed the last eye contact of the dying young woman with the camera as life departed from her body. However, if one listens to the voices of the bystanders—­all male—­who gathered around her to frantically save her, the video becomes much more compelling in its emotional and visceral impact. Here is my transcription and translation of the bystanders’ utterances, some of which are not sufficiently audible. “Let’s get someone to carry her away . . .” (to a hospital?) “Neda! Watch her eyes, watch her eyes.” “Her eyes are turning in.” “Neda, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.” “Oh, oh, oh, oh.” (voices rise to desperate shouts) “Press on her, press on her.” (Hands press on her chest, presumably the site of her gunshot wound.) “Neda, stay, stay, stay, stay.” (A man’s voice rises to a frantic and horrifying shout.) “Open her mouth, open her mouth.” When Western newscasts played this video they usually covered over the video’s synch sound with their own explanatory narration of the event, depriving their audience of this affecting sound track. This sort of affective Internet cinema augured not only entirely new relations with its social subjects, as described above, but also new relations of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception with its viewers. Production was ad hoc, spontaneous, amateurish, and without official permission, bypassing the strict government approval and censorship apparatuses. As such, Internet cinema was inherently an unauthorized, underground cinema. In addition, Internet cinema was not an authorial cinema in its production, which could benefit from the singular vision and personality of an auteur director; rather, it was a multiplex cinema, as many people, who did not even know each other, recorded what they saw in an unplanned and uncoordinated fashion and uploaded their material to the Internet. The technology of recording of this cinema was no longer optical and chemical, involving celluloid film, but entirely electronic A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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and digital. This technological shift facilitated the globalized production and distribution of the Internet cinema videos. The production of this cinema occurred in two distinct phases. In the first phase, people with digital cameras recorded the events without editing and uploaded the raw footage to Internet sites; hence my designation of these practitioners as “filmers” or “videographers,” not “filmmakers.” In the case of Agha-­ Soltan’s video, an anonymous person recorded the incident on a cell phone. In a growing practice, a second phase evolved, during which others, who were not necessarily involved in the first phase, compiled, aggregated, repurposed, edited, and uploaded these Internet videos to create other fictional or nonfictional videos. The distribution of Internet cinema videos was simultaneously individualized and globalized. The digitized recording of events and their uploading onto the Internet social networking, video-­sharing, and video-­streaming sites, as well as to the global news media outlets, facilitated this globalized individuality or individualized globalization. In this way, ordinary videographers became not only extraordinary producers but also extraordinary distributors who bypassed the traditional commercial or governmental distribution systems with their complicated monopolistic technopolitical economies. In the case of Agha-­ Soltan’s video, the anonymous filmer forwarded the video to the British newspaper the Guardian, the voa, and five other individuals. Significantly, according to the newspaper, one of these latter individuals uploaded the video on Facebook, not the filmer himself or herself, showing the two-­step production of Internet films. From that one posting “copies spread to YouTube and were broadcast within hours by cnn.” 120 This video was then used in, or served to inspire, numerous other types of Internet films—­fiction, documentary, music video, and animated films (figures 67–70). It is thus that this single video went viral and became simultaneously an icon, index, and a symbol of the postelection protest and of the democratic aspirations of Iranians—­the Green Movement—­ fulfilling all the three definitions of the sign in Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiology (Atkin 2010). While Internet cinema’s site of production in its initial phases was primarily public places, either in the streets or underground, its site of reception was chiefly private places and private viewing platforms. The exhibition venue vastly differed from that of other forms of cinema, for it shifted from the stationary movie houses in which people watched movies collectively according to a schedule, to the small and mobile handheld devices that could be viewed by any individual with Internet access at any time, and anywhere in the world. This meant that Internet cinema’s exhibition was freed from both physical location and physical structure, becoming global, cellular, virtual, and networked. In short, in all its phases of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception Internet cinema moved from professional and formal to amateur and personal

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67–70 Neda Agha-Soltan’s shooting death on a cell phone camera, as it echoed globally by the Internet and various media and forms of social protests.

67 Neda at the moment of death, from the graphic video Neda, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wXN_yCSbUYk&feature=related.

69 A frame from “I am Neda” campaign, from hbo documentary, For Neda, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F48SinuEHIk.

68, 70 Frames from “I am Neda” campaign, http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_ id=annotation_43771&v=PmgbLAJZPIY& feature=iv. By 1 November 2010 “I am Neda” campaign web site contained 677 pictures by individuals claiming they are Neda. See: http://nedaspeaks.org/gallery.

forms, marking the ultimate triumph of modernity’s individuality in Iranian cinematic expression. Narratologically, Internet cinema moved from the singularity of authorship and the cohesiveness of classical modernist narrative forms to postmodernity’s multiplicity of atomized or collective filmers and filmmakers and to fragmented, multiplexed, and networked narratives. Likewise, Internet cinema’s reception was not physically or temporally collective in the sense of viewers watching the same movie either in the same physical space (as in a movie house) or at the same time (as on TV according to a set scheduled). Instead, they were collective virtually, in the sense that viewers located far apart were nevertheless able to view and interact with the same material at different times thanks to the A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ubiquity and connectivity of the Internet and cell phone platforms. Internet cinema’s spectators were therefore more networked than collective. What is the status of the “text” of the Internet cinema? Because of their highly individualized production, their spontaneous, embodied, and amateur aesthetics, their small-­scale, short length, and unedited raw footage, and their mobility, first-­phase Internet videos cannot satisfactorily be labeled “cinema.” These brief videos do not form a singular film about a coherent topic but offer multiple views on a wide variety of topics. However, each topic, such as Agha-­ Soltan’s on-­camera death, forms a YouTube channel that contains a variety of clips on the topic provided by different individuals and from different viewpoints. Each topical channel can then be said to be an example of an “authorless” Internet cinema. The international recognition of this Iranian authorless Internet cinema of protest was swift, in the form of awards they received from film festivals and media and journalism associations—­another reason to call them Internet cinema. For example, in 2009, Long Island University bestowed its prestigious journalism award, the George Polk Award for Videography, to the video of Neda Agha-­Soltan in recognition of “the efforts of the people responsible for recording the death of 26-­year-­old Neda Agha-­Soltan at a June protest in Tehran, Iran, and uploading the video to the Internet.” 121 However, there is a second form of this cinema, an “authored” Internet cinema: the way the disparate authorless Internet videos spawn, in their second-­phase iteration, other longer, more robust, and professional works by the filmmakers, which are exhibited both on the Internet and in the movie houses. For example, the authorless Agha-­Soltan’s video soon became the contents of other protest films and videos made in different forms—­fiction, documentary, animated, and music videos—­ and some were used, reused, remade, remixed, homaged, signified on, and repurposed so many times and so transmedially and rhizomatically in a meandering global chain reaction that they became viral.122 While the anonymous filmers of the video clips forming the authorless Internet cinema resided in Iran, many of the filmmakers who appropriated and repurposed those clips to create their own professional authored Internet films were outside Iran. Whatever the most accurate definition, Internet cinema added another type to the typology of cinemas that emerged in the Islamic Republic. The fact remains that instead of being dismissed by the world on grounds of their amateur, improvised aesthetics and the brief burst of the raw footage of affect, Internet videos gained an added value precisely because of those characteristics, which were reminiscent of the Third Cinema’s aesthetics of imperfection and smallness that in the 1960s and 1970s had countered both the reigning oppressive political regimes in the world and the oppressive mainstream cinema’s aesthetic regime of polish and perfection. In fact, the aesthetics of imperfection, smallness, and embodiment of these videos authenticated them fully, as intimate and defiant documents of their filmers having been

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there, documenting, provoking, and protesting against a seemingly hegemonic and intractable state and its media. One of these authored Internet cinema films is The Green Wave (2010), which received its international premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2011. Directed by the Iranian-­born German filmmaker Ali Samadi Ahadi, according to its press book, the film is a “touching documentary-­collage” that illustrates the dramatic 2009 presidential election protests and expresses the feelings of the people involved in the Green Movement. “Facebook reports, Twitter messages and videos posted in the internet were included in the film composition, and hundreds of real blog entries served as reference for the experiences and thoughts of two young students, whose story is running through the film as the main thread. The film describes their initial hope and curiosity, their desperate fear, and the courage to yet continue to fight.” 123 These fictional story lines were animated using “motion comic” technique augmented by interviews with prominent human rights campaigners and exiled Iranians such as Shirin Ebadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Payam Akhavan, Mehdi Mohseni, and Mitra Khalatbari. These authored Internet cinema films, too, received international praise and prizes. For example, in November 2010 the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam recognized the importance of these Internet films, when it gave its Unlimited Cinema award to The Silent Majority Speaks (2010), a ninety-­three-­minute film anthology consisting of fourteen films made on cell phones and similar devices by anonymous Iranians about the post–­presidential election protests and ensuing state violence. The five thousand–euro cash award given to the film was an initiative of the hivos Cultural Fund, one of the ngos that the Iranian intelligence ministry had identified as supporting a velvet revolution against the regime. The award was given to an Iranian women’s rights activist, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, condemned in absentia in Iran to two and a half years of prison and thirty lashes, who dedicated it to the anonymous citizen filmers.124 In addition, in November 2010, the Foreign Press Association named the Iranian journalist Saeed Kamali Dehghan, who regularly writes for the Guardian, “journalist of the year” for his coverage of the disputed presidential election, and gave the top award for best tv feature or documentary film to the hbo film, For Neda, which Anthony Thomas had codirected with Kamali Dehghan (Batty 2010). Music videos became one of the most powerful forms of Internet cinema, driven by the global popularity of the music-­v ideo form and by the continuing disenchantment of Iranians with their regime. Blurred Vision, a Toronto-­ based rock band formed in 2007 by the brothers Sepp and Sohl, who fled Iran with their family in 1986 (and do not reveal their last name to safeguard family members’ security in Iran), produced one of the more powerful music videos supporting the protesters of Ahmadinejad’s reelection. This became very popu-

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71 A frame from Blurred Vision’s music video, Another Brick in the Wall (Hey, Ayatollah, Leave Those Kids Alone!).

lar if not viral. On 30 January 2010, the band remade the famous Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick in the Wall,” very popular in Iran, into a clear-­v isioned new protest video anthem, Another Brick in the Wall (Hey, Ayatollah, Leave Those Kids Alone!). In it they intercut footage of their purported clandestine performance of the song inside Iran, being filmed by a fan on a cell phone, with those of street clashes and an overbearing ayatollah who orders the security police to shut down the performance (figure  71). By 1 November, the music video had been played an impressive number of 383,394 times on YouTube; however, the brothers were more impressed by the responses from inside Iran.125 Sepp explained: “We get a lot of e-­mails, especially from the younger guys, and I remember we were in London for a film festival where we were there to receive an award for best video and Sohl was translating an e-­mail into English. And as he was translating he started crying. The e-­mail said, ‘It is you guys out there that can keep this going for us, that can keep our voice alive. We’re here sort of isolated from the rest of the world, we’ve been shut down and shut off from the rest of the world and all we can say is just keep our voice alive, keep going to allow us to reach this point of freedom’” (quoted in Macedo 2010). That YouTube was often shut down by the government made such a response all the more significant, for users had to go through extra steps to get around censorship (without censorship the hits the video received would have been much higher). Not all the comments were positive, however, for some people accused the band of being involved in U.S. public diplomacy projects, of being “backed by the cia and the Pentagon and making a fortune off the U.S. government,” a charge the band denied, stating that it donates most of the song’s download proceeds to Amnesty International. “It’s an ethos of the band that awareness can change the world and music is our tool and platform to do that,” said Sepp, “and in my opinion it’s truly working because the dialogue has begun” (quoted in Macedo 2010). Hey Executioner, Get Lost! (Hey Jallad, Gom Kon Gureto!, 2011) was another music video on the protest movement that tapped into Pink Floyd’s “Another 358

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Brick in the Wall,” except that this was more incendiary than Blurred Vision’s music videos, for it identified Ahmadinejad and Khamenei as the executioners in its title, ordering them to leave the country that was no longer theirs. The video clips of the street demonstrations that accompanied the lyrics included images of orderly protests disrupted by police violence, causing the angry demonstrators to turn on the uniformed and plainclothes policemen, whom they beat up mercilessly and whose van they turned over. The video’s message was no longer protest but revolt.126 Yet another effective counterhailing song, which spawned music videos on YouTube, was Thorn and Riffraff (Khas O’ Khashak), which Iranians produced to counter what Ahmadinejad had once called the thousands of demonstrators to his reelection, “a few thorns and riffraff.” The song turns Ahmadinejad’s own words against him and his regime, addressing them, in its refrain: “You are the thorn and riffraff / you are lower than dirt / I am the aching lover / ablaze, bright, and full of fervor.” 127 Clearly these music videos and many others like them were examples of citizens withdrawing their support from the regime, the most effective peaceful means of combating intolerant and undemocratic governments. However, these videos took one further step. All of them reversed the interpellating process that Louis Althusser describes in his famous illustration of a policeman calling a citizen: “Hey! You, there.” By turning to respond to the policeman, the passerby becomes a subject of the state. Instead of being hailed by the state and its agents (“Hey! You, there”), in these videos it is the protesters and their global sympathizers and collaborators who counterhail the state, not only in the video’s titles but also in their frequent shouted refrains addressed to the regime, “Hey, Ayatollah, leave those kids alone!,” “Hey, executioner, get lost!,” and “You are the thorn and riffraff / you are lower than dirt.” It is in this power not only to withdraw consent but also to counterhail the state, of speaking truth to power, that the Internet cinema will find its political fulfillment. The Iranian government moved to stifle this new form of cinema both in its production and in its dissemination. It began arresting virtual and social activists and videographers. It arrested an increasing number of bloggers, whose labor complemented the Internet cinema, sentencing them to jail terms ranging from a few months to many years. In 2004 it arrested about twenty bloggers and Internet journalists (Tehrani 2008), and between 2000 and 2006 Iran became the top censor of the Internet in the Middle East (El Gody 2007:223), thwarting the democratic potential of the Internet as well as of Iranians. Within a few years, Reporters without Borders was able to label the Islamic Republic, along with thirteen other countries, “enemies of the Internet” (Shahab and Mousoli 2010). In September 2008, the prominent Iranian Canadian blogger Hosain Derakhshan (nicknamed “blogfather,” aka Hoder.com) was arrested inside Iran on a variety of charges, among them collaborating with hostile foreign powers, including Israel. Derakhshan had been the editor of the Internet and film secA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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tion of Donia-­ye Tasvir (World of Pictures) magazine in Tehran and, after emigrating to Canada, had introduced “a simple but groundbreaking” way to show Persian letters and characters on the Internet, which contributed to the prominence of Iranians in the blogosphere. This charge of spying was apparently due to a well-­publicized trip of his in 2006 to Israel (on his Canadian passport) the aim of which was to show “his 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there,” and to “humanise” Iranians for Israelis (Theodoulou 2008). A controversial figure among the blogging community, he had toned down his antiregime blogging in recent times and began supporting the government, and he had returned to Iran from his self-­imposed exile, hoping to work inside the country. He was jailed for nearly two years before finally being sentenced to an incredible 19.5 years of imprisonment on charges of “conspiring with hostile governments, spreading propaganda against the Islamic system, spreading propaganda in favor of counterrevolutionary groups, blasphemy, and creating and managing obscene Web sites” (Mackey 2010c). “Like journalists, bloggers have been treated for months as if they are enemies of the regime,” Reporters without Borders said. “But the authorities have now started to impose much harsher sentences on them. Bloggers involved in censorship circumvention are being particularly targeted as they help their fellow citizens to gain access to banned information.” 128 Internet censorship took many forms, not only imprisonment but also more subtle and structural forms, such as the passing of censorship laws and regulations, content filtering, tapping and surveillance, infrastructural control, telecom control, and self-­ censorship (El Gody 2007:231). Imprisonment, however, remained a common form. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that by February 2010 there were fifty-­two journalists in Iranian jails, a record high that accounted for a third of all the journalists imprisoned in the world.129 A month later, Reporters without Borders noted that “with some sixty journalists and bloggers behind bars and another fifty forced to seek asylum elsewhere, the Islamic Republic of Iran has become the largest prison in the Middle East—­and one of the world’s largest prisons—­for journalists and netizens” (Reporters Without Borders 2010). Undeterred, some Iranian activists came up with another tactic: they took legal action outside Iran. In August 2010, the prominent jailed and tortured journalist Isa Saharkhiz and his son, Mehdi Saharkhiz, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Federal Court in Alexandria, Virginia, against Nokia Siemens Networks and its parent companies, Siemens ag and Nokia Inc., alleging their complicity in the Iranian government’s human rights violations through the spying centers that the companies had supplied. The journalist claimed that such centers had conducted surveillance, eavesdropping, and tracking of his cell phone and other communications after the 2009 elections, resulting in his incarceration and torture. The plaintiffs demanded that Nokia Siemens Networks cease its support of the Iranian intercepting centers and use its connections within the 360

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Iranian regime to secure Saharkhiz’s freedom. They also called on the U.S. judicial system to hold accountable business practices such as the ones engaged in by Nokia Siemens Networks in Iran.130 In another tactic, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran called for the removal of Ezzatollah Zarghami, the director general of the vvir, on the charge that in addition to its close cooperation with intelligence agents and interrogators, the broadcasting authority under him had “systematically produced and broadcast programs aimed to target well-­known personalities through attributing undue, libelous, and untrue matters to them.” This was a reference to the latest iteration of the Identity and Armageddon shows, a new series, Sedition Documents, which purported to be documentaries about reformists, such as Ataollah Mohajerani, Abdolkarim Sorush, Akbar Ganji, Shirin Ebadi, Fatemeh Haqiqatju, and Mohsen Sazegara, many in diaspora, aired on the main vvir channels during prime time. Having no access to the reformists to interrogate and force them into incriminating show trials, these state-­ sanctioned “documentaries” smeared these individuals by digging up dirt in their private lives and by falsely presenting them as immoral and hostile to Islam and to religion (Siamand 2010/1389). The campaign further demanded that the Iranian parliament and judiciary launch an independent inquiry into the vvir violations of the constitution and citizens’ rights on behalf of the defamed individuals who could not defend themselves in the court of public opinion because of government monopoly of all broadcast media.131 How successful these extraterritorial legal interventions will be in impeding the government’s illegal attacks on its own citizens remains to be seen. The Iranian regime took a page from the U.S. government’s public diplomacy rulebook, went global, and began countering the U.S. government’s funding of anti-­Islamic Republic and pro-­democracy ngos inside and outside Iran. This purportedly included supporting and funding ngos in the West that engaged in cultural programming that favored the Islamic Republic. However, when it comes to Iranian government’s funding of NGOs in the diaspora, the issue becomes very murky, as there is little transparency and documentation but much accusations and counteraccusations.132 The Iranian regime also began a wide-­ranging “campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-­w ide—­not just prominent dissidents—­who criticize the regime” (Fassihi 2009). This unprecedented action consisted not only of slowing down the Internet speed, blocking social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter), video-­sharing sites (YouTube), and Internet telephone services (Skype), and cutting e-­mail service inside Iran but also of tracking the activities of Iranians on networking sites worldwide, creating fake sites for the protesters to rope in more victims, monitoring Iranian protesters in the diaspora (nine hundred were tracked in Germany), videotaping their public demonstrations to harass them and their families at home, and sending them anonymous threatening e-­mails to make them cease and desist from “spreading lies and insults“ (ibid.). All these meaA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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sures may have been facilitated and enhanced by the irgc’s takeover of the telecom infrastructure. In 2010 Ahmadinejad’s government attempted another tactic: it put on another charm offensive for the Iranians in diaspora who had previously been denigrated by the Islamic Republic. It established the High Council of Iranians Abroad, which sought to attract thousands of professional Iranians and potential investors to visit, invest, and return to Iran. It sought to facilitate their travels by establishing a twenty-­four-­hour hotline, creating branch offices of the council in Iranian provinces, supporting the creation of “Iran House” branches in foreign countries, and organizing in Tehran the massive “Grand Conference of Iranians Living Abroad,” offering to pay for the participants’ travels and accommodations.133 However, instead of “polishing Iran’s image,” the conference “ended up showcasing many of the country’s bitter internal divisions” (Yong and Worth 2010), and the opposition was quick to post the participants’ names and pictures on the Internet in an effort to “expose the double crossers.” 134 Such a politicization of digital media and the Internet by the public diplomacy quartet—­Western powers, the Iranian regime, dissidents at home, and dissident in the diaspora—­had the unfortunate result of deeply and structurally politicizing the Iranian domestic and exile media and Internet cinema, whether their contents were political or not, degrading their professional impartiality and journalistic fairness, and undermining the media and civil society formations inside and outside the country, regardless of whether they had accepted U.S. or Iranian governments’ funding or not, feeding Iranians’ penchant for conspiracy thinking. It also made Iranian or binational Iranian intellectuals, academics, artists, bloggers, filmmakers, and community activists, whether they were beneficiaries of public diplomacy funding or not, suspect to Iranian and Western intelligence services or targets of their surveillance and recruitment, with serious consequences for their democratic aspirations and their lives.

Link tv’s Bridge to Iran (Poli beh Iran) Not all the governmental, commercial, civil society, diasporic, and oppositional organizations on both sides of the Iranian divide—­at home and in diaspora—­ worked to highlight binarism, difference, and division and to feed the mutually antagonistic public diplomacies of the various parties. Despite some controversies surrounding them, Iranian film and cultural festivals in the diaspora generally served to enhance mutual understanding and reconciliation. There was also one independent civic media institution in the United States, Link TV, which through its series, Bridge to Iran, begun in 2007, helped to enhance mutual understanding by screening Iranian films, often supplemented by revealing interviews with the filmmakers. As its website notes, Bridge to Iran was “a direct response to the cultural misunderstandings and political tensions that 362

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have developed between Iran and the US since the Iranian revolution. The series fills a knowledge gap by providing Americans with informed, insider’s views on modern Iranian society, through documentaries made by Iranian directors, living both inside Iran and within the Iranian diaspora. The series avoids simplistic categorizations and stereotypes about Iran to provide new insights and understandings of a nation, a people, and culture that most Americans know so little about.” 135 In addition, as Stephen Olsson, the series’ Emmy and Peabody Award-­w inning producer/director, stated in a Link TV press release, dated 23 January 2012, “Having Iranian directors tell their own stories and then be interviewed in their native language opens new windows and new levels of understanding for Americans, which may in turn help reduce the possibility of armed conflict.” In all these ways, the Bridge to Iran series was unique among the belligerent public diplomacy and mediawork involving Iran and Iranians, for it promoted people-­to-­people consensus instead of conflict.136 Persheng ­Sadegh-Vaziri, the Iranian-­American filmmaker and co-­producer of the series, also spoke to the point: “Iran has a vibrant film and cultural community, and yet, at the same time, filmmakers and other Iranians are having a hard time with the political and economic realities of sanctions and other issues. This series, quite literally, provides a bridge of understanding between U.S. audiences and Iran.” 137 Over the years, this Iranian documentary series—­the only one to be aired regularly on U.S. television—­showcased the works of leading independent filmmakers from Iran or in the diaspora, including the following: Ebrahim Mokhtari’s Zinat (2000), Nahid Rezai’s Dream of Silk (Khab-­e Abrisham, 2003), Mehrdad Oskouei’s The Other Side of the Burka (Az Pas-­e Borqeh, 2004), Bahman Kiarostami’s Pilgrimage (Ziyarat, 2005), Mohammad Shirvani’s President Mir Qanbar (Rais Jomhur Mir Qanbar, 2005), Kambuzia Partovi’s Border Café (Kafeh Teransit, 2005), Nezam Manoucheri’s A World Between (2006), Negin Kianfar and Daisy Mohr’s The Birthday (2006), Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri’s Conversations in Tehran (2006), Masoud Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (Tehran Anar Nadarad, 2007), Mohammad Rassoulof’s The Dish (Bad-­e Dabur, 2007), and Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri and Kim Spencer’s Cinematic Encounters in Tehran (2009). The 2012 season offered the following documentaries: Nader Takmil Homayoun’s Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution (L’Iran: Une Révolution Cinématographique, 2006), Nahid Sarvestani’s The Queen and I (Drottningen och jag, 2008), Rakhshan Banietemad’s We Are Half of Iran’s Population (Ma Nimi az Jamiat-­e Iranim, 2009), and Maryam Khakipour’s The Joy Makers (Siah Bazi, 2004). Some of these films are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Here only I deal with Cinematic Encounters in Tehran, which is unique because it takes one further step in enhancing crosscultural understanding and appreciation by bringing a small group of filmmakers from Iran and the United States to work together on a single film in Tehran. In 2007, Sadegh-Vaziri and Spencer and their crew followed two male AmerA Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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ican filmmakers, Yoni Brook, 25, and Musa Syeed, 23, to Tehran’s annual documentary film festival, Cinema Vérité. There, they met two Iranian filmmakers, one female, Atefeh Khademolreza, 24, and the other male, Abbas Amini, 26, with whom they joined forces on a film that juxtaposes the lifestyles of a poor carpet weaver and a wealthy carpet merchant in Tehran. Cinematic Encounter in Tehran documents their efforts to overcome cultural, sociopolitical, personal, and linguistic barriers by filmmaking and friendship. When the collaborative filming was completed, Yoni and Musa returned to the U.S. but the two filmmaking-­teams continued to work together to edit the film over the Internet. Each team edited a version of the film and made it available to the other; they went through this process several times, whittling down differences to create a joint version. Cinematic Encounters in Tehran contains excepts from the carpet film, which apparently was not completed, suffering from some of the problems both of collective filmmaking and long-­distance collaboration. Nevertheless, through this mode of production and their challenges the two teams learned about each other’s society, about themselves as filmmakers and as individuals, and about the filmmaking process. As Sadegh-Vaziri told me, team members “became quite close during this period, laughed, joked and argued as friends anywhere and forgot their national boundaries” (Naficy 2012a).

The State Islamizes, the Nation Secularizes Volumes 3 and 4 of this book show the process by which the regime succeeded in creating a theocracy—­an Islamic state—­but they also demonstrate that its attempt at creating a homogeneous and monologic Islamic culture and cinema met with considerable contestation and resistance, resulting in governmental accommodation. Indeed, throughout its existence accommodation remained a key force in play simultaneous with authoritarian tendencies. Even the more nuanced Islamicate culture and cinema that emerged were gradually emptied of some of their Islamic and collectivist values, in the interest of adopting values of liberal democracy, secular modernity, and individualism. As a result, ironically, and despite its official name, under the clerical regime Iran became one of the most secular nations in the Middle East, something that both of the secular Pahlavi regimes had failed to achieve. The foregoing contextual material in this chapter on the Internet cinema, the documentary and underground cinemas discussed in chapter 1, women’s cinema in chapter 2, and art-­house cinema in chapter 3 all corroborate such a claim about increasing secularization, individualism, and liberal democratic values, even though these tendencies are not uniformly present across all social strata. So does the study by the political scientist Mansoor Moaddel, based on two comprehensive national values surveys of more than twenty-­five thousand Iranians nationwide and conducted by University of Tehran researchers in 364

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2000 and 2005. Using these studies, Moaddel was able to establish that “Iranians today appear to be less religious than the publics from other Islamic countries, and the trend in their value orientations is toward individualism, gender equality, democracy, and national identity” (2009:126). He attributed the increased secularization of the population in the 2000s to a kind of reaction formation against the installation of a repressive religious state. Iranians attended mosques less often than the citizens of other Islamic countries (except Saudi Arabia, which like Iran is a theocratic state). Between the two surveys, interest in the value of raising independent children, less beholden to parental approval and control, increased. As did the interest in the value of choosing life partners individually and based on individual attributes and love, instead of based on collective values and by traditionally sanctioned methods. The value of Islamic identity for Iranians decreased, while that of Iranian identity gained in the same period (even Ahmadinejad began referring fondly to the pre-­Islamic history of Persia). In addition, the attitudes toward wearing of veil liberalized dramatically in opposition to the government’s intensified enforcement of compulsory veiling. While in the 2000 survey 70 percent of the respondents had advocated women wearing the veil in public, the figure dropped to 34 percent in the 2005 survey. Moaddel makes the point that under authoritarianism trends toward values change follow “in an oppositional manner to the ideology of the state and its politics” (2009:129). The imposition of a monolithic Shiite religious system and discourse on society may have made liberal values attractive to the society at large and to its filmmakers, whose films increasingly inscribed secular and liberal tendencies and experimentations. However, another factor is that during the period of these two surveys a liberal cleric, Khatami, as president popularized the discourses of liberal democracy, the rule of law, equality (for women and minorities), fairness, and pluralism. More than any other leader, he authorized the utterance and performance of liberal democratic speech acts in the public sphere—­perhaps his greatest accomplishment. However, as shown here, he failed to transform this liberal discourse into institutions, formations, and lasting reality. This ideological reorientation toward modernity and its formations was undergirded by demographic, sociological, and economic shifts and considerations. As Djavad Salehi-­Isfahani and Daniel Egel show in their extensive study of Iranian youths, starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, “Iran experienced a period of extraordinary high fertility, in the midst of falling child mortality rates” (2007:11). This “baby boom” resulted in the 2000s’ “youth bulge,” consisting of the children of baby boomers, who overcrowded schools and universities, created gender imbalance in the marriage market, increased demands for social equality and justice, and exacerbated the pressure on the country’s inflexible formal labor market. Even though Iran’s fertility rate today is the lowest in the region (1.3 percent annually), such pressures are expected to A Cont estatory Fi lm and Media Culture

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72–75 The “youth bulge” turns into time bomb. Young demonstrators in Tehran streets after the 2009 disputed election.

72, 73, 75 Frame grabs from Iranian Green Movement, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=CMD6KMdrJkk.

74 Frame grab from Bella ciao, Iran, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=SNocyz1NRjA&feature=related

last into the next decade, particularly as the Islamist regime has been unable to benefit from the “demographic gift” it has been handed (12). Inequality between the sexes, between urban and rural populations, between haves and have-­nots, and between baby boomers and their offspring, with their attendant powerlessness, disappointment, anomie, and anger, has fueled rising social discontent, turning this gift of the youth into a potential time bomb (figures 72–75). Inequality is a motivating force for other forms of discontent. For example, there is a significant inequality in unemployment between the generations: the average unemployment rate for those thirty years of age and above is below 5 percent, while it is 20 percent for those between fifteen and thirty. A similar inequality exists between the sexes: unemployment among women is twice that of men, with nearly half of the women in their twenties unable to 366

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find work (Salehi-­Isfahani and Egel 2007:24). These inequalities exacerbated other forms of generational and gender disparities in education, marriage, and housing. The high rate and long duration of unemployment among the youth “not only deplete a person’s human capital, they can also dash hopes, reduce self-­esteem, and even cause depression” (37). The alarming rate of drug abuse among youths, one of the highest in the Middle East, is one serious social consequence. Other consequences are the soaring suicide rate, the second-­highest cause of death in Iran, particularly for women,138 the “skyrocketing” divorce rate, which stands at 1 divorce for every 7 marriages nationwide and 1 divorce for every 3.76 marriages in Tehran (Yong 2010), the high rate of brain drain from Iran, one of the highest in the world (Hakimzadeh 2006), and the emergence of the oppositional Green Movement in the late 2000s. Such social issues related to the values of liberal democracy, secular modernity, and individualism and their attendant social and psychic turmoil and costs became recurrent topics not only in the society at large, feeding the reformist and oppositional movements, but also in the topics of movies, fueling particularly the social-­problems feature films, Internet films, and documentaries of both women and art-­cinema directors. Began in the 1990s, these movies and documentaries grew in force and numbers in the 2000s, commensurate with the intensification of the problems and the deepening of the failures of society and the state to adequately respond to them. At this point, Internet cinema has become the most potent medium of expression for the youth bulge, signaling the presence of a ticking time bomb.

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5 Ir ani an, bu t wit h a Differen t Accen t A Cinema of Displacement or a Displaced Cinema?

I

ranian cinema was transnational from the start, benefiting from exchanges with neighboring and world cinemas and from the international travels of Iranians. Indeed, the first documented Iranian cameraman, Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-­Saltaneh, filmed his first silent actualities abroad, such as the Carnival of Flowers (1900), when he accompanied Mozaffar al-­Din Shah as the court’s official photographer on the latter’s first state trip to Europe. These actualities were part both of the modernization and of the modernity of Iranians—­both of which were facilitated by photography and cinema. Likewise, the first Iranian who made sound fiction movies for consumption inside Iran, Abdolhosain Sepanta, made all five of his movies in India, starting with The Lor Girl (1934). As a poet inspired by ancient myths and love stories, Sepanta made movies that were also part of Iranians’ modernity, for through their syncretic Westernization, they tied Iran’s route to modernity to its ancient roots in the pre-­Islamic past. Most of the other pioneers who made movies inside the country, such as Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov, Ebrahim Moradi, Khanbabakhan Motazedi, Ovanes Ohanians, and Ismail Kushan, had traveled to Europe or Russia. Some had studied film or worked in film business there. Their movies found most of their audiences inside Iran. The many Iranians who went to Europe and North America after the Second World War and studied film also made films. But these were generally short films, few of which were ever screened publicly either at home or abroad. These were probably mostly student films, confined to personal or university archives, or they might have served as steppingstones to a

film career for their makers in Iran or elsewhere. It was only with the mass exodus of Iranians abroad in the late 1970s due to the revolution, the Iran-­Iraq war, and subsequent economic, political, and religious hardships that Iranians were positioned to make truly accented movies abroad, either for the large compatriot diasporic populations or for the general public in their adopted lands. The trauma and drama of origin and displacement were contributors to their accent. While revolution and war were the twin traumatic push factors driving the exodus of Iranians, the unconscionable taking hostage of fifty-­t wo Americans in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, which lasted for 444 days, and its lengthy, negative impact on bilateral relations formed the hostile sociocultural milieu that made Iranians’ life in the West, particularly in the United States, more painful and traumatic. Israeli and Western governments and Iranian exiles charged that the government of the Islamic Republic was involved in terrorism both at home and abroad, repressed expression, assembly, and human and minority rights, was building up nuclear arms, opposed Israel, and fomented discord in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These accusations, alongside the continually tightening economic and political sanctions imposed on Iran by Western countries and the United Nations, and the military encirclement of Iran by hostile American and regional forces, exacerbated bilateral tensions and worsened perceptions between Iran and the West. The two national mediaworks of Iran and the United States demonized each other, particularly after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George W. Bush and Barack Obama became presidents in their respective countries, with each intensifying his country’s public diplomacy campaigns against the other. These reception contexts further traumatized the displaced population, problematizing their sense of belonging and assimilation, torquing the politics and poetics of their films, and thus further contributing to their accents. This chapter examines the accented films that displaced Iranians made outside Iran in such contexts, and the impact they had on the personal, national, and transnational identities of the filmmakers and their audiences. This accented cinema is both a cinema of displacement and a displaced cinema, for the films are produced by Iranian exilic, diasporic, ethnic, and cosmopolitan filmmakers under conditions of external displacement, often for a displaced or global audience, and their reception in both the producing countries and in the director’s original home country is subjected to the routing and rooting politics of displacement and homing. More than its counterpart at home, the Iranian accented cinema is modernist as well as postmodernist. It is the product of individual filmmakers working under conditions of interstitiality and artisanal independence, whose films deal primarily with individual subjectivity and identity, often having autobiographical narratives. These attributes are indicative of the triumph of modernity in the diaspora; yet by placing the individual not squarely within the nation but in its interstices, at intersections, and within a network of relations, they are postmodernist as well. The variety of forms, types, and lengths of films 370

T he Globalizi ng Era

and media the makers produce and the way they tap into the new media and the Internet for the production and dissemination of their works underscore their postmodernity. Iranian accented films are the embodiment of the following conditions: “We are living in an interrelated world that increasingly favours horizontality over verticality, multiplicity over singularity, routes over roots, and network over nation. This has brought on the ascendance of the terms that denote connectivity and interconnectivity—­horizontal, vertical and transverse—­in the realms of culture, media, technology and society, giving new meanings to such prefixes as inter, multi, and trans that emphasize transitive and rhizomatic relations, collaboration, transition, mobility, synergy, and synchronicity” (Naficy 2007f).

Demographic Profile of Displaced Iranians and Filmmakers Iran has the highest rate of “brain drain” in the world, concluded a survey of sixty-­one countries in 2004 by the International Monetary Fund, which also noted, “every year more than 150,000 educated Iranians leave their home country in the hope of finding a better life abroad” (Esfandiari 2004). This alarming development has far-­reaching consequences for Iran, Iranian populations in the diaspora, and the receiving nations. Simultaneously, postrevolution Iran also was the world’s largest refugee haven, with the displaced Afghan population reaching 3 million at its peak in 1991 and the displaced Iraqi population reaching seven hundred thousand after the Halabja chemical bombings in 1988 (Hakimzadeh 2006:8–9). Both of these movements of displacement—­emigration and immigration—­have had profound repercussions for Iranian cinema, particularly in broadening its horizons externally and deepening them internally. This has led to extraterritorial and multiplex works by Iranian directors filmed in neighboring countries (Turkey, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iraq, Syria, and India) and to an “Afghanistani film cycle” about displaced Afghanis inside Iran. Simultaneously, interest in Iran’s own diverse ethnic communities has deepened, leading to other “ethnic cycles” such as Kurdish films. The extraterritorial films are dealt with in a previous chapter; the films resulting from the emigration of Iranians to other lands are dealt with in this chapter. Most Iranians emigrated to Europe and North America, with those in the United States forming the largest population outside Iran. These are part of the large Middle Eastern and Muslim diaspora populations in the United States. U.S. Census Bureau data from 1990 showed the total number of those tracing their ancestry to the Middle East as nearly 2 million out of a total U.S. population of about 250 million. Among them were 921,000 Arabs, 308,000 Armenians, 260,000 Iranians, and 117,000 Israelis. The largest concentration of Middle Easterners in the United States and in the Western world, some 300,000 people, lived in Los Angeles in the mid-­1990s (Bozorgmehr, Der-­ Martirosian, and Sabagh 1996). Contrary to the inflated anecdotal reports both Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

371

by the Iranian exile press and by the U.S. media, which put the number of Iranians in the United States at 1 to 2 million, the census showed a total of 285,000 Iranians in the United States—­both foreign-­born and native-­born, of whom 100,000 (35 percent) lived in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (Bozorgmehr 1997:445). This official figure represented an undercount due to Iranians’ political and legal fears of participating in the census. The 2000 U. S. census showed 338,366 people claiming Iranian ancestry (Brittingham and de la Cruz 2004:4), a figure that still undercounts the real population, for the Iranian Interest Section in Washington claims to hold “passport information for approximately 900,000 Iranians in the US” (Fata and Rafii 2003:4).1 Although highly concentrated in Southern California, this population is urban and cosmopolitan and is dispersed across the United States, with sizable concentrations in New York, Texas, and Virginia. Table 4 shows this dispersion in the early 2000s. The Iranian population in diaspora is also heterogeneous in terms of social and class affiliation, profession, politics, ethnicity, religion, gender, and generation. As a result, it is misleading to speak of an Iranian community outside Iran as if it were singular and homogenous. The same is true of the Iranian mediamakers and their products. I conducted three research projects on these, each resulting in a book. One dealt with Iranian popular culture and television in Los Angles, a second with displaced Middle Eastern and North African filmmakers, including Iranians, and a third with displaced Iranian filmmakers only. The first, undertaken in the 1980s and the early 1990s, established the extent and vitality of Iranian pop culture and television produced in Los Angeles and disseminated to what became a worldwide diaspora. Like Berlin—­which in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic became a center of cultural activity for Iranian exiles, producing influential magazines such as Kaveh (1916–22), Iranshahr (1922–27), Nameh Farhangestan (1922–27), and Elm va Honar (1927–28)—­Los Angeles became the cultural center for Iranians in the diaspora in the 1980s (and beyond), using the full spectrum of modern media available to them. In their first dozen years of postrevolution exile, Iranians in Los Angeles produced and aired about sixty-­two regularly scheduled tv programs in Los Angeles, with the number of shows in 1993 standing at twenty-­six, adding up to more than seventeen hours of programming per week. For reasons explained elsewhere, almost all these programs and their producers were secular and vehemently opposed to the Islamic Republic, and religious minorities ranked high among them—­Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, and Baha’is. In addition to these tv shows, Iranians produced twenty-­seven feature movies primarily in the United States, many by veteran Pahlavi-­era filmmakers. Finally, Iranians in Los Angeles produced eighteen regularly scheduled radio programs in this period, eighty-­six Persian-­language periodicals, numerous music albums, music videos, musical concerts, and news­ casts. They also formed many cultural, political, and student associations and nightclubs (Naficy 1993b, 2002a; Shay 2000). 372

T he Globalizi ng Era

Table 4 Population of Iranian descent in the United States (by states in order of population) State California

Population of Iranian Descent 159,016

State Kentucky

Population of Iranian Descent 1,581

New York

22,856

Utah

1,526

Texas

22,590

Indiana

1,476

Virginia

14,970

Louisiana

1,180

Maryland

12,935

Alabama

1,069

Florida

9,625

New Mexico

1,039

Illinois

8,184

South Carolina

802

New Jersey

7,790

Washington, D.C.

746

Georgia

6,377

Arkansas

616

Washington

6,351

Mississippi

588

Massachusetts

5,764

Nebraska

561

Michigan

4,673

New Hampshire

491

Pennsylvania

4,657

Rhode Island

485

Arizona

4,222

West Virginia

374

Ohio

3,927

Delaware

372

Colorado

3,738

Hawaii

363

Oregon

3,538

Idaho

272

North Carolina

3,000

Maine

228

Oklahoma

2,798

South Dakota

201

Nevada

2,702

North Dakota

161

Minnesota

2,500

Vermont

139

Connecticut

2,428

Montana

74

Tennessee

2,362

Alaska

70

Missouri

2,267

Wyoming

57

Kansas

2,004

Puerto Rico

56

Wisconsin

1,823

Source: Adapted from Fata and Rafii 2003

My second study, conducted in the late 1990s, focused on the accented films that Middle Eastern and North African filmmakers made in diaspora. These were many and diverse: 321 directors from 16 sending countries made a minimum of 920 films in 27 receiving countries, mostly in Europe and North America. Iranian filmmakers were the most productive (with 307 films), followed by Armenians (235), Algerians (107), Lebanese (46), Palestinians (35), Turks (25), Moroccans (25), Tunisians (23), and Israeli/Jewish filmmakers (24). Most of the 373

Table 5 Chronology and global distribution of Iranian accented films (1960–2012) Country USA

1960–1964 1965–1969 1970–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984 1985–1989 4

7

France

3

0

Canada

0

0

Germany

0

0

Sweden

0

0

Austria

0

3

England/UK

0

0

Netherlands

0

0

Australia

0

Norway New Zealand

20

36

45

65

2

1

13

5

0

0

0

3

0

7

9

6

0

0

3

9

3

3

9

7

0

0

1

2

0

1

4

4

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

3

0

0

0

0

0

0

Denmark

0

0

0

0

0

3

Belgium

0

0

3

0

0

0

Iraq

0

0

0

0

0

0

India

0

0

0

0

1

0

Thailand

0

0

0

0

0

2

Italy

0

0

0

0

0

0

Russia

0

0

0

0

0

0

Czech Republic

0

0

0

0

0

0

Switzerland

0

0

0

0

0

0

Chile

0

0

1

0

0

0

Total

7

10

29

48

85

109

Note: year is the year in which the films were either produced or released. Only Iranians who directed films and videos outside Iran are listed. This includes those working for commercial and professional film industries and those working in artisanal, interstitial, alternative, and amateur environments. A few directors who primarily made television films for mainstream networks are also listed, but this list is not exhaustive and their output is not counted in the total number of films, because it is vast. Iranians who worked as producers, writers, cinematographers, editors, or cast members are also not listed. Many who are not listed here produced and directed ethnic tv shows; for an extensive treatment of these, see Naficy 1993b. Those who directed only music videos are also not listed. zeros denote either lack of information or lack of films in that year. Source: Hamid Naficy, private database

374

1990–1994 1995–1999 2000–2004 2005–2009 2010–2012 60

79

79

58

24

unknown 28

Total 505

12

32

48

16

5

1

138

14

14

23

23

12

18

107

17

16

7

14

6

8

90

29

18

11

6

1

0

77

14

9

9

7

2

2

68

12

15

23

10

3

1

67

11

12

3

3

2

2

42

3

4

6

6

0

0

19

4

0

3

6

2

0

18

0

4

6

0

0

1

11

5

1

1

0

0

0

10

1

0

0

0

0

0

4

0

0

1

1

2

0

4

0

0

0

1

0

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

0

0

1

1

0

2

1

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

184

204

221

152

60

61

1170

filmmakers were men, reflecting the dominance of patriarchy in sending nations and the general pattern of migrations worldwide, which favors the emigration of men ahead of their families to establish a beachhead for chain migration. This gender imbalance also reflected the belief common to many Middle Eastern and North African societies that cinema is not a socially, religiously, and economically acceptable enterprise for women. The patriarchal ideologies of the receiving countries also contributed to women’s underrepresentation. The magnitude, diversity, and geographical spread of Middle Eastern and North African immigration gave an idea of the larger scattering of peoples across the globe and of the movement of cultural and intellectual capital. Clearly the world is experiencing a mammoth emergent transnational film movement and film style, Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

375

which I have called accented cinema. However, unlike most past film movements and styles, accented cinema is not homogenous, centralized, or hierarchical. Rather, in line with the age, it is simultaneously global and local, and it exists in chaotic, semi-­autonomous, and interstitial pockets in symbiosis with other cinemas (Naficy 2001a). My third study—­of Iranian filmmakers working abroad, conducted for the present book—­not only revised considerably upward their total output reported in the previous studies but also provided a fascinating sociocultural and cinematic profile of that output. Between 1960 and 2012 at least 264 filmmakers of Iranian descent have directed a minimum of 1,170 films outside Iran (table 5). The real figures for both accented filmmakers and their films are certainly higher, as there is no clearinghouse regularly collecting data on them. Nevertheless, the present statistics, collected from multiple filmographies, festival catalogs, distributors’ catalogs, Internet sources, and personal contacts with filmmakers through the years, are the first and the most exhaustive to date.2 The geographic locations in which Iranians have made films give a good idea of their worldwide diaspora, while their film output gives an indication of their relative numbers and the cultural capital in each location. As table 5 shows, Iranians made films in 21 countries, with the United States ranking first (with 505 films), followed, among others, by France (138), Canada (107), Germany (90), Sweden (77), Austria (68), Great Britain (67), the Netherlands (42), Australia (19), Norway (18), New Zealand (11), and Denmak (10). The dominance of the United States is not surprising, for the country houses both the largest population of Iranians outside Iran and the most powerful film industry in the world. Although there is some relationship between the size of the displaced population in each country and film production, this relationship is complicated and contingent, requiring further research. In one study the ranking of destination countries by size of the Iranian-­born population was the following, in descending order: the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, France, and Armenia (Hakimzadeh 2006:3–4). With the exception of France and Israel, all other countries with large Iranian populations also produce many films. France, with a smaller Iranian population, produced a relatively higher number of films, while Israel, with a large Iranian population, apparently did not produce any. The data about accented filmmakers’ output in each country is skewed by two factors: the unavailability of data, as in the case of Israel, and the high film output of certain individuals in a particular country, pushing the numbers up unexpectedly, such as that of Ghazel Radpay in France, of Sohrab Shahid Saless in Germany, and of Houchang Allahyari in Austria. Fuller statistics are needed for greater accuracy. The significant point here is that this dispersion of populations and products across nations has created an Iranian diasporic consciousness that emerged only two decades after their largest exodus in the late 1970s. Deterritorialization destabilized the traditional Iranian patriarchy, as did 376

T he Globalizi ng Era

Table 6 Iranian accented filmmakers by gender and country of residence (1960–2012) Country

Male

Female

Unknown

Totals

USA

76

Germany

23

28

1

105

6

0

29

Canada France

20

8

0

28

18

8

0

26

Sweden

20

4

0

24

England/UK

7

10

0

17

Netherlands

7

4

0

11

Austria

6

0

0

6

Norway

1

0

2

3

Australia

1

1

0

2

India

2

0

0

2

Denmark

2

0

0

2

New Zealand

1

0

0

1

Belgium

1

0

0

1

Iraq

1

0

0

1

Thailand

1

0

0

1

Russia

1

0

0

1

Chile

1

0

0

1

Italy

1

0

0

1

Czech Republic

1

0

0

1

Switzerland

1

0

0

1

192

69

3

264

Total

Source: Hamid Naficy, private database

revolution inside Iran. Women’s status changed, and they were increasingly involved in mediamaking, as actors and as directors, at home and abroad. My study shows that of 264 Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora 69 (26 percent) were women and 192 (72 percent) were men (the remaining three were collective or unknown; see table 6). While this female-­male director ratio appears to be low, confirming women’s low participation in the labor force in the diaspora (see Bozorgmehr 2007:474), it is higher than it was in Iran when the revolution of 1978–79 drove many into exile. As table 7 shows there is a relationship between the gender of the filmmakers and the types of films they made. Men dominated in all the film types, with the exception of the experimental films, in which women outnumbered them. Women also scored high in the documentary category. The table also shows that Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

377

Table 7 Chronology of Iranian accented film types by gender (1960–2012) Type of Film

Gender

1960–1964 1965–1969 1970–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984

Educational

Male

0

0

0

0

4

Educational

Female

0

0

0

0

0

Animation

Male

0

0

3

1

1

Animation

Female

0

0

0

0

0

Animation

Unknown Gender

Docu-Drama

Male

4

0

0

0

0

Docu-Drama

Female

0

0

0

0

0

Documentary

Male

0

1

2

11

15

Documentary

Female

0

0

0

1

5

Documentary

Unknown Gender

2

Documentary for TV Male

0

0

0

0

0

Documentary for TV Female

0

0

0

0

0

Experimental

Male

0

2

2

0

6

Experimental

Female

0

0

8

0

2

Feature

Male

2

1

0

10

17

Feature

Female

0

0

1

1

1

Feature for TV

Male

0

1

0

1

5

Feature for TV

Female

0

0

0

1

0

Music Video

Male

0

0

0

0

0

Music Video

Female

0

0

0

0

0

Short

Male

0

3

0

1

12

Short

Female

0

0

0

0

1

TV Series

Male

1

2

10

17

9

TV Series

Female

0

0

0

0

0

Uncategorized

Male

0

0

3

2

6

Uncategorized

Female

0

0

0

0

1

7

10

29

48

85

Total

Note: tv series and music videos, both highly prolific genres, are not listed here. zeros denote either lack of information or lack of films in that year. Source: Hamid Naficy, private database

378

1985–1989 1990–1994 1995–1999 2000–2004 2005–2009 2010–2012 Unknown

Total 7

1

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

1

2

3

2

1

0

1

15

0

0

0

0

3

0

3

6 2

2 0

0

1

1

1

1

0

8

0

0

2

0

3

0

0

5

12

30

19

14

29

16

11

160

6

11

23

43

22

4

2

117 5

3 2

9

4

16

5

0

0

36

0

1

1

0

0

0

0

2

14

16

14

12

13

3

2

84

2

3

28

61

18

2

2

126

21

25

23

21

28

21

9

178

0

1

2

4

4

4

1

19

2

3

3

0

0

0

0

15

0

0

0

1

0

0

0

2

1

0

1

2

2

1

2

9

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

16

45

52

29

13

7

8

186

2

13

10

11

4

0

3

44

9

10

9

1

2

1

7

78

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

16

9

6

1

2

0

6

51

1

4

2

1

1

0

4

14

109

184

204

221

152

60

61

1170

while women started to make films later than the men, in the 1970–74 period, they soon became highly productive, surpassing men’s output in certain years and types of films. For example their output in documentary film production grew fast in the 1990s, surpassing that of the men in the 2000–4 period. Likewise, during the same period women’s experimental film output outpaced that of the men. What to make of the much smaller output of women in feature film production? One reason for it may be their later start in the complex and capital Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

379

intensive business, necessitating a longer run up time to feature making; the other might be their more personal approach to filmmaking, which fitted the experimental, short, and documentary film formats. These films were smaller in scale and were often more personal, even autobiographical, expressing the travels of identity of their makers, while men’s feature movies were more political and made for commercial distribution and exhibition.3 Iranians came to the United States in three broad waves: from 1950 to 1978, from 1979 to 1986, and from 1987 to 2012. The first was motivated by Westernization spearheaded by the Shah; the second by the popular social revolution, eventually led by Ayatollah Khomeini; and the third by war with Iraq, economic misery, and sociocultural restrictions. They produced three different types of populations. The first wave comprised mainly permanent economic immigrants or temporary immigrants such as students, which numbered more than fifty thousand by revolution of 1978–79. This number took a nose dive with the revolution and the subsequent antagonistic actions at home and abroad, so that by 1999 there were only seventeen hundred Iranian foreign students in the United States. The exodus of the student population to the United States grew once again in the mid-­1990s, and it was further energized by Ahmadinejad’s election and the ensuing social oppressions, rising by nearly 50 percent since 2005 (Torbati 2010). The significance of this trend is that it has occurred despite the obstacles that successive U.S. administrations, including that of Barack Obama, placed in the way of student visas, such as giving Iranian students only a single-­entry visa, which means they cannot return to Iran to conduct research or to visit ill parents without jeopardizing their education. This evolution of the student population shows that Iranian immigration waves and their populations were not static. The second wave was made up of political refugees and exiles with high class capital (Bozorgmehr 1997:443–44). The third wave consisted of highly qualified professionals, on the one hand, and of working-­class economic refugees, on the other, who emigrated after the cease-­fire with Iraq in search of better opportunities (Hakimzadeh 2006:3). Ethnoreligious minorities figured large in all the waves. To the third wave should be added the exodus caused by the controversial reelection of Ahmadinejad in 2009, a fourth wave in the making. Citing the United Nations, the Wall Street Journal reported that between June and December of that year, more than forty-­t wo hundred Iranians worldwide had sought refugee status, contributing to “a small but spreading refugee exodus of businesspeople, dissidents, college students, journalists, athletes and other elite Iranians that is transforming the global face of Iran’s resistance movement” (Stecklow and Fassihi 2009). Turkey was a favorite way station for Iranian refugees awaiting entry into the European Union and the United States, as it did not require a prior visa from Iranians (they can obtain one at their port of entry upon arrival). According to Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs more than half of the sixty-­seven thousand people who have sought refuge in Turkey since 1995 have been Iranians 380

T he Globalizi ng Era

Table 8 Iranian immigration waves and their cinematic output Wave

Years

Type of Immigration

First

1960–1978

Temporary / Students

78

Second

1979–1986

Refugees / Elite exiles

135

Third

1987–2012

Professionals / Working class émigré

896

dates unknown Total

No. of Films

61 1170

Source: Hamid Naficy, private database

(Stecklow and Fassihi 2009). They constituted the second-­largest refugee popu­ lation in Turkey after those from Iraq. The United Nation’s High Commission on Refugees (unhcr) noted that many Iranian refugees engaged in journalism, filmmaking, or mediamaking, acting as “citizen journalists, documentarians, bloggers, radio interviewers, and internet campaigners” (Omid Advocates for Human Rights 2010:11, see also Stecklow and Fassihi 2009). However, because of Turkey’s high unemployment rate and strict refugee rules, they could not stay on permanently, having to await United Nation’s verification of their refugee status before pushing on to third countries. In the meantime, many expressed a fear of interacting with other refugees and engaged in self-­imposed isolation because they took seriously the Iranian security forces’ threats to punish asylum seekers abroad or their families in Iran. “On account of these fears and threats,” stated the unhcr, “many refugees reported high levels of stress, insomnia, migraines and other symptoms suggesting a lack of psychological well-­being, ongoing re-­traumatization, and secondary traumatization due to their conditions in Turkey” (Omid Advocates for Human Rights 2010:14). As a relatively small sojourner population, the first wave of mostly students and émigrés, who were mostly in engineering and hard sciences fields, produced a relatively small body of films in the diaspora—­78 works. However, the second, larger wave of exiles was more productive, making 135 films in a much shorter time period. In the ensuing years, between 1987 and 2012, as exile evolved for many into diaspora and a third wave of émigrés joined them, their output grew steadily, reaching an all-­time high of 896 films (table 8). Because the second wave Iranian exiles who emigrated as adults were on average older than the first wave student population, less educated, forced to accept jobs lower in status than they had held in Iran, and had a lower mastery of the host country’s language and culture, transplantation meant a drastic downward shift in their status (Bozorgmehr and Sabagh 1991:126–31).4 This partially explains the propensity to dystopia and dysphoria, particularly among intellectuals, including filmmakers and television producers, whose high-­stature identity in Iran suffered in the anonymity of exile.5 Changed social circumCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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stances often shift displaced populations from one modality to another—­exilic, diasporic, refugee, émigré, ethnic, and cosmopolitan. This change is reflected not only in the content and forms of the exile-­produced televisual culture in the United States (Naficy 1993b) but also in the thematic trajectory of Iranians’ films in Europe and North America. Compared to native-­born Americans or other high-­achieving immigrants, Iranian immigrants in the United States had as a whole an unusually high level of income, education, self-­employment, and professional skills—­necessary to support their dynamic, advertising-­driven popular culture and their emerging political influence both in the United States and inside Iran.6 Another demographic factor contributing to the politics of Iranian accented cinema and culture is the surprising heterogeneity of the displaced populations’ religion, ethnicity, and politics—­one not readily apparent to outsiders. In the United States, for example, Iranian Shiite Muslims formed the largest group, followed by Armenians, Jews, and Baha’is. However, when taken together, Iranian minorities outnumber Muslims, who had formed 98 percent of the population in Iran. Thus, for the first time, the Muslim majority found itself to be a minority in exile, partly accounting for its exilic ambivalence, dystopia, and anxiety. Significantly, Iranian exiles were also highly secular, particularly the Muslims. A mere 2 percent in Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Claudia Der-­Martirosian, and Georges Sabagh’s study said they observed religious practice, apparently reflecting their secular background before exile and their opposition to the Islamic government (which may have turned them off Islam) (1991:14). This meant that despite the prevalent sociological view, religion did not necessarily reinforce ethnicity. Their overwhelming secularism and opposition to the Islamic government accounted for the near complete absence of religious topics and Islamic iconography in the first postrevolution decade of Iranian television in Los Angeles.7 Iranian accented cinema, particularly exilic films of denial and panic, tackled the issue of politicized Islam early on, to condemn it as prone to violence and terrorism. Beyond those political and instrumentalist uses of Islam, neither Islam nor any other religion was a dominant theme of the accented films. This is likely to change in the face of increasing Islamophobia and Iranophobia in the West, which may drive Iranian Muslims to recoil in self-­defense, and in the light of increased migration of Iranian Muslims to the West during the third wave.8 Although I did not attempt to ascertain the religious, ethnic, racial, and sociocultural affiliations of the film directors, because these facts are often effaced and manipulated for fear of persecution or to gain advantage, these factors have a determining impact on exilic television, ethnic music videos, and accented films. For example, self-­employment in the late 1980s was very high among Iranians in the United States (six times that of native-­born Americans). Yet Iranian Jews had an even higher rate of self-­employment (82 percent), the

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highest of any new immigrant group in the United States (Bozorgmehr, Der-­ Martirosian, and Sabagh 1991:12). Self-­employment allowed Iranians to create a series of interethnic or subethnic economies supporting their cultural productions in the diaspora—­t v, radio, newspapers, music, films, and Internet sites—­ all driven by advertising. The high proportion of interethnic populations and the high percentage of self-­employment among Jews and Armenians accounted for their disproportionate impact on the political economy of exilic television and music videos (Naficy 2002a).9 Ethnicity as an important factor intertwines with language and nationality. Although the Iranian population is ethnically and linguistically diverse, Persian (Farsi) is the lingua franca for all subethnic groups. Unlike the North African, South Asian, East Asian, and Caribbean countries whose displaced populations formed the category “postcolonial” and created the beur cinema in France, Asian Pacific film and video collectives in the United States, and black and Asian film and video collectives in Britain, Iran was not colonized by the West, and Iranian émigrés were not postcolonial. As a result, they did not have as much access to the colonial cultures and languages as did the colonized, which would have allowed them, in the words of Gayatri Spivak, to both critique and inhabit the colonial cultures and languages intimately (1993:60). In the case of the colonies, this access created both the necessary distance and intimacy to allow the colonized to critique both the colonizers’ and their own native cultures. At the same time, shared history encouraged the consolidation of identity among the disparate formerly colonized populations now in diaspora, while shared colonial language facilitated communication among them, as well as between them and the colonizing host societies. The formerly imposed colonial language thus became an unexpected asset for the postcolonial subjects in diaspora, particularly for intellectuals and filmmakers. As such, they were more prone to invest in the constitution of a new society in the present than in a nostalgic reconstitution of an imaginary homeland elsewhere. The impact of postcolonial critical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, among others, on theorizing the postcolonial and postmodern conditions would have been at best modest were it not for their mastery of the colonizers’ languages, cultures, and philosophical traditions. The recent popularity of English-­language Bollywood movies and theater musicals, and that of their Western offspring such as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), aimed at Indian diaspora and Western fans, testifies to the advantages of that intimate inhabitation and critique. Iranians, who had not experienced direct Western colonialism and its imposed language and culture at home, could not benefit in exile from the collective identity thereby construed. This did not mean that they were not exposed to, or lured by, the West, or subjected to the West’s colonizing projects. As the present volumes have shown, Iranians’ modern identity was intimately inter-

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twined with the identities of their Western others and with other ethnic and ethnoreligious identities throughout the twentieth century. Their identities in exile and diaspora, too, were formed by this history of selfing and othering and their respective mediawork during the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and by the more recent politics and mediawork following the Islamic Republic.

Film and Cinema Help Iranians to Process Displacement As noted, media-­savvy Iranians produced dynamic mediawork in the diaspora, its recent nerve center being in Los Angeles. This consisted of telephonic newscasts; Persian-­language television and radio; books, newspapers, and magazines; contemporary and classical music recordings, performances, nightclub shows, and music videos; and film productions, film screenings, and film festivals. They established bookstores, video and record stores, grocery stores, art galleries, and Internet stores, all of which handled these and other cultural and artistic products made by Iranians outside and inside Iran. Social and intellectual salons, university faculty and student associations, political societies, professional associations, ethnoreligious associations, and women’s associations held meetings, organized conferences, art exhibitions, and film screenings, and issued position papers, adding to the cross-­fertilization, density, and richness of Iranian culture in the diaspora. As a result, these popular media forms, more than literature or poetry, “spoke for” Iranian exiles and shaped their experiences of displacement (though literature and poetry were part of it). With these cultural products they experienced their new lives, made sense of their new world, reconstructed their past, and formulated new identities, in the process both participating in and resisting the dominant cultural forms of their host and home countries (Naficy 1993b). The extensive and complex mediawork they created connected Iranians worldwide, allowing them to live in dispersed communities while staying in touch. This created a diasporic consciousness. At the local level, instead of being herded into émigré or ethnic physical enclaves, or “ghettos,” as many other and pervious immigrants had been, the Iranians of various ethnoreligious backgrounds in one place, such as in Los Angeles, could live in their ethnoreligious communities across the city, while via their mediawork maintaining relations with Iranians and others in the homeland and in diaspora. Even the most alienated and atomized exiles could thus stay in touch. I dealt with television produced in exile in the context of mutually antagonistic public diplomacy between Iran and the United States in a previous chapter. In this chapter I focus on film and cinema. Iranian cinematic efforts in the diaspora consisted of two chief activities: the exhibition of Iranian movies made before and after the revolution and the production of new movies abroad.

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Exhibiting Pahlavi-­Era Movies Exhibiting movies made in Iran before the revolution reconnected recently displaced Iranians to their homeland. Scores of theatrical features were screened in the commercial movie houses of Los Angeles and New York in the first decade after the revolution and the ensuing massive emigration. The films traveled circuitous routes from Iran onto U.S. screens, much as the exiles themselves had done. Many were smuggled out of the country. Some arrived in the possession of producers who had emigrated. Still others were obtained from distributors, particularly in the Persian Gulf states. For years, the former stewpot movie producer Ali Mortazavi and his company, Khaneh-­ye Film-­e Iran (Film House of Iran, fhi), was the most active in exhibiting features in Los Angeles (popular B-­ movies and filmfarsi films), while the film producer and critic Bahman Maghsoudlou and his International Film and Video Center (ifvc) exhibited new-­wave movies and documentaries in New York. While Mortazavi was a well-­known figure with deep connections in commercial cinema, Maghsoudlou was involved in alternative cinema. Mortazavi had published and edited the popular movie magazines Setareh Sinema (Movie Star) and Film va Honar (Film and Art) from the 1950s to the 1970s (he died in Los Angeles in June 2004), while Maghsoudlou had published six issues of an intellectual magazine in the 1970s, Vizheh-­ye Sinema va Te’atr (Cinema and Theater Special).10 In June 1985, Mortazavi gave me a list of fhi’s collection of ninety films, almost all of them shot on 35mm, mostly filmfarsi (stewpot comedies, melodramas, and tough-­guy movies) (see appendix B). In the early 1980s, he screened these generally unsubtitled movies once a week in Los Angeles, usually Thursday nights in the Four Star Cinema near Beverly Hills and sometimes on Tuesday nights in the Monica Cinema in Santa Monica, or in the Sherman Cinema in San Fernando Valley. Audiences ranged between fifty and two hundred in each venue. Starting October 1983, as his four-­page flyer announced, he also began screening a series of five new-­wave movies under the rubric of “Iran’s Progressive Cinema.” These were Hosain Rajaiyan’s The Eighth Day of the Week (Hashtomin Ruz-­e Hafteh, 1973), Mehrjui’s The Cow (Gav, 1969), Bahman Farmanara’s The Tall Shadows of the Wind (Sayehha-­ye Boland- ­e Bad, 1979), Amir Naderi’s Requiem (Marsiyeh, 1978), and Bahram Baizai’s Stranger and Fog (Gharibeh va Meh, 1976). The first three titles were not from his own collection; he probably rented them from the ifvc and others. Mortazavi was a low-­key person, and he usually did not introduce the movies himself, nor did he generally invite directors or stars to appear with their movies and interact with the spectators, although some of the movie stars, who were plentiful in Los Angeles, such as Behrouz Vossoughi, showed up at some screenings. However, Mortazavi regularly printed and distributed flyers containing his monthly film program, illustrated with movie posters of the Pahlavi era. He offered a discount

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to students ($5 general admission, $3 student admission). A Film House flyer distributed in the early 1980s, titled “We Are Not Strangers to You,” addressed the spectators and outlined in flowery language the benefits of Iranian movies in the diaspora: Now that each of us has left the homeland and is saying farewell to our fine pasts, why not spend a few hours a week on this night with Iran, watch an Iranian movie, familiarize our children with our mother tongue, revive our cultural customs and rituals, and renew memories, memories that envelope many years of our lives and we can never abandon. We have spared no expense to gather fine Iranian movies so that you will not sever your contact with the past, so that you will forget that you are in exile, so that you will create a small, cozy, and friendly gathering of fellow countrymen and women, and keep the fire of Iranianness warm and alive. . . . Consider us one of yours. . . . We wish to remain Iranian and we would also like to have you share that great feeling with us. Maghsoudlou e-­mailed me the intricate story of his film-­screening efforts. Between 1975 and 1979, while he was a freelance writer and producer for National Iranian Radio and Television (nirt), he was commissioned by nirt to organize a festival of Iranian films in New York City. Both nirt and the mca sent him some forty features in what turned out to be the last year of the Pahlavi regime, 1977–78. However, they did not send these all at once, and many of them did not have English subtitles, making it difficult to organize a festival and causing rejection by premier venues, such as by Carnegie Hall. He sent some of the films to existing festivals, such as Kimiavi’s The Stone Garden to the San Francisco film festival. “When the revolution occurred,” he wrote me, “I did not send back those prints because of fear that the new government would destroy them. And they did, as we know. Of course those prints belonged to government” (Naficy 2006e). Instead, he began in 1980 to exhibit and distribute the films he had been sent and those he acquired on his own. “I began to buy Iranian film prints from all over the world. At the beginning of the revolution, some prints were in the hands of people who did not know what to do with them. They contacted me and I bought them. I paid about $20,000 for seven feature films with subtitles, such as Naderi’s Tangsir, and for a lot of shorts that belonged to the Iranian embassy.” These were primarily documentaries on Iranian arts and culture, as well as newsreels of the Shah’s activities that the mca and nirt had commissioned and produced (see appendix C). When I inquired about the identity of the person who sold the embassy films to Maghsoudlou and whether he belonged to the ancien régime or to the new order, the murkiness surrounding the patrimony of the films became deeper: “He was a front man and I never knew him, but I am sure he was not a member of the Pahlavi regime. After the people from the new revolutionary regime took over the embassy in Washington, somebody 386

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took all the films out and stored them somewhere. Then, when I started to have my first festival in New York in 1980, they sent an unknown man to make a deal with me and I negotiated with them and gave him a check and received the film. His name, I really do not remember” (Naficy 2006e). This ransacking of the Pahlavi government’s film archives abroad, likely not unique to the embassy in Washington, paralleled the decimation of television and film archives inside Iran during the revolution. Maghsoudlou also purchased theatrical features from Iranian commercial producers abroad. He bought a print of Ali Hatami’s great new-­wave film Towqi (1970) and one of Feraidun Zhurak’s filmfarsi movie Agitator in the City (Shahr Ashub, 1969) from Dubai and paid $6,000 for their rights to Mehdi Mossayebi, the films’ producer. Sometimes he exhibited film prints rented from others. He also purchased films of the Filmco Films Studio from its owner Nandlal Hinduja, whose prints came to Maghsoudlou from Dubai. Maghsoudlou claims that “for all commercial films, I contacted the producers in Iran and bought the rights or paid them a fee for every screening. I still have all the records” (Naficy 2006e). All in all his collection contained fifteen feature movies and scores of documentaries and shorts, as well as one animated film (see appendix C). He arranged the first commercial Iranian film series in the United States at Bombay Cinema in Manhattan; it started in September 1980. The program, which ran on Thursday evenings, was in English and Persian, and Maghsoudlou himself introduced most of the films. Sometimes he was able to get a director, such as Amir Naderi, and sometimes a star, such as Vossoughi, to attend and engage with spectators after the movie. He shrewdly placed bilingual advertisements in Iranian American newspapers such as the Iran Times, a weekly published in Washington. The number of spectators ranged between ten and six hundred, with Nosrat Karimi’s Carriage Driver (Doroshkehchi, 1971) and Shaollah Nazerian’s An Isfahani in New York (Yek Esfahi dar Nuyork, 1972) being the most popular, drawing more than a thousand spectators. Soon Maghsoudlou established a tour of twenty-­one cities: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington in the United States, and Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver in Canada. The tour shows the dispersion and concentration of Iranians and the role of films in sustaining an imagined nation.11 Like much exile television programming, these movies and videos circulated images of Iran in the prerevolutionary period, their fetishized nostalgia helping exiles deepen their internal absorption of the homeland. They also helped counter the negative American mediawork about Iranians. This was part of the many reversals that occurred in exile, including in the exiles’ semiotic system: When signs cross cultural borders, they often shift or reverse meanings. The filmfarsi movies—­the bulk of those exhibited in exile—­were not popular inside Pahlavi Iran with the type of educated and Westernized population now living Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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in the United States. Yet now filmfarsi movies were no longer viewed by this population with categorical disdain, as cheap products of charlatan businessmen making a fast buck; rather, they were viewed as souvenirs of an inaccessible homeland, as irretrievable memories of childhood, a former lifestyle of prosperity, and a centered sense of self. That these movies continued to be rented long after their exhibition in the movie houses on very poor-­quality videos further underscores these points. Within a decade, both the fhi and the ifvc ceased their commercial screenings. Mortazavi transformed his Film House into a music and video store, Sound City, located in the Westwood district of Los Angeles near ucla, an area variously dubbed “Irangeles” or “Tehrangeles,” while Maghsoudlou transformed the ifvc into a well-­stocked independent video store, renting and selling movies of all sorts and all nationalities. It eventually moved to Washington. Spectators gradually dwindled for Pahlavi-­era films as the exhibitors ran out of new movies to show and as the cost of operating and advertising exceeded the box-­office sales. The quality of the prints began to deteriorate (the exhibitors in the United States did not have the negatives from which to strike new prints). Also a factor was competition from the videocassette industry, chiefly Pars Video in Los Angeles, whose printed catalog listed hundreds of Iranian films on video for purchase or rent. Even though the quality of these videos was generally very poor—­faded colors, high-­contrast or washed-­out images, mutilated narratives—­the fhi and the ifvc could not compete with the ready availability of so many films at low prices. In his flyers from the early 1980s, Mortazavi had urged his audience to create “a small, cozy, and friendly gathering of fellow countrymen and women” in his movie house to “keep the fire of Iranianness warm and alive.” Many had done this for a while but now, in addition to film, Iranians wanted something else to feed the flame of national identity: the synesthesia and intimacy of watching homeland videos in their homes among friends and family while sharing Persian meals. Movie houses could not provide that synesthetic pleasure. Finally, as exile became diaspora and immigration, and as more Iranians returned home for visits, the sights and sounds of home of decades earlier lost their hold. While the fhi and the ifvc were the primary exhibitors of Pahlavi-­era movies, there was another short-­lived company in Los Angeles, Dispodex, formed by the film director Hosain Rajaiyan in Los Angeles and Badie Film Studio in Tehran, which exhibited several new-­wave movies with great financial success. It exhibited Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle (Dayereh-­ye Mina, 1978) in Los Angeles’s Westland Twin Cinemas in June 1979 for two weeks (and in New York City and Boston). As Fuad Badie, the head of Badie Film Studio and a Dispodex partner, told me, the Los Angeles screenings generated $12,000, while the cost of exhibition and advertising amounted to only $1,000 (Naficy 1979a). The screening of movies in the diaspora was not limited to Pahlavi-­era theatrical features or documentaries, although those predominated. Political groups 388

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opposing the Islamic Republic also screened many documentaries, compilation films, and agitprop shorts in major U.S. cities, usually on college and university campuses and sometimes in churches, as part of their political mission and educational outreach, which involved speeches and discussions (discussed later in this chapter).

Characteristics of Iranian Accented Films and Videos Watching Pahlavi-­era movies made in Iran soon gave way to making and watching accented films made in the diaspora—­an empowering component in displaced Iranians’ mediawork. Exile television had presence, immediacy, and simultaneity because it was aired live (or live-­on-­tape), and it could be viewed in various locations on multiple platforms. It was also characterized by excess, repetition, and duration (multiple programs, many repeat commercials, a twenty-­ four-­hour flow). tv was ephemeral unless recorded. Movies, on the other hand, were characterized by absence, scarcity, delays between production and exhibition, and durability (through downstream distribution via video and the Internet). While television’s attributes conferred the power to inform and misinform, set agendas and mobilize, promote and sell products, and to produce income, cinema retained intellectual and cultural values. Films tended to be more modern; they portrayed individuals and individual subjectivity and dealt with issues of authorship, unlike television whose production (multicamera studio setup), enunciation (hosts and guests conversing), and reception (family viewing) tended to be collective and postmodern. The generally high class capital of Iranians helped them leapfrog the traditional low-­paying émigré jobs and ethnic residency. These factors favored the creation of a dynamic, advertising-­driven pop culture and mediawork, which consolidated a symbolic and discursive Iranian collective identity. Iranians were thus among the first new ethnic groups in the United States for whom the physical ethnic enclave (ghetto) was supplemented and supplanted by a media-­ saturated enclave of discursive identity. Ironically, these factors, along with the host society’s prejudice against Muslims and the Islamic Republic, prevented them from fully participating in the life of the host countries, slowing their assimilation. Many Iranians thus remained in an agonistic mode of cultural otherness and in a psychic split for more than three decades. The relative newness of their emigration kept them in the liminal spaces of exile and diaspora. As I noted in my book, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, exile proved to be painful and traumatic to the writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals who were deprived not only of their homeland—­because they could not return—­ but also of their intimate relation with their native language and native audience (Naficy 1993b:chap. 1). This was true of filmmakers as well, even of those who had made a successful transition into the host country’s film and theater indusCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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tries, like Susan Taslimi in Sweden. She says, “What I am lacking is an Iranian audience, for whom I very much like to perform” (Fani 2010). For some artists exile was deadly. They went into despondency, doubt, and depression, which they expressed either in their painfully dystopian and dysphoric art and lives or in their gruesome and tragic suicides.12 Yes, exile can be fatal. Again, the playwright and psychiatrist Gholamhosain, whose forced exile to Paris was noted in his own words in volume 3 of this work, offers an eloquent and moving description of his anxious life and psychology once he arrived there. It is now nearly two years since I have become a wandering refugee in this place, spending every few nights in a friend’s house. I feel uprooted. Nothing seems real. Paris buildings all seem like theater sets. I imagine I am living inside a postal card. I fear two things: one is sleeping, the other waking. I try to stay up all night and go to sleep near morning. During my few hours of sleep I dream nightmares in color. I constantly think about my country. When alone, I repeat aloud the names of alleys and lanes in Iranian cities so as not to forget them. I have totally lost the sense of ownership; I neither stop at a store, nor shop anything. I have been turned upside down. During this period, not even once did I dream of Paris, but I dreamt of Iran constantly. Several times I had decided to return home come what may, even if it resulted in my execution. My friends dissuaded me. I reject everything. Out of stubbornness I refuse to learn French. I consider this the defense mechanism of an apprehensive person who might return home any minute. Living abroad is the worst form of torture. Nothing belongs to me and I, too, do not belong to anyone. Life this way is worse than the years I spent in solitary confinement. (1986:4–5) Many Iranians at first adopted a siege mentality and later maintained a very low public profile, nourished by the monolingualism of the exile mediawork, and they remained largely “unobtrusive, unnoticed and disconnected from main­ stream American society” (Fata and Rafii 2003:2). Some changed their names and many adopted familiar American nicknames; some passed themselves off as “Persian,” Latin American, Spanish, Mexican, Italian, or Greek, while others dyed their hair blond and engaged in other strategies of ethnic passing and self-­ fashioning. The scholar Reza Aslan, living in the Bay Area, passed himself off as a Mexican in the early 1980s (Malek 2010:11). The filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, born in the United States to Iranian parents but ashamed of the label “Iranian” called himself “Persian” (Zahedi 2004).13 Inexperienced at being “ethnic,” possessing strong class capital and pride, and new to democratic systems Muslim Iranians did not create ethnic, civil society, or religious interest groups to advocate for them. However, Iranian ethnoreligious minorities, who were already familiar with the experience of being minor in the homeland and with the importance of collective association to defend them, sought coalition with their 390

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coethnic and coreligious associates in the host society. Iranian Jewish directors were assimilated into Hollywood more readily than others. This legacy of keeping a low profile made the community voiceless in an increasingly multicultural U.S. society, lacking the “necessary instruments and organizational structures to defend its rights and to become active and involved in public affairs and civic discourse” (Fata and Rafii 2003:2). With time this strategy changed, as Iranians entered professions and their children began to exert themselves as full citizens with stakes in the new host societies. In the second and third decades of dispersion, Iranians in the United States began to run for political offices at local and state levels, and civic associations, such as the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (paaia), the Iranian American Political Action Committee (iapac), and the National Iranian American Council (niac), were formed to contribute to public office candidates and to lobby for legislations and corrective Iranian representations; in short, in the words of the paaia website, to promote “initiatives that benefit the Iranian American community and the U.S. society at large, including community building, youth programs, academic and professional development, information collection and dissemination, and public education and awareness.” 14 Ironically, the Islamist terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States were instrumental in pushing Iranians out of their protective cocoon of a low public profile. At the same time, Iranians’ wide dispersion in many countries gradually tempered binarist and exilic attachment to the homeland, encouraging lateral diasporist affiliations. In addition, the Islamist regime’s gradual move toward increasing openness and reforms, particularly after the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and 2001, and the prospect of a future rapprochement between Iran and the United States made possible the idea of return. Indeed, many Iranians, including filmmakers, have traveled to Iran for the first time since the last decade of the twentieth century, where they made films, forming a “return-­to-­origin” film genre. It is in the light of these immigration factors and the larger, hostile binational relations and public diplomacy between Iran and the United States that Iranian accented filmmakers generally preferred an interstitial production mode to either a collective or a mainstream one, one that was a modernized version of the interstitial production mode of the early cinema pioneers inside Iran (other host countries, with different sociopolitical systems and customs, encouraged and nurtured different responses). These operated individually and independently in the interstices of social formations, culture industries, and cinematic practices in the West, poaching the mainstream society’s existing institutions, resources, and practices. Like the early pioneers these filmmakers were multifunctional, liminal, multicultural, multinational, and interethnic, and they engaged in hybrid self-­fashioning, improvisation, social haggling, and partisan politics and financing. Their meager budgets came from self-­financing, ethnic and exilic financing, and funding from television stations and national, state, local, and private arts agencies in Europe and North America. Some benefited Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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from the U.S. government’s public diplomacy funding. To keep costs down, a filmmaker would direct, produce, write, edit, and even act. By this means he or she also consolidated authorship of their films and their films’ hold on them. Their films thus became quasi-­autobiographical, even if they were not about the filmmakers. After an initial period of monolingual filmmaking, most displaced artists became bilingual, signaling their gradual assimilation. Accented filmmakers generally had a very low output, as it took a long time to produce, exhibit, and distribute their films. Most of them distributed their films to ethnic audiences, which meant that they had to be satisfied either with a limited general release or with specialized distribution by small boutique houses. An average of 4.4 films directed by each émigré filmmaker (264 filmmakers directed 1,170 films) points to this low output, even among a generally well-­off and media-­savvy population. A few filmmakers were very prolific, such as Shahid Saless with thirteen feature fiction movies and documentaries for cinema and television in Germany in a twenty-­three-­year career (several of them three hours long) or Ghazel Radpay with more than sixty-­four short films in France and Iran for video installations (each between ten and twelve minutes long). If the output of such prolific directors were subtracted from the total, the ratio of films to filmmakers would diminish substantially. Limited representation in film festivals was another prominent characteristic of Iranian accented films. Exilic filmmakers had difficulties entering their films into top-­tier international film festivals because of obstacles in representing either the nation they had left behind (Iran) or the one they had adopted. Several reasons stood out. They were not backed by the Hollywood majors or by their “mini-­major” offspring, with sufficient clout to push their way into festivals, as was the case with their compatriots in Iran, whose entry into international festivals was generally backed by the government. Politically, many filmmakers were highly partisan, while festival organizers shied away from politically militant films that attacked foreign countries, as they depended on their good relations with foreign governments to supply them with films. Some filmmakers had dual national identities, causing them to fall between the cracks or to be plagued by indecision. Unlike the ethnic groups that engaged in collective production or representation, such as black British in the 1980s and Asian Americans in the 1990s, Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora were slow to form credible media production collectives or civic associations to represent their interests.

Modalities of Displacement and Film Typology Iranian accented films are part of a new global accented cinema created by deterritorialized filmmakers. Despite their many differences, such filmmakers’ work shares certain features, which constitute their films’ accent, a concept I ex392

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plored in An Accented Cinema: Exiling and Diasporic Filmmaking (Naficy 2001a). This has been an increasingly significant and evolving cinematic formation. Its thousands of films feature staggering variety in forms and cultural background; its social impact extends far beyond the displaced communities to include the general public. If the dominant cinema in each country were considered universal and without accent, the films that displaced subjects make there would be accented. Likewise, if the dominant world cinema, that of Hollywood, were considered universal and without accent, the films that displaced global filmmakers make would be accented. Accent refers not to the speech of the diegetic characters but to the narrative and stylistic attributes of such films and to the filmmaker’s interstitial or collective production modes, detailed above. Iranian accented films can be divided into five overlapping types: exilic, diasporic, émigré, ethnic, and cosmopolitan films. The divisions spring from modalities of displacement, placement, and production. Other typologies are also possible, and the accented cinema is still evolving into multiplexed (Naficy 2009a) and networked films (Kerr 2010). I consider accented films also part of the Iranian “national cinema,” for in the current stage of globalization and dispersion, in which not only the movies travel across borders—­as they have done from the start—­but also the moviemakers and the movie audiences, national cinemas can no longer be limited to products of the film industry within geographic borders. Interaction has increased between the films made inside Iran and those made elsewhere, between the filmmakers inside and outside the country, and between the critics inside and outside the country through the travels and globalization of films, filmmakers, digital media (the Internet), and spectators and film festivals. Iranian immigration literature identifies two major categories of Iranians—­ exiles and immigrants. Here I differentiate five types of displaced Iranians to account for the complexity and nuances of their displacement and the variety and specificity of the accented films they produce.

Exilic Filmmakers The term exile here refers principally to external exiles: Iranians who voluntarily or involuntarily left their country of origin but who maintained an ambivalent but cathected relationship with both their original and adopted homes. Iranian exiles did not return to Iran but longed to, a desire that they projected in potent return narratives, forming a genre of return-­to-­origins films. As exiles, their relationship was with their country and cultures of origin, and with the sights, sites, sounds, taste, and feel of an originary experience elsewhere. The exilic filmmakers, who were generally older and had both a prior and sometimes a higher status before displacement, suffered from their status discrepancy at home and in exile. In addition, the loss of their language, culture, and audience robbed the filmmakers of their natural bedrock and tools of expresCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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sion (Naficy 1993b:chap. 1). If at home they were regarded as stricken by the West (gharbzadeh), in exile they became deeply stricken by home (ghorbatzadeh). Finally, filmmakers who were forcibly driven away and had entered new lands as political refugees tended to define, at least during the initial liminal period of exile, all things in their lives not only in relationship to the homeland but also in strictly political terms. Because they could not return home, home colonized them and their films all the more; their films were primarily about the politics of homeland and exile. Living in Los Angeles, Parviz Sayyad made two features against the Islamic Republic: Checkpoint (Sarhad, 1987) and Mission (Ma’muriat, 1983). He also produced, wrote, hosted, and acted in various anti–Islamic government comic plays and television shows, including Parsian Television (Televizion-­e Parsian). Living in the Netherlands, Reza Allamehzadeh made one feature fiction film opposing the Islamic Republic, The Guests of Hotel Astoria (Mehmanan-­e Hotel-­e Astoria, 1989), as well as several documentaries on government crimes and censorship in Iran. In his California exile, Barbod Taheri was primarily a cinematographer of features, shorts, and television. In the case of Iran, there is another modality of internal exile, defined as “isolation, alienation, deprivation of means of production and communication, [and] exclusion from public life” (Rowe and Whitfield 1987:233). Many Iranian intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers, particularly art-­house directors, underground filmmakers, Internet cinema videographers, and cultural producers, were working under such conditions of internal exile inside Iran. The myriad accounts of censorship and harassment during both the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods in this book testify to the variety and extent of internal exile conditions for the filmmakers working inside Iran. Some found this internal exile productive, testing their creativity against limits; others found it unbearable, and they left. Taheri, whose feature documentary The Crash of ’78 (Soqut-­e ’57, 1980), about the revolution, was banned and he himself blackballed before escaping to the United States, explains this dynamic: “I think the main reason for leaving [Iran] was because I was not able to make any more films in that country. If I had been willing they were willing to compromise with me, to allow me to make ideologically correct films for them. But then there was the matter of my honor and what I believed. To give it away to them, to become their tool, that was against what I had worked for all my life. I left the country and I became an exile” (quoted in Sullivan 2001:170). He died in 2010 in Los Angeles.

Diasporic Filmmakers Diaspora, like exile, often begins with trauma, rupture, and coercion. People are scattered outside the original homeland. Sometimes, however, the scattering is caused by a desire for increased trade, work, or other opportunities. Like the Iranians in exile, those in diaspora had a prior identity in Iran, and their dia394

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sporic identity was constructed in resonance with it. Unlike exile, which may be individual or collective, diaspora is necessarily collective. Thus the nurturing of a collective memory, often of an idealized homeland, is constitutive of the diasporic identity. While the exiles’ identity involved a near exclusive, vertical relationship with the Iranian homeland, diasporic consciousness was multisited and multilateral: a vertical relationship with Iran and horizontal relations both with Iranian compatriot communities elsewhere and with their coethnics and coreligionists across the globe. Plurality, multiplicity, and hybridity were dominant among diaspora filmmakers, while among the political exiles binarism and duality reigned. Diasporic filmmakers may travel to Iran or other sites of the Iranian diaspora to make films, or they may make films about themselves or other Iranian émigrés. There are many filmmakers in this category, by far the largest group among accented filmmakers. Among them was Babak Shokrian who made feature films dealing with Jewish subjects: Jewish Iranians: America So Beautiful (2001) and Peaceful Sabbath (1993). Because of their subject matter and Shokrian’s Jewish background, these films could also be classified as ethnic films. Another Jewish Iranian who made documentaries about Jewish topics was the journalist Homa Sarshar. Working from Los Angeles, in collaboration with other filmmakers, she made a series of films on the history of the Jews in Iran and on Iranian Jewish scholars, musicians, political and religious leaders, and monuments. As some of these connected the Iranian Jews in California not only to the history of Jews in Iran but also to the history of the Jewish diaspora, including that in Israel, they are noted here. Persheng Sadegh-­Vaziri, a Kurdish Iranian American, made many documentaries about Iranian national and ethnic belonging: Journal from Tehran (1986), Far from Iran (1991), A Place Called Home (1998), and Women Like Us (Zanhai Mesl-­e Ma, 2000–2002). Some focused more on the Kurdish identity, some on Iranian identity, and others on gender identity. Shokrian and Sadegh-­Vaziri live and work in the United States. Working out of Great Britain, Tina Gharavi has made experimental documentaries about gender and identity, some involving herself, like Mother/Country (2002).

Émigré Filmmakers Émigré filmmakers, like exilic and diasporic subjects, left Iran, though for the purpose of emigrating and settling in other countries, where after a period of resistance and adaptation they eventually became permanent residents and citizens, while also maintaining minor attachments to their home country. The trauma of displacement, the cathected direct relationship to a lost homeland, and the burning desire for a grand but impossible homecoming were much less constitutive of immigrants’ lives, for the forces of consent relations with the adopted country attenuated forces that favored descent relations with the homeland. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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Émigré filmmakers did not generally make accented films; they made other types of independent or mainstream movies. The dean of these was the veteran television director Reza Badiyi, born in 1930 in Tehran and trained by the usia Syracuse Team in Iran, who made a prodigious number of mainstream U.S. television series and films since the 1960s—­about 423 hours of them. He has been called the “Godfather of American television,” logging in “more hours as a tv director than anyone in history” (MacIntyre 2009). His output covers all genres and types, including multiple episodes of the following tv series: Mortal Combat (1999), La Femme Nikita (1997), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Baywatch (1997), Star Trek (1994–96), Cagney and Lacey (1995), In the Heat of the Night (1994), Falcon Crest (1990), T. J. Hooker (1986), Fame (1982), Knots Landing (1979), Hawaii Five-­O (1979), Baretta (1978), The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Mannix (1972), Mission Impossible (1969), and Get Smart (1965). He died in Los Angles in 2011. Joseph Jamiel Menashi Saleh, born in Hamadan in 1934, is also notable, for he became a major producer of fiction movies (such as Merchant Ivory movies) and documentaries (the Oscar-­nominated Streetwise, 1985), as well as an exhibitor, establishing the Angelika Film Center in New York in 1989 (named after his wife who ran the Angelika Film Corporation), which caters to educated professionals by screening first-­r un majors and independent movies, revivals, and foreign films.15 Houchang Allahyari, a psychiatrist working out of Vienna, made many features, some of which are comedies critiquing Austrians, such as Born in Absurdistan (Geboren in Absurdistan, 1999), while others offer somber treatments of social marginalia, such as Fear of Heights (Höhenangst, 1994). His I Love Vienna (1992) was a rare comedy about Iranian immigrants. Another type of émigré filmmaker turned to the art world to create installations and art-­house films. Working out of New York, Shirin Neshat has made several dual-­projection films for museums and galleries, and she finally moved into single-­channel and feature filmmaking. All her works deal with Iran, less so in terms of content than in terms of visual form, often motivated by the veil. Ghazel Radpay, who prefers to go by her first name only, in France made hundreds of short skits on video, showing a veil-­clad Ghazel performing various humorous or ironic tasks, which she assembled into triptych films, called the Me series, shown in art galleries. Both Neshat and Ghazel evolved into making longer form films, Women Without Men (2009) and Home (2008), respectively, demonstrating the flexibility and evolution of the filmmakers and the elasticity of this accented filmmaking classification.

Ethnic Filmmakers Ethnic filmmakers are born to exilic, diasporic, and émigré populations in the adopted countries. They are the second generation, born and bred in new lands. Their own relationship to their ancestral homeland is often indirect, second396

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hand, abstract, and sometimes mediated solely through memory, fantasy, and mediawork. Unlike the exiles, the ethnic filmmakers are concerned more with the life here and now than with the life elsewhere. Iranian émigrés and ethnics in the United States, like other similar groups before them, are hyphenated, bicultural, or multicultural subjects who assiduously play the politics of the hyphen to construct new identities. In a multicultural America, hyphenated group terms, such as African-­American, gradually replaced unitary group terms, such as Negro and black, and homogenizing terms like people of color. The adoption of the hyphen by Iranian accented filmmakers and writers had both positive and negative implications. It was an indicator of their becoming fully American; alternatively, it could be seen as their resistance to the homogenizing power of a melting-­pot ideology. Both assimilation and resistance can be regarded positively. On the other hand, the hyphen could imply a lack, or the idea that hyphenated individuals were somehow subordinate to unhyphenated people and that they would never be totally accepted or trusted as full citizens. Many Iranians in the United States at first resisted the hyphen on the basis of class. They also resisted it because retaining the hyphen could suggest a divided allegiance, even disloyalty, both to their country of origin, which was painful, and to their adopted country, which was particularly dangerous during the hostage-­taking and the subsequent era of Iranophobia, Islamophobia, Islamic terrorism, and the war on terror. Perhaps due to these and other negative considerations, the hyphen has been dropped in the U.S. from previously hyphenated ethnic designations; but the politics of the hyphen continue apace. Increasingly, Iranians in the United States are calling themselves Persian. Among ethnic filmmakers were Caveh Zahedi, born in Washington, who made fascinating autobiographical avant-­garde documentary features such as I Am a Sex Addict (2005), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Was Possessed by God (2000), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), and A Little Stiff (1991). While thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan in the sense of being focused on the individual and the self in the here and now in the United States, some of Zahedi’s films, such as I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, also dealt insightfully with his Iranian pedigree and his ethnic shame. Cyrus Nowrasteh, born in Boulder, Colorado, on the other hand, made sensationalist feature movies that fit the neoconservative political line, feeding on the Islamic Republic’s intolerance and violence in such films as The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008) and Veiled Threat (1988). These virulently anti–­Islamic Republic films were apparently driven partly by his own family’s terrible experiences in Iran that had forced them into exile and by his own conservative politics in the U.S.

Cosmopolitan Filmmakers Cosmopolitan filmmakers resisted any attachment to place, nation, and roots; instead, they emphasized routes, individualized identities, and auteurist authority. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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They rejected the politics of the ethnic hyphen, and they generally did not make films about Iran or Iranians. If they did, they did not tell their personal stories. Shahid Saless made thirteen searing feature films in Germany about alienation and anomie, such as Utopia (1982), none of them dealing with Iranians; his first feature about immigrants, Far from Home (In der Fremde, 1975), dealt with Turkish guest workers. Amir Naderi’s U.S.-­made features, Manhattan by Numbers (1993) Avenue A, B, C .  .  . Manhattan (1997), Marathon (2002), and Sound Barrier (2005), were all about homelessness and [un]belonging of one sort or another, mostly centering on Manhattan, where he lives. None of his films dealt with Iran or Iranians. Although these multiple positioned Iranians patrolled their real and symbolic boundaries, maintaining individual and collective identities distinguishing them from each other and from other communities, they differed from one another principally by the relative strength of their attachment to place and to identity. The differing relationship to place—­their original homeland of Iran, their compatriot communities in the diaspora, and their current homeland—­ created differently inflected accented films. Exilic films were dominated by their focus on the there and then of the homeland, diasporic films by their vertical relationship to the homeland and by lateral relationships to the diaspora, and émigré and ethnic identity films by the exigencies of life here and now in the countries in which the filmmakers reside. The cosmopolitans, on the other hand, claimed universality, and they make films about the human condition. Yet their assiduous denial of particularity and nationality reveals the undercurrent of anxiety about who they are and where they belong. As a result of their focus on the here and now, the ethnic identity and émigré films tended to deal with what Werner Sollors characterized as “the central drama in American culture”: the conflict between descent relations, emphasizing bloodline and ethnicity, and consent relations, stressing self-­made, contractual affiliations (1986:6). The differing relationship to identity also resulted in differently accented films. If the filmmakers insisted on a vertical link to an authentic essence that lay outside ideology and predated, or stood apart from, the newly adopted ­nation—­a link emphasizing descent relations to Iran and to roots, depth, inheritance, continuity, homogeneity, and stability—­then they would be essentialist filmmakers of any one of these film types whose task, in Stuart Hall’s words, would be only “to discover, excavate, bring to light and express through cinematic representation” that inherited collective cultural identity, that “one true self” (1994:393). Yet if the filmmakers constructed their identities based on both a vertical relation to descent and a horizontal relation to consent—­positions adopted primarily by diasporic, émigré, and ethnic filmmakers—­then they could play rooting tendencies against routing aspirations to create new identities and films. In this modality, they would not strive to recover an existing or authentic past—­there is none—­or to impose an imaginary and often fetishized coherence on their fragmented experiences and histories. Instead, by emphasizing discon398

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tinuity, heterogeneity, and specificity, they would demonstrate that they are in the process of becoming, “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (394). Even cosmopolitan filmmakers could play with place and identity strategically to create hybridized, multiple, and constructed identities and films. This playing of roots against routes can be both liberating and simultaneously destabilizing; it can be liberating, as identity could become a performance of identity, allowing new features; it can be disempowering, as it would not be rooted in any sort of stabilizing essence, thus becoming a signifier in search of the signified. In the rooted modality, identity is essentialist, nationalist, and binarist, characteristic of exilic and ethnic identities and films; in the routed modality, identity is multiple, fragmented, and global, characteristic of diasporic, émigré, and cosmopolitan identities and films. The first modality veers toward modernity, while the second does toward postmodernity. Such a complicated politics of the hyphen is discernible not only in the films but also in the burgeoning literature of travelogues, memoirs, poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiographies that Iranian exiles, ethnics, diasporans, émigrés, and cosmopolitans have been producing since the 1980s. Significantly, most of the authors are women.16 These five types of displacement are not discrete or hermetic, as filmmakers bear more than one type of identity, and they often play with and signify on them. These are also not permanent states but way stations, for filmmakers evolve and assume different statuses and identities throughout their lifetimes, producing a range of film types. The most important of these film types are noted in table 7, which shows that short films vastly dominated (with 186 films by male directors and 44 by female directors), followed by fiction features (178 by males, 19 by females), by documentaries (160 by males, 117 by females), and experimental films (84 by males, 126 by females). Exilic and émigré films tended to be fictional features with linear and realistic narratives, made for exhibition in movie theaters. Their accent came from the prevalence of the following features: the accented speech and the Persian-­ language dialogue of their characters; their themes of displacement, journey, search, the politics of blame, family unity, history, and obsession with the homeland; structures of feeling and narratives of panic and phobia as well as of memory and nostalgia that were inscribed in closed or open chronotopes. Cosmopolitan films were also feature length for theatrical exhibition, and they contained many of the stylistics and thematics of the exilic films, yet without their Iranian characters and Persian dialogues. On the other hand, diasporic, ethnic, and émigré films tended to be documentaries, experimental films, and shorts, favoring independent, Third Cinema, and art-­house film styles, including smallness; low-­tech, imperfect, and sometimes amateurish aesthetics; varied, nonstandard lengths; experimental narratives blurring fictional and nonfictional forms and crossing genre conventions, using self-­reflexivity, autobiography, and self-­inscription; and they were made for alternative exhibition venues, such as Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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educational and cultural institutions, and for alternative exhibition modes, such as video installations and performances in museum and gallery settings. These were products of modern individuals and dealt with individuals in the process of becoming modern or postmodern. The exilic films of denial and panic were in Persian, addressing only Iranian audiences, which limited their financing and distribution to exile sources and outlets. On the other hand, many diasporic, ethnic, and émigré films were too small, experimental, and specialized to find a place in these outlets as well. Indeed, most of the 1,170 films made abroad were not available even in exilic, ethnic, or émigré outlets, making access to them extremely difficult and ­sporadic—­a situation that is improving rapidly with cybercasting, streaming, and the sale of films and videos on the Internet. Yet some of the diasporic, ethnic, and émigré films that dealt with the larger issues of immigration, Islamic identity, gender oppression, and ethnic identity and that were bilingual or subtitled were picked up for distribution by boutique houses, such as Women Make Movies, Arab Film Distribution, and Third World Newsreel. Art videos and installations found space in art galleries and museums. Many are also available on the Internet. What follows is an examination of the various types of accented films.

Exilic Fiction Movies of Denial and Panic Some filmmakers who exited Iran as exiles entered their adopted lands as political refugees, where they gradually became émigrés heading toward an ethnic identity, in a process emblematic of assimilation. Others engaged in a simultaneous, dual track of resistance and assimilation. The veteran filmmakers Parviz Sayyad and Reza Allamehzadeh made their names initially as exile filmmakers in the United States and the Netherlands, their films opposing the Islamic Republic. However, Sayyad gradually moved into anti-­Islamic exile television and plays, which he toured to major Iranian population centers in the diaspora. Allamehzadeh, on the other hand made documentaries against the Islamic Republic and gradually entered the European Union’s (eu) discursive space by making, in addition to Iranian topics, documentaries on non-­Iranian eu topics for television stations.17 Many exilic fiction movies belong to what I call a “cinema of denial and panic,” for while their characters were physically in exile, they were mentally at home, disavowing exile. In addition, the films tended to be panic-­driven political thrillers, which opposed the Islamic Republic and Islam in general, for they represented Muslim Iranians as hopelessly backward and somehow complicit with the regime’s politics. These films included Sayyad’s thriller The Mission (Ma’muriat, 1983), about an assassin sent by the Islamic Republic (Houshang Touzie) to murder an ex-­Savak agent in the United States (Sayyad), where he undergoes a crisis of faith, partially because of his encounter with an outspoken 400

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woman exile (Mary Apik), with unforeseen consequences. Cyrus Nowrasteh’s fiction movie Veiled Threat (1989) deals with the problems that an Iranian exile faces when he attempts to track down the Islamic government agent who had tried to assassinate his family in exile, and his The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008) is based on the case of the stoning of a woman in Iran recounted in the French Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s best-­selling book of 1994 and of the same title, which was based on a true story. In Hassan Ildari’s Face of the Enemy (1989) a reversal of roles occurs when a former American hostage in Iran becomes a kidnapper of a former Iranian torturer in the United States. In Jalal Fatemi’s surrealistic video movie, The Nuclear Baby (Nowzad-­e Atomi, 1989), a male “dream terrorist” invades the dream of a pregnant woman in a fictitious country to create a nightmare for her. Although physically displaced, the characters seem not to have left Iran. They are haunted by its memories and hunted by its agents in what amounts to a kind of “exilic captive narrative,” as there is a sense both of spatial claustropho­ bia in their mise-­en-­scène and shot composition and of temporal claustro­phobia and panic among diegetic characters whose actions involve chases, stalking, captivity, assassination, and terrorism. Face of the Enemy and The Nuclear Baby are spatially claustrophobic. Much of the former film is devoted either to the American’s flashbacks of his Iranian captivity or to scenes of the captivity of an Iranian woman in the United States. Much of the latter film takes place indoors, in the tight spaces of an underground technological society or inside the head of a pregnant woman. In addition, one character—­the woman’s daughter, to whom she gives birth in a hole in the ground—­wears a confining mask over her face much of the time. Technical difficulties and a low budget could account for a closed configuration of space and shot composition; however, as I have shown elsewhere, one cannot discount the siege mentality that sets in as an initial reaction to the liminality and fluidity of life in exile. Closing in on the self is a defensive mechanism that pervades both exilic television programs (Naficy 1993b) and feature movies (Naficy 2001a:chap. 6). The Mission, Face of the Enemy, The Nuclear Baby, and Veiled Threat are temporally and narratively claustrophobic, centered on the taut relationships of kidnappers and terrorists with their victims. Intense struggles for power and domination are characterized by the trope of the hunt. These configurations expressed the directors’ and their native audiences’ fears of persecution by agents sent from Iran, or their fear of the host society’s hostility in the aftermath of the hostage crisis and of Islamophobia. Both politics and aesthetics were also often expressions of personal and family experiences. For example, Nowrasteh, a politically conservative filmmaker who went to the University of Southern California film school, calls himself “Persian American” instead of “Iranian American” to avoid the negative connotations of Iran. Even though he himself is not an exile, for he was born in the U.S., his politics and family history are similar to those of the exiles. He states that his conservative politics were “fairly perCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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sonal,” tied to his family’s escape from Iran after the takeover of the mullahs. It was a “by-­product for me of how I came to be in this country after a lot of people in my family had suffered under hardcore, radical fundamentalism.” 18 This personal experience of trauma and his political conservatism have resulted in heavy-­handed and pedantic films. His political conservatism vis-­à-­v is U.S. politics, far to the right of most young Iranian filmmakers, is part of the increasing pluralism and assimilation of the younger generation of émigrés and their offspring. He is also part of a new conservative Hollywood. Govindini Murty, codirector of the Liberty Film Festival, which dubs itself as “Hollywood’s first conservative film festival,” gave a glowing endorsement of Nowrasteh’s television miniseries, The Path to 9/11 (2006), which ascribes part of the blame for the attacks on the United States to President Bill Clinton’s administration: “The Path to 9/11 is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-­A merican miniseries I’ve ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible” (2006). The dystopic visions of the exile filmmakers paralleled the point of view of Iranian writers in exile. Unable to return and unwilling to assimilate, the exile filmmakers were haunted and hunted by the homeland, and they were threatened and lured by the host society. In many ways, these films were complicit with public diplomacy mediawork in the United States, as they circulated the simplified notions that the Islamic government is a terrorist government and that Iranians are all victimized by it. The exilic cinema of denial was not limited to directly political and mainstream movies. Denial could be nonpolitical but aesthetic. Art-­cinema films such as Arby Ovanessian’s exquisite nonpolitical and enigmatic How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life (Le Tablier Brodé de Ma Mère S’Étale dans Ma Vie, 1983–85), provides an example. He is an Armenian Iranian émigré filmmaker, born in 1942 in Jolfa, Isfahan, who relocated to France in 1979. Like many exiles, Ovanessian took on multiple functions in this film: he directed, wrote the screenplay, and edited. Inspired by an eponymous painting by the Armenian exile artist Arshile Gorky, the film encodes the director’s ancestral homeland, Armenia, but not his birth homeland, Iran, nor his country of exilic residence, France. Gorky’s mother, Lady Shushanik der Marderosian, belonged to a distinguished Armenian family. During the Turks’ massacre of the Armenians in the First World War she died in her son’s arms, causing him to go into exile in the United States. Her apron represented not only Gorky’s absent mother but also the disappearing Armenian culture, the same way that fetishized Armenian objects, icons, and sheets of Armenian texts circulate in Ovanessian’s film, memorializing the ancestral homeland and disavowing his recent diasporic homes. Exilic denial by filmmakers is not accidental. It is motivated both by the desire to disavow the ruptures of exile and by the wish that it will be short-­lived, culminating in a glorious return. Years later, Ovanessian returned to Iran for a short while to help start a theater workshop, but he is clear 402

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about a kind of denial of Iran in his work: he has refused to make works in exile that use the Persian language. He says: “I consciously do not do any work in Farsi. I believe the artwork belongs to the country in which it is performed, and not to outsiders. The Farsi speaking audience residing outside Iran lives in a rather unnatural environment. Also the type of work my colleagues and I used to offer at one time is not possible to offer inside Iran anymore. Therefore, it is not feasible for me to follow the path I believe in for Farsi performances. So I don’t work in Farsi these days” (Abdi 2008). Other exilic fictional movies dealt with Iranians caught in transit in third spaces and third countries, trying to get passports, visas, and tickets. Sayyad’s Checkpoint (Sarhad, 1987) charted the heated political debate among a group of Iranian and American students trapped in limbo at a Canadian-­A merican border checkpoint with visas canceled because of hostage-­taking in Tehran (Naficy 2001a:258–60). Likewise, in Allamehzadeh’s The Guests of Hotel Astoria a group of Iranian refugees is stuck in the sad and seedy Hotel Astoria in Istanbul. A young couple (Houshang Touzie and his real wife, Shohreh Aghdashloo) is trying to get into the United States, while an older couple regret their escape from Iran and are pining to return (Naficy 2001a:249–51). These movies illuminate the liminality and ambivalence of political exiles. Houchang Allahyari’s I Love Vienna (1992) is a rare comedy about Iranians in Austria, starring Allahyari himself alongside the well-­known television showman, singer, and poet Fereydoun Farrokhzad, in his last movie before his assassination. Trained as a psychiatrist, Allahyari had turned to filmmaking while working in Austria’s hospitals, making award-­w inning films, including Fear of Heights (Höhenangst, 1994), which won the Max Öphuls Prize (Naficy 2001a:207). Like Allamehzadeh’s The Guests of Hotel Astoria, I Love Vienna is about Iranians’ lives in transitional countries. In it an Iranian German teacher (Farrokhzad) and his family en route to the United States are placed in a hotel for immigrants. Both movies also deal with prostitution: Turkish society leads the daughter of one of the immigrants in Allamehzadeh’s film into prostitution; in I Love Vienna the hotel is managed by a flirtatious woman and located across the street from a brothel. Along with the young people the teacher, too, is tempted and gives in, leading to uproarious comic adventures that celebrate cultural specificities and differences instead of mourning them, as is the case in Allamehzadeh’s movie. As David Rooney of Variety noted, “In his first non-­dramatic outing, Houchang Allahyari shows a veteran’s touch for comedy, maintaining comic equilibrium and never overplaying the cultural gap between his characters. As a Persian-­born Austrian and a practicing psychiatrist, his observations on both Eastern and Western foibles are rich in affectionate truths.” 19 Ghasem Ebrahimian’s The Suitors (Khastegaran, 1989) deals with the tragic consequences of the mediawork’s propagation of the notion of Iran and Iranians as terrorist. Born to a Zoroastrian family in Mashhad, Iran, in 1953, Ebrahimian came to the United States in 1974 to study filmmaking. He earned his bachelor Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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of fine arts in 1979 from the State University of New York, College of Purchase. His short film Willie (1981), about an African American boy in Harlem, received the Best Student Film Academy Award (Oscar) in the dramatic category. He and his partner Coleen Higgins established Ebra Films in the early 1980s, through which they made The Suitors as well as documentaries for European television. Ebrahimian was also responsible for the crisp cinematography of most of Neshat’s film and video installations, and for the smooth cinematography of the circumambulation sequence in Mecca in Taran Davies’s feature documentary about hajj pilgrimage, Road to Mecca (2009). Of exilic import was his enigmatic triptych short film, The Sacred and the Absurd (2005), on the last days of Sadeq Hedayat in Paris before his suicide in 1951. Filmed in Persian for $250,000, The Suitors is about a group of Islamist expatriates in New York slaughtering a sheep in the bathtub of their apartment in a traditional ritual to celebrate the arrival of their guests, a married couple from Iran. The blood from the slaughter seeps into the apartment below, where a neighbor who is watching a Christian tv show is alarmed and calls in the swat team. Based on the assumption—­driven by mediawork’s representation of Muslims and the bloody clothes of one of the Iranians—­that there are terrorists inside the apartment, the team attacks the premises. In the confusion, the newly arrived husband, an Islamist functionary (Ashurbanipal Babila), is killed. The rest of the film is the story of Maryam (Pouran Esrafily), his young, attractive, and veiled wife, attempting to rid herself both of her veil and of her persistent suitors—­all of whom were close friends of her deceased husband and involved in the sheep slaughter. The film ends in a harrowing but astute restaging of an actual émigré tragedy at an airport. In the real-­life story, a desperate young Iranian checks his wife, who does not have a visa, as luggage to smuggle her into the United States. When he retrieves his luggage at his destination in the San Francisco airport, he discovers to his horror that she has perished in transit. Unable to deal with the tragedy and to inform his in-­laws, he commits suicide. Ebrahimian reworked this tragic émigré saga of border crossing with a different ending. Panicked by the prospect of being forced into marrying one of her pushy, patriarchal, and conservative compatriot suitors, Maryam stabs and murders one of them. To help her escape the United States and a certain murder charge, the only sympathetic suitor, Reza, checks her inside a suitcase as luggage on a transatlantic airline. The sequence ends with a claustrophobic Maryam freeing herself from inside the suitcase on the tarmac before it is loaded onto the plane, letting the suitor fly to his foreign destination without his precious cargo. Like many accented films, The Suitors inscribes both spatial and temporal claustrophobia. Maryam’s captivity inside the suitcase evidences this through the black point-­of-­v iew shots and her labored breathing, as does the film’s parallel editing comparing Maryam to the sheep about to be slaughtered. Temporal

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76 Claustrophobic temporality ends in Ghasem Ebrahimian’s The Suitors when Maryam stabs a persistent suitor, one of the enforcers of veiling. Frame enlargement.

claustrophobia is inscribed in the hunter-­prey relationships between Maryam and her relentless suitors. The airport scene in which she unzips the suitcase and steps out of it can be read as a birth scene—­declaring a new Maryam in America. By the film’s end, neither her husband nor her suitors are around to repress her with their patriarchal customs. After the murder, she no longer wears the veil. She has made her break and is freed from the enforcers of modesty in exile (figure 76). Now she must create her own individual subjectivity by facing the mirror unencumbered by the weight of collective tradition. She faces the fullness of the strange new country without the protection and interference of her male suitors.20

Reception by Exilic Audience Because of the exile filmmakers’ politics of location, their textual politics, and their exhibition practices, accented films, collectively made or not, were often received collectively as a comment on Iranians. Exilic feature movies’ concern with national politics and the politics of exile, as well as their Persian-­language dialogue, encouraged ethnic consolidation. Initially, mainstream video stores in the United States did not stock films made in exile, forcing Iranians to go to movie houses to see them. Most of the films, however, were on the screen for only a short time, from one to several nights, and only in one cinema, because they were four-­walled. Each screening in a repertory cinema, rented commercial movie house, or university cinema was heavily promoted in the Iranian media and was attended often by families, increasing ethnic affiliation and collective celebration. Ebrahimian’s The Suitors proved controversial. It was critically well received by mainline U.S. and European presses, was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the 1988 Cannes International Film Festival, and was released commercially on a limited basis in several U.S. cities, which distinguished it from

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most exile films (it can be rented from Netflix). But the exile media reacted defensively, and some commentators condemned the film. Acculturated Iranians regarded it—­despite its narrative flaws, uneven pacing, and some crude ­characterization—­as a feminist corrective to the dominant view of Iranian women as backward and dependent victims. The film’s critical edge, clearly pointed at the men and at patriarchy, spurred negative reactions in the exile media, which were heavily male-­dominated, secular, and anti-­Islamic at the time. What offended most critics were the “savage” scenes of the sheep’s slaughter in a bathtub, the suitors’ callous pursuit of Maryam, and her coldblooded murder of one of them. The critics appeared to have understood that in portraying the traditional Muslim Iranian customs of slaughtering animals and seeking a spouse, Ebrahimian was either signifying on those customs (criticizing them) or was representing all Iranians as fanatical Muslims. If the former representation offended the Muslims among the spectators, the latter offended those who were secular, by far the majority of Iranians abroad. Maryam’s murder of her most persistent suitor was also condemned for portraying Iranian women as uncharacteristically violent. Recalling the defensiveness of Iranian critics about foreign movies of the past, one reviewer called The Suitors “anti-­Iranian” and a “calamity,” since its representation of Iranian exiles as “cruel, stupid, and pitiable” fit colonialist portrayals of “natives” to justify intervention into their affairs (Pousti 1988). Another reviewer criticized it for “self-­humiliation” aimed to appease Americans (Shafa 1989:86). In a letter in the London exile newspaper Kayhan, a reader claimed that the film reinforced the negative image created by the Islamic Republic’s politics. Dramatizing his disappointment with the film, the reader stated that he went to see it full of enthusiasm but returned to his car with “stooped shoulders and hesitant steps.” 21 These readings contradicted the director’s purpose of depicting Iranians as “humans,” not “terrorists” (Dowlatabadi 1989:31). Exiles felt betrayed by an insider’s portrait of their culture for outside audiences. That some interpreted traditional courting and ritual slaughter so negatively had a lot to do with the film’s reception by secular Muslims, non-­Muslims, and antigovernment and modernist Iranians who were driven out by the theocracy and who were tarred in exile by their despised government’s actions.22 When indigenous practices are seen outside their naturalized contexts, they may be devalued, particularly if viewers are defensive about those practices. However, if they are not defensive, then defamiliarization can produce the promised critical awareness and pedagogic effect that Bertolt Brecht theorized for it. Such defamiliarization may lead to viewer self-­awareness and empathy with Maryam. Exilic films’ politics, particularly those driven by the tropes of panic and pursuit involving violence and terrorism, influenced the films’ reception. A case in point is Nowrasteh’s Veiled Threat. In April 1989, the Los Angeles International Film Festival canceled the film’s premiere at the last minute because of a bomb threat—­a controversial action that pointed to the festival’s balancing 406

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act between its dual responsibility for public safety and the protection of First Amendment rights. The controversy continued for several days, but it was difficult to determine the real reasons behind either the bomb threat or the cancelation of the screening. The festival director claimed that the producers brought the threat on themselves as a publicity stunt when they publicly linked their movie and its anti-­Islamist content to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie. The producers responded that the threat was real enough for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to have taken it seriously. This low-­ budget, low-­ velocity, lowbrow thriller (starring many Iranians, including the veteran actors Vossoughi and Bahman Mofid) finally opened in Los Angeles movie houses to dismal reviews and attendance. Trying to recoup their losses by downplaying its Islamic connotations, the producers dropped the “veil” from the title. Apparently, neither the initial attempt to associate the film with political Islam as a threat nor the subsequent attempt to dissociate from this theme helped its box-­office sales. Straddling more than one society, exilic, diasporic, émigré, and even ethnic filmmakers, such as Ebrahimian and Nowrasteh, are sometimes in a position to play the funding agencies and public tastes of different countries against each other to increase audiences and revenues. Sometimes they attempt to cash in on the newsworthiness and popular stereotypes of their country of descent. Such efforts pay off when newsworthiness is based on positive attributes, but they can backfire, as in the cases of The Suitors and Veiled Threat, if negative connotations are involved. The controversies surrounding these two movies demonstrate accented films’ extraordinary burden of representation, which stems from the expectation of their displaced and defensive audience that each film represent them in their full and unblemished historical glory, adding to the filmmakers’ dilemmas the questions of how to balance ethnic and national loyalty with personal and artistic integrity and of how to reconcile universality with specificity.

Exile and Diaspora Film Festivals Although the movies were made in the interstices, accented films’ reception by Iranian communities collectivized them. (The diaspora festivals that primarily showcased films made inside Iran are dealt with in another chapter.) This col­ lectivization particularly occurred with the exilic films and with the festivals that screened the homeland’s films alongside films made in exile. The animus and anxiety that these film festivals provoked were not only due to the antagonistic politics, filmmakers, and audiences brought together across the exilic divide but also to the cultural mistranslations that inevitably occur in such venues. While most Iranians abroad celebrated the films made in Iran and attended the festivals showing them, some political exiles and refugee filmmakers—­including Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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Allamehzadeh (the Netherlands), Hossein Mahini (Sweden), Moslem Mansouri (USA), Bassir Nassibi (Germany), Parviz Sayyad (USA), and Barbod Taheri (USA)—­ censured and boycotted the festivals and urged others to do so as well. Despite this, these film festivals and the commercial exhibition of the homeland’s films in theaters that ensued had a positive and collectivizing impact on Iranians abroad. These films reconnected them intimately to their estranged homeland, and with their successes abroad they felt a sense of national pride—­a component of positive mediawork. At the same time, a competing exhibition venue exclusively for accented films emerged with further collectivizing consequences. Perhaps the first festival of Iranian films made in the United States was the one that ucla’s Iranian Student Club organized on 23 May 1970, in which the following student films were screened: Hamid Naficy’s Black Top, Bozorgmehr Rafia’s Diamond Drawer, Hosain Rajaiyan’s The End, and Mohammad Sadrzadeh’s People. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, I organized the screening of films made in exile at ucla and at Rice University, often with the filmmakers in attendance. In 1995 the filmmaker Kamshad Kooshan put together a U.S.-­based International Tournée of Iranian Short Films in diaspora, which traveled to museum and university cinemas, but this effort did not last. Shahram Tabe-­Mohammadi started the Diaspora Film Festival in 2000 in Canada, which began as an Iranian venue but expanded to annually celebrate the “diversity of films and videos made by those cineastes living and working outside their countries of origin.” 23 In 2005 the Diaspora Film Festival, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, inaugurated the “Accented Cinema Film Series,” a year-­round monthly program of foreign movies dealing with “social and political issues associated with immigration, integration, and cultural interface.” 24 Another innovation was the festival’s geographical expansion to several Canadian cities—­Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal—­and New York (figure  77). These festivals and screening venues were not political, in that they were not organized by political exiles or designed to highlight the sorry record of the Islamic Republic and to promote its overthrow. Nevertheless, they were not short of films dealing with Iranian exile politics. The exiles in Europe organized two major politically oriented film festivals. In 1993 the dissident filmmaker Hossein Mahini organized the first, in Göteborg, Sweden, “to show why I was forced to leave Iran and come here” (quoted in Roberts 2007). Called the International Exile Film Festival (ieff), later appropriately subtitled “The World Is My Home,” it contained sixty-­four films made by Iranian filmmakers in the United States and in seven European countries. Mahini saw the collective as well as the individual responsibility of the filmmakers to “get to know each other and learn who is doing what and plan collective movements and projects in different fields of filmmaking” (quoted in Roberts 2007). The second festival, two years later, featured fifty-­eight exile films, forty-­ four by Iranians and the rest by other exiled filmmakers. The geographical dis408

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77 The Iranian Diaspora Film Festival’s 2002 poster for Cantor Film Center, New York University, designed by Hamid Rahmanian. In the original, this utopian image shows the tree of diaspora bearing a variety of colorful filmic fruit, implying not only dispersion but also efflorescence. Courtesy of Hamid Rahmanian.

tribution of Iranian participants had increased to twelve countries, mapping the global dispersion of Iranian diaspora communities. The Göteborg festival thus added a diasporic dimension to Iranian filmic identity (figure 78).25 By 2005 the ieff was boasting the screening of eighty-­one films, sixty-­seven of which were being screened in Sweden for the first time. Iranian filmmakers held the lion’s share of the screenings, with thirty-­two films. As the years passed, the festival added various sections to deal with women’s issues, prison experiences, and questions of social justice. It also organized art exhibitions and musical concerts by exiles (Persian, Kurdish, Azeri, and Chilean). The website characterizes the festival in its last evolutionary stage this way: “The festival is a forum for filmmakers in exile, regardless of their national, ethnic, religious or political backgrounds. This festival focuses on ‘exile’ as a global question and its main intent is to promote democracy, freedom of speech and the development of an open and multicultural society.” 26 Even though Iranian films still figure large in the festival, this globalization of the festival’s vision is a move in the right direction. In 1995 Sinema-­ye Azad, spearheaded by Bassir Nassibi, the publisher of the exilic film magazine of the same name, put on an Iranian exile film festival in Saarbrücken and other German cities, which continued for several years. Like Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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78 A postal card in 1993 publicizing International Festival of Films Made in Exile, Gothenburg, Sweden, designed by festival director, Hossein Mahini. Unlike the utopian Iranian Diaspora Film Festival’s poster, this is dystopic, emphasizing exilic erasure and loss. On the other hand, by offering horizons of reach beyond one’s borders (caption reads: “to see beyond the borders”), the card implies its own utopian possibilities. Publicity card courtesy of Hossein Mahini.

the Göteborg festival, that in Saarbrücken featured films made by the exiles and émigrés of other nations, helping to consolidate a global awareness of diaspora. However, the organizers of the Saarbrücken and Göteborg festivals continued to heartily invest in the binarist political discourses of the exiles and in their anti– Islamic Republic rhetoric and attacks against some of the filmmakers working in the belly of the beast. Those organizing film festivals in the West that showed films made inside Iran were not immune to the political rhetoric of organizers of festivals for films made in exile. For example, Nassibi routinely labeled these as “cultural, artistic, and cinematic brokers,” calling Mohammad Haghighat, the organizer of an Iranian film festival in Paris, the “chief broker (sar dallal) of the regime.” In reviewing the third festival of Iranian Cinema in Exile in Paris in 2005, spearheaded by Javad Dadsetan and the Center for Art in Exile, Nassibi even criticized the Iranian audiences, whose attendance at exile film festivals, he claimed, was based on “political calculations: some fear the word exile in the title of the festival, particularly those who want to visit Iran, they do not want to jeopardize that by attending exile festivals; on the other hand, there are those who have differences with the organizers, and they take revenge by not showing up and, if they can, they will even spread rumors” (Nassibi 2005). 410

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In 2007, an annual nonpolitical Hollywood-­style festival of Iranian films, Noor Film Festival, came into being in Los Angeles under the directorship of the Iranian American film producer Siamak Ghahremani. It featured all types of films made by Iranians at home and abroad. For the third festival in 2009 it received 172 films, 18 of which were selected for screening. These came from Australia, Iran, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States, indicating the dispersion of the Iranian diaspora. The festival took place in the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, a commercial cinema. The organizers attempted to create an elaborate, celebratory event with Iranian and American celebrities, a red carpet, an award ceremony, live music, dance performances, stand-­up comedy, and a sit-­down dinner—­making it a far cry from the generally frugal and politically charged atmosphere of the exile festivals. This was in line with the festival’s “only requirement,” as stated by Ghahremani, that “films cannot be religious or political in nature, or affiliated with religious or political organizations” (Kadivar 2008). Another particular difference was that the Noor (meaning light) festival followed an American capitalist model, for it was run as a commercial enterprise underwritten by “sponsors and friends.” 27 Both its commercial structure and its practice of drawing on Hollywood talent strengthened the festival’s apolitical aims and its goal of cultural reconciliation and assimilation into U.S. society, differentiating it in another way from the exile festivals, which generally thrived on difference and resistance. The dire global economic downturn forced the organizers to admit in an e-­mail to their patrons in April 2010 the shaky foundation of the festival, the majority of whose financing had been “made possible by its co-­founder and director’s personal funds, with some support from community leaders, corporate partners, sponsors, ticket sales and in-­kind donations.” They decided to postpone the 2010 festival, underscoring the precarious state of apolitical and glitzy exile film festivals. Soon London and Sydney became hosts to Iranian film festivals. The UK Iranian Film Festival aimed at “celebrating the best of contemporary Iranian films,” particularly “a new generation of emerging voices [which] remain largely unknown [in the United Kingdom].” 28 The inaugural festival in August 2010 was an all-­nighter, lasting from 11:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. the next day. The one in Sydney, begun in 2012, called itself the Persian International Film Festival, and offered the following description of itself on its Facebook: “It is a one of a kind festival that will showcase filmmakers from Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, and from the global Persian community across the globe to celebrate their similarities, diversities and complexities through film for Persian and Australian audiences.” 29 Both the name of this festival and its self-­description distinguished it from the UK Iranian Film Festival. These also emphasized not only the increasing preference by Iranians in the diaspora for their national designation as “Persian,” instead of “Iranian,” for both political and cultural reasons. Such a nomenclature avoided association with the Iran of the Islamic Republic, harked back to a rich Persian culture that predated Islam, and paid homage to the PerCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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sian Empire that once included the neighboring countries to Iran where Persian and Persianate culture still hold sway—­including Afghanistan and Tajikistan. This widening reach of Iranian film festivals in the diaspora paralleled the widening reach of Iranian filmmakers inside Iran who under the Islamic Republic began to make extraterritorial films in the neighboring countries. This multiplicity of sites associated laterally with Iran or Persia across the globe—­a far cry from the exclusivist, binary, and vertical association with the homeland Iran, typical of the early exile period—­confirms the increasing diasporization and globalization of Iranians. By their inclusion of all Iranian films—­not just those about politics—­as well as exile-­made films from diverse countries, organizers of Iranian exile festivals in Sweden, Germany, Canada, France, and the United States, even those most political and binarist, began to create a third space of diaspora in which Iranian filmmakers could finally find not only a personal voice but also a collective one. Despite the wishes of political exiles such as Mahini and Nassibi, this voice has turned out to be less a harmonious and united voice against the Islamic Republic driven by exilic duality, than a diverse and polysemic one motivated by diasporic multiplicity.

Historical Documentaries Like all the revolution, the Iranian revolution that drove Iranians to foreign shores was pivotal, disruptive, and transformative. A heavy shadow was thrown over the lives and thoughts of Iranians, concentrating the minds of writers, artists, filmmakers, and ordinary people. Exilic displacement intensified this historical consciousness. A rich trove of nonfiction films, made in many genres, arose in response on both sides of the exilic divide. Those made in the homeland often found their ways onto the screens in exile thanks to the care of oppositional political groups and film festivals. This traffic occurred primarily in one direction, as historical documentaries made by exiles rarely arrived on screens in the homeland. Historical documentaries were characterized by epistemophilia and historical consciousness of two kinds, part of the “culture of inquiry” encouraged by revolutionary upheaval and exilic displacement. One involved the desire to know what the homeland’s history had been, particularly its twentieth-­century history between the Constitutional Revolution and the Islamic Revolution, a history suppressed or distorted by the ruling Pahlavi regimes and now being reinterpreted and distorted by the Islamist regime. The other involved the desire to understand the causes of the revolution and the current mass uprooting and dispersion of Iranians to far corners of the globe, for which little precedence existed in recent history. Two types of documentaries resulted: “historical documentaries” and “iden412

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tity documentaries.” Historical documentaries were concerned with life in the homeland and had a collective historical consciousness that investigated recent Iranian national history and identity. Though made in exile, these documentaries did not deal centrally with displacement. But they benefited from the distance and freedom of exile—­and were also stymied by their limitations. On the other hand, identity documentaries, which came later, were concerned with issues primarily arising from living in exile and in the diaspora, and their personal historical consciousness explored individual, familial, ethnic, religious, national, gender, and sexual histories and identities of the filmmakers and others. Exile and diaspora films were set apart from émigré and ethnic modalities by the impossibility of return and the simultaneous harboring of a desire for a grand homecoming. Many displaced filmmakers used desire for historical epistemophilia and for return to make films that were impossible to create inside Iran. In the process, they rewrote Iranian national history from a position of exile and in the light of the revolution of 1978–79, supplementing documentaries inside Iran. Exile films suffered from a lack of access to primary historical sources inside the country—­documents, historical players, and eyewitnesses; but they benefited from access to abundant primary sources and audiovisual materials in Western libraries and film archives. In addition, some of the raw footage, news films, and documentaries of the revolutionary period were imported and re-­edited into historical compilation films by anti-­Shah, pro-­ revolution exile groups (see Naficy 1984). The leftist student filmmakers were the most active; some traveled to Iran to obtain ready footage and to film new footage. These films followed evolving conventions for compilation documentaries inside the country, but had a stronger historical depth, one driven by exilic epistemophilia. They recounted (with some bombast) the political history of Iran in the twentieth century, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s dependence on Western imperialist powers, the coup against Mosaddeq, and the events leading up to the anti-­Shah revolution. Among documentaries made in the United States were Rafigh Pooya and Marsha Goodman’s sixty-­minute Bloody Friday (Jom’eh-­ye Khunin, 1979), which documents, in the style of a newsreel, the Shah’s repression and U.S. support for it, Western media misrepresentations, and the machine-­gunning of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators by security forces in Tehran’s Zhaleh Square on 8 October 1978 (“Bloody Friday,” the first day of martial law). The Shah’s government claimed that only fifty-­seven people had been killed. Pooya and Goodman’s footage of corpses in the morgue, showing toe tags bearing numbers over three thousand, countered that claim. The filmmakers, two ambitious leftist ucla film students, had gained government permission to travel in Iran, ostensibly to make a film about women’s issues. Born in 1947 in Tehran, Pooya from childhood had been interested in the visual arts and had to his credit an earlier sixteen-­minute film, Waste in U.S., which critiques the advertising and Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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79 The flyer for screening Rafigh Pooya’s Bloody Friday, on the third anniversary of the massacre covered in the film. Sponsored by the Iranian Students in Southern California, supporters of the Fadaian (majority), the flyer’s subtitle exudes the group’s ideology: “17 Shahrivar, the day on which the people demonstrated their bravery before the bullets of the imperialist executioners.” The screening site is The House of Iran. From author’s collection.

consumer culture rampant in the United States. Bloody Friday is technically rough and has many repetitive shots and a rhetorical voice-­over narration, but it is a record of living history, during the filming of which Pooya himself was injured by gunfire. When it was first shown publicly at the Third World Film Festival at ucla in April 1979, it was still incomplete and lacked credits, and the filmmakers chose not to reveal their names—­not so much because of fear of persecution by Savak agents, as was claimed at the time (Savak was already dismantled), but because of private disagreements between the two principals over directorial credit (figure 79).30 Eager to make a more substantial and autonomous film, Pooya went back to Iran with a 16mm Éclair camera and raw stock to film footage for his feature documentary, In Defense of People (Dar Defa’ az Mardom, 1981), which was his mfa film. As he told me in an interview, he sold his car to fund the film and purchase about $5,000 worth of raw stock—­prescient, because the supply in Iran had dried up due to the U.S. embargo. All the equipment belonged to ucla, and the total cost of the film reached $30,000 (Naficy 1980b). Pooya used the footage of the televised military tribunal of twelve leftist intellectuals during the Shah era to frame a leftist analysis of the rise and fall of the Shah and of subsequent political developments, including footage of the revolutionary uprising, street demonstrations and fighting, the aftermath of the fire at Rex Cinema, speeches of revolutionary leaders, including the ayatollahs Taleqani and 414

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80 The poster for screening Pooya’s In Defense of People at Fox Venice Theater. From author’s collection.

Khomeini, a news conference of the student “followers of the imam line,” who had taken the Americans hostage in their embassy (“the nest of spies”), and extensive coverage of President Jimmy Carter’s failed military attempt to rescue the hostages, filmed for the first time in the Iranian desert. The voices of the two unwavering defendants, Khosrow Golsorkhi and Keramat Daneshian, arguing in support of their Marxist beliefs and their cause against the Shah’s White Revolution, provides the narrative spine of the film.31 Additional visuals supply evidence supporting the defendants’ voice-­overs, countering the Pahlavi regime’s claims. The film took two years to complete. Pooya claims it contains “every frame of the military court footage” (Naficy 1980b). It was selected as an official entry in the Cannes International Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight), and it won the International Jury Award at the Twenty-­Fourth Leipzig Film Festival. Its chief drawback is that for the uninitiated it fails to properly explain the trial that frames and undergirds the film and the circumstances surrounding the defendants’ imprisonment, trial, and execution (the latter is only implied by shots of their graves that bookend the film). In Defense of People screened at several film festivals and commercial cinemas in the United States, including the Fox Theater in Venice, California, which Pooya himself managed in the 1980s as an eclectic and successful repertory cinema catering to alternative world cinemas (figure 80). Neither Bloody Friday nor In Defense of People was shown in Iran. Pooya gives part of the reason: the film’s narration by Golsorkhi, a Marxist, posed a problem after the success of the ayatollahs in owning the revolution (quoted in JaCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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fari Lahijani 2008a:342). Another part of the reason is the exilic politics that makes filmmakers in exile not authorized to speak for, or about, the homeland, as if they have not earned the right to comment. Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?,” must thus be reformulated as, “Can the exile speak?” The answer, as these pages testify, must be a resounding yes. Since then Pooya has been producing, directing, and distributing movies through his company, International Home Cinema, in Santa Monica (along with his wife, Barbara Bryan), where he also owns and manages the Interactive Café.32 A two-­hour polemical documentary, Iran in the Throes of Revolution (Iran dar Arseh-­ye Enqelab, 1979), made or sponsored by the leftist Confederation of Iranian Students Association (Revival Faction [Ehia]), shown in Los Angeles in 1980, focuses on the history of the Shah’s ascension since the 1953 coup, his dependence on U.S. support, his subservience to U.S. policies, and, as the film’s flyer announced, the “struggles of the brave and heroic Iranian masses.” The film contains a treasure trove of historical footage of almost all the major political events under both Pahlavi regimes up to the revolution that toppled the dynasty, buttressed by a Marxist historical analysis of the oppression of the masses and peasants and the militarization of society. It also gives full coverage to the wild and passionate anti-­Shah demonstrations that the confederation itself organized when the leader visited the United States in the 1970s, including footage of the Shah, President Carter, and other dignitaries wiping away the tears caused by police tear gas. In addition, the film dramatically shows the transformation of peaceful demonstrations in Iran into armed struggle against the regime, ending with an emotional montage celebrating the jubilant uprising against the all-­powerful Shah, who departs from Iran for exile while Ayatollah Khomeini returns triumphantly from his exile. Despite its remarkable achievements, the film suffered from its one-­sidedness, since it underplayed the role of the clergy in the anti-­Pahlavi efforts and the revolution (figure 81). Flames of Freedom (Sho’lehha-­ye Azadi, 1979), made by the Arts Group of the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union) and screened at the University of Southern California in 1980, focuses on a detailed history of “imperialist” moves against Iran from the Portuguese occupation of the Persian Gulf islands in the sixteenth century to the revolution of 1978–79. The film provides valuable historical material on leftist students’ contributions to fighting against the Pahlavi state. Masud Ahmad Rajai’s Iran; or, The End of 1001 Nights (Iran oder das Ende von 1001 Nächten, 1979) deals with the revolutionary fervor that toppled the Shah, whom the film calls “one of the most loyal vassals of U.S. imperialism.” This is an epistolary film, organized around a mother’s letter to her son abroad, describing the actions of women in support of the revolution from December 1978 to February 1979, in which the chador became a voluntary symbol of opposition (long before the new regime imposed the veil). Shah-­era news and propaganda films, which Iranian students had liberated from the Iranian consulate in Hamburg, are used alongside the voice of the Shah ordering his gen416

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81 The flyer for screening Iran in the Throes of Revolution in the Royal Theater, Santa Monica, California. Iranian Student Association in Southern California, a chapter of isaus, sponsored the event. From author’s collection.

erals to suppress the revolution, a recording given to the director by Ayatollah Taleqani’s son. Strikes, demonstrations, cemetery visits, the Shah’s departure, and Khomeini’s return are shown. The film ends with the letter’s last, hopeful sentence: “The revolution continues. This brings us joy, and we will not allow anyone to spoil the taste of this joy and freedom.” According to the director, the German and French governments purchased about two dozen copies of the film for distribution to schools and universities, and when it was screened in commercial and art cinemas in Germany, it was well received. It was even shown in the German parliament. The Goethe Institut showed it once in Tehran, with the director in attendance, but it did not arouse much interest, perhaps because it was neither dubbed nor subtitled (Jafari Lahijani 2008a:348–49). Mohammad Tehrani made his two-­hour documentary Till Revolution (Ta Azadi, 1980) for his ucla mfa thesis, some of which he filmed inside Iran. He attempted to present an impartial view of Iranian history from the early Pahlavi period to the revolution, an admirable goal. The film notes the contributions of various factions to the revolution, and it contains historically significant documentary footage, such as the Shah apologizing to the nation on television; protesters mocking the military prime minister General Azhari’s claim that the shouts of “God is Great” (“Allah O’ Akbar”), heard from rooftops, were only audiocassettes playing the chants, not thousands of demonstrators; Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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82 A scene from Tehrani’s film Till Revolution. Production still.

pitched battles in the streets; the release of political prisoners and their emotional reunions with their loved ones; and the peoples’ jubilant celebrations after the Shah’s departure from the country. However, the film’s length, uneven pacing, unwieldy structure (caused by the director’s desire to credit all factions), and verbose narration worked against it. As he told me in interviews, Tehrani, who filmed much of the footage of the revolution himself, spent a significant amount of his own money on the film, about $15,000 (Naficy 1980c) (figure 82). Of the historical documentaries sympathetic to the Islamist view of the revolution made and screened in the United States, two are noteworthy. Blood Will Triumph over the Sword (Khun bar Shamshir Piruz Mishavad, 1978), directed by Mahmud Dorudian, is a thirty-­five-­minute mfa thesis film for ucla, whose title is a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini. It sensitively and poetically involves the audience in the collective emotions, sights, and sounds that swept the nation, primarily highlighting the Islamic dimensions of the revolution. It cleverly emphasizes the Shah’s subservience to the United States by accompanying scenes of his coronation ceremony in 1967 with the soundtrack of the U.S. national anthem. In an interview in Los Angeles, Dorudian told me how he had been transformed by the revolution while filming it with his own Super 8 camera. He said, “I don’t worry about dying now because I’ve witnessed the revolution. I loved it in a fantastic and strange way. The collective power of the masses captured me. Khomeini’s leadership had a primary role in guiding the masses. Before, I was unhappy and without hope in the masses. But during the revolution I became a believer in their power. If I didn’t show the placards of other groups like the People’s Fadaian Organization, it is because I didn’t see any. I tried to remain neutral. I filmed what I saw” (Naficy 1980a). The spell of the revolution and the lure of the changed circumstances were so strong that he said to me, “I must return to Iran. I miss it; I miss Iranians. I was with them so much during the editing process that I can’t live without them.” By summer, he had returned (figure 83). Bigan Saliani’s feature-­length film Iran: Inside the Islamic Revolution (1980) is 418

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83 A flyer for screening Mahmud Dorudian’s Blood Will Triumph over the Sword at University of Southern California. Organized by the Muslim Student Association of United States and Canada, the screening was part of a Ramadan event consisting of news, interpretation of news, film screening, iftar (breaking of fast), and speech. From author’s collection.

the only Iranian film about the revolution that the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service aired in those early postrevolutionary days. It reports on the director’s six-­ month stay in Iran in 1978–79, starting before the departure of the Shah. It fulfills its epistemophilic mission by providing a historical analysis of Iran since Mosaddeq’s overthrow in the 1950s, using interviews with participants as well as fresh archival footage. Saliani documents the oncoming revolution in various cities and towns, with a special focus on its impact on the lives of the peasants in the village of Abgir. It contains many pivotal moments of the revolution, including the joyous release of political prisoners from the Shah’s prisons, and a moving speech by the mother of a member of the People’s Fadaian Organization of Iran (pfoi) to a massive crowd of supporters in which she relates the last stirring words of her son before execution: “Do not blindfold me, I want to see the executioner’s trembling hands.” According to Susumo Tokomo, the film’s soundman, they obtained the footage they could not film themselves, such as the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris, by exchanging some of their own footage with other filmmakers (Naficy 1979h), in a work mode that had become commonplace in those days. The result is technically the most polished of all Iranian historical documentaries made in exile, and its emphasis on showing Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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the impact of the revolution in rural areas instead of in urban areas is insightful. Yet the film is marred by its one-­sided view of the revolutionary potential of the clerics in Iranian history and by the representation of Islamic Iran as a united, homogenous polity under the sign of Islam.33 This one-­sidedness and homogeneity partly reflects the heady euphoria of the early postrevolutionary period, the so-­called “spring of freedom,” when joyous populations of all strata were celebrating their success at toppling the Pahlavi regime.34 After this successful film, Saliani was hired by nbc in the United States to cover the hostage crisis and the war with Iraq; however, as he noted to me in an e-­mail, he was unable to continue to work inside Iran because of his “insistence on covering” the trial of the former foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, which “resulted in total ban of my activities in Iran” (Naficy 2005f). Interestingly, there was not much cooperation among Iranian documentarists working in the United States on historical films about the revolution, perhaps partly because they were in competition with each other for resources: historical footage, access to Iran, access to production equipment and facilities, and access to exhibition and broadcast venues in the United States. Rampant ideological differences also prevented collective work. That these films were screened primarily in colleges and universities (and sometimes in churches, high schools, and at labor unions) points to the presence of large student popu­ lations from Iran in the United States and to the educational and agitprop functions of films supporting the revolution. In these settings, documentaries were part of a larger culture of inquiry and educational process—­lectures, poetry readings, theatrical performances, and discussions. They were part of the structure of knowledge that I identified as the “republic of scholars” nurtured by exile (Naficy 1993b:52). In line with that structure, in these settings disagreements were aired, sometimes heatedly, but they rarely led to violence or police action. One exception was the screening in January 1983 of Masud Kimiai’s populist film The Deer on the campus of the University of Texas, Arlington. Sponsored by the students supporting the pfoi, the screening was disrupted by thirty members of what was reported to be the pro-­Islamic government Party of God, resulting in a fight in which six of the attackers were injured and hospitalized. The screening resumed after the restoration of peace.35 Another type of historical documentary was also attempted, with uncertain results. Cyrus (Kourosh) Kar, an Iranian-­born American filmmaker (and his cameraman, Farshid Faraji), was engaged in filming a historical documentary on the life of his namesake, “Cyrus the Great,” the Achaemenid king who “championed tolerance and human rights even as he built an empire that stretched across the Near East” (Golden 2005a). Kar had been in the United States since the age of two and had served in the U.S. Navy and the Naval Reserve. He had gone to Iraq to film the archaeological sites around Babylon, the ancient city Cyrus had conquered in 539 bce, releasing many slaves, including thousands of captive Jews, as a mark of his magnanimity and relocating some 420

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of them to Iran. In May 2005, after a taxi that he and Faraji had taken from their hotel in Baghdad was stopped by Iraqi forces, they were arrested because dozens of washing-­machine timers, which were used by Iraqi insurgents to make improvised explosive devices, had turned up in the car’s trunk. The filmmakers were turned over to U.S. forces, which detained them for seven grueling and secretive weeks on the suspicion of involvement with the anti-­A merican Iraqi insurgency. Mark Rosenbaum, Kar’s lead lawyer, characterized his client’s detention graphically: “Saddam Hussein has had more due process than Cyrus Kar. This is a detention policy that was drafted by Kafka” (Golden 2005a). That Kar had been a supporter of President Bush and the neoconservatives’ policy of exporting democracy to the Middle East at gunpoint did not help him. Neither had the dangers of the Iraqi war zone deterred him and his cameraman from going there. Kar was apparently zealously determined to make this historical documentary, ignoring impediments and dangers. His sister, Ana, pointed to an important source of his determination for making the film, which is relevant to Kar’s exilic context. “He had always been a little ashamed of being Iranian,” she stated, since the Iranian revolution and the American hostage crisis. In the Navy, “he got a lot of racial slurs. But reading about Cyrus the Great, he had felt a real sense of pride in what he thought was the real Iran—­this tolerant, benevolent empire. And he started on this quest” (Golden 2005a). For his first film effort, Kar had traveled for the previous two years to Germany, Britain, Tajikistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, filming more than forty hours of interviews and documentary footage (including of historical sites). Even after his release from detention, Kar did not go home before completing his filming in Babylon (Golden 2005b). The promotional trailers for his unfinished film, In Search of Cyrus the Great, posted on his Spenta Productions website, make a case for Cyrus’s human rights innovations and offer speculations that Western democracies and the U.S. Constitution may have been inspired by them. “In fact,” Kar’s voice-­over states, “America’s Constitution could be considered a very Persian document,” for Xenophon’s book on the life of Cyrus, Cyropaedia, was a required reading for the framers of the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson had a personal copy of it.36 This is the latest effort by Iranians at corrective self-­representation, designed to counter Western bias against acknowledging the contributions of the East, particularly of Persia, to Western civilization. It also attempts to counter the representations of Persians by contemporary Western mediawork as cruel and uncultured barbarians, which have gained momentum since the emergence of Islamic terrorism and Western governments’ declaration of a so-­called global war on terror. A plethora of movies and television shows such as Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) and Zack Snyder’s Three Hundred (2006) evidence this. On his website, Kar requests help in financing the remaining $400,000 he needs to complete the latest salvo in the wars of representation.

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Identity Documentaries Historical documentaries engaged in excavating an existing national history. Identity documentaries centered on discovering emerging, and constructing new, identities for exiles whose lives and identities had been destabilized by revolution and displacement. One fed the modernist ethos of consolidating a common, collective national identity, the other that of postmodernity’s penchant for discovering differences in the form of subnational, extranational, or alternative identities—­ethnic, interethnic, transnational gender, and sexual. There was a gender division in making these two important types of accented documentaries. While male directors dominated historical films, female directors prevailed in the identity documentaries. Identity documentaries reflected and helped constitute the changing identities of Iranians. It took several years and a change of optic—­from exile and diaspora to émigré and ethnic—­for the shift to identity documentaries to occur. This coincided with a generational shift, from those born inside Iran who emigrated in adulthood, to those who either were born in Iran but raised abroad or were born abroad. The identity documentaries often played on the discovery of a core self and the construction of a new identity in a context of historical changes (diachronic) or interethnic evolution (synchronic). The new documentarists often returned home to explore their personal and family histories, as well as national history through a personal prism. Such autobiographical narratives of a return to origin are frequent in accented cinema. Persheng Sadegh-­Vaziri, who received her master’s degree in film studies from New York University, made several films so personal that they can be classified as “diary films.” As she stated in a panel at Rice University, “I always make films about Iran because I have been kind of upset about what happened there, about my inability to live there after the revolution, and about coming to this country in circumstances that were beyond my control. So it was obsession that led me to make my diary films” (Sadegh-­Vaziri 2004). When asked to expand on this comment, she sent me a statement that details sources for her exilic epistemophilia, something that many other exile artists and filmmakers from privileged backgrounds have felt and expressed in their works: I think that I was referring to being brought up in a family that was influenced by western style and values and in a city that aspired to western values. I was born in Tehran and grew up listening to European and American music, or Iranian pop music, watched American or European movies a lot more than Iranian films, and most importantly I was educated in schools that were designed to teach English as their main focus. I attended the Community High School, which was an international school [English language Presbyterian school], so by the time I was a teenager, my goal and desire was to go to “America.” My mother encouraged this 422

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process fully, but not my father. I came here for the 1977–78 school year, when I had just turned 18. When the revolution happened a year later, I realized that I knew very little about my own country and culture, and so I was determined to change that. I felt robbed of really knowing Iran, while I grew up there and leaving it before I was an adult. Through making the films I attempt to reclaim what was lost to me. (Naficy 2006h) Sadegh-­Vaziri’s Journal from Tehran (1986) is a memoir of her first return visit during the Iran-­Iraq war, particularly during the “war of cities” period, when there was much uncertainty and fear in the air. Her prize-­w inning film screened on pbs’s Independent Focus series. Her next film, Far from Iran (1991), commissioned by the New England Foundation for the Arts, deals with Iranian expatriates, interviewing a group of friends living in Boston. After a decade of filmmaking in the United States, personal crises caused the reemergence of her identity issues, compelling her to return to Iran once more, this time for an extended period. Diary films help makers document their lives and make sense of them. “Whenever I have kind of a crisis going on in my life, I film it,” she said. She began by interviewing her family members about whether she should return to live in Iran, and received conflicting responses. While the elders and grandparents urged her to come, live, and marry an Iranian, the younger generation, ready to leave the country, begged her to stay put. During this second trip, she traveled widely. She went to her father’s birthplace, Kurdistan, seeing (and filming) the country for the first time as an independent adult. “I came back to the U.S. with the footage, and hoped that the process of making the film would help me make my decision [about where I belonged]. I was very depressed” (Sadegh-­Vaziri 2004). The result is A Place Called Home (1998), a fascinating personal documentary that taps into one of the key issues of exile—­ return to the homeland and its often disappointing aftermath. Sadegh-­Vaziri, who had grown up in pre-­revolution Tehran “daydreaming about an ideal life in the West,” decided after nineteen years of living and working in the United States to explore her controversial decision to “return to the place she never stopped calling home.” 37 In candid interviews with her mother and unhappy sister in the United States, and with her father who remained in Iran, she reveals complex layers of her Kurdish, personal, national, and transnational identities. The film also contains rare footage of women’s lives in contemporary Tehran, and it paved the way for Sadegh-­Vaziri to stay in Iran to make another film. While completing that film, she got a job with Internews, a U.S.-­based media company working to improve cross-­cultural media exchanges around the world by training journalists and media professionals. She worked on the project that involved linking by satellite two female teachers, one from Iran and the other from the United States, to converse with each other from their classrooms. The idea was to counter the epistemic violence of the negative mediaworks of both countries about each other. The Internews website explains the Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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reason for choosing Iran: “Since diplomatic relations ended in 1979, Americans have received almost no in-­depth news about politics and life in Iran. In Holly­ wood movies like Not Without My Daughter and True Lies, Iranians have been portrayed as villainous fanatics. In the Iranian mass media, Americans have frequently been depicted as deceitful enemies. The goal of Beyond The Veil was to get beyond these stereotypes and explore, through a dialogue between two women, some of the cultural and political differences which have kept Iran and America at odds for almost 20 years.” 38 Sadegh-­Vaziri was the Iranian producer of the program, which allowed her to return for an extended time, and she was involved in choosing the teacher from Tehran, Prima Daad, a woman who believed in the revolution, who knew English, and who was willing to appear in a live television dialogue with her American counterpart, Deborah Whitley, who taught in a school in Washington, where many Iranian immigrants and exiles lived. The program website continues: “As someone who supports the Islamic Revolution and theocracy in Iran, we felt that she personifies attitudes and beliefs that the majority of Americans either fear or misunderstand. We hoped that a dialogue between Mrs. Daad and an American might illuminate, for viewers, the differences in values and ideologies of either country.” Nearly ten hours of satellite television conversations between the two teachers and their students were conducted and recorded. These were later edited down to fifty-­six minutes and released as Vis-­ à-­vis: Beyond the Veil, a program that pbs aired in August 1999. This binational conversation in which teachers and students discussed teaching methods, child rearing, mutual perceptions of Iranians and Americans, and differing cultural values—­including the use of the veil—­was pathbreaking. It was conducted in 1997, before the election of President Mohammad Khatami, who advocated a reformist program, including his “dialogue of civilization” between Iran and the West. The pbs airing of the one-­hour condensation occurred after his election. As Sadegh-­Vaziri noted, this became a model for other satellite-­linked events between Iranian and American counterparts, one of which also involved filmmakers. It also led to the organizing of a festival of American documentaries at the Tehran Museum of Fine Arts, which introduced Iranians to films difficult to obtain (2004). For her Women Like Us (Zanhai Mesl-­e Ma, 2000–2002), Sadegh-­Vaziri shifted from her personal story to those of five other women: a nurse, a journalist, a rice farmer, a religious college graduate, and a piano teacher. This shift was caused by her dismay at the way the U.S. media had portrayed Iranian women as “exotic” creatures with veils. She shot the film herself and was often alone with her women subjects. Against a backdrop of Islam, gender segregation, revolution, and war, the intimate portraits of these women as they go about their daily work and life, and interviews with them, reveal that Iranian society and women are far from the homogenous, backward, victimized, and browbeaten polity generally represented by Western mediawork, U.S. politicians, and Iranian political 424

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84 Maryam the nurse visits a shrine (tekkiyeh) in Kermanshah in Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri’s Women Like Us. Courtesy of the filmmaker. 85 Kurdish mysticism in Jahanshah Ardalan’s film Beyond Words. Courtesy of Jahanshah Ardalan.

exiles. With the election of George W. Bush and the hardening of the diplomatic relations between the two countries, film projects for Sadegh-­Vaziri dried up in Iran, forcing her to relocate to the United States once again (figure 84). In Beyond Words (2003), another Kurdish Iranian, Jahanshah Ardalan, who two decades earlier had made Plaintive Song (Nafir, 1982), a poetic film about the death of music under the Islamic Republic, returned from the United States on a mission of self-­discovery and family history. This turned into a discovery of the Qaderi dervishes’ mystic religion and rituals.39 Ardalan narrates in voice-­ over his visit to his ancestral home, and personal, familial, ethnic, and national elements mingle to create an affective palimpsest of identities (figure 85). Aryana Farshad’s fifty-­two-­minute documentary Mystic Iran: The Unseen World (2003) reflects the director’s lifelong passion for mysticism and spirituality and represents her return journey to her ancestral land, Iranian Kurdistan. Farshad, a graduate of the idhec in film production and editing and a professional editor and film professor at nirt’s Film and Television College in the 1970s, relocated to the United States in 1977. Exile was traumatic for her: “I have spent 25 years of solitude in the USA, after the revolution. I had to go into solitude in order to come back out, in order to recreate myself. I woke up one day and realized that I had no country, no father, no mother, and no help. At first I panicked and cried for days. You have to understand that I grew up in a Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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leisurely life style and very spoiled. Consequently life was hard, very hard, but . . . I didn’t allow myself the luxury of depression, nor leisure. . . . I went to work and worked hard, 14 hours a day and seven days a week, and still do” (quoted in Appleton 2004). She worked in the film industry, but Mystic Iran is her personal film, in which she performed multiple functions: she produced, directed, co­w rote the screenplay (with Janelle Balnicke), and edited the film. Farshad spent nine months filming in Iran and two years in Los Angles editing the film. The film is structured like a spiritual return journey of a bicultural woman to her homeland seeking her roots. The film carries the director’s first-­person voice-­over narration (spoken by Shohreh Aghdashloo) that resembles Albert Lamorisse’s The Lovers’ Wind (Bad-­e Saba, 1969), on which Farshad had worked as an assistant. Beautifully photographed, elegantly edited, and sensitively scored (by Ahmad Pejman), the filmmaker visits Qom, Yazd, and various villages in Iranian Kurdistan to document rituals of Shiites, Zoroastrians, and Qaderi dervishes. What makes the film unique is its access to sites of women’s worship. Even though her filming crew was male, the fact that a woman spearheaded it made possible obtaining official permissions and community acceptance. Yet this was not always easy: in Qom, the narrator tells us, they had to wait “for days in burning sun” outside the Shrine of Hazrat-­e Masumeh to obtain permission; when it arrived, it was unexpected and for a mere five minutes. Given the intimate scenes of worship she obtained, it was a well spent five minutes (actually, once inside, Farshad was able to convince the guards to let them film longer on grounds that she had traveled all the way from Los Angeles). She also was able to extensively cover on film, perhaps for the first time, the female dervishes’ Sama dance of ecstasy led by a female master, Khalifa Sheney. The conceit of the film is that the ancient Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great began as a country where religious worship was open to all faiths, a legacy that it claims still continues in Iran. Given the religious intolerance of the Islamist regime, this statement seems more like a hope than reality (Judaic and Christian mysticism are absent from the film because the government refused filming permission). Mystic Iran’s emphasis on spirituality and harmony is influenced perhaps by its turbulent twin contexts: current religious intolerance at home and the 9/11 attacks on the United States, which escalated xenophobia both at home and in the diaspora. As she told an interviewer: I believe 9/11 had a strong impact on my decision on how to tell the story at that time. At first, my vision for making the film and the trip was rather to learn and experience the spiritual life in Iran, to share my spiritual growth and pass it to others by this film. As I traveled into the heart of Iran, I fell in love with the country and the spirit of the people. We have one of the most ancient cultures and civilizations. Our ancestors planted the seeds of human rights and civilization. I filmed everything on my 426

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way and decided that I will show my country from a new angle. When I returned here 9/11 happened which was heartbreaking for me. I stopped for a period of time to heal myself and then I worked non-­stop to pass the message in a healing way. I hoped that it would help to bring a new message of friendship, reconciliation and healing among cultures.40 This quote brings to the fore the existence of a dual national optic among the minority exile directors, who are doubly exiled, from both their ethnic and their national roots. Sadegh-­Vaziri, Ardalan, and Farshad made exilic return-­ to-­origin films, which also addressed the turn toward ethnicity and spirituality motivated by displacement. The works of these and other Kurdish directors in diaspora (including Taifur Patai and Bahman Ghobadi working in Iraq), along with those of filmmakers working inside Iran, point to the developing exchange relations between Iranian cinemas in diaspora and at home. They also point to the emergence of a nascent extraterritorial pan-­Kurdish cinema, nourished by Kurdish filmmakers working, sometimes in isolation from each other, within and across nation-­states. An Iranian historian of Azeri descent, Behnaz A. Mirzai, returned to Iran to codirect with Ali Ghelichi the forty-­five-­minute film Afro-­Iranian Lives (2008). As Mirzai states in her voice-­over narration at the start of the film, her emigration to Canada in 1997 (with a husband and two children) was the impetus for the film, for it was on foreign shores that she first encountered race and ethnicity as constitutive of her identity. In e-­mail correspondences with me, she elaborated on the making of the film. In the course of her doctoral studies at York University in Toronto on the abolition of the slave trade in Iran between 1828 and 1928, she returned to Iran and came across many Iranians of African descent. “My contacts with the blacks of southern Iran had a great impact on me. As a graduate student I always used my small and unprofessional video camera to record the interviews. I had collected a lot of tapes, but none were professionally recorded” (Naficy 2010a). After graduation and on being hired as an assistant professor she decided to turn the footage into a film about Africans in Iran, partly because “I was fascinated by them,” and partly because at the time “I was teaching a course called Slavery in the Middle East and there was no film on that subject about Iran.” Not being a filmmaker, she turned to an Iranian student who offered the services of his father in Iran as a “great filmmaker,” which turned out to be “a big lie!” Mirzai ended up multitasking: she funded and produced the film, codirected it, wrote the dialogue, photographed some of the footage, appeared on camera, and read the voice-­over narration. The telltale signs of multitasking and artisanal production are the film’s amateurishness, narrative flaws, and rough edits and sounds. Nevertheless, Afro-­Iranian Lives contributes to our understanding of an important population in Iran that has rarely been examined on film. Some documentaries, such as Naser Taqvai’s The Sorcerer’s Wind (Bad-­e Jen, 1970), dealt Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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with the zar ceremonies of African Iranians living on the shores of Persian Gulf, but they did not delve into the history of the people and tended to exoticize them. In addition, by posing the zar ceremonies as cures to the psychological illnesses that African slaves and tradespeople had brought to Iran, they engaged in an implicit racist discourse and blamed the victim. Mirzai’s film features a wealth of photographs of the black slaves at the Qajar court, in individual portraits and in group shots with their masters, and it provides important historical data: in 1869, for example, African Iranians in Tehran numbered thirty-­three hundred, constituting about 2 percent of the capital’s population. The film also shows today’s descendants of the slaves in various parts of southern Iran, engaged in small agricultural and artisanal labor. A good portion of the film is devoted to the zar ceremonies, which involve exorcising various illnesses from the afflicted. The film frequently intercuts these scenes with interviews with a female master of ceremony explaining how she prepares and conducts them and with a male expert describing the functions and types of the evil winds that cause the illnesses, including the zar wind (this emphasis on women’s points of view and on analysis is also new). While these interviews are informative, the interruptive editing scheme impedes viewers from experiencing the sustained power of the ceremony, which comes from the music’s driving beat and the frenzied movements of the zar-­stricken subjects who are in a state of trance (something that Taqvai’s film does admirably). It is through the sustained playing of music and through dancing that the evil winds are driven out of the subject. The film’s central point, reiterated in Mirzai’s publications, is that the common cultural heritages of Africans, including zar ceremonies, not only connect their communities in the diaspora but also help reconstruct for them a new subcultural identity in the context of the host country (Mirzai 2002:242). Mirzai and Ghelichi’s Afro-­Iranian Lives, Shahla Haeri’s Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran (2001), and Ziba Mir-­Hosseini and Kim Longinotto’s Divorce Iranian Style (1998) form a new category of film made by Iranians in diaspora—­academic research films. These are based on academic research conducted by directors not themselves filmmakers by profession; hence their pairing with filmmakers. Another notable return-­to-­origin documentary is Anna Fahr’s ninety-­minute film Khaneh Ma: Places We Call Home (2006), which charts her return after ten years to Iran, the country of her cultural origin, along with other family members arriving from Europe. Fahr, a second-­generation Iranian, was born in 1981 in Rolla, Missouri, and received her bfa in film production from Concordia University’s School of Cinema in Montreal, which awarded her the Mel Hoppenheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film Production for her Super 16mm short fiction film, Joshua’s Garden (2003). Her first feature, Khaneh Ma (literally, Our Home) creates a tender and textured “family portrait” of three generations in her family, all of them gathering in Mashhad and in the nearby hometown of Bojnurd for companionship, traveling, feasting, and dancing. Sev428

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eral family members receive special treatment. One is her grandfather, Mohammad Taqi Sepasi, whose name Fahr adopted for her production company, Sepasi Films. As Fahr told me in e-­mails, he was the owner of the Sa’di Cinema in Bojnurd, a premier movie house specializing in foreign imports, which was seized by the government after the revolution—­appropriated by the Foundation of the Dispossessed—­and it has remained closed and is in a deteriorating condition (Naficy 2007a). Then there is her grandmother, to whose powerful life story Fahr attentively listens: Her parents arranged to marry her at nineteen to a strict religious man, who already had two children. She produced six children of her own, but many irreconcilable differences separated the young woman from her older husband, the most important of which was the children’s education. She wanted her children to receive higher education, while he wanted them limited to elementary schooling. In a radical move, she took charge of the children’s education, taking them to school, registering them, and finally supporting their going abroad for higher education—­the first in her family. And finally, there is the torn subjectivity of a family member, Kurosh, planning to emigrate to Canada along with his young wife, Mandana, and a child. He is pulled between the certainty of roots and the allure of routes, a situation he explains to the camera with eloquence and tenderness (figure 86). This in-­betweenness is not limited to this family member who is about to emigrate, but extends to the director, who relates in her “Director’s Statement” that, “Growing up, I’ve always had the sense of being caught between two worlds: the one in which I lived, which I encountered daily, and the one that existed to me in smaller samplings, in remnants, passing fragrances. Never imposing itself too heavily upon my life, the fainter of my two worlds has remained a quiet presence throughout it. It has followed me till this day.” Fahr evokes these cultural and synesthetic dimensions of Iranian family life in the many family gatherings; their joys at companionship, dancing, feasting, and musical performances; and the intimacy, tender kissing, hugging, and caressing when they meet and depart at various arrivals and departures. The festive and malleable Iranian home that she portrays is a far cry from the somber and rigid Iran that the Islamic Republic projects and that the West-

86 Kurosh and Mandana planning to emigrate to Canada in Fahr’s Khaneh Ma: Places We Call Home. Courtesy of the filmmaker.

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ern mediawork tends to propagate. It is also different from the image that some Iranian exiles favor, causing controversy when Khaneh Ma premiered at the Rendez-­Vous du Cinéma Québécois in 2006. As she notes, “some people were shocked because I didn’t feed them images of religious fundamentalism, or any of the images that they were expecting to see. . . . I was not only shocked at reactions from non-­Iranians, but also from Iranians themselves. . . . . What I explained to them, when they asked why I didn’t focus on the human rights violations, [was that] from a distant, second generation perspective, I see things quite differently.” 41 This latter point is one of the fundamental factors differentiating émigré films from ethnic films—­their generational distance. Nevertheless, certain Iranian spectators advised Fahr to remove scenes that raised critical questions about Islam, fearing that they would pose a problem for family members at home and result in the film’s banning there. For that reason she cut five minutes from it. Annette Mari Olsen and her film partner, Katia Forbert Petersen, codirected the seventy-­eight-­minute return documentary My Iranian Paradise (Mit Iranske Paradis/Behesht-­e Irani-­ye Man, 2008). The two women met at the Polish Film School in Lodz, Poland, in the early seventies, and formed their company, Sfinx Film, in Denmark in 1988, specializing in what the filmmakers call “bridge-­ building films about diverse cultures.” Petersen is a Polish refugee to the West and Olsen a hyphenated filmmaker born in Denmark in 1947 to a Danish father and a Polish-­Lithuanian refugee mother who was among the thousands of survivors of Stalin’s Gulag pouring into Iran. Her father was an engineer for the Kampsax engineering and construction company that built a major portion of the trans-­Iranian railway in the 1930s. My Iranian Paradise, built around a comparative structure, documents Olsen’s nostalgic return to Iran where she visits various private homes and public places and interviews mostly women about life under the Islamic Republic. These scenes are often intercut with home-­ movie footage and pictures from family albums documenting her and her family’s lives in Pahlavi-­era Iran, creating a before-­and-­after comparison of freedoms of the past with the confinements of the present, particularly involving women. She digs deeper into her own past by taking a train ride to the Caspian Sea using the same railroad that her father helped build, and she interviews people who fondly remember the Polish refugees arriving at Iranian seaports during the war. She visits the Polish cemetery in Tehran, where she interviews its female caretaker who with sadness intones: “An exile is always in exile, I am a stranger, like these Poles; whenever I feel sad I come here to feel better.” The film intercuts contemporary scenes of Olsen’s train travel with historical footage of a Kampsax-­sponsored film, Iran: The New Persia, and of Polish refugees arriving in Iran. The result is a rare return film that situates not only the personal story of the returning filmmaker but also the historical story of the nation (although the filmmaker’s personal search cited within the history of Iran under 430

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the Pahlavis, using file footage and interviews with sternly veiled women, at times seems forced and awkward). Olsen and Petersen had made Behind the Mountains (2004), about two girls in a refugee camp in Iran, before embarking on My Iranian Paradise. Even though they had filming permits, they filmed 90 percent of it with a hidden camera. They explained: “You need one permit for one street and another permit for another street. We didn’t film illegally. We used a hidden camera mostly for practical reasons. Luckily, unpredictable things always happen in documentaries and we’re experienced enough to know how to improvise. Take the scene of the woman at the Polish cemetery, for instance. . . . This woman has a life that’s all her own. She has her own peace in the cemetery she tends, even though the religion it represents isn’t her own. That doesn’t matter to her” (quoted in Müller 2008). Abbas Yousefpour’s thirty-­two-­minute film, After Thirteen Years: Back in Iran (Nach dreizehn Jahren: Wiedersehen im Iran, 2005), is a record of his return to Iran in 2001 to answer one of the primary questions of all returnees: What has happened to my country in my absence? Yousefpour was born in 1953 in Borujerd in the province of Lorestan to a Lor family, which makes this return film an ethnic root-­seeking film, although the film does not elaborate on this point. After completing his film training at the nirt College of Cinema and Television in 1974 and working in various media positions, he left Iran in 1988. From 1995 to 2011 he worked as a film editor at the Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film (Institute for Film in Reaserch) in Göttingen, Germany, while making his personal films independently. What he finds on his return surprises him, which he shows with a delicate, ironic touch in the film. His years of experience as a film editor shine in the film’s deft editing. It is the time of Noruz, the Iranian New Year in late March, and he decides to travel to his hometown of Borujerd in eastern Iran. On the way he visits family members, creating touching and insightful episodes. In the city of Arak, for example, he interviews his cousin Gholamhosain, seated on the carpeted floor next to his wife, who is dressed in the chador. Gholamhosain says that they were married in the traditional fashion years ago by their parents, through an arranged marriage. Their life together, however, was overshadowed by responsibilities to the parental families, until after twenty-­seven years his wife fell ill due to a heart condition and she was hospitalized for nine days. No member of either his or her family called to inquire about her. “I realized then that the only people you can count on are your own wife and children,” he states, words that bring tears to her eyes. “I did them wrong,” he goes on. “I realized my mistake and I told my wife and children that I want to make up for my mistake,” adding that, “since then our love is stronger and I feel much happier.” This brings a broad smile to her face. “This is a much better period,” she adds. “His understanding of women is much better.” To renew this newfound love and understanding, they do an unusual thing: they decide to remarry the modern way, this time based on their own love, instead of Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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on family arrangement. Instead of their parental families, this time their own children attend. In Borujerd, it is the New Year and everyone is celebrating it. The surprise for Yousefpour, who narrates the film, is that the most popular site for this occasion is the town cemetery, where families set up their traditional celebratory Noruz display on the graves of their martyrs, killed in the war with Iraq. In this manner, the families include them in their festivities. There Yousefpour asks a cleric to say a prayer on his father’s grave, whereupon he begins to recite aloud his Arabic prayer at the same time that he pulls out a wad of cash from his breast pocket and proceeds to count it, completely oblivious to the spiritual task at hand. Clearly, under the Islamic Republic materialism has trumped spiritualism. Simin Farkhondeh coproduced and codirected with Sadegh-­Vaziri Caught Between Two Worlds: Iranians in the USA (2007), one of the most informative documentaries on Iranians in the United States. Farkhondeh was born in 1963 in Germany to a German mother (Catholic) and an Iranian father (Muslim) and, as she told me, “I was raised learning about both religions of my parents, but was not baptized and was not forced to choose any of them” (Naficy 2007d). This perhaps accounts for her interest in, and knowledge of, temporary marriage, about which she made a film. Like her collaborator, Farkhondeh has a graduate degree, an mfa in media and communication arts from the City University of New York (2004), as well as a long list of community activism, such as heading the screening program at New York City’s Downtown Community Television Center and producing, directing, and editing shows for socially committed alternative media such as Gulf Crisis tv Project (1991–92), a ten-­part agit­ prop series for Deep Dish tv, aired by pbs and many other stations around the world that contained nationwide responses and oppositions to the first gulf war. She also made various shows for Paper Tiger tv and directed more than two dozen shows for Labor at the Crossroads (Labor X), a monthly tv program about work issues aired on cable in New York City and in other cities from 1994 to 2003. The strength of Caught Between Two Worlds lies in its inclusiveness. The film begins with this caption: “Images from the diverse lives of Iranians in the U.S. that make up a nation in exile.” Instead of focusing on an individual or a single family, the film shows a variety of Iranians involved in a range of activities: a stand-­up comic (Maz Jobrani), a poetry performer, a knowledgeable and eloquent taxi driver (Bahram Rahmani), a Muslim family preparing for the iftar (breaking of Ramadan fast), an elaborate Jewish wedding, demonstrators for immigration rights, a Muslim hairstylist with highlighted hair, university professors (including myself), a radio host (Farhang Farrahi), a television host (Homa Sarshar), a journalist (Jahanshah Javid), and actors (Shohreh Aghdashloo, Parviz Kardan). The film’s second strength is its exuberance, and its celebration of Iranians in public life. It is a “coming-­out” film for Iranians, who after nearly three decades of extreme discomfort and defensiveness about their identity, have begun to participate in U.S. society openly and successfully, cele­ 432

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87 Simin Farkhondeh (on right) and Persheng SadeghVaziri interviewing an Iranian American cabdriver (Bahram Rahmani), Caught Between Two Worlds: Iranians in the USA. Publicity card, courtesy of the filmmakers.

brating both their cultural heritage and their hybridized identity, which are on display in the footage of the boisterous annual Iranian Noruz Parade in New York City. Ironically, the 11 September terrorist attacks on the United States served as an important catalyst for this newfound clarity amongst Iranians in the diaspora (figure 87). Farkhondeh also directed a forty-­minute documentary-­fiction hybrid, Who Gives Kisses Freely from Her Lips (2007), about temporary marriage (sigheh) in Iran, a practice that the Islamic Republic revived and popularized and one that secular, feminist, and many other Iranians reject. The film mixes documentary footage of interviews with various people in Iran who have engaged in this type of marriage with a fictional account of a female filmmaker, Salome (Goli Samii), who returns to Iran from the United States to make a film about this practice. In the process of her interviews with both men and women she learns much about not only the downsides of temporary marriage but also about its advantages, and not only for the men. Several women highlight the advantages of temporary marriage over permanent marriage by pointing out not only the sexual, emotional, and financial rewards it offers but also the independence they gain with it—­to go in and out of the house, to leave the country, to run their household they way they want, to have a term limit on their relations with a husband they do not want or to renew the term with one they want. The film demonstrates this independence and freedom when the diegetic filmmaker decides that to film a temporary marriage ceremony she herself should marry her male assistant. The ceremony turns out to be very simple. With filming complete, the filmmaker tells her assistant that she must now depart the country, to which he responds that he has grown to like her and would like her to stay, a proposal that shocks her, for it was a temporary marriage of convenience. Were she permanently married to him, she would not be able to walk away. The film has moments of awkwardness when it is not clear if one is watching fiction or documentary, undermining the authenticity of the documentary material, and the acting is also awkward in places. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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Several generations of filmmakers trained abroad returned to stay at home and make films, adding another counterflow to Iranian national cinema. The first generation of returnees was the Pahlavi-­era new-­wave filmmakers who had left the Islamic Republic to work abroad, such as Bahman Farmanara, who distributed commercial movies in Canada and the United States, and Parviz Kimiavi, who made films for television in France. They returned in the 1990s and encountered difficulties; it took them several years to make films. Kimiavi’s Iran Is My Home (Iran Sara-­ye Man Ast, 1998) and Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bu-­ye Kafur, Atr-­e Yas, 1999), both art-­house films, proved to be powerful and controversial (the first has yet to be released in Iran apparently due to a conflict between the director and the producer; the second won the top directing award at the 2000 Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran). A second generation of younger filmmakers, including Masud Jafari Jowzani (trained in USA), Shahram Assadi (Sweden), and Feryal Behzad (USA), returned to Iran early in the postrevolutionary era to make art-­cinema films. Now, a third generation of Iranians born or bred in Europe and the United States has returned to make avant-­garde, documentary, and feature films at home, such as Rafi Pitts (France), Babak Payami (Canada), Amir Amirani (UK), Taghi Amirani (UK), Ramin Bahrani (USA), Persheng Sadegh-­Vaziri (USA), and Ghazel Radpay (France). That their return is having an impact is indicated by the 2000 Fajr festival’s roster, which for the first time included films from three such returnees.42 Most of these shuttle between Iran and their second homes abroad. Return has not been possible for all. Some did not want to return because of opposition to the Islamist regime, and one who returned encountered gruesome death. The Canadian Iranian photojournalist Ziba Zahra Kazemi, who had formerly gone to the nirt College of Cinema and Television (1969–72) and made films for the nirt in Europe, returned to photograph. While taking pictures of student demonstrations in June 2003 outside the Evin Prison she was arrested and imprisoned, and subsequently died under torture.43 Some did not return because they would have to do so clandestinely or seek official permission—­which could have incurred a denial or arrest on arrival. The case of one filmmaker illustrates the complexities of exilic returns. As he tells it, when in 1998–99 Allamehzadeh wanted to return to Iran to make a film about the renowned but ailing modernist poet Ahmad Shamlu, he applied to the Iranian authorities for permission (Allamehzadeh 2003/1382). Having escaped Iran years earlier, he did not have an Iranian passport; given political asylum in the Netherlands, he had become a Dutch citizen. Iranian officials denied his request for a visa on his Dutch passport because they continued to consider him an Iranian subject, someone in no need of a visa to return to his birth country. He could not risk obtaining an Iranian passport; that would deny him the protection of Dutch citizenship, protection he would sorely need due to his vociferous writings and films against the Islamic Republic while in exile. In the meantime, Shamlu’s health took a turn for the worse, torpedoing the trip and the film 434

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project, which ironically was titled “The Testament of the Phoenix” (“Vasiyatnameh-­ye Qoqnus”). The phoenix, the lionhearted aged poet, did not rise again. He succumbed to his diabetes and cancer, burying the exile director’s wish for a grand return for filming.44 Some critics cynically ascribed the return of these filmmakers to economic or political expediencies. The argument goes something like this: Iranian cinema has international currency, as film festivals look to it for new products. Making films in Iran is more economical than elsewhere. Therefore, the best way to get into international film festivals is to make films inside Iran.45 These factors can chiefly be at work in the field of fiction film, for one, and the impact of the reform movement in Iran and the possible rapprochement between Iran and Western powers was also an important factor. Each filmmaker had different and deeply personal reasons for returning. Filmmakers who returned temporarily to Iran to work were not political exiles, but émigrés and ethnics who focused on personal and individual stories, avoiding politics or any direct criticism of the Islamic Republic. Yet there were émigré filmmakers who returned to make films about sociopolitical issues. Among these were the Amirani brothers, living and working in Great Britain, who documented the tensions accompanying the opening social atmosphere inside Iran during Khatami’s presidency. Amir Amirani, who had received a master’s degree in international relations from Cambridge University and worked in journalism, radio, and documentary films, made a fascinating twelve-­minute documentary about a subject that seems taboo in Islamic Iran. Trans-­sexuality in Iran (2005), first aired on the bbc World’s Newsnight program, is highly engaging and informative both in terms of what it reveals about the religious and legal status of transsexuality and about what it is like to be a transsexual in a sexually restrictive society. The film focuses on two girls who had undergone sex change operations to become boys (Allen and Tomik) and a young man who is undergoing sex-­reassignment surgery to become a woman (Mahyar). In interviews these subjects are candid about their history: the travails of identity confusion, sexual transformation, and identity reformulation. Interviews with Bahram Mirjalili, a doctor, reveal that he has done more sex-­change operations in Tehran than his counterparts have done in Europe—­around 320 boys and girls. His clinic has become a shelter for Iranian transsexuals, who gather to visit and compare notes. One woman who has had a successful operation brings a box of pastries to celebrate. However, all is not well, for a man who has changed to a woman named Mitra complains bitterly as she weeps, “I am confused. I have lost my self; I miss my previous self. I was very talented, and I hope that I can regain my old self again.” Later, Allen talks about the difficulties of dating women, as most women cannot ignore his female past. Nonetheless, he considers his transsexual operation, undertaken three years earlier, a success: “I was reborn after the operation. I am now a three-­year old man.” A mid-­level cleric, Hojjatoleslam Kariminia, is interviewed in Qom because he has written his Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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dissertation on transsexuality and is an advocate for the transsexuals’ cause. Apparently, in the Pahlavi period Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa authorizing transsexuality because transsexuality raised important doctrinal and practical issues regarding inheritance, as males and females are entitled to different portions of inheritance. According to Kariminia, homosexuality is a taboo and a capital crime in Iran that is severely punished, while transsexuality is considered an illness that can be surgically fixed. “There is a Wall of China between homosexuality and transsexuality,” he states matter-­of-­factly. In the Islamic Republic’s ideology, which values the strict definition and separation of genders and sexes, choosing to shift one’s gender by surgery is acceptable, but not choosing one’s sexual orientation, for homosexuality threatens the established order of things. Nonetheless, transsexuality remains highly controversial culturally. Trans-sexuality in Iran is also about modernity, for its subjects are exercising one of the privileges of becoming a modern, autonomous individual, one whose identity is not inherited and biological but constructed by the individual. Given the controversial nature of the short, its reception is worth noting. In a personal interview in London and in further e-­mail correspondences Amirani told me that when the film was aired in Britain by bbc-­2, the channel’s website received thousands of hits, and when it was aired by bbc World internationally, it was seen in Iran. However, Iranian television did not air it, and since the film was edited in London, it has not been screened for the participants inside Iran. Nevertheless, according to Amirani, the little exposure that it received there “caused a lot of discussions,” and Mahyar, who had seen a portion of it at a conference in which Kariminia had screened it, told him that the public discussion of transsexuality had “opened up” considerably. Subsequently, Amirani’s brother Taghi, himself an accomplished filmmaker, was commissioned by the British Channel 4 to make a one-­hour documentary on the same subject, but his filming permit was denied by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. When I asked about the dangers that such a controversial film may pose to its subjects, who could be stigmatized and punished, given the availability of bbc World broadcasts in Iran, Amir Amirani stated, “My prime aim throughout was that the subjects would not be affected or compromised by the film. If there was a risk, I would not include them” (Naficy 2005i). One subject lost her college scholarship as a result; Amirani compensated her for this. Transsexuality is interesting in the light of the numerous strategies of passing that the filmmakers adopted to subvert and question veiling.46 Yet Iranian policy on transsexuality is highly problematic, for it permits it—­even encourages it—­only as a “cure” for homosexuality or a disguised form of homosexuality (as in Amirani’s film), as gays, lesbians, and transgender people are pushed to choose between undergoing a sex-­reassignment operation or facing sanctioned murder by the state for their sexual orientation. Transgender filming is also highly complicated, not only because of the Islamic Repub436

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lic’s policy toward the issue or the non-­transgender filmmakers’ stereotyping or misrepresentation of the transgender people, but also because of the reception of transgender films abroad. As anthropologist and filmmaker Elhum Shakerifar, the UK-­based director of Roya and Omid (2007), a documentary on transgender people in Iran, notes attention in the West has been encouraged toward transgender topics in Iran by the “shock” of availability of sex change in Iran, “a country that Western media and society delights in portraying as monolithically repressive.” Under such circumstances, the filmmakers’ motivations also become complicated: “from a desire to sell a product that will appeal to the Western market, to films that endorse specific socio-­political agendas” (Shakerifar 2011:327). Taghi Amirani, who has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Nottingham University, and who took postgraduate courses in film and television at the University of Bristol, made a fifty-­four-­minute documentary on Iran’s foremost reformist newspaper, Shargh (East). Titled Red Lines and Dead Lines (2004), the film was broadcast by the American pbs series Wide Angle. The filmmaker spent three weeks in January 2004 at the newspaper, providing rare and intimate direct cinema coverage of its operations, including editorial meetings and interviews with editors and journalists, to shed light on the personal bravery, political savvy, and journalistic acumen of Shargh’s personnel, who dared to buck a system that since 2000 had shut down more than one hundred reformist publications. The documentary also shows that the paper’s personnel were not driven only by politics but also by the aesthetics of their profession—­the layout, captions, photographs, and ebullience of their writing—­and by the pleasure they drew from them. Nevertheless, a reviewer thought that it was “high-­ handed,” as the film could not tell the difference between having fun and revolution (Heffernan 2005). Working with a French film crew, the Iranian French filmmaker Reza Khatibi made an audacious feature film, Seven Days in Tehran (Les Beaux Lendemains de Téheran, 2002), which mixes documentary and fictional elements seamlessly and inscribes the filmmaker as the film’s protagonist. The conceit of the film is the return to the homeland of the filmmaker at the helm of a French crew after fifteen years of absence to cover developments, particularly in youth culture, during Khatami’s second term. While Khatibi’s character is cautious about what he films—­he wants to counter stereotypes about his country—­his partner, Frank (Goldmund Seiller), the television program host, favors a franker treatment. Shortly after their arrival, Frank seeks and finds Esfandiar (Esfandiar Esfandi), an old college friend now suffering from cancer, which he is battling with valor and dignity. This intense fictional friendship, now tinged with tragedy, is woven so skillfully into the documentary scenes of Tehran and the interactions of the film crew with Iranians, including a remarkable sequence of their playing soccer with neighborhood kids, that it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart. The result is a detailed, textured, and compassionate look at Iranian Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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society under the double pressures of a top-­down oppressive religious theocracy and a bottom-­up desire—­aided by reformists around Khatami—­to open up. The film’s narrative is helped along by the device of telling the film in seven chapters, each covering one day in the work of the crew, which gives the film both urgency and a forward momentum. The film’s run-­ins with various censorship efforts, official and unofficial, such as a fracas at the gates of Tehran University, are realistic and believable, demonstrating a sure hand both at directing (and crowd control) and at imparting the hair-­trigger balance between volatility and stability that characterized Iranian society under Khatami. However, both the thought and the fact of return, as well as the films of return, are hostages to the vagaries of the politics of the nation-­states and of the individuals involved, which fluctuate. As the politics of antagonistic public diplomacy between Iran and the West worsened during Ahmadinejad’s and George W. Bush’s retrenchment era, the fear of being charged with spying may have prevented some hyphenated filmmakers from returning to make films. There were many filmmakers who sought to express the new Iranian identity with synchronic examinations of other émigrés and ethnics, or with the interethnic interaction of Iranians with other minorities. One of the earliest of these was Marva Nabili’s accomplished fiction movie Nightsongs (1984), about Chinese and Vietnamese Americans. Chinese American filmmakers were irked that an outsider had crossed their ethnic boundaries, something that is generally frowned on in the world of ethnic filmmaking, where the authority and authorization to film are tied to ethnic authenticity (Naficy 2001a:73). This is another aspect of the “politics of the hyphen,” confining filmmakers to their own ethnic boundaries and encouraging ethnic essentialism. Moving vehicles (cars, buses, and trains) offer some of the key chronotopes of exilic otherness in accented cinema, which are suffused with the dramas of displacement—­departures, escapes, journeys, arrivals, and returns. Claustrophobia pervades the mise-­en-­scène, shot composition, and often the narratives of these films, and since these vehicles travel through the countryside and wide-­open spaces and between countries, there is always a dialectical relationship between the inside closed spaces of the vehicles and the outside open spaces of nature and nation. The characters in Sayyad’s Checkpoint are not only trapped on the Canadian-­ American border but also inside a bus, where the major flare-­up among the passengers occurs. This film was so weighted down by the politics of blame about the Islamic Revolution that it sank. However, Allamehzadeh’s award-­w inning twenty-­minute film, A Few Simple Sentences (Die Paar Zinnetjes, 1986), had a lighter authorial and political touch, and the sharp edge of his criticism was not directed against Iranians who had supported the revolution but against racist Dutch citizens. It explores Dutch xenophobia, heightened due to the recent massive arrivals of Muslim and third world émigrés and refugees. Nearly half of the film takes place in a long bus ride in the city, which becomes a crucible 438

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of ethnic hostility, xenophobia, and cultural misunderstanding. On his way to school, an Iranian teen, Ali (Akber Ghorab), who seems to be carrying something under his coat, runs from a park for the bus across the street. Inside the bus, the lapdog of an elderly woman barks at the boy, initiating a lengthy discussion among passengers about the new émigrés and cultural differences (“some cultures regard dogs as unclean”). One passenger complains of their large numbers, while another advocates their expulsion. A group of rowdy boys enter, one of them demanding to see what Ali is hiding in his coat. In the ensuing scuffle, an injured pigeon is freed, which frantically flies around the bus, running into passengers and windows—­a touching symbol of helpless and injured refugees. The boy is accused of having hurt the bird with a slingshot. Because of his rudimentary command of Dutch, however, his attempts at explaining that he had saved the pigeon from a dog in the park causes only more confusion. Finally, he is kicked off the bus for not having a ticket. On his arrival at school, his concerned classmates and teacher ask why he is bloodied and upset, to which he does not provide a clear answer. The film shows Ali’s flashback of how he saved the pigeon from a dog, but he refuses to take the Dutch teacher and his classmates into his confidence—­he does not trust them. The film is a plea for human compassion and understanding, regardless of origin—­or species. The pigeon, a symbol of freedom, is injured and a foreigner who himself is psychologically hurt nurtures it. Allamehzadeh wants Dutch society to take care of Ali in the same way that he protected the bird.47 Photographs both assuage and revive the pain of displacement. They feature strongly in short films and in music videos. Farzan Navab’s short The Day They Went Hunting (1981) is perhaps the first exilic film driven by photographs. In it he weaves pictures of the Germans living in Iran in the 1940s into those of Iranian exiles currently in the United States to create a powerfully impressionist study of displacement. Navab was born in 1957 in Iran, and came to the U.S. in 1976 to study art. After this film he turned to photography exclusively, in which the same strategy of inserting different times and spaces into each other are operative (contemporary Iranians or foreigners inserted into antique photographs or paintings).48 More than a decade later, another filmmaker, Mehrnaz Saeed-­Vafa, based her film about exile, including her own, on a photograph. As emblems of psychic and physical displacement, the photographs in both films are, in Freudian terms, those of an Other, not of the self. Born in Tehran in 1950, Saeed-­Vafa studied film at the London Film School (1974–76) and then taught filmmaking at the College of Television and Cinema in Tehran (1978–83). She emigrated to the United States, and in 1987 she earned her mfa in film from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and soon began working as an independent filmmaker and professor at Columbia College, Chicago, where she is presently employed. In her documentary A Tajik Woman (1994), she used a black-­and-­white photograph of an unknown Tajik woman she found in a Russian book on Tajikistan, as well as interviews with her own Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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88 The photograph that inspires Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa to make A Tajik Woman, courtesy of the filmmaker.

mother living in exile in Chicago and other Muslim women from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, to explore cultural conflicts for Muslim women and émigré women in the United States. The photograph, used several times to punctuate the film like a poem, shows the unknown young Tajik woman standing in front of a mosque reading a book (figure 88). Using a soft personal and subjective voice-­over, one charged with emotions and lyricism, somewhat reminiscent of Farrokhzad’s voice-­over in her documentary on a leper colony, The House Is Black, Saeed-­Vafa ruminates on her own personal, national, and gender identities from across the exilic divide. Taking the photograph in a Barthian move as denotation, she weaves in a series of latent meanings and recollections of life in Iran as a teenage girl, “ashamed of her black body that is desired but not loved,” and of life as an émigré woman in the United States, “looking for home, a place to belong.” Although made by a daughter filming her mother, A Tajik Woman is not a traditional exilic “daughter-­film,” in which filmmaking daughters sometimes create their own identities at the expense of their mothers (Naficy 2001a:127–31). Saeed-­Vafa is at one with her mother. The film ends with her summarizing the dilemma of her own life, that of her mother (whose parents had taught her a famous adage: a girl should enter her husband’s home in a white wedding gown and exit it in a white shroud), and those of the lives of the other young Muslim women interviewed (one woman says that news from Afghanistan is so traumatizing that many Afghan émigrés die while watching television news from home). She claims that in Iran she “was not free,” while in the United States she “is not understood.” At nineteen minutes, the film is brief but packs a dense punch as one of the first films about Muslim émigré women who become modern through exile and are “disowned” both by the traditional cultures of home and by the modern cultures of the West. It is also a rare early Iranian film that does not limit itself to Iranian subjects, connecting Iranian Muslim women to Muslim women from other countries. 440

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Saeed-­Vafa also made a moving, fifteen-­minute film essay in appreciation of Shahid Saless’s many movies made in exile. Called Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home (1998), it explores the themes of loneliness, alienation, and isolation, the closed-­form aesthetics, and the minimalist style of this sardonic filmmaker who made elegiac but dystopic movies about Iranian and German societies and the human condition. Saeed-­Vafa focuses primarily on two of his films, one made in Iran, A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, 1973), the other in Germany, Diary of a Lover (Tagebuch eines Liebenden, 1976). From her personal voice-­over, the selection of film clips, and her last interviews with him (speaking in a slow, labored English as though his tongue is heavy), it becomes clear that Saeed-­Vafa identifies with Shahid-­Saless’s dystopic vision. The film is ­really a requiem for Shahid Saless, whom she got to know during his last year of life when he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where he died a bloody lonely death in a studio apartment in Evanston (from a series of long-­standing illnesses, including ulcer, tuberculosis, and pneumonia). She had planned to make a longer film about him. Now what was left, constituting Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far from Home, were clips of his movies, brief interviews she had conducted with him, and images of his disheveled apartment and of him walking out of the hallways, down a staircase, and out the front door into the street. Like her earlier film, A Tajik Woman, this film is also about loss. These films of Saeed-­Vafa are identity films: she identifies with her homeless characters, and she also does not belong anywhere fully. In the Islamic Republic she would be considered a second-­class citizen; in the United States she is marginal, and “it is hard to see myself as part of American history” (quoted in Sullivan 2001:233). Her latest work, A Different Moon: A Story of Exile (2007), abandons the examination of others’ homelessness to focus on her own. The film presents home movies taken in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s, when she was young in a more carefree time and place, dancing around the pool in her parents’ home, cavorting with male friends in the mountains, or dancing with them cheek to cheek, and interlaces them with images of life in the United States in exilic anomie and loneliness. She recalls pivotal events that punctuated Iran’s recent history during her lifetime—­the 1953 coup against Mosaddeq, revolution, and war with Iraq. She is the subject of the camera in the first strands of pictures, but an actor substitutes for her in the second strand, symbolizing the split subjectivity and dissociation of exile: she is fully present at home but is represented by someone else in exile. The film’s first-­person poetic voice-­over narration, delivered like a lament by the director, sutures the two types of imagery to create, along with numerous images of running water, an emotionally fluid and charged film. She visits her homeland after thirteen years and finds that her childhood home has been destroyed and replaced by a high-­ rise; a former neighbor does not recognize her. This poetic film does not supply details—­she becomes a U.S. citizen, a son is born, no mention is made of a husband or partner. It takes her several years and the birth of her son to become Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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truly American and to finally feel at home. Filmmaking is another contributing factor in her home-­finding journey. Hamid Rahmanian’s documentaries dealt effectively, affectionately, and humorously with a range of synchronic ethnic, interethnic, and extraethnic national issues. Born in 1968 in Tehran, he received his bfa in graphic design and owned a graphic design firm in Tehran for five years. He moved to the United States, where he earned an mfa in computer animation in 1997 from the Pratt Institute. His one-­hour video installation, Innuendo, received a student Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and his animation The Seventh Day was nominated for a Student Academy Award (both dated 1996). After completing his studies, he worked at Disney Feature Animation Company on animated features, such as Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Dinosaur. His own live-­action film, Breaking Bread (2000), about a close intercultural relationship of two friends, a Korean American and an Iranian American (Rahmanian himself), centers on family visits and meal preparations. His Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport (2001), codirected with his wife, Melissa Hibbard, focuses on “Sir Alfred Mehran” (née Mehran Karimi Nasseri), a man suffering from ethnic and national shame, who had been living continuously in Paris’s airport since the summer of 1988. He denied being Iranian, claimed to have lost his official Belgian identity papers, and said the British had deported him by mistake to France, where without papers he could neither enter France for fear of being arrested as an illegal alien nor exit France because of lack of proper identity papers. So he waited and waited and waited, making his home on a red bench in Terminal 1, where he became an airport fixture and an international media personality, as numerous newspapers, radio programs, and television newscasts and documentaries publicized his plight and bizarre existence. However, when he was finally given new identity papers allowing him to travel, he refused to leave the airport premises on the grounds that the papers erroneously identified him as Iranian. In Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport, airport doctors and personnel, as well as the renowned French human rights lawyer Christian Bourguet, who represented him in French courts, offer various speculations about the psychological reasons for his continued residence at the airport, such as fear of the outside world and fear of losing his celebrity status (he is still there).49 A clue to his psychology is revealed in the film when he refuses to speak to Rahmanian in Persian, claiming that he does not know it, and that he does not like Persian classical music or food. He also denies that he is Iranian (he admits attending Tehran University); on the other hand, he seems comfortable speaking with Rahmanian’s wife, Melissa, in heavily accented Persianized English. What is at work seems to have a psychic cause or to be rooted in the performance of identity, rather than resulting from any legal impediment. In the end, Nasseri exits the airport building, only to return inside, as though drawn by a magnet. Nasseri’s own biography, published after sixteen years of waiting on the red 442

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89 Fear and anxiety of displacement is graphically encoded in this poster for Rahmanian and Hibbard’s Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport, designed by Hamid Rahmanian, courtesy of the filmmakers.

bench, offers further insights into the psychology and sociology of some exiles (Mehran and Donkin 2004). Of singular importance is his search for his mother, an English nurse who had had an affair with his already married father in Iran during the Second World War in the oil town of Masjed Soleiman. When his father dies years later, his stepmother reveals to him that he is illegitimate and proceeds to cruelly disavow him psychologically and to disown him financially. This history accounts in part for his ambivalence about and attraction to both Iran, his birthplace, and Britain, his preferred homeland. The book offers contradictory versions of his story about his place and date of birth and upbringing, his travels and nationality, and his loss of identity papers. These are at variance in the book and in Rahmanian’s film. As a result, Nasseri comes across as an astute “unreliable narrator.” From the film one gathers that he is a fearful man who is at home in the anonymous, public, transitional, and transnational spaces of the airport, where he stands out, more than in the privacy, anonymity, and isolation of being an ordinary émigré (figure 89).50 While a resident of New York, Rahmanian made three films inside Iran, one fictional and two documentaries, testifying to the increased traffic between those at home and those in the diaspora. However, these were not exilic return-­ to-­origin films, as they do not deal with the director’s own life and times; rather, Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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90 A Catholic American woman and a Muslim Iranian woman meet on the same page—a playing card. Publicity card for Rahmanian and Hibbard’s Shahrbanoo, designed by Hamid Rahmanian, courtesy of the filmmakers.

they deal with stories of those in the homeland, as told by an émigré. Rahmanian has found stories inside Iran that distinguish his filmic works. These films, like those of Amir and Taghi Amirani, Amir Hamz, and Per­sheng Sadegh-­Vaziri, thus break new ground and bring with them new issues related to exilic returns. Rahmanian and Hibbard’s Shahrbanoo (2002) offers an affectionate counter to Not Without My Daughter by documenting the director’s visit, with his Persian-­ speaking American wife, Melissa, to his hometown of Tehran, during which she is befriended by Shahrbanoo, her mother-­in-­law’s housekeeper. Shahrbanoo, a conservative Muslim, invites Melissa, a Catholic, to a meal with her extended family. They talk heatedly and humorously about religion, U.S. foreign policy, meal preparation, and the role of women, in the process developing an intimate, affectionate, and respectful relationship across a trenchant cultural divide. The film’s treatment of the complexities and rewards of intercultural contact provides a corrective not only to Not Without My Daughter but also to the more general effects of the U.S. media’s twisted representations of Iranians and of veiled women as fundamentalist, hostile, and backward (figure 90). 444

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Rahmanian’s first fiction movie, Day Break (Dam- ­e Sobh, 2006), is about capital punishment inside Iran, which according to the sharia law of qesas (retribution) gives the family of a murdered victim ownership of the offender’s life. Based on a compilation of true stories and filmed inside Tehran’s century-­old Qasr Prison, part of which was being turned into a museum by the city, the film revolves around the imminent execution of Mansour (Hosain Yari), a man found guilty of murder. When the family of the victim repeatedly fails to show up on the appointed day, Mansour’s execution is postponed several times. Stuck inside the physical prison and the purgatory of his own mind, he waits as time passes as if without him, caught as he is between life and death, retribution and forgiveness. Rahmanian told me that it took him eighteen months to get permission to film inside the infamous prison, including getting around the objection of the head of prison security. When he found that Rahmanian had worked at the Disney studios, he said, “Disney is a Zionist organ, don’t ever show your face around here anymore!” In addition, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance rejected his screenplay twice. Despite these obstacles, he shot, edited, released, and screened the film in many festivals; however, Filmsaz Studio, which handled the film’s processing, badly damaged twenty minutes of the release print’s negative, causing the filmmaker enormous difficulties (Naficy 2006m). Rahmanian’s latest documentary, The Glass House (2008), deals with four clients of Omid-­e Mehr, a shelter for young women between fifteen and twenty-­ five, which a returnee expat, Marjaneh Halati, has established in Tehran. The thirty-­five girls forming the center’s clientele are enamored of their freewheeling and outspoken Westernized patron when she visits them: she removes her veil and greets them warmly, and they hug and kiss and fawn over her. With a fluid and mobile camera, Rahmanian inquisitively follows four girls as they battle forced drug addiction, sexual abuse by brothers, parental abandonment, and disastrous relations with boyfriends, temporary husbands, and family members. Rahmanian and his producer wife Hibbard chose their subjects adroitly: they offer a range of painful and hopeful situations. Mitra channels her hatred of her family (whom she wants to throw away and burn) into writing, Sussan skips from one bad boyfriend and temporary husband to another, fourteen-­year-­ old Samira deals with her warring parents and the terrible aftermath of her addicted mother feeding her the drug ecstasy, while Nazila works her violence-­ prone family life (frequently visited by the police) into ferocious lyrics and rap music (providing a powerful ending to the film). During all this, the center’s councillors and therapists patiently work with the girls and their issues. But the magic is what happens between the subjects and Rahmanian’s camera. “Since I had a traumatic and unpleasant experience working with a crew on Day Break I decided to handle The Glass House all by myself. So there is no crew. It was just me and me and me,” said Rahmanian in an e-­mail to me (Naficy 2009d). The seven months of daily visits meant that “we were very close as though there was Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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no camera present. I had become like the air around them,” said Rahmanian (Naficy 2009b). Explicitly trusting the director, the girls reveal their secrets to him as though chatting with a close friend. In these moments, Rahmanian’s voice conversing, cajoling, and drawing out information from them is clearly audible. Yet these bits of self-­reflexivity are not intrusive and self-­aggrandizing of the director, as they often are in this sort of film. By revealing the complicated lives of these four women and the services that the center offers the film also reveals much about the complexity of Iranian society in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. The title, The Glass House, underscores the fragile and dysfunctional original homes of the film’s subjects, the vulnerability of the female subjects’ bodies and psyches as their homes, and the frailties of the Mehr­e Omid Center as a temporary but nurturing way station. Because many of the women and girls do not wear any veil or scarf the film is unlikely to be shown in Iran publicly. Both the unveiling and the verbal intimacy between the male cameraman and director and his female subjects are influenced by the poetics and politics of émigrés’ returns. By feminizing the male returnee, Rahmanian, the women are able to be intimate with him, confide in him, and appear before him without a veil. They may also have thought that the film was not for screening inside Iran, thus ensuring that it would not be shown there. In addition, Rahmanian told me that the women ignored the official forms of veiling “as a form of protest and to demonstrate that it was not important to them. Many times I asked them to cover up. They would do so for a few minutes, but then drop it.” Finally, Rahmanian’s considerable social skills should be credited for helping to put his subjects at ease, transforming him from a stranger and outsider (namahram) to an intimate insider (mahram).51 Nasrin Tabatabai, born in 1961 in Tehran, is a visual artist with an ma in fine art theory and design from Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, who lives and works in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. Her Passage (2005) is a quietly impressive twenty-­five-­minute film about a fifty-­six-­year-­old woman, Nasrin Negahdari, who sells Christian magazines outside the busy Albert Heijn Supermarket. As she sells her wares, she interacts good-­naturedly with customers, asking them about their health, retrieving an old woman’s cane from the ground, and giving change to another. In these interactions she reveals snippets of information about her past and current circumstances: She was a middle school teacher in Iran, where her husband and two children live, but now she is living alone as a refugee in a foreign country, awaiting her residency permit. However, as in Rahmanian’s Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport, this picture of clarity and intimacy gets murky, for as her interactions with the camerawoman, Tabatabai, increase, she offers different versions of her current status—­is she a refugee or an illegal immigrant?—­and of the reasons for leaving her country (abuse she suffered from her husband or from her adult son?). Like Nasseri in Rahmanian’s film, Negahdari is holding back, nursing a secret, and she seems at home in public, which keeps her safe from private demons. As Tabatabai 446

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presses her for clarification, she becomes more elusive, refusing to reveal her secret, stating: “People have their own reason, I have mine. . . . I don’t want to think about the past or talk about it.” The film is a mixture of documentary and recreation, based on what Negahdari had told Tabatabai in the months of their acquaintance before filming. As Tabatabai told me, “When I finally started to shoot the film, I knew a lot about her, yet I was not sure what was real or true. I somehow reconstructed parts of her stories and she helped me with it. She is acting sometimes and following my script, but my script was actually what I had heard from her long before filming” (Naficy 2006j). Filming took about a month. The dynamic of Iranian veiling and unveiling, concealing and revealing, intensified by the politics of displacement and immigration, is well crafted in this work.52 Tabatabai succeeds in problematizing the notion of the “innocent foreigner.” The film leaves the spectator with this moral question: Can undecided information, or fabrications of truth—­the outcome of certain conditions and circumstances—­be truly perceived as false? And what are the consequences of such ambiguity? Like Rahmanian’s film and his subject, Nasseri, Tabatabai’s Passage and her subject, Negahdari, problematize the notion of identity as an unchanging essence; instead, they propose and embody identity as a cultural strategy and a performance. At the same time, these films and their subjects point out the costs of such strategic and performative reconceptualizations, both to the subjects and to the society at large. Ramin Bahrani was born in 1975 in Winston-­Salem, North Carolina, to Iranian parents, and he graduated from Columbia University in 1996 with a ba in film theory. Soon he moved to Iran for three years to make Strangers (2000), a feature film about a young man from the United States (Bahrani himself) who takes as his guide an Iranian truck driver and sets off on the roads of southern Iran to find Dehdari, the childhood home of his estranged deceased father. In 2001 he began working on a major film, The Taste of Her Mouth, but as he told me telegraphically, “I landed in Iran. Four days later was 9/11. All the financing collapsed,” forcing him to abandon the project (Naficy 2006b). If Strangers, which he submitted as his thesis film, fit into the return-­to-­roots genre, his next feature movie, Man Push Cart (2005), fit into the interethnic genre, favoring routes. In it he depicts movingly and with meticulous detail the hard life of a Pakistani American pushcart vendor, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), who must daily pull and push his giant food cart, like a Sisyphean rock, through New York City streets’ rush-­hour traffic (figure  91). A former Pakistani rock star, Ahmad is now alone, lonely for his family and selling bootleg porno dvds and fast food from his cart. His confining and routinized existence against the towering skyscrapers and noisy traffic is brightened by his adoption of a kitten and his interethnic friendship with a pretty female Spanish-­speaking street vendor. A critic called Man Push Cart, filmed in less than three weeks, “an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring” (Holden 2006). Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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91 Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), pulling his Sisyphean cart in Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart. Publicity card, designed by Jon Higgins, courtesy of the filmmaker.

Like Man Push Cart, Bahrani’s next movie Chop Shop (2007) deals with a non-­Iranian subject: Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), a tough, ambitious Latino street urchin nearing adolescence, lives and works in an auto-­body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard in Queens, New York, trying to make a better life for himself and his teenage sister. Bahrani is clearly influenced by Kiarostami’s work, not only in his self-­inscription into his films but also in his minimalist filming style, his concern with marginal people, and in the manner in which he turns daily routines and mundane events into operatic treatises on humanity and reality. His Goodbye Solo (2009) is a case in point: at once a riveting original work and a rumination on, and a reworking of, Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, it involves an affable black Senegalese cab driver, Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), who befriends an enigmatic, despondent white man, William (Red West), who is on a downward spiral toward suicide. Like many accented films, Bahrani’s films inscribe claustrophobic spatiality and are shot using a closed-­ form aesthetic. Born in Iran in 1972, Tina Gharavi was sent at age six to Britain to live with 448

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her father when her parents divorced around the time of the revolution. She lived and worked in various countries, including Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States, where she received her ba in media production and film theory from Rutgers University (1995). She received a master’s degree in 1999 from Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, France, and is currently working on her practice-­based PhD on veiling, gender, and sexuality in Iran at the University of Newcastle-­Upon-­Tyne, where she also teaches digital media. Her works, ranging from films to multimedia projects and installations, often deal with questions of ethnic, gender, sexual, national, and religious ­identities—­an example of a postmodern filmmaker concerned with multiplicity and multiplexity. In the late 1990s, when Gharavi was in artistic residence at Le Fresnoy, she made the twenty-­four-­minute Closer (2000), an experimental docu­mentary that mixes fiction, re-creation, and fact to explore the poignant story of Annelise Rodger, a seventeen-­year-­old lesbian living in Newcastle, who despite her youth held a strong vision of moving to London for education and eventually settling in the United States as a psychologist. She speaks to the camera about this future vision, about being a lesbian and coming out to her mother, and about her desire to make love to a woman. These candid interviews are intercut with documentary footage of her washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen, walking the streets at night, and dancing in a club—­as well as with scenes in which what she speaks about is re-created, such as her delicate lovemaking with a woman and her tender coming-­out scene with her mother—­who, after a long pause, smoking a cigarette, accepts her choice in a loving way. This intercutting scheme, along with other abstract uses of blurry images and colors and pulsating music, help re-­create Rodger’s fluid subjectivity and her quiet but forceful determination to forge ahead in life. In making Closer, which was an official selection at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, Gharavi discovered her own sexuality, and the film became a model for her next work about her own life. Like many displaced Iranians, Gharavi made her own return pilgrimage to Iran after a long absence (twenty years). This was also the first time that she would see her mother since her childhood, hence the title of the resulting twenty-­four-­minute film, Mother/Country (2002), an emotionally powerful and self-­revealing work and a good example of an exilic “daughter-­film” among Iranians, an under-­explored emergent genre. Commissioned by the Britain’s Channel 4, it begins with a phone call in which Gharavi informs her mother that she is coming to visit and to make a film in Iran. The director’s first-­person-­singular voice-­over tells of the many questions that she hopes the trip will answer. Like her previous film, this one is experimental in that she not only films herself and her mother in documentary fashion but also engages two actors to perform the mother-­daughter parts, re-creating their dialogue as both of them look on. At one point the mother and daughter take each other’s part, which Gharavi hoped would facilitate empathy between them. UnCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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like in Closer, however, this hope was dashed, for her glamorous but elusive mother—­who embraces her affectionately, swims with her, caresses and kisses her, throws a partly for her, and professes an enduring love for her—­does not fully reveal her reasons for sending her daughter away as a child. The daughter, in the meantime, tells her about her depression and difficulties living in the United States and of her shame at being Iranian under the U.S. media’s characterization of Iranians as kidnappers. At one point, the film intercuts between Gharavi and the actor performing her part, both of whom complain of a crisis of identity and belonging, of neither being Iranian nor anything else. The double voicing graphically underscores the ambivalent identity. Her mother’s reticence frustrates the daughter, who confesses to her that she is gay, in a serious relationship with a woman, and will not be marrying a man. Mother/Country is an accented daughter-­film in which the daughter constructs herself across cultural and national divides in contradistinction to her mother, and even at the expense of her mother, using this confession “as a weapon” to later get her mother to open up and be truthful, an action which, she admits, “I kind of regret” (quoted in Kohli 2004). Her mother, on the other hand, presumptively blames herself, claiming that if she had not sent her daughter away, she could have prevented her sexual reorientation (figure 92). It is also an accented return-­to-­origins film, which demonstrates that return trips are never to the destinations, or to the persons, that the exiles dream about. There is always slippage, and the discovery that in one’s absence not only the exilic subject but also those left at home and the ground underneath the idealized homeland have shifted. It seems that these were motivating factors for Gharavi to become interested in larger questions of identity. In 2000 she initiated the Kooch Cinema Project (kooch meaning migration), a collective of Iranian and Palestinian refugees and émigrés based in Tyneside in north England, whose aims, like those of the British video workshops and collectives of the 1980s, are to train community members in creative self-­expression and ethnic representation through media. This shows her horizontal growth toward inter­ ethnicity and beyond.53

92 Mother and daughter face each other’s images in Gharavi’s exilic “daughter-film,” Mother/ Country. Frame enlargement.

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Walls of Sand (1996) by Erica Jordan and Shirin Etessam deals elegantly with the intersection of interethnicity and sexuality. The feature fiction movie follows an Iranian illegal immigrant in the United States (Etessam) who, to obtain a residency permit, becomes an au pair for a young Anglo mother suffering from severe agoraphobia. To wrest his son away from his wife, the husband blackmails the au pair, forcing her to choose between her (sexual) friendship with his wife and legal status. The film embodies claustrophobia as female protest, a tactic that Turkish accented filmmakers in Germany such as Tevfik Baser and Yilmaz Arslan in the 1980s and Iranian accented filmmakers such as Shahid Saless, Naderi, and Bahrani employed in their films, and one that ironically imprisons the protester (Naficy 2001a:208–10). The tight shot compositions and mise-­en-­scène produce this sense of claustrophobia, as does an image of three women dressed in black chadors, parading and prancing on Northern California beaches. This image is a leitmotif throughout the movie, with the last one showing the chadors suddenly slipping off, playfully releasing the white nakedness underneath, releasing the tension (figure 93). Not all films made by displaced Iranians were dystopic, dysphoric, and claustrophobic, or about loss and absence. A few filmmakers did show playfulness and humor about Iranians’ culture and lives abroad, demonstrating that they were beginning to move out of the serious, defensive, binarist, and essentialist world of exile and entering into an ethnic subjectivity informed by multiplicity and the fluidity of identities. Rahmanian was one such filmmaker in the United States. The British Iranian filmmakers Marjan Safinia and Parisa Taghizadeh in their But You Speak Such Good English (1999) examined with self-­ reflexive humor and without either modernist angst or exilic self-­defensiveness Iranian diasporic identities. In it they showcase the life of Iranians in London as seen through the eyes of British Iranian stand-­up comics, including Omid Djalili and Shappi Khorsandi, who deal humorously with a range of Iranian exilic, émigré, and ethnic characters and cultural and political situations. Their comedy and criticism clearly comes from their position of occupying the hyphen in Iranian-­British. They observe, comment on, and play with national iden-

93 Three playful naked women under the veil form a leitmotif in Erica Jordan and Shirin Etessam’s feature, Walls of Sand. Courtesy of Erica Jordan and Shirin Etessam.

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tity. Likewise, Soudabeh Oskoui-­Babcock (with her husband, James Babcock, an emergency-­room physician and filmmaker), working out of Houston, made Comedy Middle Eastern Style (2005) about stand-­up comedians from the Middle East, including a Jewish Iranian named Dan Ahdoot, performing in comedy clubs in the United States.54 In these films, one can see the pleasures both of freeing oneself from the clutches of inherited roots and of searching for fresh routes. These films celebrate Iranians’ “coming out” as an ethnic group into the light of the public, without the fear of reprisal or shame that had dogged them for years after the hostage crisis. Unlike other Iranian subethnics who tended to work interstitially, Jewish Iranians made strong headway as producers, directors, and actors in the Hollywood system. Ethnoreligious connection with other Jews working in Hollywood and their business background and class capital facilitated these inroads. Like Reza Badiyi, these are not accented filmmakers; some are émigrés, but they do not necessarily make films about Iranians. Among them is the real-­estate tycoon Bob Yari, who made an unusually large-­scale commitment to mainstream productions by creating four separate companies—­El Camino Pictures, Stratus Film Company, Bob Yari Productions, and Bull’s Eye Entertainment—­through which he planned to make ten to fifteen movies a year. He justified such a high investment in multiple films by stating, “An investment in one film is a very risky investment, but an investment in a slate of 10 or more films is much more stable” (Galloway 2003). Designed to take advantage of the fragmentation of film markets, his companies have different management and partnership structures and aim at different sectors and spectators. His most successful film is Crash (2004), which he produced and Paul Haggis directed and which won three Oscars for best picture, best writing, and best editing. Another successful Iranian businessman of Jewish heritage is the nightclub and hotel entrepreneur Sam Nazarian, who financed and produced Hollywood films—­ten so far—­ through his sbe Entertainment Group and his production company, Element Films. His movies have featured A-­list stars such as Demi Moore and Kevin Costner. Azita Zendel, an executive assistant for Oliver Stone on many of his movies, produced, directed, wrote, and edited her first feature, Controlled Chaos (2003), and Soly Haim produced When a Man Falls in the Forest (2007), starring Sharon Stone and Timothy Hutton. Ben-­Hur Sepher’s short fiction film, The Desperate (2009), about a Jewish surgeon in a concentration camp who is ordered by a fearsome Nazi general to operate on his only son, won the best short film award at the 2010 Hollywood Film Festival. Sepher based the film on a real-­life story he heard from a lieutenant who had been present in the operating room. Although most Iranian Jewish filmmakers who made it in Hollywood shunned movies dealing directly with Iran or with their Jewish heritage, they are not oblivious to these issues. Haim, for example, sought financing for a documentary about how Iranian Jews helped Jews flee Iraq in the middle of the pre452

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vious century, and Yari has said, “One of the things that’s always attracted me to film is its power to influence people to put aside their prejudices” (Melamed 2006). The only Jewish fiction director to have centrally focused on Iranian émigrés and Jewish Iranians in Los Angeles is Babak Shokrian, with his America So Beautiful (2001) and Peaceful Sabbath (1993). In addition to these producers and directors there are many Iranian actors and comics of Jewish descent working in Hollywood, who employ and make fun of their own religion and nationality and those of others. Some postmodernist ethnic filmmakers turned their films into instruments of identity formation in the new land. Autobiography as a film form has been rare among Iranians at home, perhaps due to their dual, hierarchical, and collective senses of self, which favor concealing the inner, authentic self from examination by the outer world of surfaces. Autobiography only became a viable form in the diaspora, where personal subjectivity and collective identity were both disrupted by deterritorialization and modernity, necessitating honest examination and new self-­fashioning. Deterritorialization also facilitated autobiographical works because authors no longer feared state-­sanctioned restriction or patriarchal traditions’ suppression of self-­revelation. That this is a new form is indicated by the tensions in some of these films between self-­concealment, as necessitated by Iranian psychology and traditions, and self-­revelation, as is required by the autobiographical pact and the exigencies of exile and modernity. A good example is the twenty-­five-­minute documentary Najeeb: A Persian Girl in America (2002) by Tanaz Eshaghian (codirected and edited by Taima Smith), who was born in Tehran in 1974 and emigrated to the United States, where she graduated with a ba in semiotics from Brown University. The film is about the tensions that young marriage-­age Jewish Iranian émigré women—­ such as the director—­endure in New York and Los Angeles, maintaining a balance between appearing najib for the family (proper, demure, and reserved—­ feminine ideals deemed worthy of marriage) and nanajib (violating those ideas by following their own heart’s desire in behavior, dress, and friendship with boys). Ironically, this dichotomy, so characteristic of traditional filmfarsi cinema and luti movies four decades earlier, which stereotyped women into either houris or whores, is glaringly on display among Westernized upper-­class Iranian immigrants, including Jews, testifying to the enduring power of premodern collective formations, which compete with emergent modern individualized subjectivity. The film begins with an autobiographical voice-­over by Eshaghian about having to leave Iran at age seven with her family due to the revolution—­ along with eighty thousand other Jews. The film spends as much time with the director and her parents discussing marriage, potential suitors, and their suitability and class capital as with her cousin’s wedding and baby shower. Although this split focus on the two cousins brings up fascinating common cultural practices of dating and matchmaking among Jewish Iranians, it does so at the expense of Eshaghian’s own subjectivity and deeper personal truths. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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In another documentary, I Call Myself Persian: Iranians in America (2001), which Eshaghian produced and directed (with codirector Sara Nodjumi), Eshaghian again delivers the film’s voice-­over narration, but the film soon becomes an expression of the collective angst of Iranian émigrés. This work is not so much a personal biography as it is a community biography, a lively catalog of hardships, prejudices, insults, and beatings that the émigrés and their children endured in the United States after the revolution, the hostage crisis, the gulf war of 1991, and 9/11. Racial insults hurled at Iranians include “rag-­ heads,” “camel-­jockeys,” and “sand-­niggers.” In addition to documenting these with news clips, the film contains interviews with prominent and ordinary Iranians, as well as with prominent outsiders (such as the scholar Edward Said) about their experiences and thoughts about racism, Islam, ethnic shame, and media representation. Eshaghian and Nodjumi clearly demonstrate with their film that Iranians’ battle with self-­Other representations against Western cinema and mediawork is now waged not only across national boundaries but also in Western exile—­in the belly of the beast, so to speak. Eshaghian has been able to make films on ethnic and gender issues on both sides of the diasporic divide; in 2009 she made the documentary Be Like Others, about men in Iran undergoing sex-­reassignment surgery. The film premiered on hbo 2 cable television. In a revealing discussion on modernity and individuality between a transgender male named Anosh and his mother, she decries his wearing of makeup in the streets because of the negative impact it will have on her professional career and family honor. She urges him to wear whatever makeup he wants at home but to be discreet in public. He argues that “as an individual with rights, I can decide for myself,” shunning communal and familial pressures to conform to a preestablished identity. That these efforts at reconstructing sexual and gender identity are taking place in Iran at great risk to individuals and families shows the failure of the theocratic regime, which has attempted to vigilantly segregate genders and to vigorously patrol sexual identities. Of the cineastes who engaged in autobiographical methodologies, the most searingly personal and relentlessly honest is Caveh Zahedi, born in Washington in 1960 to Iranian parents. He moved from an American national identity in his early films toward increased ethnicization, more and more often exploring the hyphen. His drama is that of performing a new hyphenated identity, instead of attempting to retain a preformed authentic identity. While most exilic and diasporic filmmakers made their films about Iran, displaced Iranians, or other displaced subjects, Zahedi made films about himself, using filmmaking as an instrument of modernist self-­exploration, self-­representation, self-­expression, and self-­construction. Zahedi is both the diegetic subject and the enunciating subject of all his films, whose narratives revolve around his life, both as a fictive persona and as an empirical subject. As I noted elsewhere (Naficy 2001a:253– 57), he has classified his movies as “experimental documentaries,” for he employs in them autobiography and self-­inscription with varying levels of ambigu454

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94 Publicity card for Caveh Zahedi’s film, In the Bathtub of the World, starring Zahedi, courtesy of the filmmaker.

ity and complexity, as well as with filming strategies that raise questions about the authenticity and veracity of what they document. His first feature, A Little Stiff (1991), about his crush on an art student at ucla, is empty of apparent ethnic content. He appears as himself in it, using his own name and enacting his own life and his real-­life crush on a girl with the type of anxious humor typical of Woody Allen, which became a hallmark of his screen persona. Both the girl and her boyfriend also play themselves. For his second feature, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), about a Christmas trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Zahedi, his father, his brother, and his crew members all appear on camera as themselves, using their own names. Here, Zahedi’s ethnic shame, particularly that involving his father, who does not speak proper English, comes through uncomfortably. However, in his subsequent films, such as I Was Possessed by God (1999), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), The World Is a Classroom (2002), and I Am a Sex Addict (2005), ethnicity is submerged in the interest of bringing to the fore Zahedi’s continuing examination and construction of his individual identity and public personality (figure 94). In I Was Possessed by God, he takes an enormous amount of hallucinogenic mushrooms and documents three hours’ worth of his “possession” under the drug’s influence. In The World Is a Classroom, part of Underground Zero, an omnibus film in which independent filmmakers responded to the bombing of the United States on 11 September 2001, Zahedi documents a fascinating conflict between a teacher (Zahedi) and a rebellious student in a film class shortly after the bombing.55 In both I Was Possessed by God and The World Is a Classroom he takes personal risks in exposing himself to the world: in the first by taking the mind-­bending drug and documenting his own unguarded reactions to it, and in the second by causing a rebellion by one of his students and documenting his own handling of the explosive situation. In the process he creates an apt allegory about, as the film’s jacket states, “the Bush and Bin Laden in each of us,” and about how to solve the wider conflict between the United States and Muslim terrorists, and not just through violence. In these films and others Zahedi engages in what may be called the “politics of ethnic risk” by making himself vulnerable as an individual and an Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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ethnic subject, by exposing himself to an unrehearsed world, and by documenting the result, warts and all. What he obtains is worth the risk: insightful and moving, if somewhat solipsistic, films. This risk, and his postmodernist style were particularly appreciated by, and empowering to, the second-­generation Iranians. As he told the spectators at Rice University after the showing of his I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, “A lot of second-­generation Iranians really loved the film and they would come up to me and tell me how good it was and how much it meant to them to see on the screen someone they liked who reminded them of themselves” (Zahedi 2004). There had been very little representation of nonpoliticized ethnic Iranians before. Filmmaking, in turn, was empowering to the director: “You realize that what all the minorities say is true, that they really do need to see representations of themselves in the media, without which there is a real sense of emptiness or inadequacy.” Zahedi’s films were risky in another way: they were far from being straight documentaries. The inscription of real people as themselves was designed less to enhance cinematic authenticity than to problematize it, as was the seamless combining of re-created and documentary scenes. Ultimately, his films were performances of the documentary form. In their hybridization, self-­reflexivity, and metaphysical outlook, Zahedi’s films are akin to Iranian art-­house cinema, particularly to that of Kiarostami, whom he admires tremendously. When Zahedi finally saw these films, he noticed their similarity to his own, wondering if somehow “genetics, collective unconscious” may have caused it (Zahedi 2004). Such is the zeitgeist of late modernity, which undermines mimesis in favor of diegesis, whether in Iran or in the United States. Once introduced to Iranian art cinema through festivals, Zahedi drew satisfaction from these films. Indeed, Zahedi is clear about the importance of such festivals to his cinematic selfing: “Talking in film festivals to Iranian filmmakers that I could relate to and seeing people that looked like me in their movies was very appealing and inspiring. And to have a really great, world-­class master filmmaker like Kiarostami really meant a lot to me in terms of my own attempts to explore my own identity or ethnicity” (Zahedi 2004). This is a prime example of how Iranians’ cinematic othering by Western films is being supplanted by cinematic selfing thanks to Iranian filmmakers working inside Iran and in the diaspora. The documentarists’ turn to the here and now meant more subjects were worthy of filming. Born in Isfahan in 1977 and receiving two bachelor’s degrees (in political science and economics) from Reed College in Oregon, Laleh Kha­ divi was hired by Gabriel Films to head The Farm outreach program, for which she raised money, organized town-­hall discussions, and arranged prison and high school film screenings. In 1998 she began working on her own documentary at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, located in the swamps of southern Louisiana in the small town of St. Gabriel. After eighteen months of 456

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work and full access to the facility, she released the film as Nine Hundred Women (2000). Built in 1970 for an increasing population of female convicts, the institution housed at filming time the state’s most dangerous female prisoners and often exceeded its capacity of nine hundred. Narrated by Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon, the film notes that 75 percent of the prisoners are mothers and that a quarter of them are serving sentences of fifteen years or more. Six women—­a grandmother, a high school student, a pregnant woman, a recovering heroin addict, a prison guard, and the only woman on death row—­share their stories of life on the streets, abuse, crimes, childbirth, and motherhood as well as their frustrations and hopes. What is remarkable about this film is the atmosphere of friendship, compassion, and love among the incarcerated women, as well as their affective linkage to the outside world through their children and families, which sets this prison film apart from the violence-­prone and angry prison films involving men. Nine Hundred Women provides a fascinating counterpoint to Shirdel’s documentary Women’s Prison (1965), made during the Shah’s time, and Sheikholeslami’s films Murderer or Murdered (2003) and Article 61 (2005), made under the Islamic Republic. Unlike Shirdel’s and Sheikhole­slami’s films, which suffered from censorship and limited circulation, Khadivi’s film was distributed in the United States. She toured with it to thirty-­seven prisons across the country, where she held workshops and panel discussions. In her artist statement, sent to me by e-­mail, Khadivi states, “I believe that film, more than any other form of media, can generate community discussion. By organizing group viewings and discussions of films all sides of an issue are brought to the table by a series of common images, and from there a true dialogue can begin. Filmmakers are responsible for giving their films life after television or art-­house theater, they have to take their films to the places where the stories need most to be told” (Naficy 2006d). The luxury of public screenings and exhibitions within and outside the prison system was not available to the filmmakers working in Iran, let alone the kind of wide-­reaching outreach touring that Khadivi undertook. Many of the ethnic filmmakers discussed here are either hybridized first-­ generation Iranians or second-­generation hyphenated Iranian Americans born in diaspora. The involvement of the second generation in filmmaking brought new topics. Gender and sexual orientation has already been discussed. Another was the first generation of Iranian émigrés as film subjects, in the context of which filmmakers examined not only themselves but also their familial and national predecessors—­in effect passing judgment on the first generation. They mined historical, national, and family archives for footage and documents to produce longitudinal biographies of individuals, families, and dynasties. Maryam Kashani’s The Best in the West (2006), a seventy-­one-­minute documentary filmed on 16mm film, focuses on her father and his generation, particularly on a group of male friends, all of whom came to the United States in the 1960s as students, where they stayed on and became naturalized citizens. Kashani was born in San Francisco in 1977 to an Iranian father and a Japanese mother. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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95 The first generation of Iranians in the United States in Maryam Kashani’s The Best in the West. Courtesy of the filmmaker.

She received her ba in 2000 in film and interdisciplinary field studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her mfa in film and video in 2003 from the California Institute of the Arts. The Best in the West is her mfa thesis film. Told by her in first-­person voice-­over, the film supplies an affectionate audiovisual profile of her father, her uncle Naser, and nearly a dozen of their male friends who attended Napa Union College in Napa Valley, California, where, according to one of “the Guys,” as the film calls its subjects, apparently 90 percent of the student body at one time was Iranian. After college, “the Guys” lived on the margins of the counterculture movement, obtained odd jobs such as gas station attendant, and in entrepreneurial moves borrowed money from their American girlfriends (who in turn borrowed from their fathers) to open up businesses, restaurants, and clubs. It appears that most ended up owning gas stations, a business in which they succeeded, fulfilling the middle-­class American dream of leisurely golf with buddies. As in most ethnic identity films, there is a wealth of personal and family photos, as well as of home movies and interviews (figure 95). Each member of this affable group faces the camera in a different setting—­in a bar, at home, in an office—­and relates his own circumstances of departure from Iran and his conditions of emigration. These stories are often laced with humor, such as a funny anecdote about auditioning rock bands for a nightclub without knowing much about either rock music or the club scene. The novelty of the film is not only its focus on first-­generation Iranians but also its contextualization of their lives in the geopolitics of oil. The film intercuts their personal narratives with Western narratives about oil: Western newsreels about the politics of oil and Western oil companies’ industrial films. That most of “the Guys” have been gas station owners, managers, and attendants at one time or another since the 1960s places them at the center of the politics of oil that tied the fate of their two nations together and tore them apart. This intercutting is one of the strengths of the film, enriching and situating this particular story of Iranian immigration within its multiple national, political, and commercial contexts. The film is less successful in teasing out the 458

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personal reactions of these gas station owners to the geopolitics of oil involving their two countries. The film implicitly brings up Iranians’ multiculturalism, rarely discussed in filmic circles. Several of the men seem to have girlfriends and wives who are themselves recent immigrants, including Kashani’s Japanese mother. Kashani deals with these issues in another coproduction, My Mother Is Not Chinese (1999). As she told me in an e-­mail, this film is about discrimination against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, featuring the stories of “four women who had experienced some type of violence or discrimination based on race. My sister is actually featured in the film as well as a civil rights lawyer, a Vietnamese immigrant, an elder Korean woman, and a dancer” (Naficy 2007c). The interaction of Iranians with other minorities signals not only the emergence of interethnic relations but also their assimilation into the emerging global multiculturalism.

ngo Documentaries Nongovernmental organizations are an important component of any modern democratic civil society. While there has been a long history of charitable ngos in Iran, most of these have been based in religion. Nonreligious, nonsectarian ngos are a relatively new phenomenon, and they increased in numbers under the Islamic Republic and contributed to documentary cinema by sponsoring films about their organizations and related sociocultural issues. The most prominent non-­religious ngo-­supported film in the Pahlavi era was Forugh Farrokhzad’s film The House Is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast, 1963), which the Iranian Society for Assistance to Lepers sponsored. As the number of displaced Iranians in the diaspora grew, nongovernmental civic associations supporting various professional, national, ethnic, religious, and human rights causes also increased. The increasing repressiveness of the Islamic Republic regime strengthened the determination of the human rights ngos both inside and outside the country. Some of those in the diaspora initiated films by turning to exilic, diasporic, émigré, ethnic, or cosmopolitan filmmakers abroad. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran (abf) was one such diasporic ngo. The foundation is named in memory of Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-­democracy activist who was assassinated allegedly by the Islamic Republic’s agents in Paris in April 1991. The foundation’s website declares that “promoting human rights awareness through education and the dissemination of information are necessary prerequisites for the establishment of a stable democracy in Iran. . . . Through its programs of research, documentation, publications, and outreach, the Foundation hopes to help restore the dignity of Iran’s countless victims of human rights violations.” Founded in Washington by the two daughCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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ters of the slain lawyer, Ladan and Roya Boroumand, abf created Omid, a valuable and comprehensive searchable database of the names of the victims of the Islamic Republic’s human rights violations and violence, what its website calls “a memorial in defense of human rights in Iran.” 56 In addition to this virtual memorial abf cosponsored the twenty-­one-­minute documentary film Interrupted Lives (Sargozashtha-­ye Natamam, 2010), about the human rights violations suffered by students inside Iran. Written and produced by Geri Migielicz, Richard Koci Hernandez, and Liza Culik (other funders were U.S. governmental and private funding agencies), the film reports that since the revolution of 1978–79, “at least sixteen hundred students have been executed for their ideas, thoughts, speech, beliefs, and votes.” The palimpsestical display, consisting of the continual appearance and disappearance of scores of names and faces of the executed students, dramatizes the terrible loss of the nation’s youths. This somewhat amateurish but effective film focuses chiefly on the various waves of student repression: the imprisonment and execution of students early after the revolution; the suppression of Tehran university students in their dorms in 1999; and the violent defeat of student protesters against Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection in 2009. It includes profiles of several students and interviews with survivors of torture who describe various gruesome jailhouse ordeals.57 Another ngo sponsoring films in exile was the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (in Exile). This was an offshoot of the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners, formed clandestinely primarily by Marxists and leftists inside Iran in 1989, following what is known as the “ 1988 prison massacre,” when the regime allegedly liquidated thousands of its opponents inside its prisons, among them a great number of Marxists and pmoi supporters and members.58 In a report two years after this horrendous event, Amnesty International reported that it was “convinced” that during the six-­month period between July 1988 and January 1989 “the biggest wave of political executions since the early 1980s took place in Iranian prisons.” 59 Some of the founders of this homegrown association, forced into exile, formed the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (in Exile) in June 1994. This association operates branches (both open and clandestine) in about a dozen countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the United States.60 This association sponsored Blindfolded Witnesses (Shahedan-­e Cheshmbandzadeh, 2008), which the veteran theater director and actor Nasser Rahmaninejad wrote and narrated and the dissident filmmaker Reza Allamehzadeh edited. A more polished film than Interrupted Lives, Blindfolded Witnesses interviews exiles about their harrowing experiences of torture and the widespread executions of the 1980s, when the regime of the Islamic Republic was consolidating itself. One relates that of the ninety incarcerated people in his prison ward in the city of Rasht eighty-­one were executed. Others describe various techniques of torture and violence practiced on prisoners, including being confined for 460

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days and weeks in small boxes, appropriately called “coffins” and “graves.” Some of the interviews take place in a wooded area, allowing the filmmakers to provide a powerful visual metaphor for their gruesome topic. In one compelling sequence, the film dwells on the trees that have been cut down and stacked on each other like so many dead bodies; the close-­up shots of their cross-­sections showing annual aging rings suggest the lives cut short by torture and execution. The on-­camera narrator, Rahmaninejad, himself a torture victim now in exile, states that each prisoner is both a victim and a witness, whose testimony is powerful because it is based on lived experience. It is for this reason that the film contains many such testimonials, which he says is the only way for victims to acquire a measure of closure and relief.61 The Internet, particularly YouTube and social networking sites, have become valuable venues for displaying not only these complete films but also brief individual testimonials and videos uploaded by torture victims and their supporters. As such, the Internet contains a treasure trove of testimonials about Iranians’ tragic lives—­tortured, hurt, humiliated, and snuffed—­making it a most appropriate global memorial for the victims of violence and their loved ones who are strewn around the world.

Cinema and Arts Documentaries Like prerevolutionary filmmakers, those in the diaspora made documentaries about the arts; these focused on cinema, filmmakers, artists, and writers. Jamsheed Akrami, the former editor of Film va Honar (Film and Art) magazine in Iran during the second Pahlavi period and a film professor at William Patterson University in New York since the mid-­1990s, made two meticulous and insightful feature-­length film essays that unpack some of the major issues of Iranian cinema—­particularly repressive censorship—­through interviews with auteur filmmakers and choice extracts from their movies. His Dreams Betrayed (1986), later updated and retitled as The Lost Cinema: Iranian Political Films in the Seventies (2006), focuses on the Pahlavi period’s new-­wave political cinema (figure 96), while his Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema after the 1979 Revolution (2000) centers on the emergence of art-­house films in the Islamic Republic. These film essays are essential companions to any course on Iranian cinema. Akrami subsequently made two other valuable documentaries about, and with, Kiarostami and his films. His Kiarostami 101 (2004) provides an analytic primer on the filmmaker’s stylistic signatures, while A Walk with Kiarostami (2003) offers insight into his filming and framing techniques and into his concerns with landscape photography through a walk and a conversation with him in the Galway countryside in Ireland, the site of the Galway Film Fleadh. Akrami’s Scattered Seeds of Hanareh: A Talk with Bahman Ghobadi (2003) is also notable. From his base in the Netherlands, Allamehzadeh made several documenCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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96 A flyer for Jamsheed Akrami’s film, Dreams Betrayed, on the prerevolution new-wave cinema.

taries about Iranian writers and intellectuals and about their suppression. His ten-­minute film The Last Farewell to Dr. Saedi (Akharin Bedrud ba Doktor Saedi, 1986) is an emotional eulogy for the great dissident writer, who contributed so much to the rise of the new-­wave cinema and who died literally of exile (and alcohol) in Paris in November 1985. It documents the gathering of scores of Iranian exiles mourning Saedi, who weep while circumambulating his open coffin surrounded by massive bouquets of flowers. Later they form a walking procession behind a hearse bedecked with more flowers and a portrait of the writer. Under a downpour they walk to the Père Lachaise cemetery while carry­ing books and umbrellas, heads bowed, and pushing baby strollers. There, a speaker reads an announcement from Iran’s Writers’ Association eulogizing him and his restless productivity in various literary forms and recounting his opposition to autocratic regimes, whether Pahlavi or the Islamic Republic. Among the attendees is film director Parviz Kimiavi. Some weep openly at the gravesite and some console others in a film that is a secular rowzeh (religious sermon) for an intellectual driven to an early grave by authoritarian regimes and late modernity’s disruptions and displacements (figure 97). Allamehzadeh’s fifty-­minute documentary The Surf Is at Rest (Mowj va Aramesh, 1997) deals with human rights abuses under the Pahlavi and Islamic regimes. His The Night after the Revolution (Shab-­e Ba’d az Enqelab, 1989), which uses the word night as a symbol of Qajar and Pahlavi dictatorship and of the Islamic Republic’s retrogressive “dark 462

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97 Fans mourning Gholamhosain Saedi’s death in Paris, in Reza Allamehzadeh’s film tribute, The Last Farewell to Dr. Saedi. Frame enlargement.

thinking,” examines the history of Iranian censorship. It contains a visit with Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh, in his nineties, at his home in Geneva: he is the last remaining spectator of Sahhafbashi’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema in 1904, who relates that when his groundbreaking book Once Upon a Time—­containing the short story “Persian Is Sugar” about a Westernized dandy and a religious fanatic—­was put on sale in Tehran in the 1910s, the bookseller, Seyyed Abdolrahim Khalkhali, was threatened with death and his bookshop with fire. This was because “ignorant mullahs” had declared Djamalzadeh a heretic, whose assassination was permissible. In his subsequent forty-­five-­minute film Holy Crime (Jenayat-­e Moqaddas, 1994), aired by rvu Television, Allamehzadeh investigated the extrajudicial, state-­sanctioned terrorist actions ascribed to agents of the Islamic Republic abroad, including the assassination in Europe of opposition figures—­the Kurdish leader Abdolrahman Qasemlu, the pmoi leader Kazem Rajavi, the former prime minister Shapur Bakhtiar, and the television entertainer Fereydoun Farrokhzad. The film additionally charges that to protect their own economic and diplomatic interests in Iran, European governments, particularly that of Germany, were complicit with the Islamic government by creating impediments to the prosecution of perpetrators of “holy crimes,” which the film claims were ordered and planned by Iranian officials and executed by Iranian agents or their hired guns. Many exiled opposition figures and European human rights officials are interviewed. Allamehzadeh’s latest feature film Iranian Taboo (Tabu-­ye Irani, 2010) documents and exposes Islamic Republic’s inhumane persecution and scapegoating of the Baha’is inside Iran, from peasants in remote villages to those taking courses in the Baha’i underground university. In his artist’s statement Allamehzadeh states that although he is banned from returning to Iran many “devoted friends risked their lives to film the footage that I needed for this film.62 However, a Los Angeles Times reviewer called the film, which includes wordy interviews with Iranian lawyers, scholars, and political activists, a “dull, inelegant scrutiny” of a “crucial civil rights issue” that fails to give the basics of the Bah’i faith to the uninitiated viewer (Goldstein 2012). Although AllameCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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hzadeh’s films are uneven in quality, it is clear that behind them lurks the heart and intelligence of an epistemophilic and dissident intellectual who is trying from a position of exile—­benefiting from its freedoms—­to make sense of his country’s history and of its maltreatment of intellectuals. In the same vein, Josef Akrami’s ninety-­minute film A Few Simple Shots (Chand Nama-­ye Sadeh) is notable. Paying homage to Allamehzadeh’s émigré film A Few Simple Sentences, this film focuses on the mistreatment, repression, torture, and execution of political prisoners under the Islamic Republic, with a particular emphasis on women. Several segments of the film were screened on 20 April 2005 on Women’s Liberation Television, a weekly half-­hour program hosted in Los Angeles by Minoo Hemati, on which the director, now residing in Canada, was also interviewed.63 In these segments, Iranian political prisoners who had survived their harrowing prison terms describe what had happened to them in jail, while Western human rights workers, lawyers, and activists provide analysis. This emotional film, where dramatic music and editing accentuate the trauma of victimhood, replicates colonial ethnographic power relations, whereby the natives serve as informants for Westerners who engage in objective analysis; it seems as if the natives (Iranians) are incapable of such analysis and theorization (such a power relation is also present in Akrami’s The Lost Cinema and in Friendly Persuasion). Allamehzadeh was unable to make his documentary The Testament of the Phoenix about the poet Ahmad Shamlu, but Moslem Mansouri, aided by his executive producer, Bahman Maghsoudlou, succeeded in doing so. Called Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty (1998), the one-­hour film contains a series of interviews with the ailing poet in Tehran, as well as with many literary critics about Shamlu’s political life (imprisonment during the Shah era), his modernist poetry that mixes politics with lyricism (at one point Shamlu boldly states that “the aim of poetry is to fundamentally transform the world”), his status among poets (two distinguished critics nominate him as the best lyrical poet since Hafiz), his spearheading of influential literary magazines (Ketab-­e Jom’eh and Ketab-­e Hafteh), his massive unfinished encyclopedia of vernacular Persian (The Book of Streets/Ketab-­e Kucheh), as well as a generous sprinkling of his own gravelly voice reading his poems and intimate and touching interactions between him and his wife, Aida Sarkisian, who is the subject of so many of his poems (combing his hair, putting him to bed). While the film’s effort at documenting Shamlu’s life is commendable (including many pictures of his childhood and youth), its efforts at illustrating his poems (empty alleys, thunder, and lightning) is less successful for their attempted literalism. The film took two years to make, finishing only months before the great poet’s death. It is slow, and it does not cover Shamlu’s work in cinema as a screenplay writer for filmfarsi movies and as a documentarist for the mca. Thus a historical opportunity to obtain his interpretation of his cinematic work was lost. Mansouri’s and Maghsoudlou’s involvement with Ahmad Shamlou: Master 464

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Poet of Liberty was part of the exiles’ efforts at the salvage documentation of aging literary and artistic figures, and the film soured their relationship.64 Maghsoudlou had begun these efforts before the revolution by making Ardeshir Mohasses and His Caricatures (Ardeshir Mohasses va Suratakhayash, 1972), a twenty-­minute black-­and-­white documentary on a renowned Iranian cartoonist who came to world attention in the late 1960s. Made for the nirt, the film deftly shows the shy, meek, and bespectacled artist working quietly in his home studio, which resembles a busy archive, with stacks of books, paper, and art everywhere. Unlike Shamlu, whose own narrative and voice provide the backbone for the film about him, Mohasses never utters a word, and in one long scene, he just sits there on a chair looking past the camera, yet aware of its presence: he is self-­aware and wound up tight, yet shut off to the world. His horrific and ironic cartoons mostly deal with unequal power relations, pitting the powerful slave master, boss, or government official against the powerless slave, worker, or citizen. With academic zeal, the title, volume, and number of foreign magazines featuring his work are shown. Interviews with domestic critics and local press clippings provide a national picture of his status (one headline from Ettela’at reads, “Mohasses, the Artist of Protest”). In the same salvage vein, Maghsoudlou made Ahmad Mahmoud: A Noble Novelist (2004), a one-­hour documentary on Ahmad Eta (pen name Mahmoud), who died in 2002. Like Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty, this film is shot inside Iran, most of it in Mahmoud’s home, where like Shamlu he talks about his political life, imprisonments during the second Pahlavi period (cumulatively for more than five years), his membership in the Tudeh Party, the publication of his various short stories and novels, and ideas like “an intellectual is by definition a protestor, he must always protest for the betterment of the peoples’ lives.” Refreshingly, the film goes beyond the platitudes and praise that are part of the genre, providing insightful analysis by critics and provoking Mahmoud to talk specifically about his techniques of writing, such as creating elaborate charts of characters and floor plans for story locations and using active verbs to drive the story forward. Even in his old age, the ailing writer is stubborn: he continues to chain-­smoke even though he is suffering from chronic pulmonary disease, which is advanced enough to force him to resort from time to time to oxygen supplied by a tube.65 Mehrad Vaezinejad, a PhD student in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, made the twenty-six-­minute documentary A Soul on Fire: Susan Taslimi According to Susan Taslimi (Ruhi az Atash: Susan Taslimi Beh Ravayat-­e Susan Taslimi, 2011), on the premiere Iranian theater and film actress named in the film’s title, who due to the difficulties recounted in volume 3 had emigrated to Sweden. Unlike most exile actors she did not withdraw into the Iranian community, writing or acting in Persian language plays. Instead, she learned Swedish and became a successful cosmopolitan theater director, actor, and filmmaker, while continuing to draw upon Iranian and Persian performance traditions.66 Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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BBC Persian broadcast the film in January 2011 and several times thereafter; it was so well received that Vaezinejad was commissioned to make a one-­hour version involving additional footage of Taslimi and interviews with film scholars such as myself and theater directors such as Arbi Ovanessian. In the longer version she delves deeper into censorship of her films in Iran (all but one directed by Bahram Baizai) and the circumstances that forced her departure as well as into the circumstances of her adaptation to the new foreign environment. The film is studded with a generous helping of clips from her films and plays. This version is due out in 2012. Homa Sarshar, an experienced and indefatigable journalist and broadcaster both in Iran before the revolution and in exile, made many salvage documentaries about famous Iranian poets, writers, artists, and religious and public figures now stranded in exile. These include Nader Naderpour: Poet (coproduced with Ali Limonadi, 1989), Mahshid Amirshahy: Writer (with Barbod Taheri, 1989), Nasser Ovissi: Painter (1988), Samineh Baghchehban: Teacher (with Parviz Kardan, 1995), Simin Behbahani: Poet (1994), Iran Daroudi: Painter (with Barbod Taheri, 1989), Moniroo Ravanipour: Novelist (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1993), Jalali Sussan-­Abadi: Miniaturist (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1993), Faranguis Yeganegi: Activist (with Parviz Kardan, 1994), Malak Nafisi: Philanthropist (1996), Bersabeh Hovsepian: Educator (with Parviz Kardan,1992), Morteza Khan Neydavood: Master Musician (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1996), Soleiman Haim: Lexicographer (1997), Moshfegh Hamedani: Translator and Journalist (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1996), Youna Dardashti: Vocalist (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1997), Hakham Yedidia Shofet: Iran’s Chief Rabbi (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1999), Habib Levi: Historian (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 1997), Jamshid Kashfi: The M ­ ajles Representative (with Kourosh Bibiyan, 1990), Esther’s Children (with Jahanshah Ardalan, 1997), Jewish Monuments in Iran (with Kourosh Bibiyan, 1999), A Jewish Retirement Home in Iran (with Bahman Mojjalal, 1997), Shaban Jafari (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 2002), Moshe Katsav: The President of Israel (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 2005), and Sadredin Elahi: Journalist (with Abbas Hojjatpanah, 2008). That many of these profiles were of Jewish figures shows that these documentaries engaged not only in national salvaging from a position of exile but also in ethnoreligious reclaiming, for the Jews have been important contributors to the Iranian letters, arts, culture, and politics. Sarshar, herself a Jew, coproduced most of these films with other filmmakers and producers (their names appear in the parantheses above); she produced the rest on her own. These biographical and salvage documentaries are valuable for the light they shed both on contemporary modernist dissident visual arts, cinema, literature, and poetry and on the political circumstances that produced Iranian dissident new-­wave, art-­house, and accented cinemas and their intrinsic connections to the other arts.

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Avant-­Garde, Experimental, and Animated Works Throughout the history of cinema, avant-­garde and experimental filmmakers produced a small but continual body of works in Iran, which until recently received insufficient attention. Women cineastes working at the intersection of personal, ethnic, gender, and national identities and film practices dominated abroad, including Shirin Neshat, Mitra Tabrizian, Marjane Satrapi, and Ghazel Radpay. This underscores one strand of feminist scholarship that posited a special affinity between women and avant-­garde and experimental cinemas (not counting animated films). Supposedly experimental cinema has been more open to women because of low budgets and amateur aesthetics; and because of women’s own interests in the private sphere, personal self-­expression, biography, feminist politics, and theory, women themselves have gravitated toward alternative film forms (Butler 2002:57–58). In addition, the fact of exile necessitated a fiction of exile for its processing—­narratives of self-­examination, self-­ expression, and self-­fashioning—­which the new, mobile, high-­tech, and digital but inexpensive camera-­pen film equipment facilitated. Male filmmakers with complex identities or alternative sexualities, such as Caveh Zahedi, Shahram Karimi, Jalal Fatemi, Farshad Aminian, and Reza Abdoh, were drawn to these forms as well. The avant-­gardism of the filmmakers is inscribed in their films’ unconventional narrative structures, experimental filming style, accented aesthetics, biographical and self-­inscriptional strategies, the diversity of technical film formats, varied lengths that did not fit into standard commercial exhibition and broadcast time slots, noncommercial and boutique distribution and exhibition venues, and diverse forms of projection and exhibition. For example, Neshat worked primarily in the United States, making highly formal 35mm films, many of the works in her second phase for double-­screen video projections for exhibition in museums and galleries; Tabrizian made her narratively experimental and still photo styled films in Britain for single-­channel exhibition in art-­house cinemas; while Ghazel, working primarily in Iran and later in France, made many short Hi8 videos for triptych video displays in art galleries. Zahedi made experimental documentary features in the United States for distribution to commercial cinemas as well as smaller experimental and diary videos for alternative venues. Fatemi made perhaps the first special-­effects feature on video with his futuristic thriller The Nuclear Baby (Nowzad-­e Atomi, 1990). In An Oasis in the Moment (2004) and in his mfa thesis film for Southern Illinois University, This Prison (2005), the Kurdish Iranian American filmmaker Aminian used the classic and contemporary poetry of Jalal al-­Din Rumi and Sohrab Sepehri as voice-­over narration, character dialogue, and inspiration for evocative, tender, poetic visual impressions of loss and absence, congruent with both Sufism and exilic feeling structures. Abdoh, working primarily in the United States as an experimental theater director, made, prior to his untimely death

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from aids, many shorts, multimediaworks, and one feature video, The Blind Owl (1992), for theater performance and exhibition in art museums.67 Born in 1957 in Shiraz, Shahram Karimi has been working out of Sankt Augustin, Germany, since 1988. He is a painter influenced by the flat perspectives of Persian miniatures, by calligraphy, and by Western art’s three-­dimensional minimalism and abstraction. He served as a set and costume designer for Neshat’s video installations and films and for Shoja Azari’s films. He also made several experimental films of his own, which echo his paintings, focusing on narratives of search and absence. His thirteen-­minute video Traces (Jostoju, 2002), shown first at the Istanbul Biennale in 2003, accompanied his painted portraits of “Iranian poets, artists, writers, cultural and political activists who have lost their lives, have been forced into exile or were erased from public life and collective memory.” 68 Traces consists of two parts. In the first, the camera walks through a series of tunnel-­like, mud-­walled, and roofed alleyways with openings on the top or the side that cast beautiful, sculptural light onto the ­eerily deserted alleys below, as well as onto the occasional wall graffiti, consisting of Arabic writings. All the old doors lining the alleyways are shut and no human being is in sight, as though the place has been abandoned due to some calamity. As Karimi told me in an e-­mail, “In the film the camera is either searching for or just passing through history, whose traces are left on the walls” (Naficy 2006c). Since the camera does not pay attention to the wall graffiti, its movement represents less a search than a cruel and relentless bypassing of history, inattentive to the human traces left behind. It is a haunting walk; each time the camera reaches a junction it takes a different alley. Throughout this nine-­ minute segment, the bellowing of a mysterious male voice is heard, creating a hypnotic rhythm. In the second part, the camera exits the claustrophobic alleyways to arrive at a four hundred-­year-­old ruined cemetery (located in Dakhla, Egypt). In this segment, the camera shifts from looking ahead to gazing downward, and it alters its activity from “passing through” to “searching through” history. The soundtrack now carries a sorrowful song that like a terrible lullaby mourns what the downcast, meandering, and mobile camera sees—­dusty rubble strewn around, makeshift graves decorated with desiccated palm fronds, and traces of human life now vanished: lonely footprints in the dirt, deserted shoes, and an abandoned watering jug. Traces is not only about searching for memory but also, as Neshat notes, about “an obscure travel through Karimi’s paintings.” 69 It is also about the act of searching and the fact of absence, for search never yields a find, and the absence is not filled at the end. The circular motion of the camera, the repetitive structure of the film, and the embodied camera movements that inscribe each step of the cameraperson all invoke Omar Khayyam’s terrific and mystical poetry about loss, impermanence, and circularity of life on earth, showing that Karimi is deeply influenced by Persian philosophy and poetry as well.70 Some of the films of art-­cinema directors working inside Iran—­Parviz Kimi468

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avi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Samira Makhmalbaf, Marziyeh Meshkini, and Mania Akbari—­may be counted as avant-­garde, along with films, videos, and installations created by avant-­garde artists living in Iran, such as Saifollah Samadian’s The White Station (Istgah-­e Sefid, 1991), Barbad Golshiri’s What Has Befallen Us, Barbad? (2002), Neda Razavipour’s Variation (2005), and Razavipour and Ramin Dehdashtian’s The Willow Tree (2003). For secular women directors in exile, who were not forced to wear a veil in their daily lives, the veil became both a sign of opposition and an aesthetic system. Three of these produced the most sustained and challenging—­as well as contrasting—­body of works using the veil: Shirin Neshat, Mitra Tabrizian, and Ghazel Radpay.

The Anxiety and Aesthetics of Dislocation—­Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) In the majority of the many critical writings about Neshat, she is portrayed as a woman either without a history, or with a very brief and recent history. Most have noted her date of birth in Iran, her departure to the United States in the early 1970s, and her first return to her home country in 1990, a decade after the Islamic revolution, which affected her profoundly. For most critics, the return visit was the only history, either personal or national, worth noting. Nothing much was said about her past in Iran or about her country’s past prior to that date, both of which were highly influential in forming her personality and the poetics and politics of her art. Neshat was born in the religious city of Qazvin to a physician father and a homemaker mother. As she told me in an interview, her father, Ali, was very influential both in her life and in her art. He loved and protected her, but he was aloof. He sent her to a Catholic boarding school in Tehran, Sohail High School, which caused “an amazingly negative reaction” in her, including a cluster of psychophysical symptoms involving severe anxiety, nightmares, and anorexia (Naficy 2003a).71 This was her first experience of displacement, a kind of internal exile, lasting about two years, and the “strange anxiety” resulting from it would resurface years later when she became an external exile in the United States. These anxiety symptoms, including claustrophobia and agoraphobia, are often associated with traumatic experiences of exile (Naficy 2001a). She received her ba (1979), ma (1981), and mfa (1982) in visual arts from the University of California, Berkeley, where she admitted she was not a very good student. Her first visit to Iran occurred in 1990, and it affected her deeply in terms of understanding the dramatic changes that had taken place both in the life of the country and in the lives of women under the Islamic Republic. This unsettling upheaval fed into her unsettling photography of “weaponized veiled women” and “textualized veiled women,” depicting women either clad in black chadors and holding firearms (including herself) or with the bare parts of their bodies (including the whites of their eyes) covered with handwritten Persian Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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98 Gun barrel as earring and handwritten text as skin: a weaponized and textualized woman in Shirin Neshat’s photograph “Untitled” (1996), from the Women of Allah series. Photo by Larry Barns, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

texts, some of them snippets from Farrokhzad’s poems. While these texts ostensibly veil bare parts of bodies, their poetic contents offer a loud protest against veiling. Exhibited in galleries and in the book Women of Allah, these photos put Neshat on the map of the art world (Neshat 1997) (figure  98). Photography constitutes Neshat’s first phase of artistic activity. She did not rest there, for by the close of the twentieth century, she had moved to phase two, making powerfully formalist film-­based art videos and dual-­screen video installations involving gendered screens (one inhabited by males, the other by females) bearing the telltale aesthetics of still photography. The two screens were either in dialogue with, or in opposition to, one another. In the 2000s, she evolved yet again, entering phase three, by making single-­screen films, with Passage (Gozar, 2001), scored by Philip Glass, and two narrative fiction films, a short called Zarin (2005) and her first feature, Women Without Men (2009).72 Her photographs, videos, video installations, and films were exhibited internationally in scores of major galleries, museums, film venues, and film festivals, catapulting her to the pinnacle of the art and art-­house cinema worlds. Neshat is a nomadic artist—­in three major ways. On the one hand, she has traveled physical and national borders, from Iran where she was born, to North Africa, where most of her videos and films are shot, and to the United States, where she currently resides. On the other hand, she has simultaneously traveled across artistic media and forms, from photography, to art video, to video installation, to feature film. Each of these physical and textual forms of travel have left their residue and marks on Neshat’s art; in particular one can detect her training in and aesthetics of static shot composition and dramatic fram470

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ing from still photography migrating to her subsequent videos and films. In her third modality she traveled politically, evolving from making purely artistic works with political content to making artistic works that are more urgently political and further toward more activist extratextual politics—­as borne out by her activism around Women Without Men. With each of these forms of travels she evolved and matured to become both a more deeply Iranian and a widely recognized international artist. In a way, Neshat is an exemplar of a growing tendency in the transnational, intercultural, and accented art worlds of becoming “glocal,” simultaneously local and global. Like other glocal artists she inhabits an anxious “other than” psychosocial space, comfortable neither in her homeland nor in her adopted land. And it is from this liminal position that she speaks and draws both her inspiration and her authority as an artist and a critic of both societies. The resulting tensions produce the complexity and intensity that characterize great works of art. Like many accented filmmakers and artists she inscribes both autobiography and herself as a primary diegetic subject in her work. One place she has not traveled since she began making art seriously is her country of birth and rearing, Iran, an absence that also resonates powerfully in the poetics and politics of representation, nostalgia, longing, and reunion in her work. Unlike most accented filmmakers, Neshat has consistently worked collaboratively; she has written and made her videos and films with her life partner Shoja Azari, himself a filmmaker.73 Father Figures and Mystic Obsession Despite his love for her, her father cut a formidable figure whom Neshat tried throughout his life to impress and please. As she said to me: “I wanted his approval. And I think that he really loved me, but he never had any high expectation of me. . . . He never took me seriously.” This was partly because she was interested in art, which he did not value as a career. She (as she tells it), had “an intense amount of closure” (Naficy 2003a) with him only just before his death, after she had begun making a name for herself as a successful artist, at which point he was very proud of her. Although welcoming, this approval was late in coming, for Neshat had already internalized the critical voice of male authority: there are several charismatic male authority figures in her films who judge, exhort, accuse, interrogate, and entrance their subjects, many of them women. An example is the preacher, or curtain reciter, who sermons a crowd of males and females about good and evil in Fervor (Eltehab, 2000). The attendees are segregated by gender the way movie spectators were in Qajar-­era movie houses. The preacher is charismatic, whipping their emotions into a frenzied chant of “curse upon Satan, curse upon Satan” (la’nat bar shaitan). Another powerful, judgmental authority figure appears in The Last Word (2003) in the form of an imposing interrogator who relentlessly questions a young female prisoner, accusing her of various crimes (figure 99). Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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99 A charismatic curtain reciter holds his gendersegregated subjects spellbound in Neshat’s Fervor (2000). Photo by Larry Barns, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

An alternative reworking of this theme lies in the structures of infatuation in her videos, which govern relationships not only of subjects and authority figures but also of lovers and beloved. The lover-­beloved relationship, paramount in Iranian mythology, psychology, arts, poetry, and politics, finds its most exalted manifestations in the Sufi and mystic ballads in which lovers are so infatuated with their beloved as to want to possess and be possessed by them; in short, to lose their individuality, to be annihilated, and to become one with them. This wished-­for union, however, is almost never fully achieved, fanning the fire of perpetual desire and longing for the beloved. This beloved may be another earthly being of either gender—­because Persian pronouns do not indicate gender—­or it may be an ethereal or philosophical presence, a master, a guide, a saint, or God. Neshat’s videos are replete with imagery and poetry of mystic possession, infatuation, annihilation, and longing. The powerful ballads of Rumi and Hafiz are quoted in several films such as Pulse (Nabz, 2001) and Turbulent (Biqarar, 1998). Mystic infatuation structures not only relations of humans with each other but also human relations with nature or with power objects—­as in Passage, in which the arrival of a group of men carrying a coffin into a female circle causes a triangle of fire to encircle them; a tree in Tooba (2002), in which a woman is absorbed into a tree, becoming part of it; and a radio in Pulse, in which a woman in the solitude and emptiness of a dark room listens to a radio from which a mystical ballad is emanating while she caresses, embraces, and eventually sings to and with it, as though it is the beloved. The famous poem from Rumi on the radio, whose first line is “You must die, you must die from love / It is only then that you can be reborn free,” emphasizes the mystical self-­annihilation of lovers.74 The titles of her videos give away their emotion and spirit: Fervor, Rapture, Turbulent, Pulse, and Soliloquy (figure 100).

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100 Mystical absorption, annihilation, and reunion of self with the Other or with nature in Neshat’s Tooba (2002). Photo by Larry Barns, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Exilic Trauma, Autobiography, and Self-­Inscription Neshat’s arrival in California revived the deep anxieties of her childhood displacement from Qazvin to the Catholic boarding school in Tehran, this time tinged with a deeper universal melancholia, loneliness, and longing for a faraway home. These painful reactions to external exile found their way into her art, making them self-­inscriptional and autobiographical. She appears in many of her photographs and videos, often as the sole diegetic character, as in Soliloquy, and her own traumatic exilic experiences and deterritorialized structures of feeling inform them. As she told me, she realized this autobiographical dimension only years later. Now looking back at my work, I see myself appearing here and there, which I never really thought about very much. It occurred to me only recently that the women in all of the films are me, in the sense that they are always very restless, always rebellious, always running away from something. . . . All these films are about always being an outcast, about fitting in and yet not fitting in. It never occurred to me that these characters that I’ve been building are really a reflection of me. I so often think about the social, political and all the structures of the film that I didn’t realize that the personal aspect of it is just as pronounced as the social aspect of it. (Naficy 2003a). The United States “shattered” her: she felt “completely alienated” and disliked everything. The first ten years of exile became a process of simply adapting to things she did not like and of surviving. She felt very insecure and at one point she became ill again with the cluster of exilic symptoms, as in Iran when she had been sent away to Tehran. “I developed all these anxiety attacks and I started to have all these headaches and stomachaches and I went to the doctors and they said there is nothing wrong with you, it’s all emotional” (ibid.).

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Her works are suffused with loneliness and melancholia, and her protagonists are almost always alone, even amid a crowd, best exemplified by the four women of Women Without Men. These feeling structures of anomie are not only related to modernity and exile but also to the distant relationship with her father, which had left an “enormous sadness” and a deep “hole” in her life and art, which she was unable to fill until the end of his life. “I felt that if there is anything that I regret about migration, it’s that loss of opportunity to really get to know him and for him to really get to know me. . . . I think that the love and compassion that comes from the family, from the father, is a void in my work and, I think, that is only one level of my anxiety that shows up in my work” (ibid.). Another aspect of this father-­daughter anxiety surfaces in the way she portrays the men in her videos, with cynicism and disdain, a characterization with which she concurs: “I look down on them in some ways!” (ibid.). The inability to be spiritually reunited with her beloved, her father, and her homeland, which made her melancholic, also drove the bittersweet nostalgia, longing, and lonely hope that one day the gap would close and she would be reunited and healed. My works are very sad, very melancholic, and I realized that that’s the nature of what I am. I am deeply melancholic and I don’t mean it in a negative way. I think that the sense of longing comes from the Iranian tradition, the mystical tradition in a sense in which longing is connected to the idea of spirituality and mysticism and one that is tied to poetry and one that is very Iranian. You know we love sad music, we love beautiful poetry that makes you cry; it’s a fundamental aspect of being Iranian. But at the same time I think it’s deeply personal on my part, because I do have a lot that I consider personally very melancholic—­the personal experiences that I’ve had. A lot of it has to do with being in exile. I think a lot of it has to do with being alone. (ibid.) Shiite Islam and Modernist Duality Not only her relationship with her father and with male authority figures and the trauma of exile but also Shiite Islam affect the thematic, narrative, iconographic, and stylistic aspects of Neshat’s videos and films. Educated, secular, Muslim, and modern, her father was simultaneously traditional and conservative and observed community standards—­a dichotomous position typical of many Iranian modernists. He never allowed Neshat to set foot in his medical clinic because it was “not nice” for his daughter to be seen there, and he never went to the movies during her childhood because it would have been “disrespectful” to the community in Qazvin. She was artistic and modernist from childhood on, but Islam also fascinated her as a redemptive force: “I developed this strange sort of obsession with religion, with Islam, because for one thing I think I felt a tremendous guilt because my parents weren’t religious enough 474

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and part of me felt that they were committing sins. I prayed every day. I mean, unlike anybody in my family, somehow I was asking for redemption for my family!” (Naficy 2003a). Even a cursory look at her photographs and videos demonstrates the continuing hold of this fascination with Islam and its ideology and iconography—­in the black chador that women wear, in the beards and somber expressions of men, in the gendered segregation of space and the invasive gazes of men and women, in the various religious rituals and icons, and in the ideological paradigms of Shiite Islam, such as martyrdom, which in many ways is similar to the mystic annihilation of the self into the beloved. During her teenage years, a new interpretation of Islam came to the fore—­ what became known as revolutionary, political, or militant Islam. This inter­ pretation made Islam a conduit for channeling and expressing discontent with the Shah’s authoritarian and corrupt regime and with the corrosive consumer culture of the West that had found fertile soil in 1970s Iran. Revolutionary thinkers such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and revolutionary guerrilla groups such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (pmoi) made effective uses of politicized Islam. They tapped into the life of the Shiite saints and imams and into the Shiite discourses and iconography to express this discontent and guide it into revolutionary action. Neshat herself did not join political Islam, but one of her close girlfriends became a member of the pmoi, eventually giving her life for it. Later on in exile, while she remained a Muslim culturally Neshat distanced herself from the official Islam promulgated by the Islamic Republic and increasingly became a vociferous critic of the regime, publicly supporting the Green Movement in 2009 to the point of dedicating her feature film, Women Without Men, to it. Neshat is at heart a structuralist, whose art is filled with binarism, dualities, and dichotomies of various visual and cultural sorts. She admits as much: “My work is all about opposites and parallels” (Heartney 2009:155). The dualities and dichotomies in her family life, in Neshat herself, and in the country between religious tradition and modernity’s aspirations play themselves out in the inscription of these structures, particularly in her photographs and video installations, between males and females, Islam and modernism, East and West, and home and exile. In her double-­screen installation Turbulent (Biqarar, 1998), for example, the two facing screens are gendered—­one female, the other male—­ and their inhabitants never violate their segregated spaces. The “male” screen shows a group of Islamically bearded men in white shirts and black pants seated in an auditorium, facing the stage, on which a male singer (Shoja Azari) sings a lovely and powerful Sufi song of love by Rumi (the voice is the classical singer Shahram Nazeri). Surprisingly, however, he delivers the song to the camera, with his back to the diegetic audience, thus privileging the extradiegetic viewers of the video and the facing female screen. On the opposite “female” screen, a woman clad in a black chador (Sussan Deyhim), stands on the stage, facing the empty seats of an auditorium, listening. Her back is to the camera, to the Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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male singer, and to the extradiegetic viewers. However, when the man finishes his song, she begins to sing to the empty auditorium. The camera, which was stationary for the man, tracks around to reveal her expressive face. Unlike the male ballad, which contained words and was delivered with the authority of tradition and the authenticity of the genre of classic avaz singing, her song is a wild, wordless, avant-­garde, and individualized vocalization that mixes whispering, singing, panting, and screaming, accompanied by emphatic gestures. As though surprised and transfixed by her vocalization, the men, including the singer, stare at her intensely from the male screen. The physical arrangement of the two screens opposite one another reinforces their contrasting contents, helping reproduce the strict sex segregation that the Islamic Republic imposed in Iran. But the screens are not hermetically sealed, in the same manner that social space in Iran is not totally segregated, despite the stifling rules. As noted in a previous chapter, for every stratagem of veiling, there is one that violates it, or plays with it, turning the veil into not only a cathected semiotic and political icon of suppression and control but also into a dynamic instrument of power, sexuality, visuality, self-­expression, voyeurism, eavesdropping, exhibitionism, and transgression in whose manipulations both men and women are implicated. To be sure, Neshat’s double-­screen presentations and binary male-­female representations naturalize the segregated and stifling gendered social spaces of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To that extent she is complicit with Islamicate ideology and values. But she also violates them. Despite the rules of modesty that forbid women from singing in public, the woman’s singing voice in Turbulent—­personal and passionate—­breaks through the screen barrier, transfixing the men on the opposite screen. In addition, there is an exchange of gazes and power between the two screens, reminiscent of Louis Althusser’s famous example of interpellation, whereby by turning to respond to the call of an authority figure, such as a policeman shouting, “Hey, you there!,” a passerby becomes the subject of police authority. When the man sings authoritatively, the woman turns her back to him, but when she begins to sing, the men cannot help but turn toward her. By so doing, they are interpellated by her, becoming her subjects. Her emphatic gestures and facial expressions further violate the codes of modesty and public decorum for women. The men, in turn, break the social rules forbidding direct eye contact with an unrelated woman by staring intently, almost violently, at her. Their aggressive looks only serve to cover up their subjectification and interpellation. Segregated vision and transgressive sound play crucial narrative and critical functions in Neshat’s other videos. In Rapture (Owj, 1999), filmed in Essaouria, Morocco, the male screen shows a similarly dressed group of bearded men forcefully chanting and pushing their way into a fort, whose walls they scale with ladders. From the rooftop ramparts they look at the ocean beyond and at their cohort, who in various circular formations is engaged in ritualized acts of fighting, ablution, and praying. Meanwhile, on the female screen, 476

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a large group of women in black chadors appear in the flat desert in various straight-­line formations reminiscent of the crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)—­silently, patiently, and ominously waiting. Then, they begin to ululate wildly, causing the men on the other screen to stop their self-­absorbed rituals to gaze at them. The men are thus interpellated. Eventually, the women find their way to a beach, where with some effort they push a rowboat into the water and half a dozen of them row away into the vast ocean beyond. The men, on the other hand, ensconced in their fortified bastion, can only watch and wave at them from their screen. These scenes powerfully symbolize female liberation and male entrapment. The interactions in Rapture between male and female screens are more frequent than in Turbulent and are driven by an exchange of gazes. Significantly, however, this is not so much an exchange between two individual characters as between male and female collectivities, or male and female screens. There is nothing personal or individual about these exchanges. Unlike the conceptualization of the gaze by Western feminists and film theorists, in Neshat’s films the gaze is not personal but social. Since no individuality or subjectivity is ascribed to them, the male and female owners of those gazes are hermetically sealed in their social type. Ironically, this reinforces a binarist and a politically conservative view of the gendered worlds, undermining Neshat’s own transgressive suggestions. Such contradictions, signs of exilic anxiety and ambivalent modernity, are part of the accented film style. In Soliloquy (Zemzemeh, 2000), Neshat leaves the binarist construction of genders aside, a move signaled by her abandoning crisp black-­and-­white cinematography with its diametrical black and white, male and female worlds. Instead, in this color film she explores one of the most intimate and intimidating experiences of displacement brought on by modernity and exile: the splitting of self and the duality of identity. On one screen (filmed in Albany, New York), Neshat, clad in a black chador, peers out of a window onto a modern cityscape; on the other screen (filmed in Mardin, Turkey) she, similarly dressed, looks out of a window onto a traditional Muslim cityscape. The two women, each the other’s doppelgänger, have their backs to the camera and to each other. Then the camera travels out of each room and around the buildings to show the women looking out of the windows. Now, the two images of Neshat face the camera and one another like a person split apart by the traumas of modernity, exile, visuality, and East-­West incompatibility. This latter incompatibility becomes more evident when the Neshat doubles leave their rooms to explore their respective cities. The Western city is modern and urban, filled with impersonal concrete buildings and subways humming with rushing crowds, while the Eastern city is traditional and rustic, with alleyways, mosques, and courtyards, in which children joyously play in the water. Eventually, the modern Neshat ends up in a church where a chorale is being sung, while the traditional double enters a mosque where women have gathered Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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101–102 Binarist renditions of an organic, traditional East with an industrial modern West in Neshat’s Soliloquy. Photos by Larry Barns, copyright Shirin Neshat, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York.

to pray. If visuals highlight the incompatibility of East and West, and the concept of refusal, the mixing of the chorale and prayers on the soundtrack from the two screens emphasizes the reconciliation of those worlds and the notion of refusion. The film thus suggests that the disruptions of modernity and visuality are healable by the agency of human orality, reminding one of Walter Ong’s differentiation between analytical vision and engulfing voice. If images can exist separately from their producing agency, sound cannot. That is why sound and interiority are closely intertwined and why voice and speech are associated with potency and magic (1982:32). Like the other films noted, Soliloquy forcefully inscribes the distancing properties of vision and the engulfing attributes of voice, but in glorious color cinematography (by Ghasem Ebrahimian) and in memorable sound works (by Sussan Deyhim) (figures 101 and 102). Although in Soliloquy Neshat empties her two screens of male-­female dichotomy, she inscribes not only a West-­East dichotomy but also that of the modern Christian world versus the traditional Muslim world. Such a binary formulation of the incompatible West and East, like her irreconcilable binarism of male and female screens, is retrograde, undermining the liberatory potentialities of fusion in her own films. A key problem for Neshat, as for other accented filmmakers, is how to represent the dual or multiple times, spaces, foci, and events of their lives and worlds—­far apart, parallel, simultaneous, discontinuous, and often dichotomous—­in a medium like film, which is ruled by the tyranny of linear time and narrative. Citing Sergei Eisenstein, George Marcus offered “montage” as a methodology that can not only encode multiple times and sites but can also self-­ 478

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consciously critique the realist and linear representation of the world. In the accented cinema, as in the multisited ethnography that Marcus theorized, montage may be achieved by the critical juxtapositions of multiple spaces, times, voices, narratives, and foci (1994). Neshat’s most radical strategy for achieving critical juxtaposition is to defy the tyranny of linear time and narrative by avoiding single-­screen presentations of her films. Her installations Turbulent, Soliloquy, and Rapture consist of simultaneous video projections on two facing screens. Regardless of what is on them, their oppositional arrangement ensures that they resonate with and against each other. They produce a “montage effect” for the audience. The mere exposure to the screens reproduces in viewers, in some measure, the duality, fragmentation, contradictions, and simultaneity of deterritorialized existence. For these reasons, her film installations represent a criticism of mainstream cinema’s realistic and coherent stories, as well as of its pampering of the audience. Neshat’s installations produce neither coherence nor comfort. In that sense, they are cinematically counterhegemonic. The juxtaposition of conflicting content and mise-­en-­scène within each televisual space further reinforces the montage effect. In this her works are progressive. Both of Neshat’s narrative films are literary adaptations, reviving in exile a key feature of the Iranian new-­wave and art-­house cinemas. She not only adapted but also collaborated with the author (and Shoja Azari) in this process. Both Zarin and Women Without Men are adapted from Shahrnush Parsipur’s magic realist novel, Women Without Men (Zanan-­e Bedun-­e Mardan), which contains the stories of five women. For Women Without Men Neshat concentrated on the stories of only four of the women and wove their painful private stories of suppression into the oppressive political fabric of the 1953 coup against Mosaddeq to create a rich and harrowing tapestry of that tumultuous time. As Neshat told me, “I occasionally called on Shahrnush for her advice, in particular with the dialogues because we [Neshat and Azari, screenplay writers] wanted to keep some of her sense of humor in the film.” In addition, Parsipur travelled to Casa­ blanca twice, where filming was taking place, and she gave a credible performance in the movie as the brothel madam. “We grew extremely close throughout the years,” noted Neshat, speaking to another dividend of collaboration in times of stress and of exile-­imposed atomization (Naficy 2010d). One of the four women is Zarin, a prostitute, anorexic, lonely, haunted, and haunting woman who remains speechless throughout the film. She is alone in the midst of a crowd; even when spoken to she does not reply; she crouches in corners and hugs herself into a bundle; in the bathhouse she scrubs her body so emphatically and furiously that streaks of blood run down her body. But her loneliness and melancholia are not passive; rather, they are agential for, like her anorexia and agoraphobia, these can be read as her silent but embodied protests against the patriarchal and sexist society of her time. The other figure is Munes, who plunges to her death at the film’s beginning in a breathtaking slow-­motion scene, in protest against her stifling life thanks to her overbearCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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ing and religious brother. However, she does not perish, for Neshat treats her jump not so much as the taking of a life but as taking flight. Released from her body, her ghost is alive, floating in the air, walking about, observing the living, and even participating in anti-­Shah protests and in Tudeh Party meetings. Although her silence and ethereal presence turn her into a weightless presence, that the film is narrated by her and from her perspective endows her with agency and gravitas. Toward the end, all the women escape from their varied stifling, male-­driven private hells and take refuge in a paradisical garden, where a kind male gardener comes to their aid; but even here there is no real solace for the women. As a result, the film, like many of Neshat’s other works, is profoundly melancholic. The chief problem for her in Women Without Men was how to transform the visual aesthetics of her powerful photography and single-­and dual-­screen videos to fit the single-­screen, time-­based feature film. She articulates this well, “I realized that I had underestimated the difficulties of pacing, story development, dialogue and many other related issues. In a film, you must never lose the thread of the story, and at times beautiful imagery has to be discarded as too distracting. The issues of comprehension and clarity are very important, whereas in art practice, enigma and abstraction are encouraged” (quoted in Heartney 2009:154). Her attempts at pacing, story development, dialogue, and narrative construction are largely successful, and her injection of surrealist elements—­what she calls “magic realism”—­imbues the film with ambiguity and interpretive depth. The other issue she had to deal with in this transformation was how to work with characters and character development. While characters in her photographs and installations are iconic, two-­dimensional, and, as she labels them, “sculptural,” she had to “learn how to build characters, how to enter their inner worlds, their mindsets” in film, an entirely new experience for her (Heartney 2009:154). This, too, she does successfully, even though unevenly, for not all the four women accrue an equal amount of interiority and depth. Neshat won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2009 Venice Film Festival for the film. Her exploration of political and religious oppression in the Iran of the 1950s resonated tremendously with the political oppression at home in 2009 following Ahmadinejad’s disputed presidential reelection, which some opponents called a coup, bringing with it wide international attention to the film and the filmmaker’s politics. A dedication caption in the film underscores the extradiegetic connection between the quashed quest for freedom and democracy in the 1950s and similar attempts that preceded and followed it. The caption reads: “This film is dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran, from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009.” This, too, is part of Neshat’s continual evolution, this time toward more activist politics.

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The Politics and Poetics of Representing Terrorism: Mitra Tabrizian (b. 1956) Born in Iran, Tabrizian received a ba in film and photography in 1985 and a PhD in 1987 in photography, both from the University of Westminster, London. Since then she has taught at Westminster while producing a series of elaborately staged photographs driven by the themes of her dissertation—­women, advertising, psychoanalysis, and theories of photography—­and three short films propelled by the overarching themes of male authority, female subjectivity and agency, female displacement, and the politics of terrorism. Her latest photography project, Border, consists of a series of photographs dealing with the subject of her films: deterritorialized Iranians living and working in Britain as refugees, asylees, émigrés, and exiles. Inspired by the self-­reflexive uses of nonactors and often true stories by some art-­cinema practitioners in Iran, Tabrizian creates not just photographs but “film stills” or “film posters” in which the subjects are both themselves and self-­consciously play themselves in a largely fictive mise-­en-­scène arranged by the director—­one that could be read as being in Iran or in Great Britain. Such doubling and ambiguity are part of the exilic structure of feelings and of the politics of location of both the subjects in the photographs and of Tabrizian. They are also part of the poetics and politics of accented cinema (Naficy 20061). Both her photographs and films have been exhibited internationally. Made in Britain, the short black-­and-­white film The Third Woman (1991) focuses on a female protagonist who is summoned by Ali, the leader of an Islamist guerrilla organization somewhat resembling the pmoi who is fighting the Iranian regime. While she has not met him before, she has secretly admired and idealized him. From Ali’s study of her file, we learn that the “third” woman is unattached, without friends or husband, and that she has been involved in several of the organization’s previous operations, performing decisively and loyally. In other words, she has been a good soldier. Because of this record, he has summoned her to London to give her a new and important assignment: the assassination of a high-­ranking official in Iran. During her interview with Ali, however, she realizes the extent of the antidemocratic and antifeminist sexual politics both of the leader and of his organization. She acts decisively and immediately again, but this time by turning the gun on the leader. By so doing, as Tabrizian told me, she deidealizes the leader and his organization, both of which use Islam politically (Naficy 1997a). In the process, she transforms herself from a mere soldier into a real leader. Like Ebrahimian’s The Suitors, The Third Woman uses a suitcase as a powerful prop to denote and connote the many meanings of this cathected object of immigration and displacement, including inspiring a childhood flashback for the third woman, in which her grandmother packs her a suitcase and sends her off to live with her father, saying: “You don’t want your father to forget you,

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do you?” Psychoanalytically speaking, this unexplored childhood problem with her father may be one reason for the adult terrorist’s problem with the organization’s male leader. Without saying so directly, the sharp edge of Tabrizian’s critique is directed at groups like the pmoi that, as noted in another chapter, generate much propaganda about adherence to democracy and the promotion of women to its highest offices. Like Neshat’s films and videos, Tabrizian’s works contain male authority figures and father-­daughter issues, adding a new category to the émigré genre of “daughter films.” Tabrizian’s films are more direct than Neshat’s. Her next film, Journey of No Return (1993), is an epistolary exilic film that, unlike the more common mother-­daughter epistolaries, centers on father-­daughter relations. It contains despondent letters from an exiled photographer and filmmaker in England to her father who lives in an unidentified country. Despite parallels between the protagonist’s story and Tabrizian’s own life, she denied in an interview with me that the film was autobiographical: “My father is more important to me than my mother, but this is not an autobiographical film. I am not trying to work out my relationship with my father. I was sick and tired of mother-­ daughter films then prevalent and wanted to upset that paradigm. Fathers can also be feminine” (Naficy 1998d). The filmmaker does not send her “Dear Father” letters, from which we learn that she was sent abroad as a child. Now, years later, she wonders why she is abroad and complains of forgetting the original language she knew and of not knowing the new language she was supposed to learn. What is worse, her film script is rejected by a prospective film financier because, as the voice message left on her answering machine tells her, “History is not what we are looking for just now.” Her deep sense of rejection and exilic anomie is illustrated by a haunting image that opens and closes the film. In the opening, attracted by the sound of running water, the filmmaker walks into her steamed-­up bathroom, where a woman’s long black hair is hanging over the full bathtub. In the end, the same shot is repeated, but it goes further: the filmmaker reaches into the tub and lifts up the immersed body to reveal that it is she in the tub, looking vacantly at herself. Whether these scenes imply exilic splitting, doubling, or suicide is not made clear. What is made clear, though, is that her journey abroad did not produce a home for her and that she has no place else to return to. A photograph of her father, or, as the voice-­over says, of “the father who mothered me”—­again echoing The Third Woman—­is on her desk. But she is not close to him, as indicated by her not mailing the letters; her returning to him is not an option. Unlike in Neshat’s doppelgänger video Soliloquy, in which the visually split worlds are united by the human voice, in Tabrizian’s Journey of No Return there is no such hope of reconciliation. Tabrizian’s vision is considerably darker. In her latest short film, The Predator (2004), a political thriller like The Third Woman, Tabrizian explores once again the psychology of an assassin on assignment as well as the psychology of disillusionment. This time, the assassin is a 482

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103 Production still from Mitra Tabrizian’s The Predator, courtesy of the filmmaker.

young man sent by “an unknown Islamic country,” and his target is an influential intellectual and writer in England (although there are no women in this film, the picture and voice of a woman intrude in the mind of the predator at crucial moments). In this iteration of the theme preoccupying Tabrizian, the suspense is that of hunter and prey—­but both are losing faith. The prey (the writer) has lost his belief in the efficacy of any political intervention, while the hunter (the hit man) is beginning to lose his loyalty to his Islamic cause. The question is whether this hit man will remain a soldier or rise to a higher level and become a leader like the third woman (figure 103). According to Tabrizian, both the third woman and the predator characters take the actions they take “not for a belief or an ideal, but because of lack of it. [They don’t] know how to live without an ideal!” (Naficy 2007d). These films are timely for our age, when desperation, impotence, and grievance drive young men and women into sacrificing themselves. In addition, both The Third Woman and The Predator play into exilic captivity narratives driven by the politics of the Islamic Republic—­with its stalking of its opponents abroad—­and by the pmoi’s history of “revolutionary violence” against its opponents within the Islamic government, as well as by other existential anxieties of exile. They fit well within the category of exilic panic films. What sets them apart from those films are their experimental, nonlinear narratives. The strategy of not identifying the terrorist group in The Third Woman and the Islamic country in The Predator gives Tabrizian a measure of political cover because of plausible deniability and polysemic interpretation; however, the danger is that it can also generalize the charge of terrorism to all oppositional groups and to all Islamic countries, playing into prevalent Islamophobia and Western mediawork’s stereotyping of the Muslims in the West.

Poking Fun at Everything, Seriously: Ghazel Radpay’s Performative Videos and Persona Like Neshat, Ghazel (she prefers to be known by her first name) led a privileged life marked by a series of physical and psychological displacements that Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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produced the critical distance, fragmentation, and juxtapositions evident in all her works. Born to a well-­to-­do family in Tehran, Ghazel went to the Iranzamin International School for her elementary and middle-­school education. The school’s teaching language was English, and the institution was closed down after the revolution, in June 1980, as a vestige of Western “cultural imperialism.” On graduating from a public high school in 1984, she was admitted to the design department of Tehran’s Alzahra University, where she felt alienated. As she told me, “There were people [there] from all around Iran, [from] cities I hadn’t even heard of. There, everyone made me feel like a foreigner, like an alien. I even noticed that I had a slight accent speaking my language. I realized then that I had lived for 19 years in a protected bubble [from which] one could not easily escape” (Naficy 2000:A).75 She moved to France in 1986 to study art, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual arts from the École des Beaux Arts, Nîmes, in 1990 and 1992, respectively, and another bachelor’s degree in cinematography from Paul Valéry University in 1994. Performative Art Projects The death of a close friend, Ardalan, in the war with Iraq brought Ghazel face to face with the cost of war, giving her her first subject for art. She employed black aluminum tulips in art installations both to mourn the death of the youngsters in war and to counter the image of the red tulip that the government was mobilizing to celebrate their martyrdom. She also created installations involving sculptures, photograms, and suitcases—­that familiar symbol of displacement that Ebrahimian and Tabrizian had also used (Naficy 2001a:261–69). For several years, she moved about European and U.S. cities, living provisionally out of her suitcase and making art. These moves made the suitcase a deeply personal motif that she used in her art as a symbol “of being uprooted and [of ] carrying my home on my back” (Naficy 2000:B). A seminal event was her involvement in teaching art in the mid-­1990s to immigrant and disadvantaged North African youths in the suburbs of Montpellier, France. According to Ghazel, art changed the youngsters, giving them hope, confidence, and self-­respect. This also proved to be a “turning point” for her, as it made her realize the therapeutic and social values of art—­a realization that she put into use back in Iran. In 1997, she taught art at the Correction and Education Center (Kanun-­e Eslah va Tarbiat) to delinquent boys and girls and street children of Tehran’s South End. This experience provided her with another turning point; she was able to finally set foot outside her social class and “be accepted the way I was” (Naficy 2000:C). In fact, it was so self-­validating that from then on she returned to Iran regularly, staying for several months at a time and putting on unconventional and controversial art installations and performances.76 In 1998, for example, she turned what she calls her “ex-­house” on her grandparents’ property in Mardabad, near Karaj on the outskirts of Tehran, into a site for the video installation Red Home Installation IV. Because of the death of 484

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her grandparents and neglect, the house was in disrepair, and an Afghani refugee family was living in it. These factors made the dilapidated house an apt site and its occupants a dramatic symbol of war and displacement. The installation included the continual screening of Wedding (1998) on a tv monitor, a short “mockumentary” that showed Ghazel in a white wedding dress with her husband walking through gardens, running on the beach, and swinging in a playground. The tv set and the framed wedding pictures on the walls were integrated into the personal effects of the Afghan refugees, as they continued with their daily lives during the hours that the installation was open to the public. A house in disrepair thus became “home” for a disrupted family—­disrupted not only by the family’s escape from war-­torn Afghanistan but also by the presence of cosmopolitan visitors from Tehran who walked through the intimate spaces of their makeshift refuge, while Afghan children looked on. In an exploitative manner, Ghazel’s Red Home Installation IV turned not only the ruined house but also the ruptured Afghan family’s life into art. It also skillfully mixed reality with the performance of reality, to the point that a few visitors congratulated Ghazel on her marriage before realizing that both the Wedding film and the installation were fake, a performance. While at nineteen her cultural differences had caused her to want to flee the country, her return at age thirty to Iran and to her ruined family home reconnected her to the country and its social realities. This national reorientation involved other personal reorientations as well. For example, the veil that the Islamic government had imposed on women had alienated the teenage Ghazel from Iran. Now, at thirty, she accepted it as “the reality of my country and a part of its culture, history, actuality. That’s how I live the veil as a woman in Iran” (Naficy 2000:D). This acceptance of the reality of the veil profoundly influenced its representation in her future films, setting her apart from the iconographic users of the veil, such as Neshat. In 1999 Ghazel organized with the aid of unicef a two-­month art project: a large mural conceived and painted by eight teenage boys on the walls of ­u nicef and municipal buildings in central Tehran. She recruited the eight homeless youngsters from among those living in the Green House (Khaneh-­ye Sabz), a municipal home for street children from throughout the country. She taught the teenagers the rudiments of art for three weeks before embarking on the mural project, which according to Khordad newspaper was the first children’s street mural in the country.77 The mural, which took some three weeks to paint, was unveiled publicly on the International Day of Children in October. According to the newspaper, the children were very proud that they had depicted for public display and enlightenment their unicef-­defined “right to life, entertainment, and education.” Although the art was rather primitive, the act of producing collective art for public display was self-­validating for the teenage boys (and for Ghazel). Some of the mural tableaus carried slogans that were political and seemed to directly critique the Islamic Republic’s behavior, such Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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as those stating, “Children must not be oppressed” and “Children must not be used in wars.” The mere teaching of the rights of children to them and the children’s public depiction of those rights was politically charged and modernist. The murals were considered newsworthy enough to receive front-­page coverage by the daily newspaper Sobh- ­e Emruz, including an interview with Ghazel.78 Reiterating her belief in the therapeutic function of collective art production, she declared that unicef’s duties should not be limited to “medical injections” that heal only the body but should also extend to cultural works and to psychological healing.79 Also in 1999 she put on a controversial performance (with the photographer Kaveh Golestan, the son of Ebrahim) in Tehran’s Golestan Gallery (operated by Lili, Ebrahim’s daughter). On the gallery wall was mounted a large photograph of a badly damaged dead body, half veiled with pieces of cloth that bore tally marks, perhaps symbolizing the massive number of people who had died in an eight-­year war and by government torture. These white body-­count sheets of cloth were also hung on other walls, and a few were draped down onto the floor. The rest of the gallery was left bare. Titled Chronicle of Void and Beyond (Gahshomar-­e Hich va Ansu), the performance involved the arrival into this space of the largest number of spectators in fifteen years at Golestan Gallery and their watchful waiting for something to happen. (I viewed a video of the event.) Suddenly, three people from among the attendees dropped “dead” on the gallery floor. Immediately, Ghazel and her associates took the white drapes off the walls and covered the dead bodies, while another associate forcefully asked the spectators to leave. Puzzled and bemused, the crowed poured out onto the street, lingering there for an explanation, which never came, as Ghazel and her cohorts locked the gallery doors and left. According to a reviewer who was himself “shocked” and bewildered by the experience, the audience, consisting of artists and intellectuals, was angry, sneering, and critical. The performance, like Ghazel’s other works, had evoked a “so what” response. Some felt they had been had and played with (Tahbaz 1999b/1378). Both the form and the content of her work were rather daring and unusual for Iranian audiences. In an interview later, Ghazel responded that many Iranian artists were producing decorative art for the market and that they failed to appreciate ephemeral art with ambiguous or complicated content that could not be sold or hung above the mantle (Tahbaz 1999a/1378). Ghazel’s performances, installations, and happenings in Iran were all “underground,” in the sense that they lacked the official permission generally required for such things. As she told me, “I never did anything with permission there” (Naficy 2006f). During her periodic stays in Europe in the late 1990s, she also engaged in various agitprop art productions, such as her Wanted or Urgent fliers and posters in various languages, which she created in response to the French government’s refusal to renew her residency card. In an attempt to subvert and critique the government’s immigration policy, she circulated fliers and posters in Paris, 486

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104 A poster by Ghazel for the 2006 Sydney ­Biennial, offering herself in marriage (all but eyes veiled) to an illegal immigrant, installed in the city’s central business district. Courtesy of Ghazel.

Berlin, Sète, Montpellier, and Stockholm, soliciting for a male citizen willing to enter into a marriage of convenience with her so she could obtain a new residency permit. The text of one flier, bearing a large picture of her, declared the artist’s subversive (and perhaps illegal) aim: “Urgent, woman, 33 years old, artist, Middle Eastern, without official paper, looking for husband, (passport).” The first person who offered to marry her was her friend, Jean-­Marc Saurel, whom she did not marry but whose last name she adopted for a short time, becoming Ghazel Saurel. She was eventually able to reestablish her student status, a status that she was basically forced to stretch out for almost thirteen years (sometimes by not turning in her final class projects to remain a student) until a new French immigration law allowed independent artists to receive visas on the basis of their art (Naficy 2001f). It took her almost a decade to receive a ten-­year residency card from France in 2003. Since then she has continued with this sort of agitprop art, keeping the issue of the rights of third world illegal immigrants on the front burner, this time by reversing the previous posters and offering herself in marriage to an illegal man (figure 104). During this period of engagement in art installations, performances, and happenings she also began making an extended series of what she calls Me films. The first two films were completed in 1997. The Me Films The Me films currently constitute sixty-­six short films (more to come) that run ten to twelve minutes each and contain ten scenes, each scene consisting of a single shot showing Ghazel herself performing a task that lasts from thirty to sixty-­plus seconds. Her total output then is 660 scenes, collectively lasting more than ten hours. These films are not narratively coherent, however, for each Me film consists of ten autonomous and unrelated scenes. Thus multiplication, repetition, fragmentation, and excess—­characteristics of late modernity and accented cinema—­are inscribed in her films’ formal structure. Despite their formal multiplicity they are coherent in their obsession with the filmmakCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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er’s self and biography, the black chador, and the contradictions of women’s lives under the Islamic Republic. Twenty-­four of the films were completed between 1997 and 2000, the remainder between 2001 and 2006. Almost a third were filmed in black and white (films Me 1 to Me 24).80 All of the films are called Me and are numbered. The numbered titles are for cataloging purposes only, as the films have no opening or closing titles or credits. The films’ only forms of direct address are captions, consisting of single words or a phrase, which usually precede each of the ten scenes of a film, and occasionally follow them. These are usually in English; however, they are often bilingual (English and French). These are generally brief and aphoristic, although the early films contain long and descriptive, even narrative, captions. An example of the former caption is: “Every woman wants to become a mother.” An example of the latter is: “I was playing squash with a guy called François once and he hit me (accidentally) with his racket. I had a checkered bruise on my face. That night I went to a Screaming Jay Hawkins concert. A lot of people congratulated me on my make-­up.” Many of the captions, like the second example above, are in first-­person-­singular form, referring to the life and times of both the filmmaker and the on-­camera persona—­ both of whom are Ghazel—­thus consolidating the autobiographical, authorial, and authenticating functions of the films. No extradiegetic musical soundtrack is used to either ease the viewers into the films or to ease them out into the world. In addition, no voice-­over narration or dialogue explains or propels the fragmented episodes. The only sound is ambient: street noises, crows in the fields, video-­game machines, and motorboats that are shown in the films. Nothing is added to the world. Such minimalism enhances the documentary feel of the films and creates confusion for some viewers, who have criticized her works for inaccurately documenting the situation of Iranian women. But these films are not documentaries and they are not about Iranian women in general; rather, they are bittersweet ironic and humorous moments, puzzles, aphorisms, sketches, skits, miniature tales, or visual asides conjured up, constructed, performed, and filmed by a hybridized filmmaker, who appears not to be at home anywhere. Like a worker ant, she is continually busy, as though compelled by some inner urge to set up new scenes, to act, to film, to express, and to narrativize her liminal position at the intersection of East and West. The Descartian dictum would have to be rewritten for Ghazel to say, “I film, therefore, I am!” (figure 105). The Me films are organized by two sets of juxtapositions, which produce their critique and humor. Captions are narratively juxtaposed with filmed scenes; the veil is juxtaposed with modernity and its supposedly incompatible features, such as speed, movement, physicality, performativity, technology, and individualism. Ghazel is the sole performer in all the Me films, and she wears a tightly wrapped black chador that covers her from head to toe, even dur-

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105 Clad in a black chador in Me 1 (1996), Ghazel emerges from the sea. The caption reads: “Every woman dreams of being a ‘Botticelli Venus.’” Courtesy of Ghazel.

106 Ghazel in Me 5 (1998), doing aerobics to a Jane Fonda exercise video. The caption reads: “My friends and I tried to lose weight over a weekend once.” Courtesy of Ghazel.

ing energetic physical activity, such as ice-­skating, downhill skiing, diving, and swimming. She has no name, identity, or history because she is not a character in a narrative that poses itself as representing Iranian reality. Rather, she is an agent, an icon, with which the filmmaker, as the enunciating subject of the film, thinks and speaks to the spectators. The Me films do not create an imaginary diegetic world inhabited by interacting characters—­a world that is posited as real by continuity filming and editing. These are direct cinema films in a new sense: it is not the documentary figure who speaks directly to the spectator without the artifice of fictional cinema, but the director, and the character she plays, who stage-­manage a fictional profilmic world, which is then recorded without fictional artifice (figure 106). The Modest, Imperfect, and Chaste Filming Process Ghazel’s Me films are “modest” in their diegetic content, as her character wears the most conservative and modest form of the Islamic hijab—­the all-­enveloping black chador, black pants, and black shoes. Likewise, her facial expression remains neutral and she has no voice. Because of their low-­tech style and ar-

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tisanal production, the films are also both “imperfect” and “chaste,” harking back to the politically radical “imperfect cinema” and “cinema of hunger” movements in the 1960s and to the Dogme film movement’s “vows of chastity” in the 1990s. This modesty and chastity are not in the moral sense but in the technical and production senses. They mean simplicity, minimalism, improvisation, and artisanal sensibilities and techniques.81 Ghazel filmed most of the scenes herself, using a consumer-­model Hi8 camera with an internal microphone and without artificial lighting. All the scenes are filmed on location, not in a studio. As she told me, she filmed almost all her scenes in a single take to preserve their spontaneity (Naficy 2001k). Like many avant-­garde and accented filmmakers, who are alienated by society or by personal choice, she makes her films alone and in a state of obsessive loneliness. She sets up the camera on a tripod, frames her stationary shot, and starts filming; then she walks into the shot from behind the camera and begins to perform for it. After the action is over, she walks out of the shot toward the camera/ audience, and turns the equipment off.82 She preserves many of these repeated walk-­ons and walk-­offs, which give her films a theatrical feel. The film frame is treated as a stage, similar to the way pre-­nickelodeon films worked the frame. This theatricalization counters the films’ documentary figurations. Occasionally, this do-­it-­yourself production mode results in imperfect framing (as in the circling-­the-­globe scene), in which the character’s head is cropped. She keeps these imperfect scenes to preserve spontaneity and an unpolished look. She told me, “I work impulsively (or eshqi), if I redo a scene it loses something” (Naficy 2001j). She later elaborated: “I do the pure use of video, the instamatic use of it. I’m too impatient for anything else; it has to be quick, like bezan o darro or zarbol ajali in Farsi [“hit and run” and “working under a tight deadline,” respectively]! That’s what they are. These films, like myself, are spontaneous, impatient, and talkative” (Naficy 2001d). Ghazel does not pay for producers, a cast, a crew, writers, or editors because she uses none. She owns her own cameras and edits the films herself, either on film school equipment in Montpellier (Me 1 to Me 7) or at a friend’s editing facility in Tehran (Me 8 to Me 24). The sources of funding for her films are her own investments, as well as grants from the French Ministry of Culture. She sold Me 1997–2000 to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the income from which she plowed back into editing the rest of the Me series (Naficy 2001g). If the Third Cinema aesthetics were in support of the decolonization and national liberation movements in the third world and in the counterculture movements in the first world in the 1960s, the Dogme 95 manifesto and Ghazel’s modus operandi speak of the concerns of late modernity’s artists with our contemporary era’s pervasive fakeness, excess, and simulacral cultures, as well as with rampant displacement. Like Zahedi’s films, Ghazel’s idiosyncratic, personal, and autobiographical, even solipsistic, films are her interventions into these discourses. They may appear simple and mundane, arousing the “so 490

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107 A blindfolded Ghazel in an execution scene in Me 9 (1999). The caption reads: “no comment (pas des commentaires).” Courtesy of Ghazel.

what” response of Iranian critics to her art installations, but on reflection, they resonate with gravitas, in discourse with these and other key radical film movements and cultural theories of our time. She taps into them without intention, but by being true to herself, she manages to make films about her times. By turning to the personal, like Zahedi, she becomes political—­cinematically as well as socially—­because autobiography, self-­inscription, spontaneity, imperfection, a small scale, nonlinearity, critical juxtaposition, and amateur aesthetics, which are so integral to these filmmakers’ styles, are critiques of the dominant forms of storytelling (figure 107). Ghazel’s avant-­garde aesthetics and artisanal production mode extend to the exhibition of her Me films. She shows them in galleries and museums on three simultaneous screens side by side—­as a video triptych. She stipulates that the exhibition space be completely darkened, with the monitors serving as the only sources of light (Naficy 2001b). The screens run endless loops, playing off each other. The viewers become film editors, for as they look from one screen to the next, they are in essence cutting from one scene to the next, creating their own mental movies. There is thus no single film, but multiple films mixed by different audience members. Here also multiplication is structural to Ghazel’s cinema.83 Her films have been exhibited in many cities and countries, including in Copenhagen, Zagreb, Santiago, Sharjeh, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, and London.84 They have never been screened in Iran. Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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The Autobiographical Pact and Diary Cinema One of the key characteristics of avant-­garde cinema and of Ghazel’s Me films is their faithfulness to what Phillipe Lejeune called the autobiographical pact (1989). Collectively, the Me films constitute a diary cinema that expresses obsessively the life and times of a single artist astride multiple cultures and societies. Diary film was practically nonexistent in Pahlavi-­period cinema, which like most expressive literary arts in a premodern society (except poetry) was deeply suspicious of self-­revelation, self-­inscription, and autobiography. With modernity and the ruptures caused by revolution and exile, diary filming emerged among Iranians, particularly in exile, Zahedi, Sadegh-­Vaziri, Gharavi, Ghazel, and Satrapi being outstanding examples in different film genres. But even among the filmmakers who practiced self-­inscription, such as Neshat, the technique did not guarantee autobiographical inscription. Exilic retrospection encouraged not only filmmakers but also ordinary people to go through their photo albums and home movies to discover their histories, sometimes creating amateur films or posting their home movies involving important historical figures on the Internet.85 Ghazel’s lengthy “artist statement” underscores these autobiographical dimensions: My work talks about the outsider I am in the West and the outsider I am in Iran. I make video performances that are in fact like a diary (self-­ portraits) and like a parallel life. I use personal anecdotes and experiences to illustrate myself, as a woman with a mixed culture, and as a nomad wandering to and from different “homes.” As much as I am alien to the veil (that is, in my point of view, the “reality” of my homeland that became a part of my life at age 15), I am alien to the English, French and German languages I use in my films. I speak all the languages I know (even my mother tongue) with an accent. The texts are as important as the images; they work together and are complimentary. I talk about being suspended between two different worlds and it’s my world that I show in these films. I see the funny side, the void, and the absurdness in life and in everything. I comment on the paradoxes of my life and of life. All the paradoxes that make me make my Me films. (Naficy 2001c) Ghazel makes her films herself, and she has based many of the filmed situations on her own experiences and on those of people she knows. For these reasons, her films fulfill Lejeune’s rigorous definition of an autobiographical pact, which requires that author (filmmaker), protagonist, and narrator be identical (1989:5). This is how she further described to me these autobiographical dimensions: “My films are like home movies, like moving snapshots, documenting my life, my mind, my observations, my ideas, my thoughts, my trophies, my fears, my desires, my souvenirs, my wishes, my experiences, my present, my past, my future, my emotions, my hopes, my passions, my energy, my feelings, my obses492

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sions, my complexes, my paradoxes, my identities, my dreams, my memories, my memory. They are my parallel life” (Naficy 2001c). Most early scenes were filmed in Iran, while others were filmed in Europe (such as the ice-­skating, weight lifting, ballet, boxing, merry-­go-­round, and Darth Vader scenes), and a whole series of later scenes were filmed in the United States.86 Many of those in Iran were filmed inside, outside, or on the rooftop of her family home in Tehran. The outdoor scenes elsewhere were mostly filmed in her family orchard in Mardabad or in her family villa in the village of Alamdeh, near the Caspian Sea. Yet these films inscribe not only physical biographical locations but also the upper-­class social station of the filmmaker, whose family can afford several homes. Ghazel’s class capital is further reinforced by several scenes showing her downhill skiing, water skiing, and ice-­skating—­ the type of expensive and Westernized sports in which average Iranian women rarely participate. Such inscriptions of personal, physical, and social locations consolidate the autobiographical and documentary dimensions of her films. They thus give the impression of being totally indexical of the filmmaker’s life. They do not completely map out onto the life of the empirical person named Ghazel Radpay, however, for she engages in various strategies of camouflage and identity doubling, something characteristic of cultural hybrids and accented filmmakers. Take her name, for example, about which she has held a complex set of feelings since childhood. As she told me, as a child attending Iranzamin International School—­a private elite school for children of privileged Iranians and foreign nationals—­she heard both the foreign students and the faculty continually mispronouncing her name, which disturbed her psychologically. Only when she attended normal public high schools was her name pronounced properly, as “Ghazal,” meaning gazelle or lyric poetry, depending on whether the second “a” is long or not). Such naming troubles introduced her early in life to cultural displacement and to the constructedness of identity—­key themes of accented cinema. She does not use her full name in any of her films or in her foreign installations (she does use it in her art in Iran). Instead, she uses the single name Ghazel, which is her first name, but misspelled, so as not to have it mistaken for a man’s name. The single first name also declares her an independent individual, separate from rooted categories, for Ghazel invokes neither her family genealogy nor her national origin (Naficy 2001e). This declaration of ­independence—­me instead of us—­is in line with and embraces modernity. That all her films are titled Me underscores both their autobiographical authorship and this modernist singularity. However, because Ghazel is close enough to Ghazal, which is the Arabic root of the English, French, and Persian word gazelle (as well as of ghazal, meaning lyric poetry), her name invokes romantic Arab cultures, not Iranian, and therefore confers a certain measure of exoticism. These strategies of doubling have served to create a personal myth and a mysterious persona. Her circumspection about her date and place of birth have Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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further fanned both the myth and the mystery. There is another mystery encouraged by her on-­camera persona. While she is extremely visible, appearing as the sole actor in all her Me films, she does not reveal much about herself, thus remaining an iconic enigma (like Neshat). She is wrapped in an enveloping black chador, revealing very little of her body; her face is perennially expressionless, giving a masklike quality to her presence; and her speechlessness reduces her presence to that of a visual sign, an icon of Iranian womanhood, not a person. Like those of figures in Persian miniature paintings, her facial expressions remain opaque and unchanged regardless of the activities in which she is engaged, whether she is sleeping in a cold basement, reading in a dry bathtub, making a Molotov cocktail, sitting in an electric chair, ice-­skating, doing aerobics, boxing, practicing ballet, or being executed by a firing squad. The expressionless face undermines the materiality and individuality of the diegetic character named Ghazel by subsuming her under the abstract collective sign of womanhood, the chador.

Animating Cultural Revolution and the Veil: Marjane Satrapi (b. 1969) When Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, became international best-­sellers (she rejects this high-­culture appellation, preferring to call them “comic books”), she received offers for adapting them to the screen. Among these were movie offers from Hollywood producers, as well as a surprising proposal from a television producer to make a youth series, based on the books, along the line of Beverly Hills 90210 with chador! She preferred to work in France, however, and she found her producer there amenable to her requirement to make the film in Paris and in black-­and-­white ink, using hand-­ drawn animation. The result of her collaboration with her codirector, Vincent Paronnaud, was the Oscar-­nominated animated movie Persepolis (2007), which charted through Satrapi’s childhood recollections the arrival and triumph of the Islamicate culture in Iran after the revolution. Ironically, this animated film turned out to be one of the most “documentary” and realistic narratives about those years, including the grim imposition of the veil, surpassing most of the published memoirs,’ documentary films,’ and fiction films’ renditions of those events. Satrapi’s account of life with the veil is rendered with incisive humor and insight, enabled by the distance, liminality, and hybridity of exile (Malek 2006). In addition, as she stated in a talk at Columbia College in Chicago (3 April 2009, which I attended), comics as a narrative art form gave her “the distance to tell the same horrible story in another way that is humorous and critical but not cynical.” 87 She used herself, what was happening around her, and who was near her to construct her stories, but she does not regard these as autobiographical; rather, these are “about what I know, what I saw, what I felt.” This freedom from strict adherence to the autobiographical pact allowed her to choose her 494

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moments and characters carefully to humanize Iranians while also critiquing them. She chose to deal with the topics that underlined “what Iranians shared with the West,” instead of emphasizing “differences that made it easier for the West to bomb them.” She wanted her readers and viewers to ask, “Is this person a human being? Is her life worth as much as mine? Does she have the love of country, pride of country, love of family? Does she like to play air guitar?” For her, drawing and animation, instead of live-­action imaging, contributed to her movie’s universal message because it removed certain Iranian cultural and national specificities. It allowed foreign spectators to draw abstract conclusions from them and to empathize with the conditions in which the characters found themselves. In addition, for her, hand-­drawn comics do not age; they remain graceful, humane, and sensual: “Animation by hand is like making love to a real person, instead of masturbating to an image.” However, for a solitary artist (and the sole offspring of her parents, born in Rasht, Iran), working with about 180 people for six months on the movie required some adjustments. Overall, it was a very rewarding and enjoyable shared experience, something she is reexperiencing while making her second movie, Chicken With Plums (Poulet aux prunes, 2011). A surprising and esoteric group of films and styles influenced her imagery and mise-­en-­scène, among them German expressionist films, particularly F. W. Murnau’s visual style and lighting scheme in such movies as Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, 1922), the fear that haunts the children in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), and the out-­of-­proportion fantasy figure of Godzilla from Japanese horror movies. What is surprising and insightful is not only the range of movies and styles but also that they were all part of the horror genre, as though the only filmic convention that could lend itself to examining the Islamization of society and the imposition of the veil was horror. It and only it offered the appropriate visual vocabulary. As a result, although she deploys the veil like other filmmakers and artists discussed here, her evocation of it does not affirm the imposition of the veil, its stereotypical iconography, and its unidirectional power relations. Why make films in exile about her homeland? Her response, with her characteristic humor: “If I were a man, Iran would be my mother; I would love her even if she was crazy. France would be my wife; I could cheat on her!” It is ironic that the release of this film that was designed by its directors to humanize Iranians and to create empathy for them abroad caused the opposite reaction at home—­one of the liabilities of accented filmmaking. The film was banned inside Iran. Further, in a letter of protest to the French cultural attaché in Tehran about the film’s selection at the Cannes International Film Festival, Farabi Cinema Foundation’s managing director Alireza Rezadad accused Persepolis of presenting “an unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution.” The furor was not only because of the film’s perceived misrepresentation of the achievements of the Islamic Republic but also over Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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the selection committee’s failure to select a film from Iran (for the second year in a row). Amir Esfandiari, Farabi’s director of international affairs, admitted as much: “The letter was actually about the lack of Iranian films in Cannes. If they’re going to select a film against Iran, we can protest why the festival committee didn’t select a film from Iran itself” (Jaafar 2007). The film won the Jury Award at Cannes in 2007, but the pressure from the Islamic Republic caused the cancellation of its screening at other festivals, such as the Bangkok International Film Festival, which is organized by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, a government agency. The film’s fate in Lebanon became a big issue, as it was tied to larger sectarian, nationalist, and geopolitical issues, particularly to Iran’s controversial support for the Lebanese Hezbollah. First, the general security chief (and Hezbollah supporter), General Wafik Jezzini, banned the film in Lebanon, apparently on request from Shiite clerics, who considered it an affront to the Islamic Republic. This action triggered “an uproar among many Lebanese,” including the culture minister, Tarek Mitri, who apparently “vigorously fought the ban,” which ultimately caused it to be lifted. The opposition was not only to the censorship of a popular movie but also to the Iranian influence, meddling, and “attempts to commandeer our cultural and ideological spheres.” 88

Exilic Veiling and Unveiling: Complicity or Critique? The visual artists inside Iran did not deploy the veil so prominently and realistically perhaps because they were too close to it and because it would be read as too political, subversive, and incendiary. Censorship would be the least of the troubles they would face. However, many artists in the diaspora—­and not only women—­who benefited from the safety of distance of time and geography, worked the veil into their art to create meaning and to critique its imposition and the government’s repressive gender politics.89 When the Islamic Republic mandated its system of modesty, or hijab, on women, including the wearing of the chador, it forced domestic filmmakers to develop a complex gendered grammar of representation for women, men, and the veil, which evolved toward liberal, nuanced, and resistant interpretations. Despite this evolution at home, the diaspora artists’ renditions of the veil continued to be surprisingly conservative and stable in the main, consolidating the dominant, even reactionary, Western stereotypes abroad and Islamist formulations at home. They simplified the complexity and bidirectionality of veiling, construing it as an entirely authoritarian, male-­imposed practice that totally victimized women, ignoring women’s own complicity and agency in the practice, the variety of forms that veiling took, and the diverse ways in which women strategically accommodated as well as resisted, subverted, or played with the official dictates on veiling. These artists tended to regard veiling as backward and antimodern, a belief they underscored by setting up dichotomous juxtapositions between veiled women and modernity to highlight the purported incompatibil496

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108 A photograph of a nude model wearing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s official black veil, shot against the country’s official flag. Image from “Patriotic women among us” photo series by Amir Normandi, courtesy of the photographer.

ity of the veil, and of Islam, with modernity. An alternative Islamic modernity, with or without the veil, appeared unthinkable for them. Shadiafarin (Shadi) Ghadirian’s exquisite photographs, for example, showed immaculately madeup women dressed in fancy traditional Qajar-­era clothing and veils, posing with an assortment of supposedly incongruous modern objects such as a vacuum cleaner, a bicycle, a Coke can, and a boombox.90 Neshat’s powerful photographs of weaponized and textualized women in her Women of Allah series offered another example. Likewise, the cartoons by the prolific artist Saman, carried by the Internet publication Iranian, particularly the series called Those Eyes, placed black-­veiled women in various humorous and incompatible situations, such as tanning at the beach, as a milk carton “missing person” mug shot, as a tooth fairy, as a stripper in a club, and as a suspect in a police lineup. Thus attired, women water-­skied and played basketball (the latter cartoon carried the caption “Chad Air”).91 Likewise, the Chicago-­based photographer Amir Normandi in a series of photographs juxtaposed the chador with aspects of modernity to point out the incongruity (figure  108).92 While such representations may illustrate what Daryush Shayegan called the “grating humour which derives from incompatibilities” (2001:10), and while by means of these ironic juxtapositions they critiqued the imposition of the veil and the oppression of women by the Islamic Republic, these artists also circulated a fetishized and stereotyped form of the veil, propagating the erroneous notion that Islam and modernity are fundamentally incompatible. Simultaneously and ironically, the diffusion of the chador iconography expanded the visual vocabulary available to artists. Saman’s cartoons and Normandi’s photos of veiled models demonstrate the gradual evoluCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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tion of the chador as an iconography that is no longer limited to critiquing the Islamic Republic alone but can be mobilized to comment on the diasporic contexts in which the artists find themselves. In her engrossing film installations, Neshat pressed the same juxtapositions to create irreconcilable binary worlds of bearded males and veiled females, often on separate screens. While formally rigorous and forceful, these installations ultimately reproduced the state ideology of gender segregation in Iran. Soliloquy also replicated the dominant Orientalist ideology: the East as retrogressive and premodern, the West progressive and modern. Ghazel’s Me films also partake of some of these strategies, but they complicate them. On the one hand, in her films the veil tends to exoticize women and homogenize them, robbing them of individuality, subjectivity, and personality—­their modernity. The woman on the screen is never explicitly identified as either fictional or real, with a history, story, or point of view (although if many of her films are viewed, an overall personality emerges). In this use the veil therefore appears to function more as a semiotic placeholder for women than as a realistic representation of women. On the other hand, the woman in the Me films is physically very active, continually concocting schemes, performing tasks, and displaying herself for the camera. Indeed, nothing, including the tightly worn veil, deters her from honing her skills, having fun, and playing around. She takes the discourse of the veil away from the official culture and its stalwart critics by demonstrating that while veiled, women can have fun and learn to ski downhill, water ski, and ice-­skate; that veiled women can drive motorcycles, excel at sports, stay in good physical shape, or become Miss Universe; that conservatively veiled women can be critical of housing problems, food shortages, war conditions, detentions, and executions under the Islamic Republic (as well as of the torture practiced by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, in her latest series on Abu Ghraib prison). To be sure, Ghazel’s films partake of the exiles’ mocking attitude toward veiled women, but they also contain genuine humor not condescending to female diegetic subjects, women spectators, or Muslim women in general. The same could be said about Sa­trapi’s representation of the veil. As a result, the viewers of Ghazel and Satrapi do not so much laugh at the diegetic woman or at veiled women in general as they laugh with them at the incongruities of their lives. Because both Ghazel and Satrapi are autobiographically implicated in their films, because the veiled women are active persons and not just politicized or aestheticized signs, and because the veil does not define them completely, their films have widened the narrowly defined discourse of the veil. The veil is not so much a metaphor as a real part of both the filmmakers’ lives and of Iranian society—­convoluted, contradictory, and contested. In addition, Ghazel’s inscription of her own biography and person in the films, her documentary realism, her aesthetics of imperfection, and her artisanal production mode ground her films in the specifics of the social reality of a specific woman named Ghazel Radpay, thus preventing them from flying into the weightless world of aestheti498

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109 Ghazel, in “Keep the Balance” scene of her Me 60, invokes American soldiers’ torture of an Iraqi in Abu Ghareib Prison. Courtesy of Ghazel.

cized abstraction, which is highly marketable in the political economy of East-­ West relations in the twenty-­first century. Because of their grounding, the films do not make any claims about representing the reality of all Iranian women or of all oppressed women under Islam—­after all, that is why she calls them Me films. Yet they are not straightforward documentaries either. None of this, of course, prevents viewers and critics from reading them as documentaries and then criticizing them for having failed to be all-­encompassing.93 It is their specificity that makes the Me films universal. Ghazel also expanded her visual vocabulary. In her later Me films, (numbers 30–41, shot in New York), she adopted an additional face covering, a gas mask of sorts, which further occluded her facial features but also offered a criticism of the air quality in the great U.S. metropolis. In several of these films, she also exchanged her all-­black chador with some other covering, such as a white bedsheet or a colorful bedcover, signaling the beginning of her exhaustion with the veil as a national trope and with personal topics. As she told me in an e-­mail (Naficy 2007g), “Autobiography is just a pretext to comment on anything I want to comment on. . . . In earlier works and scenes, such as the water skiing scene, I can’t deny that this scene is about a woman, and of course a veiled woman, even more precisely a veiled Iranian woman.” In still later films, she found a new vocabulary in news events. For example, the scene “Keep the Balance” in Me 60 (2004) clearly invokes the notorious photograph that U.S. soldiers had taken Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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in 2003 of the torture of an Iraqi prisoner, known as “Gilligan,” who had been linked to electrical wires in Abu Ghraib (figure 109). In these recent works, as she noted, “The woman is more a human than just a woman; it could be a man. The veiled woman is just a graphical element, representing a human and not necessarily or only a woman” (Naficy 2007g). Whether this move toward universality will rob her of the power of specificity remains to be seen.94 The veil remains not only a problem but also a problematic for filmmakers, as well as an agent for treating deeper philosophical and sociopolitical issues. This includes not only Neshat’s installations and films but also Shirazeh Houshiary’s sculptures, paintings, and films, including her animated film Veil (2006), which tapped into Sufi concepts such as absence and presence and visibility and invisibility.

Cosmopolitan Accented Cinema There were accented filmmakers, particularly veteran new-­wave and art-­cinema filmmakers Shahid Saless in Germany and Naderi in the United States, who disavowed any particularist subnational, national, or transnational affiliation or identity—­particularly Iranian—­in the interest of being recognized as stateless, universal, and transcendent auteur directors. However, under such disavowal lurked the complex crosscurrents of identity politics and the psychology of self and Other.

Dark as Tar: Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944 Qazvin-­1998 Chicago) After the national and international successes of his new-­wave films, A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-­e Sadeh, 1973) and Still Life (Tabi’at-­e Bijan, 1975), Shahid Saless left Iran in 1974 semiclandestinely—­he did not have the exit permit then required of all passengers—­by pretending he was an important director on his way to Germany for a major film coproduction deal (Sar Reshtehdari 1998:56– 57). The primary impetus for what turned out to be a permanent departure was the stifling conditions governing society and the film industry under the Pahlavi regime, which had put a stop to his production of Quarantine (Qarantineh), a film he never completed.95 Because he left voluntarily, as he told me, he did not consider himself in exile. Instead, following the German Jewish film scholar Lotte H. Eisner, about whom he made an affectionate documentary, he preferred to speak of his lengthy sojourn abroad as a kind of “long vacation.” 96 It is this conceptualization that allowed him to express neither remorse nor nostalgia, which are constitutive of exilic structures of feeling. In a series of interviews with me over a three-­day period, a year before his untimely death, he shared his candid thoughts about his life and films.

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I do not belong to the Iranian diaspora cinema. I left the country in 1974 because of certain difficulties that had been placed in my filmmaking path and because I was very interested in filmmaking, like any young person. I left the country voluntarily and worked for twenty-­three years in Germany without returning home, despite encouragement by the regimes of both the Shah and Khomeini to do so. I must admit with extreme sadness that I have no nostalgic longing for Iran. When each morning I set foot outside my house, whether it was in Germany, France, Venice, or the Soviet Union—­the places where I have lived and made films—­I would feel at home, because I had no difficulties. I am essentially not a patriot. . . . I think one’s homeland is not one’s place of birth, but the country that gives one a place to stay, to work, and to make a living. . . . Germany was my home for a long time. (Naficy 1997b) Despite this exilic denial, Shahid Saless’s critically dystopic and dysphoric films point to a deep undercurrent of exilism. The filmmaker’s self is embedded, camouflaged, in all of them. His successful but marginalized career as a filmmaker in Germany, his departure for yet another exile in Canada and the United States, are further indicators. In his nearly two dozen years in Germany, Shahid Saless made thirteen difficult films for cinema and television, some three hours long, most of them examining the psychology of social displacements, disillusionments, anomie, and alienation in German society. The inhabitants—­ including immigrants—­seem to be suffering from some sort of internal exile, a claustrophobic, ennui-­ridden existence, and deterritorialization in situ (Naficy 2001a:199–207). His Far from Home (In der Fremde/Dar Ghorbat, 1975) centers on the dreary, claustrophobic, and crushing life of a Turkish guest worker (Parviz Sayyad) in an industrial plant in Germany and on a compatriot who is lured into returning to Turkey—­a return he dreads and which permanently forecloses his dream of freedom and residence in Germany. His uncompromising Utopia (1982) deals with the painful and tightly controlled lives of a group of female prostitutes in a Hamburg brothel managed by a brutal whoremaster, while his last feature, Roses for Africa (Rosen für Afrika, 1991), focuses on the dystopic and fruitless efforts of an unemployed German worker, Paul, either to eke out a dignified living with his menial jobs and satisfy his upper-­class wife or to escape his humiliating circumstances by leaving for his dream continent, Africa. Like those of many accented filmmakers, Shahid Saless’s films resonate autobiographically, their despondency reflecting his exilic structures of feeling. There is nostalgia in them for a lost mother, while father figures are rare. These figurations have deep personal sources, for Shahid Saless lost his mother when she abandoned the family before he was two years old, and he was not particularly close to his father. As he said to me: “I saw my mother only once, in Austria, when I was eighteen years old, and we ended up having a fight” (Naficy 1997b). He has a daughter with a German woman to whom he was not Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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married, a daughter he did not see after she reached her fifth month. These fractured relations and profound loneliness haunt his movies. His most autobiographical film in Iran is his first feature, Still Life, while his most autobiographical exilic film is his last feature, Roses for Africa. Of the latter he said: “[It] is all about myself, even though it is an adaptation of a novel. I have changed the story a lot and, at any rate, Paul’s attitude and behavior are exactly like mine. Whatever he does, I do. I wanted to see myself on the screen as I am” (Naficy 1997b). What is this most autobiographical film about? It is not about escaping the trap of here and now by returning to an earlier home, as those in exile would want to do; rather, it is about the unfulfilled wish of people trapped in their own stifling societies to escape the trap for an idealized elsewhere, named “Africa.” As such, the film is about a home-­founding journey—­one that fails, like Shahid Saless’s own journey, or long vacation. Despite their manifest differences, all his films ruminated about the common dilemma of pervasive homelessness. Collectively, they constitute one of the most sustained critiques by an exilic filmmaker of his adopted homeland, Germany. In Far from Home he offered an undesired return home, in Utopia, a form of internal exile, in Order (Ordung, 1980) amnesia, and in Roses for Africa, suicide. Despite his hard work and accomplishments, Shahid Saless remained an outsider in the German cinema. Chief among the reasons were his uncompromising attitude, his difficult personality, and his demanding work habits (requiring working through an attorney since Utopia; Dehbashi 1992:205). Shahid Saless told me that he removed his name from Hans—­A Boy from Germany (Hans—­Ein Junge in Deutschland, 1983) because of the producers’ demand that he shorten the three-­and-­a-­half-­hour film. He refused. The film was broadcast without his name, until four years later, when he finally shortened the film to his liking and allowed his name to be used (Naficy 1997b). Other reasons were his minimalist filming style, his critical dystopia, and his bitter structure of feeling, which caused one sympathetic critic to label his films “dark as tar” (Ruhani 1992:229). Although there are numerous reviews of his films in various languages, Eurocentric film scholars in Europe and North America paid little attention to him, treating him as more of a guest than a contender (his films are difficult to find as well). Given the dystopic trajectory of his films, it is no surprise that in a sardonic short write-­up he would call cinema a “whore’s milieu,” one that does not do “much for one’s potency” (Shahid Saless 1988:56). The designation of filmmakers as impotent whores working in societies to which they do not fully belong and from which they cannot truly escape (like the prostitutes in Utopia) is a pessimistic but realistic assessment of accented filmmakers’ interstitial conditions. This metaphor became a reality for Shahid Saless in the mid-­1990s. Up to then, state-­subsidized funding helped shield alternative filmmakers (including accented filmmakers) from the vagaries of the market. As for the new-­wave filmmakers under the Pahlavi regime and early art-­house filmmakers under the Islamic Republic, economic dependence on the state meant that these Ger502

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man filmmakers did not gain a mass following because “government subsidy ensured that they never needed to gain one” (Kaes 1989:21). However, after Germany’s unification and the triumph of capitalism, involving media privatization, which profoundly transformed both Germany and its film industry, Shahid Saless could no longer make his type of art films. The transformation worsened the whorish competitiveness in West Germany he had critiqued. Unwilling to compromise, he was now not only an outsider but also a true stranger in a strange land, because of which he became more despondent and dark in outlook. Interstitial authorship takes a high toll: After Roses for Africa, for six years I could not make a single film. I had three great screenplays, which people in the know thought could be made into successful films. Unfortunately, one by one they were rejected by the producers who wanted films with happy endings—­the type of films I’d never made before. When all three screenplays were rejected, I began drinking all alone from the crack of dawn until five in the afternoon. At five o’clock I would fix myself a meal, eat it, and then make numerous phone calls to friends in different parts of the world. All of them would admonish me for drinking. After hanging up the phone, I would fall into a state of stupor until the next morning. I did this for three years. Without any films to make, I was totally undermined and vanquished; while when I was making films, nothing in the world mattered to me. (Naficy 1997b) 97 His refusal to play along meant that there was no place for him in Germany, even in its interstices. Roses for Africa seemed to have acted as a prophetic, proto-­ exilic film, foreshadowing his second exile and death. Unlike his alter ego in the film, Paul, who, unhappy with life in Germany and unable to go to his idealized elsewhere, commits suicide with a gun in a telephone booth, Shahid Saless succeeded in leaving for the United States, where he settled in 1995 in hopes of making his first U.S. feature. If for two decades he had felt at home—­albeit marginalized—­in Germany, he was uncomfortable in the United States, largely because of its history of interventionist foreign policy in Iran and elsewhere: “I do not feel at home here for I have an open account with America that cannot be closed” (Naficy 1997b). As in Utopia, the place of comfort was inside, in a nondescript apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles, where he lived with his stepmother, Farrokh Kamravani Shahid Saless (where our interviews took place). He was unable to finance any film projects, forcing him to move to Chicago, where he had to battle with a series of long-­standing illnesses, including tuberculosis, cancer, pneumonia, alcoholism, and ulcers, to which he finally succumbed at age fifty-­four in a sad, lonely, and bloody death in a small apartment, like Paul’s bloody death in the telephone booth. Mehrnaz Saeed-­Vafa, perhaps the last person to interview him on camera, described his last days to me. Shahid Saless lived alone in a studio apartment Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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110 Sohrab Shahid Saless before his death in Saeed-Vafa’s Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far from Home. Courtesy of Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa.

in Evanston. He had promised his friends to stop drinking alcohol cold turkey. After several days of not hearing from him, a friend, Mohammad Pakshir, decided to check up on him. When he knocked on his apartment door and heard no response, he called the police, who on breaking the door discovered a grisly scene: Shahid Saless lying supine on the floor behind the door, dead, naked, and covered in his own blood. He had had another bout of severe bleeding from his multiple maladies years earlier in Philadelphia when his stepmother and brother had been around to help rescue him. Not this time. The doctors estimated he had died within forty-­eight hours, declaring 1 July 1998 as his date of death, but Saeed-­Vafa thinks he may have died on his birthday (28 June), a bitter irony that would fit his films. The path from the bathroom to the door and the back of the door were bloodied, indicating that he had tried to crawl and open the door. His telephone, his lifeline to the outside world, had been cut off ten days earlier because of his failure to pay his bills. His brother had his body cremated without an autopsy and had the ashes mailed to him, so that he could divide them up with his stepmother. That way each would have something “to spread on water.” No memorials were held for him (Naficy 2006k) (figure 110). Shahid Saless’s profound homelessness and exile—­despite his denial—­come through in his elegiacally dystopic films, in the snippets of my interviews with him I have quoted, in the way he lived and died, and in the final film that Saeed-­ Vafa made about him, Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far from Home. What more than anything else turned him into an exilic figure, causing his successive departures from previous homelands, was not national belonging but obstacles in his filmmaking path. Cinema was his true home: “From the time that I went after film and became a filmmaker until today, I have not felt for a moment that I am Iranian. But that which gave me everything and was my home, my wife, my father, my mother, my children, my life was filmmaking. If one day they tack a red ribbon on my lapel, that says “Filmmaking Forbidden,” I won’t commit suicide because I hate people who do so, but I think I will die within two years’ time” (Naficy 1997b). While such an obsessive passion for cinema is peculiar to only a few exilic filmmakers, such as Shahid Saless, Naderi, and Luis 504

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Buñuel, the empowering function of filmmaking, which helps the exiles to cope with deterritorialization by creating new narrative homes, motivates all accented filmmakers.

Alone, on the Run, and Searching: Amir Naderi (b. 1945) Naderi’s more than two dozen features and short films made in Iran since the early 1970s fall into two groups: social realist action movies such as Tight Spot (Tangna, 1971) and Tangsir (1973), which formed the output of his early career, and lyrical, minimalist visual films such as Elegy (Marsieh, 1975–78), First Search (Jostoju-­ye Yek, 1980), Second Search (Jostoju-­ye Do, 1981), The Runner (Davandeh, 1985), and Water, Wind, Dust (Ab, Bad, Khak, 1987), which constitute the bulk of his later effort.98 While the prerevolution realist action movies inscribed outrage at social injustice, the minimalist postrevolution films evoked sorrow for a nation damaged by revolution and war. The films of the latter category used the leitmotifs of search, loss, and escape in ways that symbolized Naderi’s own search for a home. These brought him the lion’s share of his international reputation. His proto-­exilic movie The Runner offered Iranian cinema’s most graphic inscriptions of the desire to escape the homeland for foreign lands, what in German is called Fernweh, and what Shahid Saless’s last film, Roses for Africa, was all about. The Runner foreshadowed Naderi’s own permanent departure from Iran. The film’s visually striking narrative is almost entirely driven by the delight of Amiro (Majid Nirumand), an eleven-­year-­old boy, in racing against his street friends, moving trains, and blocks of melting ice. It is also motivated by his love for Western flight magazines, airplanes, and ships, which symbolizes his longing to be taken away. Born in the port city of Abadan, Naderi lost both of his parents before he was six years old. Orphaned like Amiro, Naderi spent his childhood in the Persian Gulf seaports where The Runner was filmed. The representation of seaport society as a hybridized “montage culture” between East, West, and the rest, and some key stories were based on Naderi’s own childhood. They were part of his othering and modernity: “At age twelve, I became aware of periodicals. It was in the cargo ships anchored in the Abadan port that for the first time I encountered film periodicals, and at that very moment I decided that I would go to the United States. Most of the films that I used to see in Abadan in those days were in English, and this attracted me to English-­ speaking people” (quoted in Haidari 1991b/1370:19). Amiro does not cross actual borders, but he inhabits a psychic and metaphoric border zone where the allure of escape and the pull of the permanent rub against each other. He is a liminal figure living in a liminal space-­time continuum (chronotope). He is between boyhood and adulthood and poised between Iranian and foreign cultures. He frequently visits the liminal spaces of an airport (between land and air) and a seaport (between land and sea), during a limCi ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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inal time of day (at dusk) to cheer the planes taking off and landing and to hail the oil tankers and ships anchored in the distance, shouting at them: “Take me, take me, take me.” Unlike Amiro, however, an alienated Naderi overcame his own liminality and crossed the national borders when in the late 1980s he voluntarily left for the United States, where he started a new phase of filmmaking. If Amiro has no family and no home and is forced to live in a makeshift room in an abandoned ship, the protagonist of Water, Wind, Dust (also played by Majid Nirumand) discovers on his return to his village that drought has devastated the village and turned the inhabitants into homeless bands of nomads scouring the desert like ghostly apparitions in blinding sandstorms. Naderi made four accented features in the United States: his Manhattan trilogy—­Manhattan by Numbers (1993) Avenue A, B, C . . . Manhattan (1997), Marathon (2002)—­and his Sound Barrier (2005). They are all about homelessness of one sort or another. In Manhattan by Numbers, a laid-­off journalist, George (John Wodja), separated from his wife and child, is about to be evicted from his apartment. He spends the entire film roaming the streets in an attempt to raise funds. However, even the streets and subways are not safe, as he has panic attacks and agoraphobia, and Naderi’s exquisite filming encourages claustrophobia by foreshortening space and speeding time. As I have discussed elsewhere, such agoraphobic and claustrophobic spatiality not only signal profound homelessness but also embody exilic panic (Naficy 2001a). In A, B, C . . . Manhattan, three women must make vital decisions about their home life and future: Colleen wants to be a photographer but cannot support her daughter; Casey is looking for her dog, stolen by her ex-­boyfriend, and for her lesbian lover who has dumped her; and Kate wants to break up with her boyfriend and start a new life. The film’s cinematography (by William Rexter) is stunning, as an inquisitive handheld camera doggedly follows the restless characters everywhere, with dozens of focus points in a single long take. As in his other films, there is a minimum of dialogue; visuals carry the narrative weight. In Marathon, the crossword puzzle master, Gretchen (Sara Paul), possessed by puzzle-­solving, takes no notice of whether she is at home, in the street, or on a subway train; while in Sound Barrier, the orphan boy, Jesse (Charlie Wilson), does not seem to have a home at all. Naderi’s characters are on the move, on the run, and in perpetual search. It is no wonder that he can claim that Herman Melville has been “far more important in his cinema than the entire course of Persian literature” (quoted in Dabashi 2007a). The mobile characters in his movies pursue their goals the way Captain Ahab pursued the white whale in Moby Dick—­forcefully, indefatigably, and relentlessly—­signaling larger epistemological, philosophical, and sexual quests. Like Ahab, Naderi’s characters also oscillate “between productive determination and self-­destructive obsession—­either motivated toward personal growth or propelled toward madness” (Gadassik 2009:9). Such obsessiveness gives his films temporal and narrative claustrophobia, while an enclosed mise-­ en-­scène and closed-­form filming and editing produce spatial claustrophobia. 506

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In Marathon, for example, Gretchen is oblivious to the New York she inhabits, for she spends the twenty-­four hours covered by the film in a frenzied marathon of solving crossword puzzles against her own best record of seventy-­seven puzzles. The walls of her apartment are covered with crossword puzzles cut from newspapers, and stacks of newspapers are piled against the walls, giving a graphic representation of her colonization and obsession by the puzzle marathon. Her obsession is Ahabian, so to speak. The film features other elements of accented cinema’s narratives, such as epistolarity. Gretchen leaves messages on her own answering machine about her progress in the marathon and her mother, an ex–puzzle marathoner herself, leaves helpful phone messages for her. Gretchen prefers to solve her puzzles in crowded public places where the city’s hustle and bustle keep her focused. Gradually, however, a sense of panic builds up as her deadline approaches and she returns to the quiet of her apartment. To offset the paralyzing silence, she turns on a tape recording of the sound of subway trains and begins to solve more puzzles. She is blocked; frustrated and panicked, she rips the puzzles from the walls, turns all the faucets and electric appliances on, and her dictionaries and books, which she keeps in the bathtub, dissolve into pulp, providing a graphic metaphor for her mental meltdown. By the 7 a.m. deadline, she has matched her previous record of seventy-­seven and exceeded it by half—­not an insignificant accomplishment. However, she opens the venetian blinds to a stunning and surprising scene—­like the endings of all of Naderi’s accented films. This time, thick snow has silently covered everything, and it is still falling. Amazed, she sits on the windowsill and for the first time in the film begins to appreciate what she sees outside her preoccupation with her marathon. Solitude is another shaping presence in Naderi’s cinema, particularly in the minimalist and accented films; it is also a feature of accented cinema in general. But this is not a forlorn, needy solitude; nor is it a despondent one, as in Shahid Saless’s films. Rather, it is a contented, competitive, and productive singularity; it is an autonomous, hermetic, majestic solitude. A scene in The Runner has a watermelon-­eating Amiro paging through flight magazines in his room in the abandoned ship; when a chick walks onto the magazines, Amiro gently picks it up and relocates it. This moment is emblematic of such contented, sovereign, majestic solitudes. Yet scenes like those in which he competes against himself while racing a train or learning the alphabets are emblematic of competitive singularity. Like Shahid Saless, Naderi does not want to be considered a member of a group—­a filmmaker in exile, an Iranian filmmaker, or even an Iranian American filmmaker; instead, as he forcefully told me in an interview, he prefers recognition as a universal film auteur: “I want to make a complete break, destroy all the bridges. I want to have nothing to do with Iran, my family, Iranian cinema, or being an Iranian exile filmmaker. I want to be a great filmmaker, period. [Pause] I have undergone a blood transfusion [no longer carrying Iranian Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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blood]. I don’t care about family, country, language, and the great poets like Ferdowsi, Hafiz, or Sadi. I have broken away from all that. I am here and now, and I want to make my mark on history not as an Iranian or an Iranian American filmmaker but as a filmmaker, pure and simple” (Naficy 1996).99 For Naderi, good films are those that tell their stories well: “Subject matter does not matter to me, but whether it is told well or not, does.” In line with his attempt at universalism, all signs of Iranian specificity and belonging are removed from his accented films and none of the stories or characters are Iranian. The emphasis on film style over content is inscribed not only in the visuality of his American-­made films but also in the way Naderi lives and breathes film, including the way he ends conversation, in person or on the phone, with the film director’s command to his crew, “cut,” instead of saying “goodbye,” “see you later,” or similar pleasantries. The roots of his othering reside deep in his childhood, when he was exposed widely and deeply to Western cultures, because his hometown of Abadan, the site of the world’s largest oil refinery at the time, attracted many foreign cultures, peoples, and products to its shores. His cultural transfusion began there and then, and it continued its subcutaneous work throughout the years: “My life today is with saxophone and trombone, not with tar and tanbur [Iranian musical instruments]. I don’t have the Iranian nostalgia, either for Iran or for the past. I don’t miss anyone or anything in Iran. I was raised in Abadan with the smell of oil refinery and the sight of ships and tankers and heavy industry; only a small part of my life there was Iranian. I knew more about keshti [ships] than about Kerman [a major city], as I worked on ships since I was six years old” (Naficy 20051). Perhaps that upbringing in a liminal and Westernized port city and his personal presentist orientation are reasons enough for him to claim not to have any regrets or longing for his country of origin or for his childhood. He presents himself as a man of routes, not of roots: “I am not a nostalgic person. If I leave my glasses somewhere, I won’t go back to retrieve them. I throw all my possessions away, the dearer the faster. Every year on my birthday I throw away several garbage bagfuls of my personal possessions, such as letters. I want to open up space for new things” (Naficy 20051). The desire of postcolonial and third world filmmakers such as Shahid Saless and Naderi from Iran, the Algerian filmmakers Mehdi Charef and Merzak Allouache, and Romany filmmaker Tony Gatlif not to be associated with their homelands and their desire also not to be ghettoized as mere “ethnic” or “national” artists in their adopted countries is certainly understandable. However, this disavowal of origins can rob them of ethnic and national funding, of pride of their collective audience, and of the stories in which they have a deep and abiding personal investment. In addition, as demonstrated in these volumes, in the vehemence of such national disavowals lurks an element of othering and defensiveness stemming from national shame and a perception of national inferiority. Despite his denials, however, for anyone who spends some time with 508

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Naderi it becomes clear that he is concerned with Iran and takes pride in his accomplishments both as an individual auteur director and as an Iranian.100 While two film titles, The Runner and Marathon, point to his competitive and nomadic ethos, two other film titles, Manhattan by Numbers and Avenue A, B, C . . . Manhattan, are place bound, highlighting life in Manhattan, which Naderi considers his true home. The latter two titles also underscore another of Naderi’s preoccupations: language and literacy, as vehicles of cultural value, human communication, and community formation. Deprived of literacy (Amiro in The Runner) and of hearing language (Jesse in Sound Barrier), characters reach out to the world and to others through their remaining senses and through their bodies, reinforcing Naderi’s materialist philosophy and ethics as well as what, following Laura Marks’s theorization, might be called his haptic visuality. Intercultural and accented filmmakers often turn to embodied forms of knowledge as alternatives to traditional Western narrative forms, which tend to erase or elide their minoritarian histories (Marks 2000:24–25). Fundamental to haptic visuality and embodied knowledge is synesthesia: the way visuality in the film is made to represent other senses. In a dynamically edited sequence in The Runner, Amiro attempts to learn the Persian alphabet not only mentally and orally but also corporeally. He has been deprived of formal education, so he can neither read nor write, a humiliating deficiency he is determined to correct. Standing on a rock against the crashing waves, he gesticulates, jumps up and down, and punches the air while repeatedly and rhythmically shouting the letters into the waves. The crisp cinematography by Firuz Malekzadeh and the incisive editing by Bahram Baizai isolate and punctuate Amiro’s corporeal learning. In his black-­and-­white feature Sound Barrier, the lone eleven-­year-­old male protagonist, Jesse, is literate, but because he is deaf and mute, he is excluded from language and sound. He is obsessed with these elements, for he is driven to locate an audiocassette recording of his mother’s radio call-­in show before her death, called Life in Fragments, in which she had spoken publicly about him. The search for the lost mother and the lost voice takes him into a massive public storeroom, where behind locked doors he finds hundreds of neatly stacked boxes on shelves, each containing dozens of labeled audiocassettes. He spends sixty minutes of the movie’s running time going through these boxes, first methodically and then chaotically and angrily, until he finally locates the right cassettes. Watching this long sequence is a challenge to any viewer. But his search is not over: he must find someone in that industrial neighborhood of New York to listen to the cassettes on his portable player and to say what she or he hears, so that Jesse can lip-­read. He traps a man on a very noisy, traffic-­laden bridge and offers him $20 to act as a translator, or dilmaj. The extreme close-­up filming of streets and cars and the punctuated orchestration of loud traffic sounds encourage haptic visuality, embodying the deaf-­mute protagonist’s feeling and communicating corporeal understanding to spectators. Amid the visual clutter of huge trucks speeding by and the cacophony of traffic the translator speaks Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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the words while the boy intently stares at his lips and places his hand on the tape player’s speaker for tactile hearing. Angry at the difficulties of the communication process and at the tapes’ brevity, he wrecks the player and throws the cassettes into the relentless traffic, a scene filmed in emphatic close-­up. Soon, the loose audiotapes gather like piles of moss, swept hither and yonder with the passing of each vehicle, some of them becoming airborne, creating a powerful allegory of Jesse’s homelessness and of his willingness to discard the only mementos of his mother and his history he owns. The boy eventually finds his way into a quiet suburb, where he gradually discovers that he is now able to faintly hear the sounds of the world, including a person whistling a happy tune, when his face suddenly blooms into a glowing smile. It appears that the mother’s voice and words acted like an acoustic mirror in whose grain the boy recognized himself and regained his hearing, becoming whole. Whether we find the protagonists racing against time and rivals to grab a block of melting ice in The Runner, digging the ground furiously to create a wellspring in Water, Wind, Dust, wrestling triumphantly with the Wall Street Bull in Manhattan by Numbers, encountering the tranquility of silent snow covering the world in Marathon, or discovering the miraculous restoration of hearing in Sound Barrier, the endings of Naderi’s films all involve the senses and the body, making his highly visual films also uniquely physical, materialist, synesthetic, and haptic. That these scenes of exuberance and ecstasy occur after prolonged and propulsive effort endows these endings with a certain orgasmic unity. The reduced use of traditional plot, action, and dialogue means that his films contain many fewer shot reverse-­shots and more long takes, all of which tend to create a corporeal filmic space instead of a psychological narrative space. In the Iranian accented cinema, the universalism of Shahid Saless and Naderi is the Janus face of the particularism of Sayyad and Allamehzadeh. It is easier to be polar and categorical—­either Iranian or universal—­to create hard-­ and-­fast borders between self and other, here and there. The real challenge and reward, however, lie in fighting for a hybridized, liminal, transnational, third space of being and working, which offers neither safety, nor security, nor clarity. These films’ solitary protagonists, who have discarded rooted attachments or have been discarded by society, are stand-­ins for Naderi. By means of relentless searches and prodigious quests they are brought into individuality and autonomy. The emphasis on lone and homeless individuals and on their dogged subjectivity, obsessive preoccupations, and profound pain provides the most sustained representation in Iranian cinema of the exuberance of modernity and its cost, ennui.101

After examining more than a century of cinema spectatorship and film production by Iranians, this book ends as it began, on foreign shores, but with a decidedly different relationship of Iranians to the screen, to the institutions of 510

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production, representation, and reception, and to the producing nations in the West between the beginning and the ending. Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi Tehrani, the first commercial film exhibitor, viewed movies for the first time in the Palace Theatre in London in May 1897, and during his travels that year through North America he felt utterly othered and humiliated by the powerful sites and sights of Christian worship and Western modernity. In comparison to these, he found his own culture and society so inferior and the differences so enormous that he was forced to admit that “the only thing that we do better is washing our anus with water [instead using toilet paper].” Tehrani was among the trickle of Iranian businessmen, tourists, diplomats, and students visiting the West. A little more than a century later, millions of Iranians are living outside their homeland in one of the greatest modern diasporas, from where they are creating dynamically intertwined multilateral, transnational, and multicultural communities tied to each other and to their homelands by a global mediawork currently consisting of nearly twelve hundred films and videos and dozens of satellite television channels, among other cultural productions. In the meantime, inside Iran, the film industry has undergone many turbulent upheavals, ones propelled by the forces of history, politics, ethnoreligiosity, and technology, but also by individual entrepreneurs’ politics of location, personalities, and authorial initiatives. The industry is also driven by commercial, governmental, and paragovernmental institutions, Iranian and foreign, which have transformed it from an artisanal cottage industry in the Qajar and first Pahlavi periods to a hybrid industrial enterprise in the second Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods. By the 1990s, the maturing industry and nation had placed Iran among the top ten movie producers by volume and one of the top new world cinemas in quality. Produced both inside and outside Iran, films proved to be instrumental in shaping and reflecting Iranians’ modern and cosmopolitan subjectivities, as well as their ethnoreligious, national, and transnational identities. Globalization, displacement, convergence, digitization, and the Internet have helped substitute the polarity of early modernism with the plurality of late modernism. Iranian exile satellite television channels and hostile governmental public diplomacy entertainment and news channels provided venues for the global exhibition of governmental and oppositional films and opinions. The emergence of independent countercultural satellite channels, such as Link tv, Free Speech tv, and Current tv, and of websites, such as Cultureunplugged and Indymedia, further increased the venues for counterhegemonic films and videos worldwide, including those made by Iranians inside and outside Iran. These films and their distribution channels also helped transform the vertical binary relation between a nourishing home left behind and a despondent exile with horizontal and multilateral diasporic relations with compatriot communities. Likewise, while for decades the defensive, nationalist, and corrective representations of the binarist type theorized by Fanon, Gabriel, and Said occupied center stage Ci ne ma of Displ acement or Displ aced Ci nema

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and politicized art-­house films, this gradually gave way to a more pluralist, auteurist, personal, and experimental art cinema under the Islamic Republic and in the diaspora. Multiplexity, too, began to enter Iranian films, in the form of various multiplicities—­multiple languages, characters, cultures, locations, and narratives (Naficy 2009a). To paraphrase Tzvetan Todorov in his treatise on the conquest of the Americas, in producing their best cinematic works, Iranians at home and abroad were able to achieve equality without it compelling them to accept identity with the West, while maintaining difference without it degenerating into superiority or inferiority vis-­à-­v is the West (1982:249–51). The gift of this “century of cinema” for Iran is that film is no longer considered a Western product or an import, but an indigenous art form and a commerce as Iranian as ghazal poetry, miniature paintings, carpet weaving, Islamic architectural design, classical Persian music, and taziyeh passion plays.

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A ppen di x A Iranian Films in Distribution (c. 2005)

Empire Pictures (www.empirepicturesusa.com) Phone: (212) 629–3097 Fax: (313) 629–3629 11’09”01, one segment by Samira Makhmalbaf, 2002, 135 min., 35mm

Facets Multi-Media (www.facets.org) Phone: 1–800–331–6197 Phone (international orders): 1–773–281–9075 Fax: 1–773–929–5437 The Actor (Honarpisheh), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1993, 88 min., vhs Alone in Tehran, Pirooz Kalantari, 1999, 25 min., vhs Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak), Bahram Baizai, 1990, 120 min., vhs Boycott (Beykot), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1985, 85 min., vhs Christine (Christine), Mohammad Jafari, 1999, 50 min., vhs The Cyclist (Bicycleran), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1989, 75 min., vhs Daughters of the Sun (Dokhtaran-e khorshid), Mariam Shahriar, 2000, 90 min., 35 mm The Girl in Cotton Sneakers (Dokhtari ba Kafshha-ye katani), Rasul Sadrameli, 1999, 110 min., vhs The Hidden Half (Nimeh-ye Penhan), Tahmineh Milani, 2001, 103 min., vhs The House Is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast), Forugh Farrokhzad, 1962, 22 min., vhs Images from the Qajar Dynasty/The School Blown Away by the Wind, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1993/1996, 26 min., vhs The Jar (Khomreh), Ebrahim Foruzesh, 1992, 100 min., vhs The Key (Kelid), Ebrahim Forouzesh, 1986, 76 min., vhs Laleh and Ladan (Laleh va Ladan), Mohammad Jafari, 1999, 37 min., vhs

The Last Act (Pardeh-ye Akhar), Varuzh Karim-Masihi, 1991, 110 min., vhs The Legend of a Sigh (Afsaneh-y Ah), Tahmineh Milani, 1991, 105 min., vhs Makhmalbaf: Unveiling an Islamic Filmmaker, Shapour Daneshmand, 1998, 66 min., vhs The Lizard (Marmoulak), Kamal Tabrizi, 2004, 115 min., vhs Marriage of the Blessed (Arusi-ye Khuban), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1989, 70 min., vhs The May Lady (Banu-Ye Ordibehesht), Rakhshan Banietemad, 1998, 88 min., vhs Nargess (Nargess), Rakhshan Banietemad, 1992, 100 min., vhs The Need (Niaz), Alireza Davudnezhad, 1991, 81 min., vhs Once Upon a Time, Cinema (Nasser al-Din Shah, Aktor-e Cinema), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1992, 100 min., vhs The Peddler (Dastforush), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1986, 95 min., vhs Prince Ehtejab (Shazdeh Ehtejab), Bahman Farmanara, 1974, 93 min., vhs The Protest (E’teraz), Masud Kimiai, 2000, 102 min., vhs The Runner (Davandeh), Amir Naderi, 1984, 94 min., vhs Saffron, Ebrahim Mokhtari, 1992, 40 min., vhs The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar Beh Mohr), Marva Nabili, 1977, 90 min., vhs Stardust Stricken—Mohsen Makhmalbaf: A Portrait, Houshang Golmakani, 1996, 70 min., vhs Street Life in Tehran, Saeed Tarazi & Saifollah Samadian, 1999, 43 min., vhs The Tenants (Ejarehneshinha), Dariush Mehrjui, 1991, 110 min., vhs Travelers (Mosaferan), Bahram Baizai, 1992, 90 min., vhs Trial, Moslem Mansouri, 2002, 45 min., vhs Two Women (Do Zan), Tahmineh Milani, 1999, 96 min., vhs Under the Skin of the City (Zir-e Pust-e Shab), Rakhshan Banietemad, 2001, 93 min., vhs Where Is The Friend’s Home? (Khaneh-ye Dust Kojast?), Abbas Kiarostami, 1989, 90 min., vhs Zinat (Zinat), Ebrahim Mokhtari, 1994, 88 min., vhs

First Run Features (www.firstrunfeatures.com) Phone: (212) 243–0600 Fax: (212) 989–7649 The Cow (Gav), Dariush Mehrjui, 1969, 100 min., 35mm Deserted Station (Istgah-e Matruk), Ali Reza Raisian, 2002, 88 min., 35mm Hamun (Hamoon), Dariush Mehrjui, 1990, 117 min., 35mm

First Run/Icarus Films (www.frif.com) Phone: (718) 488–8900 Fax: (718) 488–8642 Leila (Leila), Dariush Mehrjui, 1997, 102 min., 35mm Mokarrameh, Memories and Dreams (Mokarrameh, Khaterat va Royaha), Ebrahim Mokhtari, 1999, 48 min., video sos in Tehran, Sou Abadi, 2000, 52 min., video

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Women’s Prison (Zendan-e Zanan), Manijeh Hekmat, 2002, 106 min., video Zinat, One Special Day (Zinat, yek Ruz-e Bekhosus), Ebrahim Mokhtari, 2000, 54 min., video

Mk2 Distribution Phone: +33 (0)1 4467 3000 Fax: +33 (0)1 4341 3230 10 on Ten (10 on Ten), Abbas Kiarostami, 2004, 88 min., 35mm a.b.c Africa (a.b.c Africa), Abbas Kiarostami, 2001, 84 min., 35mm The Apple (Sib), Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998, 85 min., 35mm Five Dedicated to Ozu (Five), Abbas Kiarostami, 2003, 74 min., 35mm Gabbeh (Gabbeh), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1997, 75 min., 35mm A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1995, 78 min., 35mm Salaam Cinema (Salam Cinema), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1995, 75 min., 35mm The Silence (Sokut), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998, 77 min., 35mm Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e Gilas), Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, 95 min., 35mm Ten (Ten), Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, 94 min., 35mm A Time For Drunken Horses (Zamani Bara-ye Masti-ye Asbha), Bahman Ghobadi, 2000, 80 min., 35mm The Wind Will Carry Us (Bad Ma ra Khahad Bord), Abbas Kiarostami, 2000, 118 min., 35mm

New Yorker Films (www.newyorkerfilms.com) Phone: (212) 645–4600 Fax: (212) 645–3030 a.b.c Africa (a.b.c Africa), Abbas Kiarostami, 2001, 84 min., 35mm The Apple (Sib), Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998, 85 min., 35mm The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda), Majid Majidi, 1999, 90 min., 35mm The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi ke Zan Shodam), Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001, 79 min., 35mm Djomeh (Djomeh), Hassan Yektapanah, 2000, 94 min., 35mm Gabbeh (Gabbeh), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1997, 75 min., 35mm Kandahar (Safar e Qandehar), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001, 85 min., 35mm The Mirror (Ayeneh), Jafar Panahi, 1998, 95 min., 35mm A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1995, 78 min., 35mm The Silence (Sokut), Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998, 77 min., 35mm Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bu-ye Kafur, Atr-e Yas), Bahman Farmanara, 2000, 93 min., 35mm A Time For Drunken Horses (Zamani Bara-ye Masti Asbha), Bahman Ghobadi, 2000, 80 min., 35mm The Wind Will Carry Us (Bad Ma ra Khahad Bord), Abbas Kiarostami, 2000, 118 min., 35mm

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Swank Motion Pictures (www.swank.com) Phone: 1–800–876–5577 Baran (Baran), Majid Majidi, 2001, 94 min., 35mm Children of Heaven (Bachehha-ye Aseman), Majid Majidi, 1997, 89 min., 35mm Through the Olive Trees (Zir-e Darakhtan-e Zaitun), Abbas Kiarostami, 1994, 103 min., 35mm The White Balloon (Badkonak-e Sefid), Jafar Panahi, 1996, 81 min., 35mm

Wellspring (www.wellspring.com) Phone: (212) 686–6777 x161 The Circle (Dayereh), Jafar Panahi, 2000, 90 min., 35mm Crimson Gold (Tala-ye Sorkh), Jafar Panahi, 2003, 95 min., 35mm Marooned in Iraq (Gomgashtei dar Araq), Bahman Ghobadi, 2002, 108 min., 35mm

Zeitgeist Films (www.zeitgeistfilms.com) Phone: (212) 274–1989 Fax: (212) 274–1644 10 on Ten (10 on Ten), Abbas Kiarostami, 2004, 88 min., 35mm And life Goes On (Zendegi va Digar Hich), Abbas Kiarostami, 1992, 95 min., 35mm Close-Up (Nama-ye Nazdik), Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, 100 min., 35mm Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e Gilas), Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, 95 min., 35mm Ten (Ten), Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, 94 min., 35mm

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a ppendix a

A ppen di x B Film House of Iran’s Film Collection

President: Ali Mortazavi c. 1985 Ajal-e Moallaq, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1970 Ali Baba, dir. Amin Amini, 1967 Aludeh, dir. Esmail Pursaid, 1976 Aqa-ye Halu, dir. Dariush Mehrjui, 1970, English subtitles Baba Shamal, dir. Ali Hatami, 1971 Bandari, dir. Kamran Qadakchian, 1973 Bedeh Dar Rah-e Khoda, dir. Reza Safai, 1971 Biganeh, dir. Reza Safai, 1973 Biqarar, dir. Iraj Qaderi, 1973 Bonbast, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1978 Bot, dir. Iraj Qaderi, 1976 Charkh va Falak, dir. Saber Rahbar, 1968 Dalahu, dir. Siamak Yasami, 1972 Dar Emtedad-e Shab, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1977 Dash Akol, dir. Masud Kimiai, 1975 Dashneh, dir. Feraidun Goleh, 1972 Ehsas-e Dagh, dir. Rubik Zadurian, 1971 Emshab Dokhtari Mimirad, dir. Mostafa Alamian, 1969 Faryad-e Zir-e Ab, dir. Sirus Alvand, 1975 Ganj-e Qarun, dir. Siamak Yasami, 1965 Gharibeh va Meh, dir. Bahram Baizai, 1975, English subtitles Gavaznha, dir. Masud Kimiai, 1975 Ghazal, dir. Masud Kimiai, 1976 Gholam Zhandarm, dir. Aman Manteqi, 1971 Hamkelas, dir. Siavash Shakeri, 1977 Hamsafar, dir. Masud Assadollahi, 1975 Hasan Kachal, dir. Ali Hatami, 1970 Hasan Siah, dir. Parviz Osanlu, 1972

Hasrat, dir. Nezam Fatemi, 1975 In Goruh-e Mahkumin, dir. Reza Saberi, 1958 Javanmard, dir. Feraidun Zhurak, 1974 Kajkolah Khan, dir. Saber Rahbar, 1973 Kandu, dir. Feraidun Goleh, 1975 Khaneh Kharab, dir. Nosrat Karimi, 1975 Khashm-e Oqabha, dir. Iraj Qaderi, 1970 Khastegar, dir. Ali Hatami, 1972 Khodahafez Tehran, dir. Samuel Khachikian, 1966 Khorus, dir. Shapur Qarib, 1973 Khoshgel-e Mahalleh, dir. Iraj Golafshan, 1971 Khoshgeltarin Zan-e Alam, dir. Qodratollah Ehsani, 1971 Ki Dasteh Gol Beh Ab Dadeh?, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1973 Kineh, dir. Parviz Khatibi, 1954 Laili va Majnun, dir. Siamak Yasami, 1970 Mah-e Asal, dir. Feraidun Goleh, 1976 Malek-e Duzakh, dir. Amir Shervan, 1969 Mamal-e Emrika’i, dir. Shapur Qarib, 1974 Manham Geryeh Kardam, dir. Samuel Khachikian, 1968 Mard-e bi Setareh, dir. Azizollah Bahari, 1967 Mard-e Sharqi Zan-e Farangi, dir. Shapur Qarib, 1975 Marsiyeh, dir. Amir Naderi, 1978 Maslakh, dir. Hadi Saberi, 1974 Mowj-e Tufan, dir. Manuchehr Ahmadi, 1981 Mozzafar, dir. Masud Zalli, 1974 Naqs-e Fanni, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1976 Pashneh Tala, dir. Nezam Fatemi, 1975 Qafas, dir. Iraj Qaderi, 1974 Qaisar, dir. Masud Kimiai, 1969 Qalandar, dir. Ali Hatami, 1972 Ragbar, dir. Bahram Baizai, 1970, English subtitles Ranandeh-ye Ejbari, dir. Naser Mohammadi, 1975 Raqqaseh, dir. Shapur Qarib, 1970 Reza Motori, dir. Masud Kimiai, 1970 Salomeh, dir. Feraidun Zhurak, 1973 Samad Artist Mishavad, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1974 Samad beh Madreseh Miravad, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1973 Samad dar Rah-e Ezhdaha, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1977 Samad Darbehdar Mishavad, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1978 Samad Khoshbakht Mishavad, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1975 Samad va Qalicheh-ye Hazrat-e Solaiman, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1971 Samad va Sami Laila va Lili, dir. Parviz Sayyad, 1971 Saraydar, dir. Khosrow Haritash, 1976, English subtitles Sehta Bezanbahador, dir. Hosain Madani, 1965 Shab-e Ghariban, dir. Mohammad Delju, 1975 Showhar-e Kerayeh’i, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1974 Showharjunam Asheq Shodeh, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1976

518

a ppendix B

Sutehdelan, dir. Ali Hatami, 1977 Tabiat-e Bijan, dir. Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1975 Takhtehkhab-e Seh Nafareh, dir. Nosrat Karimi, 1972 Tangsir, dir. Amir Naderi, 1973 Taksi-ye Eshq, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1970 Tavalodat Mobarak, dir. Nosrat Vahdat, 1972 Tufan-e Nuh, dir. Siamak Yasami, 1968 Usta Karim Nokaretim, dir. Mahmud Kushan, 1974 Yeki Khosh Seda va Yeki Khosh Dast, dir. Reza Safai, 1977 Zabih, dir. Mohammad Motavasselani, 1975 Zanburak, dir. Farrokh Gaffary, 1975 Zir-e Bazarcheh, dir. Reza Safai, 1971

Film House of Iran’s Fi l m Col l ec t ion

519

A ppen di x C International Film and Video Center Iranian Film Collection

President: Bahman Maghsoudlou c. 2006 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Reign of the Pahlavi Dynasty, 16mm, color, 40 min., Beta, 1975, in Farsi Ali Qapu, dir. Manuchehr Tayyab, 35mm, color, 20 min., 1969, in English Ardeshir Mohasses, dir. Bahman Maghsoudlou, 16mm, b&w, 20 min., 1972, in Farsi Auschwitz, dir. Marco Grigurian, 16mm, b&w, 7 min., 1964, in Farsi Bamboo Fence, The (Parchin), dir. Arsalan Sansani, 16mm, color, 42 min., 1976, in Farsi Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak), dir. Bahram Beyza’i, 35mm, 1990 Behzad: Master of Miniatures, dir. Mohammad Qoli Sayyar, 16mm, color, 14 min., 1958, in English Bita, dir. Hazir Daryush, 35mm, 1972, French subtitles Broken Column, The (Sotun-e Shekasteh), dir. Hushang Shafti, 35mm, color, 18 min., 1966, in English Celebration of Shah’s Departure, 16mm, color, 7 min., Beta, 1979, in Farsi Chehelsotun, dir. Manuchehr Tayyab, 35mm, color, 22 min., 1973, in English Cow, The (Gav), dir. Dariush Mehrjui, 35mm, 1973 Dash-Akol, dir. Masud Kimiai, 35mm, 1971 Day of Qods, 1979, 16mm, color, 28 min., Beta, 1979, in Farsi Dilamani Dance, dir. Ahmad Shamlou, 16mm Downpour (Ragbar), dir. Bahram Beyza’i, 35mm, 1971 Flame of Persia (2,500th Anniversary), dir. Shahrokh Golestan, 16mm, color, 56 min., in English Flaming Poppies (Shaqayeq-e Suzan), dir. Hushang Shafti, 35mm, color, 21 min., 1963, in Farsi

Freedom After Revolution, 16mm, color, 60 min., Beta, 1979, in Farsi Friday Mosque (Masjed-e Jame’), dir. Manuchehr Tayyab, 16mm, color, 10 min., 1969, in Persian Harmonica (Saz-e Dahani), dir. Amir Naderi, 35mm, 1974 Hills of Qaitariyeh (Tappeha-ye Qaitariyeh), dir. Parviz Kimiavi, 16mm, b&w, 15 min. Holy Pit (Gowd-e Moqaddas), dir. Hajir Daryush, 35mm, color, 16 min., 1964, in French Iran during the Pahlavi Dynasty, dir. Jost Von Morr, 16 mm, color, 90 min., Beta, in Farsi Iran Industrial Progress, dir. Hushang Shafti, 16 & 35mm, color, 16 min., 1971, in English Iran Zamin., b&w, 20 min. Iran, 35mm, b&w, 21 min., Beta, in English Iranian Miniatures, dir. Mostafa Farzaneh, 35mm, color, 20 min., 1958, in English Iranian Modern Art, dir. Khosrow Sinai, 16mm, color, 27 min., 1976, in English Isfahan, dir. Hossein Torabi, 35mm, color, 9 min., 1974, in English Lover’s Wind (Bad-e Saba), dir. Albert Lamorisse, 16 & 35mm, color, 85 min., 1971, English Malek Khorshid, dir. Ali-Akbar Sadegi, 35mm, color, animated, 17 min., in Farsi Mashad Qali, dir. Naser Taqvai, 16mm, 22 min. Mashad, the Holy City, dir. Jalal Moqaddam, 35mm Minab’s Bazaar, (Bazar-e Minab), dir. Naser Taqva’i, 16mm, 20 min. Mongols, The (Mogholha), dir. Parviz Kimiavi, 35mm, 1973 Nakhl, dir. Naser Taqvai, 16mm, 16 min. North of Iran, The (Shomal-e Iran), dir. Zeyni, 35mm, color, 18 min., Beta O’ Deer Savior (Ya Zamen-e Ahu), 16mm, color, 20 min., 1971, in Farsi P As in Pelican (P Mesl-e Pelican), dir. Parviz Kimiavi, 16mm, b&w, 30 min., 1972, in English Persia 2500, 35mm, color, 17 min., in English Persia Faces Today, 16mm, color, 12 min., in English Qasemabadi Dance (Raqs-e Qasemabadi), dir. Ahmad Shamlu, 16mm Reflection, 35mm, color, 6 min., in Persian Rhythm (Ritm), dir. Manuchehr Tayyab, 16mm, b&w, 9 min., 1971, in English Runama Dance (Raqs-e Runama), dir. Hushang Shafti, 35mm, color, 18 min., 1971, in English Runner, The (Davander), dir. Amir Naderi, 35mm, 1985 Shah of Iran, The, 16mm, color, 51 min., in English Shah’s Coronation, The, 16mm, b&w, 40 min., in Farsi. Produced by nirt Shah’s Coronation, The, dir. Shahrokh Golestan, 16mm, color, 40 min., in Farsi Shah’s Coronation, The, dir. Shahrokh Golestan, 16mm, color, 46 min., in English Shah’s Coronation, The, dir. Shahrokh Golestan, 35mm, color, 23 min., in English Shah’s Wedding, 16mm, b&w, 14 min., Beta, in Farsi Shaikh Lotfollah Mosque (Masjed-e Shaikh Lotfollah), dir. Manuchehr Tayyab, 35mm, color, 15 min., 1972, in English Shiraz Art Festival (Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz), dir. Naser Taqvai, 16mm, color, 27 min., 1971, in Farsi Sorcerer’s Wind (Bad-e Jen), dir. Naser Taqva’i, 16mm, 20 min.

I nt ernat ional Film and Vi deo Cent er Col l ec t ion

521

Still Life (Tabiat-e Bijan), dir. Sohrab Shahid-Sales, 35mm, 1974 Stone Garden, The (Bagh Sangi), dir. Parviz Kimiavi, 35mm, 1976, German subtitles Stranger and the Fog, The (Gharibeh Va Meh), dir. Bahram Baizai, 35mm, 1974 Sword Dance (Raqs-e Shamshir), dir. Naser Taqvai, 16mm, 20 min. Tangsir, dir. Amir Naderi, 35mm, 1973 Tehran Refinery, dir. Hushang Kavusi, 35mm, 45 min. Tehran Today, dir. Ahmad Faruqi Qajar, 35mm, 30 min., in English Tehran Today, dir. Ahmad Faruqi Qajar, 35mm, b&w, 22 min., Beta, 1962, in English Texture of Wool (Qali), dir. Hushang Shafti, 16mm, color, 12 min., 1971, in Farsi Topoli (Mice and Men), dir. Reza Mirlowhi, 35mm, 1971 Tourism in Iran, dir. Khosrow Sinai, 35mm, color, 17 min., Beta, in English Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Aramesh dar Hozur-e Digaran), dir. Naser Taqvai, 35mm, 1971, in Farsi Views of Iran (Manazer-e Iran), 16mm, color, 19 min., Beta, in English Waiting (Entezar), dir. Amir Naderi, 16mm, color, 60 min. Water, Wind, Sand (Ab, Bad, khak), dir. Amir Naderi, 35mm, 1986 Zar, dir. Naser Taqvai, 16mm, 20 min.

522

a ppendix C

No t es

Chapter 1: The Resurgence of Nonfiction Cinema: Postrevolutionary Documentaries and Fiction War Films 1 The founding members of the isdf were the veteran documentary filmmakers Mohammad Tahaminejad, Ebrahim Mokhtari, and Pirooz Kalantari. The society’s website is http://www.irandocfilm.org (last accessed 28 December 2011). 2 For the Week of Iranian Documentary Cinema in 2004, the society published a sixty-­four-­page illustrated booklet, From Cinématographe to Digital Cinema, charting the history of documentary cinema in Iran from the beginning. Throughout the years the isdf also published other booklets about Western documentaries and newsreels in the Iranian archives (Tahaminejad 2004a, 2004b). Among the international film festivals with which it placed Iranian documentaries is the prestigious Cinéma du Réel Festival devoted to ethnographic and sociologic films, held at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in March 2003. 3 This is taken from the aidfp’s mission statement on its website at http://www .iranshad.com/irandoc, which is no longer in operation. 4 Taken from the new aidfp site: http://www.irandocproducers.com/ (last accessed 28 December 2011). 5 The pamphlet is called Regulations and Procedures Governing Sponsoring the Production and Exhibition of Documentary, Experimental, and Animated Films (Zavabet va Raveshha-­ye Ejrai dar Barnamehha-­ye Hemayati Marbut beh Towlid va Arzeh-­ye Filmha-­ye Mostanad, Tajrebi, and Animaishen). 6 Of significance is the Sixth Biennial Conference of Iranian Studies, held in August 2006 at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, which included the screening of an impressive thirty-­three old and new documentaries by Iranians and others about Iran, under the rubric “Documenting Iran.” For the list of the films (most of which are discussed in these volumes), see http://www .iranheritage.org/sixthbiennial/filmprogramme.html (last accessed 28  December 2011). 7 For the latest perspectives and publications about documentary films, see P ­ eyk-­e Mostanad, http://www.peykemostanad.com; Film-­e Kutah, http://fa.shortfilm news.com; and Vamostanad, http://vamostanad.com (all sites last accessed 28 December 2011).

8 Years later, in mid-­2005, the Shiite-­dominated government following that of Saddam Hussein admitted for the first time that Iraq had been the aggressor in the war (Tavernise 2005). 9 “Basij-­e Emkanat-­e Filmsazi dar Khedmat-­e jang,” msf, no. 37 (1986 / 1365), 6–7. 10 According to Mohammad Soleimani, between 1980 and 1999 just more than 70 war films were produced (2002a:38). Massoud Farasati in a later publication lists 193 feature war movies produced between 1980 and 2004 (2004 / 1382:102–5). It is hard to pin down the precise output, as critics and historians use different and sometimes ambiguous criteria for their statistics and for their definitions of what constitutes a war film. Some count both fiction and nonfiction films, others only one of these categories; some consider war films only those that deal directly with war, while others include those that deal with the effects of war on society as well. For filmographies of war movies, see Soleimani 2002a, 2002b; Dorri Akhavi 1992 / 1371; and Farasati 2004 / 1382. 11 “The War Movies of Iran,” Iran, 19 September 1995, 12. This article contains a list of directors and films. See also http://www.netiran.com. 12 “Ettelaiyeh-­ye Hey’at-­e Davaran,” msf, no. 7 (1983 / 1362), 11. 13 “Sinema-­ye Iran va Hafteh-­ye Jang,” msf, no. 5 (1983 / 1362), 4–5. 14 “Sinema Dar Hafteh-­ye Jang,” msf, no. 18 (1984 / 1363), 12. 15 For a graphic account of one of the television group’s coverage of the war, headed by the filmmaker, novelist, and actor Zakaria Hashemi, see Hashemi 2004. 16 “Ba Durbin, Dar Sangar . . . ,” msf, no. 17 (1984 / 1363), 12–13, 48. 17 According to Index on Censorship (3, no. 2 [1984], 46), between September 1980 and April 1984, twenty-­nine Iranian journalists, photographers, and film crew were killed in the war with Iraq. 18 “‘Chehel Shahed’: Shahedan-­e Bidar va Hamisheh Hazer-­e Jebhehha,” Ettela’at, 21 February 1988 / 2 Esfand 1366. This brief article contains pictures and identities of the ten cameramen martyrs and people missing in action. 19 Around the same time, Niknejad directed another pro-­war film for vvir, The Pain of My Fellow Trench Man, aka Barricade (Dard-­e Hamsangaram, 1981), in which he compared the life of young soldiers fighting on the Iraqi front to the leisurely life of young people in Tehran’s rich North End. He also directed, with Amir Qavidel, an anti-­Shah feature, Bloody Rice (Berenj-­e Khunin, 1981). Before long, however, Niknejad emigrated to the United States, where in 1989 he obtained a master of fine arts in film production from the California Institute of the Arts. Since then, he has successfully transitioned to mainstream Hollywood studios and television networks, where he has served on films as executive producer, director, producer, line producer, director of photography, and editor. 20 Alongside amateur films, there were professionally made war documentaries such as We Are Alive . . . (Ma Zendeh Az Anim . . . , 1984) by Bozorgmehr Rafia, a graduate of ucla film school, made for mcig, which through slick aerial filming and rhythmic editing created a dynamic visual representation of the war. 21 “Salshomar-­e Sinema-­ye Pas as Enqelab—­6, 1359,” msf, no. 18 (1984 / 1363), 45. 22 For a discussion of religious cinema, Islamicate cinema, and spirituality in Iranian cinema, see Erfani 2012; Pak-­Shiraz 2011; Lashgaripur 2002 / 1381; Soleimani 2002a, 2002b; Farasati 2000a / 1379, 2000b / 1379, 2000c / 1379; Fazlinezhad 2000 / 1379; Jabbaran 1999 / 1378; Arjomand 1997 / 1376; Razzazifar 1998 / 

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1377; Sazman-­e Tabliqat-­e Eslami 1998 / 1377; Avini 1997 / 1375, 1996 / 1375; Amoli 1996 / 1375; and Madadpur 2005 / 1384, 1994 / 1373. 23 Ravayat-­e Shaidai, a pamphlet containing Avini’s biography and filmography, was published in Tehran by Moaseseh-­ye Farhangi-­ye Ravayat-­e Fath. 24 These narrations are collected in Avini 1996 / 1375. 25 According to Mohammad Sadri, who with Avini codirected The Haj Asdollah Bridge (Pol-­e Haj Asdollah, 1987), Moradinasab and his crew had gone ahead of the military unit in which they were embedded when they confronted the enemy. One of Chronicle of Victory’s films, Reza, is about this incident (Sadri 1995 /  1374:59). Moradinasab was one of the soundmen on Operation Valfajr 8 and The Road, while Dalai filmed both of these episodes. 26 The Road was broadcast as part of the third series of Chronicle of Victory, program 2. 27 For their names, see Avini 1992b:45. 28 On Avini as an auteur director emphasizing his last film A City in the Sky (Shahri dar Aseman), see Karimabadi 2009. For an extensive website devoted to Avini’s works and to works about him, see http://www.aviny.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). In 2009, the visual anthropologist Pedram Khosrownejad created the Avini Collection at Saint Andrews University, Scotland, which contains 1,800 books on different aspects of the Iran-­Iraq War and over 200 hours of films. 29 The iatc was a major producer of war films, making about one hundred altogether. Some forty of these were about the war, nineteen of them features (Farasati 2000c / 1379:140). 30 Other key war film directors were Rasul Mollaqolipur, Kamal Tabrizi, Kambuzia Partovi, Ahmadreza Darvish, Jamal Shorjeh, and Masud Dehnamaki, most of whom made both documentaries and fiction films. 31 Notable among war comedies is the trilogy The Deported (Ekhrajiha, 2007–2011), directed by Masud Dehnamaki, a zealous Islamist filmmaker. 32 See the chapters by Arash Khoshkhu (53–60), Majid Mohammadi (61–70), Ramin Haidari Faruqi (71–80), Hamid Reza Sadr (97–110), and Robert Safarian (160– 170) in Farasati 2000b / 1379. 33 An indication of how important the war has been to Hatamikia’s life and career is provided by his official website, which displays his military dog tag as the only image on its first page; see http://www.sasite.net/hatamikia (last accessed 28 December 2011). 34 Iraq extensively employed chemical and biological agents against Iranian forces. For the history of such uses and their physical and psychological effects, see Omid Ruhani’s chapter in Farasati 2000b / 1379 (265–75). 35 For a sampling of these debates, see “Posht-­e in Khaneh-­ye Shishehi,” Hamshahri, 9 September 1998 / 18 Shahrivar 1377, and Hamshahri, 15 September 1998 / 24 Shahrivar 1377; “Parvandeh Azhans-­e Shishehi: Dahha Goftogu Naqd va Yaddashtha-­ye Ekhtesasi-­ye Motafavet,” Sinema 7, no. 327 (1998 / 31 1377), 5–14. 36 For further readings on Hatamikia’s films and career, see Moazezinia 1997 / 1376; Farasati 2000a / 1379, 2000b / 1379. 37 “In Hameh Vaqe’iyat Nist,” Enqelab-­e Eslami, 8 June 1980 / 20 Khordad 1359. 38 On Naderi as an exilic filmmaker, see Naficy 2001a. 39 In the 1950s, a famous hangout for intellectuals and dandies in Isfahan was Polonia Café, which must have belonged to these Polish immigrants.

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40 A nearly eight-­minute trailer of the film containing the director’s voice-­over explanation of the film is available at http://www.jadidonline.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). Sinai also made “On the Borderline” (1991), an episode of a four-­part, half-­hour series, made by Middle Eastern directors on the “Gulf War” of 1991, broadcast in April by the bbc. His film was on the Iraqi Kurdish refugees and on displaced persons near Iran during the war. 41 For more on the dynamics of self and other involving gender, language, and national identity in Bashu, see Rahimieh 2002. 42 Although at the manifest level the film claims that the husband is on a job search, it leads the spectators to favor a latent and subversive interpretation, which places the husband on the war front with Iraq. When toward the film’s end he returns to Nai, he is missing an arm, which the spectators could interpret as having been lost either to an industrial work accident or to an injury in the war. 43 “Aya Shadbudan Mamnu’ Ast?,” Par no. 86 (1993 / 1371), 42–44. 44 “Sinema dar Hafteh,” Tous, 21 August 1998, http://www.neda.et/tous. 45 For more on Fatemeh Motamed Arya’s films and career, see Qukasian 2004 / 1383. 46 For Shahla Haeri’s film see her distributor, Films in the Humanities & Sciences, http://ffh.films.com/search.aspx?q=shahla+haeri. 47 For a whimsical fiction movie about the elections on an island, see Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot (Ra’y-­e Makhfi, 2001), which has a soldier guarding a deserted beach being surprised by an electoral box parachuted from the sky and by a young female election worker arriving by boat to administer the voting in nearby villages. Duty bids him to escort her (unwillingly) with his rifle and army Jeep across the desert as she insists (doggedly) on collecting all the secret ballots, including his. She is educated, assertive, and in charge, while the male solider is defensive, undereducated, and must follow her orders. Like many recent art cinema films, the central character is dogged in her aims, and the film couches its social criticism in the guise of humorous, absurd, and surrealistic situations. By nightfall, the young soldier has learned not only a lesson in democracy but also in human relations. By the film’s end the word secret has acquired not only a political meaning, as in secret voting, but also a private meaning, as in personal love between the soldier and the election worker. 48 To view the film, go to http://payvand.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). 49 This film should not be confused with another with an almost identical title, Stories of the Island (Qessehha-­ye Jazireh, 1999), a tripartite omnibus film consisting of Naser Taqvai’s The Greek Boat, Abolfazl Jalili’s The Ring, and Mohsen Makh­ mal­baf ’s The Door. 50 “Rafsanjani’s Publicity Stunt Turns Into a Flop,” Iran Focus, 16 June 2005, http:// www.iranfocus.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). 51 The film can be seen on Iranian, http://www.iranian.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). 52 “Dar Baiqulehha,” Khabarnameh-­ye Farhangi-­Ejtemai [Zamimehye Andisheh va Pay­kar no. 2] (April 1989/Farvardin 1368), 17. 53 Another valuable feature film dealing with housing problems is the drama Cardboard Hotel (Hotel Karton, 1997) by Cyrus Alvand. 54 The third film in this series is Feraidun Javadi’s Housing and Urban Lands (Maskan va Arazi-­ye Shahri, 1982).

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55 There were also fiction movies about soccer, such as Jafar Panahi’s insightful Offside (Ofseid, 2006), the germ for which was sown when officials did not permit the director to take his twelve-­year-­old daughter into a soccer stadium to watch a match, only to have her sneak in. This film was shown at a festival and then banned. During the World Cup games in South Africa in 2010, Tehran movie houses screened the games live to female audiences, who, taking advantage of being surrounded by only women, displayed wild enthusiasm for their favorite teams, including the removal of head scarves, causing the website IranDokht to characterize it as “revenge of the stadium ban in the movie house” (http://www .irandokht.com; accessed 20 July 2010). 56 Bahari was arrested in late June 2009 after the disputed presidential elections, which reinstalled Ahmadinejad, and held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, from where he was coerced to make a televised confession acknowledging Western journalists as spies and his own complicity in fomenting a “velvet revolution” in Iran. He was released in October 2009. 57 Television series by women also dealt with these issues, for example, Puran De­ rakh­shandeh’s Hemlock (Shokaran, 1990–1991), made for vvir’s First Channel Network, about drug addiction among women and its impact on their lives and families. 58 For further information about Mansouri, see his website: http://moslemmansouri .com/Biography.html (last accessed 28 December 2011). 59 Mansouri in collaboration with Mahmud Shokrollahi made an intriguing documentary, Close-­Up Long Shot (Kelosap, Nama-­ye Dur, 1996), about Sabzian’s fascination with cinema and his impersonation of Makhmalbaf, a kind of companion and counter to Kiarostami’s Close-­Up (Kelosap, Nama-­ye Nazdik). Aided by his executive producer, Bahman Maghsoudlou, Mansouri also made Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty (1998), a one-­hour film on the ailing poet at his home in Tehran (with his wife Aida). The writer would soon succumb to death. 60 For further on Granaz Moussavi’s take on the controversy surrounding her film My Tehran for Sale, see her interview with Amir Mosaddeq Katouzian of Radio Farda, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HqUBjjKdLg&feature=related (last accessed 28  December 2011). For Naser Taqvai’s take on the arrest of his wife, the film’s lead actress, see Resaneh-­ye Sabz-­e Iran, at http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=sSGwAVEHuos&feature=player_embedded (last accessed 28 December 2011). 61 A special issue of Iranian Studies titled “Ethnographic Fieldwork in Iran,” guest-­ edited by Erika Friedl and Mary Hegland (37, no. 4 [2004]), provides valuable articles by anthropologists about their fieldwork in which they talk about their uses of still and video cameras. See, for example, the articles by Reinhold Loeffler, Mohammad Shahbazi, and Sekandar Amanolahi. 62 “Banned Documentary Sparks Oxford Discussion on Iranian Jews,” http://www .chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/887018/jewish/Renegade-­Filmmaker-­ Discusses-­Jewish-­Documentary.htm (last accessed 28 December 2011). 63 For a review of the film and its six-­minute trailer, see Dabir 2010 / 1389. 64 For more on this film, see “Dar Bareh-­ye Mostanad-­e Akharin Bakhshi,” msf, no. 313 (2004 / 1383), 113–15. 65 Another film about this topic is the thirty-­seven-­minute-­long aids, Iran 2004:

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The Lovers, the Victims (Eidz, Iran 1383, 2004) by Mohammad Ehsani and Kamal Bahar. 66 To see the Sixty Minutes program and read its transcript, go to http://www.cbs news.com/video/watch/?id=4920609n (last accessed 28 December 2011). 67 An example of a popular opposition blog with visual material is that of Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder, who maintains it in both English and Persian. His Persian blog is called Sardabir: Khodam, his English one, Editor: Myself. According to his website, the former “attracts thousands of Iranian readers from all around the world every day.” For more information on Hoder, see http://www.youtube .com/user/Hoder (last accessed 28  December 2011). Derakhshan was arrested in November 2008 at his family home in Tehran, and incarcerated in the Evin Prison, where he received the high sentence of nineteen and a half years for espionage (in 2010 he was allowed a temporary short furlough). For more on him see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan. 68 In its English-­language publicity materials (on dvd) Press tv claims that it produces more than 350 documentaries annually, and it actively markets these internationally. 69 The selection committee for the second Kish film festival consisted of the filmmakers Kamran Shirdel, Arsalan Aslani, Mohammad Tahaminejad, and the film critic Robert Safarian. The jury consisted of the filmmakers Rakhshan Banietemad, Mahvash Sheikholeslami, Jafar Panahi, Morteza Pursamadi, and the scholar Masud Shafiq. See “Goftogu ba Kamran Shirdel, Mostanadsaz-­e Sarshenas-­e Iran,” Ettela’at, 10 January 2001 / 21 Dey 1379. 70 “Festival Director’s Note,” Sixth International Documentary Film Festival Catalogue, 26 February–2 March 2005 / 12 Esfand 1383, 10. 71 “Kamran Shirdel: Jashnvareh-­ye Filmha-­ye Mostanad Yek Bimarestan Ast,” A ­ ftab-­e Yazd, 15 October 2000. 72 “Iran’s ‘Green Film Festival,’” Iranian (January 1999) http://www.iranian.com (last accessed 28 December 2011). 73 Shirdel sent me a copy of the typed note. 74 For more on the Documentary and Experimental Film Center, see http://defc.ir/ en (last accessed 28 December 2011). 75 For the full Persian text, see http://www.peykemostanad.com. 76 Filmmakers who signed the petition included Rakhshan Banietemad, Esmail Emami, Reza Haeri, Pirooz Kalantari, Bahman Kiarostami, Parviz Kimiavi, Ram­tin Lavafipour, Farhad Mehranfar, Ahmad Mir Ehsan, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Ebrahim Mokhtari, Mehrdad Oskouei, Mani Petgar, Shadmehr Rastin, Mohammad Rassoulof, Mahvash Sheikholeslami, Kamran Shirdel, Mohammad Shirvani, and Farhad Varahram. Some of these participated further in the ensuing public and media debates (see http://www.peykemostanad.com). 77 Mokhtari’s quotations are from this article: ”Sinema-­ye Mostanad dar Bonbast-­e Saliqehha,” Iran, 21 September 2000 / 31 Shahrivar 1379, 12. See also, “Aqa-­ye Vazir! Sinema-­ye Mostaqal Niazmand-­e Tafahom-­e Nahadha Ast,” Iran, 27 July 1998 /  5 Mordad 1377, 12. 78 “The First Kish Documentary Film Festival, Hoping for the Blue Horizon of 2000,” Asr-­e Azadegan, 27 February 2000. The quote was modified slightly for ease of understanding. The festival website is located at http://www.kidff.com.

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79 “Jaigah-­e Mostanadsazi dar Sima,” Khabarnameh-­ye (Dakheli) Anjoman-­e Tahiyehkonandegan-­e Sinema-­ye Mostanad-­e Iran, no. 6 (2001 / 1380), 2.

Chapter 2: Under Cover, on Screen: Women’s Representation and Women’s Cinema 1 For a table containing the various professional and high-­level positions that women held in government in the early 2000s, see Kian-­Thiébaut 2002 / 1381:504. 2 For more on women’s press, see Khiabany and Sreberny 2004. 3 For a historical and philosophical reading of women’s representation in Iranian culture, see Sattari 1994 / 1373. 4 The protests against official unveiling have been dealt with earlier; for the early politics of veiling during the revolution and immediately after, see Betteridge 1983; and Tabari 1982. For an overview of the situation of women from the revolution of 1978–79 to 2000 and a chronology of events related to them, see Keddie 2000; and Gheytanchi 2000. 5 “Sokhanrani-­ye Rais Jomhur dar Molaqat ba Jam’i az Khaharan,” Zan-­e Ruz, 22 Tir 1366 / 13 July 1987, 7. 6 Gholamhosain Saedi in his parodic play Othello in Wonderland (Otello dar Sarzamin-­e Ajayeb, 1985), directed by Naser Rahmaninejad in exile, made fun of the temporary marriage of actors and of other procedures developed in theater and cinema early in the Islamic Republic to adapt to Islamicate values. 7 “Andar Ahvalat-­e Filmi Keh Mojavvez-­e Shar’i Nadasht,” Fogholadeh (Los Angeles) 1985, 16. 8 “Goftogu ba Tahmineh Milani, Filmsaz: Tahhamol-­e Harf-­e Nahaq Nadaram,” Zanan, no. 35 (Tir 1376 / June 1997), 17. 9 “Mas’ulan-­e Kar-­e Film va Sinema Bayad Maidan Bedehand Beh Afradi Keh Mokh­lesaneh Mikhahand Biayand Khedmat Konand,” Sinema-­ye Iran va Sevvomin Jashnvareh-­ye Film-­e Fajr (Tehran: Edareh Koll-­e Tahqiqat va Ravabet-­e Sinemai, 1983 / 1362), 29. 10 “Goftogu ba Homa Rusta, Bazigar-­e Film,” msf, no. 58 (1987 / 1366), 59. 11 “Honarpishegan-­e Zan az Film Hazf Shodehand,” Kayhan (London), 26 September 1985 / 4 Mehr 1364, 11. 12 On the unrepresentability of Iranian reality because of the unrepresentability of its women in cinema, particularly in Baizai’s movies, such as Maybe Another Time (Shayad Vaqti Digar, 1987), see Mottahedeh 2000. 13 “Aramesh dar Hozur-­e Hemingway,” msf, no. 60 (1987 / 1366), 59. 14 Ayatollah Morteza Mottahari states in this context that the Quran contains many verses that state that humans are rewarded by God not based on their gender but based on their devotion. See “Maqam-­e Ensani-­ye Zan az Nazar-­e Quran,” Kayhan Havai, 4 March 1986 / 13 Esfand 1364, 12. 15 “For the Sake of Women’s Image,” msf, no. 117 (1991 / 1370), 3. I have edited the English for smoothness. 16 “Naqd-­e Khanandegan,” msf, no. 89 (May 1990 / Ordibehesht1369), 54. 17 “Nazar-­e Emam Khomeini Darbareh-­ye Filmha, Serialha, Ahangha, va Pakhsh-­e Barnamehha-­ye Varzeshi Elam Shod,” Kayhan Havai, 20 December 1987 / 29 Azar 1366, 2. “Goftogu ba Aqa-­ye Mohammad Hashemi, Rais-­e Sazman-­e Seda va Sima,” Sorush 13, no. 594 (1992 / 1379), 40–43.

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18 The Persian original is “estefadeh-­ye abzari az zanan.” 19 For the details of the law and the reactions of various public figures to it, including that of the filmmaker Tahmineh Milani, see Zanan, no. 42 (1998 / 1377), 2–12. Also see “Tarh-­e Mamnuiat-­e Estefadeh Abzari az Zan va Mard dar Tasavir va Mohtava Tasvib Shod,” Zanan, no. 45 (1998 / 1377), 60. 20 “Ta’sir-­e Manfi-­ye Tasvib-­e Tarh-­e Estefadeh-­ye Abzari bar Vahdat Raviyeh-­ye Qazai,” Tous, 16 August 1998 / 25 Mordad 1377, http://www.neda.net. 21 “Censors Nudge Acclaimed Iranian Director Out of Cinema,” Daily Star, 9 September 2004. 22 A film by a female director that deals with transsexuality and gender reassignment surgery in Iran is Sharareh Attari’s forty-­minute documentary It Happens Sometimes (2006), which was screened only once, to one hundred spectators in Tehran’s Artists’ House, before being banned. Like Amirani’s documentary, this one also follows several fearless individuals who grapple publicly with the psychological and social dilemmas of sexual orientation and reassignment. 23 Born in Tehran in 1969, Razavipour received her master’s degree in space and stage design from the École National des Arts Décoratifs (ensad) in Paris in 1998. For more on this and her other works, see her website, http://www.neda razavipour.com. 24 Razavipour’s use of autobiography is extensive and varied. Both her transgressive themes and techniques are driven by the disruptions of some thirteen years of education and residence in Europe. Autobiography is central to her work, as many of her installations are based on her own situation at the time of their crea­tion. Making them, she told me, is “a kind of auto-­therapy.” In addition, not only does she appear in her videos but so do her daughter (in ultrasound form), her family (in the form of Super 8 home movies of her uncle’s family), her personal objects (puppets, dolls), and views of her own home environments (Naficy 2006g). 25 According to Jaleh Olov, one of Oshin’s dubbing directors, in preparing the shows for broadcast in Iran, nothing was cut visually from the films, but while dubbing the voices the content was changed in several cases “to convey the authentic meaning of its Japanese version” (quoted in Mowlana and Mohsenian Rad 1992:63). 26 For a full filmography, see the Catalogue of the Ninth Fajr International Film Festival (Tehran: Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, 1990 / 1369). 27 “Moruri bar Vizhehgiha-­ye Moshtarak-­e Filmha-­ye Iran-­ye Emsal: Bakhsh-­e ­Avval: Avamel-­e Ensani,” msf, no. 79 (1989 / 1368), 15. 28 For a documentary on women filmmakers, see Iranian Women Filmmakers (2002) made by two male directors, Hamid Khairoldin and Majid Khabazan. It contains interviews with women filmmakers, clips from their films, and commentaries by three feminist experts from the United Kingdom, Laura Mulvey, Rose Issa, and Sheila Whitaker. 29 For Sheherazad Media International, see: http://www.smediaint.com/new/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 30 Zan-­e Ruz, 16 March 1991 / 25 Esfand 1369, 45. 31 Shayda, a girl’s name, means “delirious with love” and, as an adjective, it can apply to either males or females.

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32 Many movies dealing with love centered their narratives on post-­betrothal love because that arrangement allowed the two parties to be freer in terms of how they interacted with each other verbally, visually, tactilely, and sartorially (in terms of wearing the hijab). 33 For more on mystical love in postrevolution films, see Razzazifar 1998 / 1377: 141–50. 34 Under the Islamic Republic what was once unthinkable has occurred: secular, Westernized male filmmakers engage in polygamy. Among these are Khosrow Sinai who after years of marriage to his Czech artist wife, Gizzela Varga, married an Iranian artist, Farah Osuli. Sinai and his cowives are open about the joys and rewards of their polygamous family arrangement; others are not. Such marital arrangements are controversial within intellectual and feminist circles. See “Az in Pechpechha-­ye Daemi Khasteh Shodeham,” Zanan, no. 38 (1997 / 1376), 20– 26; and “Nameh-­ye Mah,” Zanan, no. 39 (1997 / 1376), 48–49. 35 The Circle, for example, won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice International Film Festival and was sold for commercial distribution to an unprece­ dented twenty-­nine countries. See “Dayereh dar 29  Keshvar-­e Jahan beh Namayesh Darmiaiad,” Hamshahri, 14 December 2000 / 24 Azar 1379. 36 “Iranian Film Ventures into Adultery, Lesbianism,” Reuters, 8 September 2004. 37 The title refers to the four years that had elapsed between Kiarostami’s Ten and her film. 38 These are Self, Repression, Sin, and Escape, made in 2004; Fear and Devastation, made in 2005; and Humiliation and Erosion, completed in 2007. See her website: http://www.mania-­a.com/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 39 See http://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/mania-­akbari-­statement (last accessed 29 De­cember 2011). 40 A reference to Godfrey Reggio’s visually stunning environmental film Koya­ anysqatsi (1982), whose title (from a native American language) means “life out of balance.” 41 Farid Parsa, “Accelerating Freedom,” Iranian, 6 May 2005, http://www.iranian .com. 42 Fiction movies also dealt with women’s crimes and prisons. The most noteworthy was Hekmat’s Women’s Prison, a searing tripartite film dealing with three different periods (1984, 1992, and 2001) that spanned both the Pahlavi regimes and the Islamic Republic. 43 See “Tunnel: Iranian Women’s Movement,” 3 September 2011, http://www.iranian .com/main/2011/sep/tunnel-­iranian-­women-­s-­movement. 44 At the same time that Mir-­Hosseini was involved in her two documentary film projects with Longinotto, Richard Tapper, Mir-­Hosseini’s husband, and an anthropologist of Iranian tribes, particularly of the Shahsavan, expanded his areas of interest to Iranian cinema. Under the auspices of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he spearheaded three international one-­ day conferences on that topic from 1999 to 2001, which led to an edited volume (Tapper 2002). 45 See the online magazine This Week in Palestine, http://www.thisweekinpalestine .com. 46 See “Iran: Human Rights Defender Ms. Mahnaz Mohammadi Arrested and Held

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in Incommunicado Detention,” 6 July 2011, http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/ fr/node/15227 (last accessed 20 January 2012). 47 For the video, see Iranian, http://www.iranian.com (last accessed 29 December 2011). 48 For more on Banietemad’s career and movies, see Qukasian 1999 / 1378. 49 “Ghamkhar-­e bi Edde’a-­ye Zanan-­e Darmandeh: Goftogu ba Rakhshan Banietemad,” Zanan, no. 25 (1995 / 1374), 44–50. 50 Women’s characters’ narrative use of the telephone increased, as Banietemad’s The May Lady and Milani’s Two Women show, perhaps as a device to break out of—­and to critique—­the enforced official veiling and patriarchal sequestration of women from men. The result was the reverse: the naturalization of separation. 51 This is taken from Jennifer Fey’s response to my presentation on Banietemad’s movies at the “Globalization and Visual Culture” conference at Michigan State University, East Lansing, 17–19  March 2005. I thank her for letting me quote from it. 52 This is taken from Milani’s English-­language website, at http://www.tahmineh milani.com, slightly edited for clarity. For more on Milani’s films and career, see Mazra’eh 2001 / 1380. 53 See the Adventure Divas website, http://www.adventuredivas.com/divas/iran/ tahmineh-­milani/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 54 See the Adventure Divas website, http://www.adventuredivas.com/divas/iran/ tahmineh-­milani/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 55 See “Iran’s Fearless Film Maker—­Iran,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/results? search_query=iran+fearless+filmmaker&oq=iran+fearless+filmmaker&aq=f&a qi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=386751425821014279412312310114101012961169 111.4.41910 (last accessed 29 December 2011). 56 “Iran: Possible Prisoner of Conscience/Fear for Safety, Tahmineh Reza’i Milani,” Public Amnesty International Index, 31 August 2001, http://www.amnesty.org/ en/library/info/MDE13/032/2001/en (last accessed 29 December 2011). 57 For the signatures, see Facets Multimedia website, http://www.facets.org/astic at?function=web&catname=facets&web=features&sub=directors&mnu=milani tahmineh&itm=petition (no longer available). 58 See the Adventure Divas website, http://www.adventuredivas.com/divas/iran/ tahmineh-­milani/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 59 “Stoned to Death for Porno Movie,” bbc World Service, 22 May 2001, http://news .bbc.co.uk. 60 See the Adventure Divas website, http://www.adventuredivas.com/divas/iran/ tahmineh-­milani/ (last accessed 29 December 2011).

Chapter 3: All Certainties Melt into Thin Air: Art-­House Cinema, a “Postal” Cinema 1 Later on, during the retrenchment era, another nomenclature came into use for the same binarism: khodi (insider) and nakhodi (outsider). 2 Cinematheque Ontario Film Programme Guide, Winter 1995, 23. 3 For Close-­Up’s full production credits, see Naficy 2005k. 4 Moslem Mansouri’s documentary, Close-­Up Long Shot (1996), gives a fascinating

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account of Sabzian’s life and times, as well as of his fascination with cinema and with Makhmalbaf (mostly in Sabzian’s own words). This car ride may have been the seed for others, which became a dominant trope and narrative agent of Kiarostami’s subsequent “road movies.” For more about his road movies, which include Life and Nothing More . . . , Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, a.b.c Africa, and Ten, see Orgeron 2002. In this intimate coincidence of authorship and autobiography, Kiarostami resembles another great auteur filmmaker, Chris Marker, who in his seminal film Sunless (Sans Soleil, 1982) used the revised Descartian dictum of “I film therefore I am.” Such uses of the camera-­pen were made by Ebrahim Golestan, who once said, “I never stopped writing stories. For me filmmaking was a type of writing, that is, I wrote with a camera instead of with a pen” (quoted in Jahed 2005 / 1384: 136). That the film’s subtitle, Kojast Ja-­ye Residan . . . (Is There a Place to Approach . . . ), is an excerpt from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri deepens the relationship of his films to poetry. For further films on Iranian cinema history, see the following documentaries: Moslem Mansouri’s documentary on Abbas Kiarostami, Close-Up Long Shot (1996); Faraj Ansaribasir’s Iranian Cinema: From Birth to Rebirth (Sinema-­ye Iran, az Tavallod ta Tavallod-­e Dobareh, 1991); Mohammad Tahaminejad’s Iranian Cinema: From Constitutional Revolution to Sepanta (Sinema-­ye Iran az Mashrutiyat ta Sepanta, 1976), made for nirt and documenting various cinematic events and entrepreneurs from the 1900s to the 1930s; and Bahram Raipur’s Magic Lantern (Fanus Khial, 1976), made for mca, which focuses on Iranian pictorial traditions before cinema and their presence in early films. Hasan Hedayat’s Grand Cinema (Gerand Sinema, 1988) is a fiction comedy about the Ivanov-­Aqayov rivalry during the early period of cinema that emphasizes in a broad, somewhat crude comic manner their differing politics and subservience to the Great Powers. On these issues, see Kalantari 1997 / 1376; and Eshqi 2003 / 1382. Close-­Up is an exception, for Sabzian has subjectivity and undergoes change when he admits to his fraud, confesses to his love for Makhmalbaf ’s movies, and meets up with his idol. For more on self-­reflexivity, see Ruby 1988, 1982. The best source for Brecht’s theories of distantiation for theater and the performing arts continues to be the book that John Willett edited and translated (1964). Quoted in Online Film Home, http://onlinefilmhome.dk (last accessed 31 December 2011). An insightful documentary about the way the lives of carpet weavers are intertwined with their carpets is David Collison’s Woven Gardens (1976), made for the bbc’s Tribal Eye television series. It focuses on Qashqai tribes’ carpet weaving by examining the way of life from which it evolved. The wool comes from their flock, the dye from the plants on their migratory routes, and the irregularities in their designs from the jostling of pack animals that carry the unfinished carpets on their looms. These and the functional nature of the carpets, the gendered division of labor in making them, and the social and technical elements that go into

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their production, turn the carpets not only into aesthetic and functional objects of great beauty and utility but also into “documents of the tribe” (Naficy 1979g: 232). 16 These Latin American and Third Cinema polemics and manifestos are collected in Martin 1997a, 1997b. 17 Quoted in “Jashn-­e Sinema Avay-­e Mehrabani-­ye Mast . . . ,” Hamshahri, 15 September 1999 / 24 Shahrivar 1378, http://www.neda.net. 18 For more on the representation of children in films of the Islamic Republic, see Sadr 2002. 19 “Where Is the Friend’s Home?,” Variety, 16 August 1989. 20 Among these intellectuals was the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was imprisoned in the summer of 2006, causing a worldwide campaign to free him. 21 Some films pushed these ideas to the point of moralism. This is particularly true of the popular cinema, which instead of concentrating on deeper Iranian and Islamic mystic values, catered to superficial morality, to what one critic characterized as sentimentality, cheap advice, attainable hopes, and inexpensive good deeds (Karimi 1988 / 1367). In art-­house films, however, moralism exhibited itself usually in subtle forms, as in Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Panahi’s The White Balloon, and Majidi’s The Children of Heaven. In Banietemad’s Nargess (1991), however, moralism veers on the stark side. In its final scene, Adel is offered a difficult moral choice by the side of a busy highway. He has to choose not only between two women but also between two ethical positions. The young, pretty Nargess stands for ethical behavior and honesty by urging Adel to give up thievery; the older cowife and partner in crime, however, represents moral laxity and a continuation of his life of robbery. Conveniently, fate intervenes and makes the difficult decision for Adel in the form of an oncoming truck that runs over the older woman. Validated here are not only ethical behavior but also youth, beauty, and love. 22 For more on Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his movies, see Baharlu 2000 / 1379; Dabashi 2001; Egan 2005; and Ridgeon 2000. See also these works he has published himself: Makhmalbaf 2002 / 1381, 2001 / 1380, 1997 / 1396, 1993a / 1372, 1993b /  1372, 1993c / 1372, 1990 / 1369, 1981 / 1360. There are also individual books about most of his films (some containing production stills), which are not cited here as there are too many and as almost all of them are duplicated in the citations above. See also the documentaries cited in the text on Makhmalbaf. Finally, video-­sharing sites such as YouTube contain many of his political statements. 23 This did not stop some critics from criticizing Makhmalbaf for compromising with the former regime’s filmmakers, whom he had insulted earlier (Farasati 1992 / 1371). 24 Kiarostami also underwent ideological and cinematic shifts of his own, but on a less drastic scale; see Golmakani 2000 / 1379. 25 Kiarostami also highlighted the restorative powers of nature’s beauty in key scenes of Under the Olive Trees and throughout The Wind Will Carry Us. 26 For more on Iranian and other mystical and religious cinemas and filmmakers from both secular philosophical viewpoints and from religiously inclined perspectives, see Arjomand 1997 / 1376, 1993 / 1372; Ahmadi 2003 / 1382, 1985 / 1364;

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Raz­zazifar 1998 / 1377; Madadpur 1994 / 1373; and Avini 1996 / 1375, 1991 / 1370. See also the three-­volume book based on papers presented at conferences in Tehran titled Sínema az Negah-e Andisheh (Pazhuheshgah-­e Farhang va Honar-­e Eslami, 1998a / 1377, 1998b / 1377, 2000 / 1379). 27 “Devist va Chahardah Sinemagar-­e Irani Khastar-­e Laghv ya Kahesh-­e ­Zavabet-­e Dastopagir va Pichideh-­ye Nezarat bar Filmsazi Shodand,” msf, no. 174 (June 1995 /  Tir 1374), 24–25. 28 “Ekran-­e 74: Zavabet-­e Tolid, Pakhsh, va Nemayesh-­e Film dar Sal-­e Jari,” msf, no. 172 (April 1995 / Ordibehesht 1374), 15. 29 See the filmmaker’s website at http://www.makhmalbaf.com/persons.php?p=2 (last accessed 31 December 2011). 30 Quoted in Stephen Offenbacker, “Iranian Cinema: Documenting the Human Condition,” http://www.cinecosm.com (no longer available). 31 “Bahram Baizai: Man Agar Mandam Bara-­ye in Bud keh Dast Beh Neveshtan Dash­tam,” Sinema-­ye Azad Vol. 3, No. 14 (January 1999/Azar & Dey 1377), 14. 32 Hiring family members and acting with them in the movies has also steadily increased in Hollywood, but perhaps for different reasons (Pearlman 2006). 33 This familial production mode sometimes involves serial or plural marriages, influenced by the Islamic system of patriarchal polygamy. Makhmalbaf ’s first wife was Marzieh’s sister, who died in a fire. 34 Quoted on the mfh website, http://www.makhmalbaf.com/articles.php?a=4 (last accessed 31 December 2011). 35 The Door also served as a model for Babak Payami’s feature film titled Secret Ballot (Ra’i-­ye Makhfi, 2001). 36 To counter such accusations, the mfh placed disclaimers on its films, which either denied or hedged Mohsen’s authorial or patriarchal involvement with them. 37 For Makhmalbaf family filmmaking, see Susan Kemp’s sixty-­minute film made for the bbc, The Makhmalbaf ’s Film House (2002). 38 For an example of such a critical approach to familial modes of production in films, see Bresheeth 2010. 39 Several movies dealt with Jewish characters, including Masud Kimiai’s Lead (Sorb, 1989), Varuzh Karim Masihi’s The Last Curtain (Pardeh Akhar, 1990), Rakh­shan Banietemad’s Nargess (1991), and Davud Mirbaqeri’s The Snowman (Adam Barfi, 1994–8). These characters were often subsidiary, not leads, and they were stereotyped Jews, mostly played by non-­Jewish actors. However, the presence of a large population of Iranian Jews and their wide involvement in various aspects of cinema meant that even those films which had Jewish characters in leading roles and dealt with hot political issues regarding the Jews, like Kimiai’s Lead, about emigration of Iranian Jews to Israel after its creation, were not so much anti-­Semitic as anti-­Zionist. 40 For example, between 1979 and 1997 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees spent more than US$1 billion on the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan, which was much smaller than that in Iran, but it spent only US$150 million on those in Iran (Hakimzadeh 2006:9). 41 For Jowzani’s films, see Jowzani 2000 / 1379. 42 For further readings on Ghobadi’s films and career, see Ghobadi 2003 / 1982.

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43 Ghobadi himself began by making a short film, Life in Fog (Zendehgi dar Meh, 1986), which is fiction. He also made a short documentary, Daf (2003), on the percussive instrument named in the title. Both run to about thirty minutes. 44 Sohrab Shahid Saless should be credited with having made perhaps the first modern Iranian film about Afghanistan, A Journey Without a Destination (­Safar-­e Bedun-­e Maqsad), which he made during the Soviet occupation of the country. Apparently, it was a pro-­Soviet work, for he claimed that all the socialist countries’ screened it on television, and that if “I had given it to the West, they would have skinned me” (quoted in Sar Reshtehdari 1998:148). 45 As it turned out, his story was a complicated thriller, like the war against the Taliban and Osama bin Ladin, with many twists and aliases. David Belfield had converted from Southern Baptism to Islam in 1969 after entering Howard University, whereupon he had changed his name to Dawud Sallaheddin. Apparently, he received $4,000 from Khomeini backers around the time of the revolution to assassinate Tabatabai. On 22 June 1980, dressed as a postman with a special-­delivery package, Belfield/Sallaheddin shot Tabatabai in the stomach at his home and killed him. The same day, he fled to Canada, France, and Switzerland while news stories about the murder he had committed and his fugitive status were making headlines around the world. He ended up in Tehran, where security guards took him to the foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, in the dead of night. Soon, he began working as the editor of the state-­owned English-­ language daily Iran Today, this time under yet another alias, Hasan Abdelrahman. At one point in the mid-­1980s, he apparently joined the mujahedin in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets for eighteen months. It was revealed in 2009 that he was working as an editor for Press tv, the Islamic Republic’s government-­run English-­language news channel. In the Kandahar credits, the actor’s name is different: Hassan Tantai.  Makhmalbaf knew that his actor had killed someone, but he claims not knowing that he had been convicted of murder. When asked whether he would have made a film with him knowing of the conviction, he answered, like any good filmmaker looking for new subjects: “I have to say yes, of course. If I knew that he were a murderer, I would have made a film with him about the murder that he had committed, in order to explore why it is that in the civilised and opulent United States, a black man commits a political assassination and then escapes to a country like Iran, which has a tense relationship with the United States. In fact it has just occurred to me that if I were to see him I will make that film” (quoted in Gibbons 2002).  In an insightful feature documentary about him, An American Fugitive: The Truth about Hassan (dir. Jean-­Daniel Lafond, 2006), Belfield states that he had not met Makhmalbaf before the latter nabbed him to act in Kandahar, and that he had not told him the story of his crime. His problem in acting in the film was that he could not grow a beard, which he needed to fit in. As a result, in another act of disguise, he glued a fake beard on for daytime, which he removed at bedtime. In his extensive direct address to the camera filmed in Iran and Afghanistan, Belfield comes across as an articulate anti-­imperialist thinker, someone opposed to the U.S. history of colonial race relations within the country and to colonialist and imperialist designs abroad. He appears to be living a lonely

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and secluded life behind the very high walls of an exile within a secondary exile inside Iran. He readily admits to “executing” Tabatabai, an act he justifies on anti-­imperialist grounds. The investigative reporter Joseph J. Trento intriguingly claims that the assassination and Belfield’s escape were sanctioned jointly by U.S. and Iranian intelligence services: the Americans allowed the assassination of an opposition figure to the Islamic regime to occur on their land hoping to gain the release of their hostages in Tehran. 46 See Women Make Movies film catalogue on their website, http://www.wmm.com/ filmcatalog/catalog_request.shtml. 47 The most publicly discussed of this strategic listening and looking is the screening of the celebrated film of Algerian resistance to French colonial forces, The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri, 1965), which ironically was made not by an insider filmmaker—­Arab, Algerian, or French—­but by the Italian Gilo Pontecorvo. 48 Toronto International Festival of Festivals Catalog, 4 September 1992, 8. 49 “Five Thousan Hozur va Three-­Hundred-­and Thirty Jayezeh-­ye bainolmelali,” msf, no. 229 (1998 / 1377), 11. 50 “Dar Kuchehha-­ye Kan,” msf, no. 92 (1997 / 1376), 84. 51 In different Cannes festivals, Kiarostami won the Rossellini Award for Life and Nothing More . . . (1992) and the Golden Palm Award for Taste of Cherry (1997) and Jafar Panahi won the Best Film Award and the International Film Critics Award for White Balloon (Badkonak-­e Sepid, 1995). 52 In the 2000  Cannes festival, Samira Makhmalbaf ’s The Blackboard shared the Jury Prize with Songs from the Second Floor by the Swedish director Roy Andersson, while the Golden Camera Award for a first film was shared by the Iranian filmmakers Hasan Yektapanah for Jomeh and Bahman Ghobadi for The Time for Drunken Horses. The Time for Drunken Horses also won the International Film Critics Award at Cannes. 53 One of the largest festivals of Iranian films abroad was Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, held at London’s National Film Theatre, which during June and July 1999 screened more than fifty films by twenty directors, from both Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic periods. Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker curated this festival and edited a book on Iranian cinema (Issa and Whitaker 2000). 54 All the posters in the exhibition came from my personal collection, as did all the books. The proceeds from the book sale were turned over to the Rice Iranian Student Association, which managed the book sale. 55 The film programmers during this period were Marian Luntz at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (mfah), and Christine Gardner, Liz Empelton, and Charles Dove at Rice University. I was variously curator, programmer, and consultant with all of them. For the list of all the films shown during one decade in Houston, see the booklet Houston’s Tenth Annual Iranian Film Festival, published in 2003 by the Museum of Fine Arts and Rice Cinema. Invited filmmakers who made personal appearances during this period were Jamsheed Akrami, Bahram Baizai, Rakhshan Banietemad, Jahangir Kowsari, Amir Naderi, Shirin Neshat, Hamid Rahmanian, Persheng Sadegh-­Vaziri, and Caveh Zahedi. 56 Based on the data Zeitgeist Films provided the author. 57 “Bachehha-­ye Aseman yek Milion Dollar Forukht,” Iran Daily, 13 September 1999, carried by the Iranian web magazine: http://www.iranian.com.

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58 There is a parallel development in the field of literature. In 2009, three novels by prominent authors in Iran were first published in Europe by mainstream presses, though not in Persian but translated into English and German (M. Naficy 2009). These do not form part of the burgeoning exile literature because the authors live inside Iran. Yet the books’ publication abroad enters them into both the global and the exile literary markets. 59 “Hoshdar-­e Sinemagaran Nesbat beh Hazf-­e ‘Sinema-­ye Mostaqal,’” bbcPersian. com, 30 October 2009, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2009/10/091030_m_ poorahmad.shtml. 60 For an insightful early reading of Iranian films at international film festivals, see Nichols 1994. 61 This prescient statement was made a decade before the Nobel Prize for peace was awarded to the Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the honor. 62 For Nassibi’s cinematic writings and for others opposing the Islamic Republic, see the various issues of Cinema-­ye Azad magazine published in the mid-­1990s in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the Cinema-­ye Azad website, www.cinemayeazad .blogspot.com. For Mahini’s writings, see the various catalogs of the International Exile Film Festival, Göteborg, Sweden, and its website, http://www.exilefilm festival.com. For Mansouri’s critique, see Behrouzian 2005. 63 Quoted from the English-­language synopsis of the article in Sayyad 1996 / 1376, printed on page 2 of the English section in the same issue of Iran Nameh. 64 Sayyad allowed his movie made in exile, The Mission, to be shown at a diaspora film festival in Canada, which had promoted the exile films by tying them to the success of the films made inside Iran, only on the condition that the festival distribute his letter of objection from which these quotes are taken. See “Success Shmuckess: Islamic Republic—­Not Iranian—­Cinema,” Iranian, 6 June 2001, http://iranian.com. 65 See “E’teraz Beh Hozur-­e Sinema-­ye Jomhuri-­ye Eslami dar Hafteh-­ye Film-­e Ostok­holm va Jashnvareh-­ye Bainolmelali-­ye Gutanberg,” Cinema-­ye Azad 2, no. 11 (1997 / 1376), 31. 66 For a list of scholars who spoke about Middle Eastern and North African cinemas, including Iranian cinema, at the Society of Cinema and Media Conference in 2007, see Naficy 2008a. 67 See “Payam-­e Tabrik-­e Khatami beh Asghar Farhadi,” Ettela’at, 28 February 2012 /  9 Esfand 1390, http://www.ettelaat.com/new/index.asp?fname=2012/02/02–28/ 13–45–36.htm (last accessed 28 February 2012). 68 See “Payam-­e Javad Shamaghdari,” Ettela’at, 28  February 2012 / 9  Esfand 1390, http://www.ettelaat.com/new/index.asp?fname=2012\02\02–28\13–45–22.htm (last accessed 28 February 2012). 69 See “Israelis Flock to See Oscar-­winning Film Produced in Arch-­enemy Iran,” The Washington Post, 27 February 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/israels-­prime-­minister-­hopes-­his-­country-­wins-­its-­first-­oscar-­ says-­film-­hits-­home/2012/02/26/gIQA116sbR_story.html (last accessed 29 February 2012). 70 See “Iranian Director Hands Back Award” 17 October 2009, http://news.bbc.co .uk/2/hi/entertainment/film/2321051.stm.

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71 “Iranian Director Protests Harassment by US Immigration Officials,” Word Socialist Web Site, 4 May 2001, http://www.wsws.org. 72 “Radd-­e Viza-­ye Emrika Bara-­ye Kiarostami,” msf, no. 291 (1992 / 1381), 41. 73 Mehrjui told the New York Times that before making the film, he had written to Salinger to obtain permission to loosely adapt his work, but since he did not hear from him, “I just continued and made it” (McKinley 1998). 74 “An Haqq-­e Mobham-­e Moallef,” msf, no. 227 (1998 / 1377), 7. 75 For the Iranian copyright law of 12 January 1972, see: http://portal.unesco.org/ culture/en. 76 “Behtar Ast Beh Qanun-­e Jahani-­ye Kopireit Beh Paivandim,” msf, no. 259 (2000 /  1379), 25.

Chapter 4: Emergent Contestatory Films, Media Culture, and Public Diplomacy 1 See “What Is Public Diplomacy,” University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy, http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org (last accessed 10  December 2011). 2 For a U.S. government report that formulates more than a century of IranianU.S. cultural relations under the “public diplomacy” rubric, see Asgard 2009. 3 “What Is Public Diplomacy,” University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy. 4 If public diplomacy was the “carrot,” surrounding Iran with U.S. troops (in Iraq and Afghanistan), with massive U.S. warships and military bases (in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea and in Qatar and Bahrain), and with U.S. allies antagonistic to Iran (Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan) as well as imposing severe economic and diplomatic sanctions, covert actions, cyberattacks, sabotage, defections, assassinations, and bombing all constituted the “stick.” By 2012, Israel and the United States had allegedly taken all of the latter harder measures against Iran except the bombing of the country (see Shane 2012). 5 To see these Shared Values Initiative commercials, go to the following website at Oklahoma State University, Tulsa: http://www.osu-­tulsa.okstate.edu/shared values/commercials.aspx (accessed 24 November 2011). 6 On the representation of Iran in British documentaries during this period, see Ganjaei 2010. 7 “Ayatollah, Please Say Yes,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 11 November 1979. 8 “Webs Vie for Ayatollah Gabs,” Variety, 12 December 1979, 1. 9 Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1987. 10 Walter Cronkite’s usual sign off tag line before hostage taking was “That’s the way it is,” to which he now added every day the number of days the hostages had been kept in captivity in Iran. 11 In early 2006, when the issue of the Iranian development of nuclear technology for either peaceful or weapons development became hot international news and with the United States and Iran locked into diplomatic brinkmanship, Lifetime Television rebroadcast Not Without My Daughter (on 4 March 2006), though it had been made years earlier. 12 Also see “New Iran Disk Released,” Variety, 2 January 1980, 2. 13 Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1987.

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14 “Ayatollah Orders Iran Terrorists to Kidnap Stallone as He Films Rambo III in Israel,” National Enquirer, 3 November 1987, 1, 37 (no longer available). 15 “Media Manipulating Mullah,” Aim Report, December, 1979, 2. 1 6 Wall Street Journal, 29 January 1979. 17 For a comprehensive compilation of all television daily newscasts, weeklies, and news specials on Iran from 1951 to 1984, see Naficy 1984:119–84. 18 See http://www.wwe.com/superstars/halloffame/inductees/theironsheik; also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrow_Vaziri (both last accessed 14 January 2012). 19 For an entertaining but foulmouthed and homophobic interview with the Iron Sheik, which shows his take on the famous tag-­team match between him and Volkoff and the Killer Bees in 1987 in Pontiac, Michigan, watched by ninety-­three thousand fans, see the following YouTube video, http://www3.youtube.com/ watch?v=9K-­wEUCCvE0 (accessed 24 November 2011). 20 In the 1990s, the Iron Sheik made an appearance on The Jerry Springer Show, where he wore his trademark pointy boots. Overjoyed to see the wrestling legend, the live audience broke out numerous times into spontaneous chants of “Sheik! Sheik! Sheik!” 21 Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1990. 2 Kayhan Havai, 11 July 1990, 6. 2 23 See http://www.aeispeakers.com/Mahmoody-­Betty.htm (last accessed 14 January 2012). 24 Quoted from the film’s entry in the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb .com. 25 “Iran Attacks Hollywood over Movie ‘Insults,’” cnn, 1 March 2009, http://www .cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/03/01/iran.hollywood/index.html?iref=allsearch (last accessed 14 January 2012). 26 According to Aghdashloo, one periodical’s editor in Iran was interrogated for publishing her photo. See “Aghdashloo Will Not Use Oscar for Political Speech,” Iran Times, 2 February 2004. 27 The Islamic Republic did not take either of these two honors graciously, as some people in the regime saw them as part of Western governments’ public diplomacy and the “cultural invasion” of the iri. 28 The American military acronym for Judge Advocate General is jag, which refers to the legal branches of the various U.S. forces. 29 For details of the monarchists and of pmoi politics and their connections to the Bush administration, including their funding and media relations, see Bruck 2006. 30 See the preview of Shahs of Sunset at http://www.bravotv.com/shahs-­of-­sunset/ season-­1/videos/from-­the-­old-­country-­to-­beverly-­hills (last accessed 20  January 2012). 31 See http://www.kumawar.com/about.php (last accessed 14 January 2012). 32 See http://www.kumawar.com/Mission.php (last accessed 14 January 2012). 33 For information about the Israeli Iranophobia, which since the Camp David Accord has been manufacturing a “folk devil” out of the Islamic Republic and not only driving the Israeli politics, public diplomacy, and mediawork regarding Iran but also those of the United States, see Ram 2009.

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34 All quotations in this paragraph are from http://www.kumawar.com/Mission .php (last accessed 14 January 2012). 35 See http://www.kumawar.com/Mission.php. 36 “First Video of Confessions of American Born cia Spy Amir Mirzaei Hekmati,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpG23N19QaQ (last accessed 14 January 2012). 37 See Hekmati’s mother’s statement on the family website, http://www.freeamir .org/ (last accessed 14 January 2012). 38 According to Wikipedia, the game was created under the leadership of Ali Reza Masaeli, based in Isfahan, Iran, in three years’ time and on a budget of $32,000 (300 million rials), which the student association supplied. See “Special Operation 85: Hostage Rescue,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operation_85:_ Hostage_Rescue (last accessed 14 January 2012). 39 To see the ad, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xu8rX6aYE8&feature= player_embedded, 14 January 2012 (last accessed 20 January 2012). 40 See http://www.clandestineradio.com/crw/news.php?id=281&stn=743&news=732 (last accessed 14 January 2012). 41 For Marjan tv see http://marjantvnetwork.com; for Manoto tv, see http://www .manoto-­1.com (both last accessed 14 January 2012). 42 For Salaam tv, see http://www.salaamtv.org; for Ahl-­e Bait tv, see http://asx.pack deal.com/Ahl-­e -­Bait-­TV-­Live; and for Velayat tv, see http://velayattv.org (all sites were last accessed 14 January 2012). 43 See http://www.iraniancinemachannel.com/programs.htm (last accessed 14 January 2012). 44 See https://www.weekingreen.org/page?show=the_show (last accessed 15 December 2011). 45 For the mission statement of Rasa tv, see http://rasatv.net; for that of the IraNeda Foundation, see http://www.astreetjournalist.com/2010/08/08/statement-­of-­ establishment-­of-­the-­iraneda-­foundation (both sites last accessed 14 January 2012). 46 See “Khamenei: Enemies Target People, Religion” http://www.payvand.com/news/ 10/oct/1157.html (last accessed 14 January 2012). 47 See http://www.mbc.net/. 48 See “Iran Shuts News Corp Office, Arrests 5—­Agency,” 7 December 2010, Reu­ters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/07/industry-­us-­iran-­tv-­closure-­idUSTR E6B66E720101207 (last accessed 14 January 2012). 49 Iranian government’s problem with the bbc news was apparently its Persian-­ language broadcasts only. Mehrdad Khonsari, the press attaché at the Iranian embassy in London in the run-­up to the revolution stated that “in principle, we did not have any objections to the news that bbc’s international division broadcast in English. However, the same news, when translated into the Persian and read by people who had specific political views [primarily leftist], would change meaning in an unacceptable way” (Khonsari 2010). 50 The Internet website Clandestineradio.com maintains a roster of radio stations worldwide, and it lists about two dozen “clandestine” radio stations in Persian, Arabic, Baluchi, and Kurdish operating against the iri. To listen, go to http://www .­intervalsignals.net (last accessed 14 January 2012). Besides the British and U.S. gov-

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ernments, other foreign governments also maintained radio programs or twenty-­ four-­hour stations in Persian. The most prominent were Germany’s Deutsche Welle, http://www.dw-­world.de; the Swedish Public Radio’s Persian service, Pejvak Radio (Persiska Redaktionen), http://www.sr.se/rs/red/ind_per.html; Radio France’s International Persian Service, http://www.rfi.fr/langues/statiques/rfi_ persan.asp; Radio Israel’s daily Persian service, Seda-­ye Esrail, http://www.radis .org; and the Netherlands’ parliament-­funded Radio Zamaneh, http://www.radio zamaneh.com (all sites last accessed 15 December 2011).  Several other extraterritorial Persian-­language oppositional programs were also broadcast: Seda-­ye Aras, the organ of the Iranian National Socialist Party, http:// members.tripod.com/~araz; Ava-­ye Ashena Radio, http://avayeashna.com; A ­ va-­ye Iran Radio in Paris, http://www.avairan.com; Azadegan Radio, http://www.iran57 .com; Ghasedak Radio, produced for Iranian women in Zurich, http://www .ghasedak.ch; Hambastegi Radio, with left and feminist views coming from Stockholm, http://radiohambastegi.net/; Persian Radio tv, http://www.persian radiotv.com; Radio Multikulti in Berlin, http://www.multikulti.de; Radio Velayat, broadcasting for two hours on Saturday mornings from Washington, http:// mamali.com/main/main.html; Seda-­ye Iran Radio in Los Angeles, http://www .krsi.net/us-­en. For a series of reports mapping the minority media in the European Union, including those of Iranians, see: “Diasporic Minorities and Their Media in the EU: A Mapping,” http://www2.1se.ac.uk/media@lse/research/ emtel/minorities/workshop.html (most of these sites were last accessed 14 January 2012).  To combat these extraterritorial radios the iri beefed up its own broadcast channels in Persian, in Iranian ethnic languages, and in foreign languages. The Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir) (aka Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, irib) opened many regional and local stations throughout the country, as well as the following national networks: Radio Sarasary, Radio Farhang, Radio Javan, Radio Maaref, Radio Payam, Radio Quran, and Radio Varzesh. See http://english.irib.ir/ (last accessed 14 January 2012). 51 For a film on Farrokhzad, his life, times, and death see the feature documentary aired on Manoto tv, It Was Night: Fereydoun Farrokhzad (Shab Bud: Fereydoun Farrokhzad). See the film on YouTube, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX0_ NuEshdc&feature=youtu.be (last accessed 1 January 2012). 52 See http://www.sarbazan.com/fazeli.htm. 53 See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0306/18/ltm.05.html. 54 See http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2009/10/sentences (last accessed 14 January 2012). 55 See “‘cia agent,’ Ali-­Zamani’s Confessions in Court,” Press tv, 9 August 2009, http://www.presstv.ir. Also see “Operatives of Iranian Monarchist Group Confess to Terrorist Activities,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com (both sites were last accessed on 4 January 2012). 56 The issue of Gardun carrying the controversial cover art was nos. 15–16, 1 Mordad 1370 / 23 July 1991. 57 Some of the contents of the Identity programs also appeared (almost verbatim) in Kayhan, the major daily newspaper controlled by the Islamists. 58 For the transcripts of Hoviyat programs, see Khorrami 1997 / 1376.

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59 Mohajerani’s political party, Hezb-­e Kargozaran-­e Sazandegi (Agents of Renewal Party), published a massive 1,056-­page tome containing transcripts of the impeachment debates, which I used to construct this narrative (Etemadi et al. 1999 / 1378). Among the supporters of impeachment were the filmmakers Farajollah Salahshur, Jamal Shorjeh, Javad Shamaghdari, Seyyed Alireza Sajjadpur, and Shahriar Bohrani (Etemadi et al. 1999 / 1378:545–46). The lobbying organization of the film industry, the House of Cinema, rose to his defense. For the names and declaration of those opposing the impeachment, see Etemadi et al. 1999 / 1378:565–67. 60 For Mohajerani’s website, go to http://mohajerani.maktuob.net. 61 “Sinema-­ye Iran Tahqirshodegi dar Barabar-­e Gharb ra beh E’temad-­e beh Nafs Mobaddal Kard,” Gozaresh-­e Film, June-­July 1997/Tir 1376, 40. 62 For more about Muslim intellectuals and the politics and structures of the reformist press, see Jalaeipour 2003. 63 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2002, Iran, http://www.hrw.org/wr2k2/mena3 .html. 64 Because of the amateur quality of the video clips that vvir showed in Iran and of those posted on the Internet by various partisan groups, it is difficult to ascertain what actually happened there. My account here is based on the eyewitness report of a trusted attendee. Some in the West accused the protesters of acting undemocratically by disrupting a conference that included courageous dissidents from Iran and by labeling them agents of Western imperialism. For a full list of participants, the transcripts of conference presentations and protesters, and the ensuing persecution of participants, see Zakariai 2000 / 1379. 65 For example, taking sides in Iranian politics, in early June 2010 a few days before the anniversary of the disputed election, voa tv broadcast an hbo documentary on Neda Agha-­Soltan, For Neda (2010), to commemorate the graphic and moving shooting death of this young woman on camera in Tehran streets, which made her an icon of the Green Movement. The opposition and voa claimed she was shot by the Basij forces, while Iran’s state-­controlled media issued different explanations, including the preposterous allegation that “a bbc correspondent had arranged for her to be shot as part of a news media war against the country” (Yong 2010a). 66 See http://www.iranian.com/main/2011/mar/what-­nuclear-­iran-­means (last accessed 14 January 2012). 67 See “Iran: Tose’eh-­ye Davazdah Reshteh-­ye Olum-­e Ensani Motovaqef Mishavad,” bbcPersian.com, 24  October 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran (last accessed 14 January 2012). The humanities and social sciences are not under attack in Iran alone. In the same period, universities in the United States began eliminating or combining departments and programs in these fields, chiefly for economic reasons. The budgets for the National Endowment for the Humanities and for the National Endowment for the Arts were likewise slashed, causing the president of Cornell University, David Skorton, to launch a “campaign on behalf of the humanities” (Jaschik 2010a, 2010b) 68 See “Entekhab-­e Mozu’ha-­ye Resaleh Mortabet ba Iran bara-­ye Daneshjuyan-­e Irani-­ye Kharej-­e Keshvar, Mamnu’ Shod,” 8 March 2011 / 17 Esfand 1389, http:// www.irna.ir.

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69 See “Moslehi: Barnamehha-­ye Vezarat-­e Ettela’at Tahajomi Mishavad,” bbcPersian .com, 3  March 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran (last accessed 14  January 2012. 7 0 The documentary Interrupted Lives (Zendegiha-­ye Monqate,’ 2010), written and produced by Geri Migielicz, Richard Koci Hernandez, and Liza Culik, reports that some sixteen hundred students have been executed since the revolution. 71 See “Hoshdar-­e Mottahari beh Ahmadinejad dar Mored-­e ‘Maktab-­e Irani’ va Hejab,” 9 March 2011, bbcPersian.com, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran. See also “Az Takhrib-­e Takht-­e Jamshid ta Bargozari-­ye Noruz dar an,” Deutsche Welle, 19 March 2011, http://www.dw-­world.de/dw/article/0,6465999,00.html (all sites acessed 14 January 2012). 72 See “iri Noruz at Persepolis,” Iranian, 10 March 2011, http://www.iranian.com. 73 Ali Larijani and Ezatollah Zarghami were appointed director generals of vvir, the state broadcasting monopoly, and Mohammad Hosain Saffar-­Harandi was appointed minister of culture and Islamic guidance. 74 See “Panj Trillion Rial Bara-­ye Moqabeleh ba ‘Jang-­e Narm,’” bbcPersian.com, 8 March 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2010/03/100308_139_softwar_ 1389budget.shtml; see also “Sartip Fazli: Hakerha-­ye Basiji beh Saitha-­ye Doshman Hamleh Mikonand,” bbcPersian.com, 13 March 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ persian/iran/2011/03/110313_an_iran_hackers_cyberwar.shtml (all sites last accessed 14 January 2012). 75 See “Talash-­e Basij Bara-­ye ‘Dekhalat-­e Mostaqim’ dar Tanzim-­e Kotob-­e Darsi,” bbcPersian.com, 29 October 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2010/10/ 101029_108_martyrdom_iran_schools_curriculum.shtml (last accessed 14 Jan­ uary 2012). 76 See http://www.amniatenarm.ir. 77 “Iranian State tv Acts as an Arm of the Intelligence Apparatus,” International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, 11  August 2010, http://www.iranhuman rights.org/category/reports/ (last accessed 14 January 2012). 78 See “Parvaneh Pakhsh-­e ‘Press tv’ dar Britania Laghv Shod,” BBCPersian.com, 20 January 2012 / 30 Dey 1390, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2012/01/120120 _132_presstv_license.shtml (last accessed 20 January 2012). 7 9 See http://www.presstv.com/aboutus.aspx. 80 The Islamic Republic’s mediawork did not target only Israel and Zionism but also certain Arab nations and leaders. In 2010, a one-­hour documentary, Assassination of the Pharaoh (E’dam-­e Fer’on), produced by the Cultural Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement in Iran (Komiteh­ye Farhangi-­ye Pasdasht-­e Shohada-­ye Nehzat-­e Jahani-­ye Eslam), which extolled the assassination of the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, and called him a “traitor” for signing a peace treaty with Israel, became controversial, causing diplomatic tensions between Iran and Egypt. 81 “Raz-­e Armagedon Beh Ma’bad-­e Tariki Resid,” 1 March 2010 / 10 Esfand 1388, see Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, http://www.irinn.ir. 82 See “Iran Launches Arabic iFilm Channel,” Press tv, 9 September 2010, http:// www.presstv.ir. For the channel’s website, go to http://www.ifilmtv.ir/en. 83 See “Shamaghdari: Paida Kardan va Bozorg Kardan-­e Noqat-­e Tarik Az Jasusi

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Badtar Ast,” bbcPersian.com, 5  August 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/ iran/2010/08/100805_141_cinema_shamaghdari_spying.shtml (last accessed 14 January 2012). 84 The film industry objected to such a view. For example, Mehdi Asgaripur, the director general of the House of Cinema, the umbrella organization for all the film industry unions, whose organization was accused of housing opposition figures and “enemies” of Ahmadinejad’s regime, objected to Shamaghdari’s comments, stating that “one of our predicaments today in cultural administration is the predominance of the security perspective over the cultural perspective among authorities in the fields of culture and arts.” See “Modiramel-­e Khaneh-­ye Sinema: Dar Modiriat-­e Farhang va Honar Nabayad Negah Amniyati Bashad,” bbcPersian.com, 12  September 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2010/09/100912_108_ asgarpour_on_cinema_policies.shtml (last accessed 14 January 2012). 85 In December 2010 a group of Iranians received permission and planted a tree in a brief ceremony in London’s Hyde Park. They called the tree Neda-­ye Iran, Iran’s Voice (neda in Persian means “voice”), in honor both of Neda Agha-­Soltan and of the protest movement she came to symbolize. See “Neda Agha-­Soltan, Tree Planted in Her Name in London’s Hyde Park,” Iranian, 12 December 2010, http://www.iranian.com/main/2010/dec/neda-­agha-­soltan (last accessed 14 January 2012). 86 See “Honarmandan-­e Sinema Khastar-­e Azadi-­ye Jafar Panahi Shodand,” 3 March 2010 / 12 Esfand 1388, http://www.ilna.ir/printable.aspx?ID=113819 (last accessed 14 January 2012). 87 See “The Message from Jafar Panahi,” http://laregledujeu.org/2010/05/18/1564/ the-­message-­from-­jafar-­panahi (last accessed 14 January 2012). 88 For the full text of Panahi’s letter in Persian, see “Tarikh Barkhord ba Honarmandan ra Faramush Nemikonad,” 11 November 2010 / 20 Aban 1389, http://www.rooz online.com/persian/archive/archivenews/news/archive/2010/november/11/article/ -­a53b46133d.html (last accessed 14 January 2012). 89 See “Namehha-­ye Sargoshadeh-­ye Mohammad Nourizad beh Ayatollah Ali Kha­ menehi,” bbcPersian.com, 15 August 2010 / 24 Mordad 1389, http://www.bbc.co .uk/persian/iran/2010/04/100421_117_nourizad_khamenei_letters.shtml (last accessed 14 January 2012). 90 See “Revolutionary Guard Confiscated Confidential Footage to Fabricate Film, Says Nourizad,” 17  December 2011, http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2011/12/ nourizad-­video/ (last accessed 14 January 2012). 91 See “Jashnvareh-­ye Fajr va Chalesh-­e Tahrim az Su-­ye Sinemagaran,” 10 January 2010 / 20  Dey 1388, http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2010/04/100421_117_ nourizad_khamenei_letters.shtml; also see “Namehha-­ye Sargoshadeh Mohammad Nurizad beh Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” 15  August 2010 / 24  Mordad 1389, http://www.payvand.com/news/10/jan/1271.html (both sites last accessed 14 January 2012). 92 For the letter and the list of the 142 filmmakers signing it, see “Iranian Documentary Filmmakers Boycott Cinema Vérité Documentary Film Festival,” 20 August 2009, http://www.payvand.com/news/09/aug/1179.html (last accessed 4 January 2012).

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93 See “Iranian Filmmakers Make a Pleas for Truth,” 29 June 2009, http://www .documentary.org/content/iranian-­filmmakers-­make-­plea-­truth (last accessed 4 January 2012). 94 To view the film, go to: http://www.lenziran.com/2011/09/17/bbc-­persian-­tv-­ documentary-­about-­the-­life-­of-­khamenei/ (last accessed 29 December 2011). 95 See “Iran House of Cinema Shut Down,” 4 January 2012, http://radiozamaneh .com/english/content/irans-­house-­cinema-­shut-­down (last accessed 5  January 2012). 96 See “A Letter from Bahman Ghobadi about Roxana Saberi,” http://stillinmotion .typepad.com/still_in_motion. 97 For Farahani’s Sokut music video (aka Sokoot), 19 April 2010, see YouTube, http:// www.youtube.com (last accessed 15  January 2012). For an interview with her about its making, see, “Golshifteh-­BBC.wmv,” 9 July 2010, on YouTube, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqL7_5ZmvXA&feature=player_embedded#! 98 See “Goftogu-­ye Hana Makhmalbaf ba ‘Narges Kalhor” Dokhtar-­e Moshaver-­e Ahmadinejad,” 12 October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR6shJzZ 5Yw&feature=player_embedded; and “Panahandegi-­ye Narges Kalhor D ­ okhtar-­e Moshaver-­e Ahmadinejad,” 14, October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=IqGPFNCIig0&feature=related (both sites last accessed 15 January 2012). 99 To view Iran: A Struggle for Freedom, go to http://vimeo.com/12426467 (last accessed 25 July 2012). 100 These sources include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; the Hurford Foundation; Larry Diamond, Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; and the National Endowment for Democracy. 101 See http://www.makhmalbaf.com/news.php?lang=2&n=67 (last accessed 15 January 2012). 102 “Hana Makhmalbaf Addresses the People of Lebanon ahead of Ahmadinejad’s Visit,” Makhmalbaf Film House, 11 October 2010 / 19 Mehr 1389, http://www .makhmalbaf.com (last accessed 15 January 2012). 103 See “Former Elite Officers in Revolutionary Guard Reveal Increasing Tensions in Iran Regime,” 14 June 2010, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua Z3G-­B7j_s (last accessed 15 January 2012). 104 Also see “Iran’s Film Biz Nipped in the Bud by Islamic Belief,” Variety, 9 May 1979, 91. 105 “Ravaj-­e Mod-­e Punk dar Tehran,” Iran Times, 9 November 1984. 106 “Javanan-­e Iran Baray-­e Mobarezeh beh Lebas-­e Punkha dar Amadehand,” Kayhan (London), 12 September 1985; Iran Times, 20 September 1985. 107 “Rahha-­ye Mobarezeh ba Videoklub,” Iran Times, 25 June 1982. 108 “Iran Cracks Down,” Variety, 19 February 1986, 4. 109 Among those specializing in Hollywood films are the following: http://www .bezhco.com; mihanblog, http://divxshoping.mihanblog.com; http://bestarchive .blogfa.com; fdvdbox, http://xdvd.pib.ir/pages/order.html; “Forushgah-­e Filmha-­ ye Holyvud,” http://www.jmshop.mihanblog.com/extrapage/sefaresh; “Forushgah-­e 3dhdfarrokh,” http://3dhdfarrokh.shoploger.com/?cat=3248; and http:// www.asanfilm.co.cc. One that specializes in Hindi and Bollywood movies is

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http://www.bwfans.org, and one that deals with Korean movies is http://www .1000pich.com (some of these sites are now either suspended or changed to offer merchandize other than movies, indicating their ephemerality; last accessed 15 January 2012). 110 See http://www.behfilm.com (the link no longer works; last accessed 15 January 2012). 111 “Khodsuzi-­ye Zan-­e Bist Saleh dar E’teraz beh Tamasha-­ye Filmha-­ye Mobtazal­e Videoi Tavasot-­e Hamsarash,” Kayhan Havai, 27 July 1994 / 5 Mordad 1373, 4. 112 Iran Times, 25 May 1994. 113 “Antenha-­ye Mahvarehi Jam’avari va Motokhalefan Mojazat Mishavand,” Kayhan Havai, 10 August 1994 / 19 Mordad 1372, 3. 114 Kayhan Havai, 26 April 1995 / 6 Ordibehesht 1374, 23. 115 Kayhan Havai, 19 July 1995 / 15; and Kayhan Havai, 26 July 1995 / 4 Mordad 1374, 15. 116 See “Naja: Kharid va Forush-­e Mahvareh Mamnu,” 15 October 2010 / 23 Mehr 1389, http://entekhabateazad.net (site no longer available; last accessed 15 January 2012); also see “Polis-­e Iran: Mahvareh Manand-­e Mavad-­e Mokhader Khatarnak Ast,” 16 October 2010 / 24 Mehr 1389, bbcPersian.com, http://www .bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2010/10/101016_144_kargar_police.shtml (last accessed 15 January 2012). 117 The original in Persian is “Seit O’ mobeil arzunitun, keshvar nemidim behetun.” 118 The original Persian slogans are “Telefon-­e man, resaneh-­ye man” and “Har Irani tarikhnegar.” 119 See Zibashenani-­ye E’terazat-­e Siasi dar Iran, 22 July 2010 / 31 Tir 1389, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/persian/tv/2010/07/100721_green_art.shtml (last accessed 15 January 2012). 120 See “Anonymous Video of Neda Agha-­Soltan’s Death Wins Polk Award,” Guardian, 16 February 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/feb/16/george-­ polk-­awards. To see the video go to “Neda Agha-­Soltan Shot in Iran,” http:// www.dailymotion.com/video/x901tq_neda-­agha-­soltan-­shot-­in-­iran_news (both sites last accessed 15 January 2012). 121 See “Long Island University Announces Winners of 2009 George Polk Awards in Journalism,” Long Island University, 16 February 2010, http://www.liu.edu (last accessed 15 January 2012). 122 Neda, an animated version, offers a historical background of the incident and runs for four and a half minutes, 7 June 2010. See it on YouTube, http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=wXN_yCSbUYk&feature=related (last accessed 15 January 2012). 123 The Green Wave, press book, http://www.thegreenwave-­film.com, 4 (last accessed 15 January 2012). 124 See the following sites: http://www.idfa.nl/nl/webzine/nieuws/prijs-­voor-­the-­ silent-­majority.aspx; and “Jayezeh-­ye Sinemai Bara-­ye ‘Filmsazan-­e Nashenas­e’ Iran,” 24 November 2010 / 3 Azar 1389, http://zamaaneh.com/news/2010/11/ post_14948.html (both sites last accessed 15 January 2012). 125 Blurred Vision’s music video is at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcp5ua_ blurred-­vision-­another-­brick-­in-­the_music (last accessed 15 January 2012).

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126 The “Hey Executioner, Get Lost” music video is available on YouTube under the title “Hey Devils, get lost,” 6 March 2011, at http://www.youtube.com (last access 15 January 2012). 127 See Khas o Khashak on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com (link is now removed; last accessed 15 January 2012). 128 “Persecution of Bloggers Continues, Now With Harsher Sentences,” 15 October 2010, unhcr, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher,RSF,,,4cbd445512,0. html (last accessed 15 January 2012). 129 See “With 52 Journalists in Jail, Iran Hits New, Shameful Record,” 9 March 2010, http://cpj.org/2010/03/with-­52-­journalists-­in-­jail-­iran-­hits-­new-­shamefu.php (last accessed 15 January 2012). 130 See “Tortured Prominent Iranian Journalist Sues Nokia Siemens Networks for Human Rights Abuses,” http://onlymehdi.posterous.com/tortured-­prominent-­ iranian-­journalist-­sues-­no (last accessed 15 January 2012). 131 “Iranian State tv Acts as an Arm of the Intelligence Apparatus,” International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, 11 August 2010, http://www.iranhuman rights.org (last accessed 15 January 2012). 132 One ngo purportedly receiving such help was the Center for Iranian Studies in Toronto. See “Is Toronto Cultural Centre Funded by Iran’s Mullah Regime?,” http://www.onlydemocracy4iran.com. The National Iranian American Council (niac) has also been accused of promoting the causes of the Islamic Republic by some exiles, even though it has received funding from the U.S. government and from foundations, which would militate against such cross-­funding. niac denies any affiliations with, or funding from, the Iranian regime, and charges that the accusations are fabricated by the pmoi and right wing U.S. neocons. For a sampling of arguments on this issue see the following: “Voice of the Mullahs: Public Diplomacy Takes a pro-­Islamist Tilt,” Washington Times, 14 April 2010; Timmerman 2008; and “Myths vs. Facts: Fighting the Smears,” http://www.nia council.org/site/PageServer?pagename=About_myths_facts (last accessed 5 January 2012). 133 See “High Council of Iranian Affairs Abroad,” http://congress.iranianshouse.ir (last accessed 15 January 2012). 134 “Barkhiaz Sherkat Konandegan-­e dar Hamayesh-­e Bozorg-­e Iranian-­e Moqime-­e Kharej,” 5 August 2010, http://greenprotests.blogspot.com/2010/08/blog-­post_ 05.html (last accessed 15 January 2012). 135 See http://www.linktv.org/BridgeToIran (last accessed 29 January 2012). 136 Link Media, which operates Link tv, was founded in 1999 as an independent and non-­commercial media company, which acquires, produces, and delivers global news, documentaries, and cultural programming over three distribution channels: broadcast, Web, and mobile devices. According to a Link tv press release dated 23 January 2012, Link tv programs are carried by DirecTV and Dish network satellite channels, reaching more than 35 million U.S. households, and they are also aired by several cable television companies, reaching another 22 million homes. 137 Ibid. For more about the Bridge to Iran series go to www.Linktv.org/BridgeToIran. 138 See “Suicide Is the Second Leading Cause of Death in Iran,” AsiaNews, 3 November 2006, http://www.asianews.it (last accessed 15 January 2012).

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Chapter 5: Iranian, but with a Different Accent: A Cinema of Displacement or a Displaced Cinema? 1 This claim by the Iranian Interest Section is not verified and must be taken with caution. 2 Among these research tools are issues of The World Is My Home, a catalog of the Exile Film Festival, Göteburg, Sweden, from 1993 to 2001; issues of Sinema-­ye Azad magazine, published in the 1990s in Saarbrücken, Germany; film festival and film distributor catalogs; my own books, Naficy 1984, 1993b, and 2001a; and filmmakers’ filmographies, résumés, films, and interviews and correspondences with them. 3 Among these female filmmakers are the following, classified by film format. Fiction: Shirin Etessam, Maryam Keshavarz, Granaz Moussavi, and Marva Nabili; documentary: Alaleh Alamir, Simon Farkhondeh, Aryana Farshad, Sepideh Farsi, Tanaz Eshaghian, Tina Gharavi, Roya Hakakian, Ziba Mir-­Hosseini, Sara Nodjumi, Soudabeh Oskooi-­Babcock, Mansooreh Saboori, Mehrnaz Saeedvafa, Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri, and Mahyad Tousi; art films: Tina Batajian, Gita Ha­ shemi, and Mitra Tabrizian; video art and installations: Shirin Neshat and Ghazel Radpay; animation: Zahra Dowlatabadi. 4 For more on displaced Iranian populations outside Iran see, in addition to the sources cited in the text, Ansari 1988; Fathi 1991; Kelley, Friedlander, and Colby 1993; Naficy 1993b; Mahdi 1998; Sreberny 2000; Spellman 2004; Mobasher Mostafavi 2006, 1996; Mohammadi 2003; and Der-­Martirosian 2008. Some of these also cover Iranian media in diaspora. 5 There have been few systematic studies of Iranian exile media outside Los Angeles. For studies of Iranian exile media in the U.K., see Sreberny 2000 and Spellman 2004; for Iranian exile TV in Germany see Horz 2011; and for Iranian exile media in Dallas, see Mobasher Mostafavi 2006, 1996. 6 More than half of the immigrants from Iran, 54.9 percent, had a college degree or higher, twice as high as that among all foreign-­born people. Their rate of self-­ employment in 2000 (21.8 percent) placed them among the most entrepreneurial groups, and with a rate of 50.2 percent, they led all Middle Eastern groups in managerial and professional occupations (Bozorgmehr 2007:473). 7 Television programs with significant religious content produced in exile only began in 1992, when Mozhdeh (Glad Tidings), an Assembly of God Christian program, and Aftab (Sunshine), a pro–Islamic Republic show, began. The former concentrated on religious discourses, conversations, and testimonies, while the latter focused on Iranian culture, Islamic art, and current affairs (Naficy 1993b). 8 Fariba Adelkhah examines the conservative and Islamic dimensions of Iranians in California (2001). 9 A prominent music video director in the United States is Ahmad Kiarostami, the son of Abbas, who describes some of his videos and his techniques in the Voice of America report titled “Goftogu-­ye Seda-­ye Emrika ba Ahmad Kiarostami,” available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com. Of course, Iranians made music videos not just in diaspora but also inside Iran, in a burgeoning underground music scene. See the website of Zirzamin, Iran’s alternative music magazine, http://www.zirzamin.org.

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10 In the years to come, Maghsoudlou would also publish several books of film criticism, including a filmography of Iranian cinema (1987). 11 To get a full list of all the Pahlavi-­era feature movies shown in the United States in the 1980s, in addition to those in the hfi and ifvc collections (appendix B and appendix C, respectively), the following titles should be considered, as my records indicate they were screened: Alafha-­ye Harz, Asrar-­e Gang-­e Darreh-­ye Jenni, Bar Faraz-­e Asemanha, Cheshmeh, Farar az Taleh, Faseleh, Haft Shahr-­e Eshq, Havas, Jenjal-­e Arusi, Kalaq, Khak-­e Sar Behmohr, Khaterkhah, Khakestari, Khoda Qovvat, Marg dar Baran, Mehman, Mi’adgah-­e Khashm, Mohallel, M ­ oshgel-­e Aqa-­ye Etemad, Mozhdeh-­ye Eshq, Nazanin, O.K. Mister, Panjereh, Pol, ­Qasr-­e Zarrin, Sazesh, Shab-­e Yalda, Shahr Ashub, Shazdeh Ehtejab, Showhar-­e Pastorizeh, Topoli, Towqi, Yaqut-­e Seh Cheshm, Yek Del va Do Delbar, Yek Esfahani dar S ­ arzamin-­e Hitler, and Zan-­e Farangi. 12 These include the following suicides: Niusha Farrahi committed suicide by public self-­immolation in Los Angeles in 1987; Nooshin Amani hanged herself in Los Angeles in 1994; Eslam Kazemiyeh drugged and asphyxiated himself in Paris in 1997; Hassan Honarmandi combined sleeping pills with Cognac in Paris in 2002; and Mansur Khakhsar asphyxiated himself in Los Angeles in 2010 in a manner similar to the suicide of the exiled Iranian general in Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog (2003). Hossein Ziai, the Islamic and Iranian studies professor at UCLA, committed suicide in summer 2011 by leaping from his three story condominium due to a deep depression he suffered in the last few months of his life apparently caused by a combination of the medicine administered to him for his acute diverticulitis and the failure of the Green Movement inside Iran. To these, of course, must be added the suicide by kitchen gas of the most famous Iranian writer of the twentieth century, Sadeq Hedayat, in Paris in 1951. 13 Not only Iranian émigrés but also Iranian art and crafts had to change identity to cross national borders and to avoid the U.S. embargo on Iranian products. An art dealer states that Safavid-­period artworks were imported into the United States disguised as Turkish art, while Afghan carpets were imported as Persian rugs (Moallem 2000:205). 14 See Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, http://www.paaia.org/CMS/ mission-­ focus-­ history.aspx (last accessed 29  February 2012). In 2007 vision-­ Jimmy Delshad became the mayor of Beverly Hills, making him the highest-­ ranking Iranian American elected official in the country, in a city in which eight thousand of the thirty-­five thousand residents were of Iranian origin, most of them Jewish (Kasindorf 2007). 15 Essy Niknejad also produced mainstream films for broadcast tv and cable tv channels, among them Chromiumblue.com (2003), Women of the Night (2000), and Red Shoe Diaries (1997). 16 There are too many individual books to name here; for anthologies containing samples of these, see Karim 2006; Zanganeh 2006; Sullivan 2001; and Karim and Khorrami 1999. 17 These are A Nation on Two Wheels (1990), a twenty-­eight-­minute film on the Dutch’s strong relation with their bikes (rvu Television); We Are Gypsies (1990),

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a series of three thirty-­minute documentaries about Gypsies in the Netherlands (nos Television); But the Shadow Remains (1992), on the history of crime and punishment in the Netherlands (rvu Television); Poetry Is an Act (1994), on the twenty-­fifth anniversary of Poetry International in Rotterdam (rvu Television); Teaching Lightness (1995), on visually handicapped children (rvu Television); Faraway Students (1996), a twenty-­five-­minute film on refugee children; The Voice of the Stone (1996), a twenty-­five-­minute documentary on cave paintings in Spain and France; Manuscripts Don’t Burn (1997), an eighty-­minute film about Russian writers and poets (rvu Television); and The Trail (2000), a seventeen-­minute film on Gypsies during the Second World War. 18 Govindini Murty, “Interview: Writer-­Producer Cyrus Nowrasteh on his ‘Into the West’ and ‘9/11’ Miniseries,” Libertas: A Forum for Conservative Thought on Film, http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas (the site has since ceased operation). 19 Quoted on Vancouver’s Cinematheque website, http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca. 20 For more on The Suitors, see Kibbey 2005; and Naficy 2001a. 21 Kayan (London), 7 December 1989. 22 For a comprehensive analysis of The Suitors, involving interviews with some thirty spectators and the film’s cast and crew, see Kibbey 2005. 23 See the festival website, http://www.diasporafilmfest.com (last accessed 29 February 2012). 24 From Accented Cinema Film Series electronic flier sent to the author (21 February 2006). 25 See the festival website, http://www.exilefilmfestival.com (last accessed 28 February 2012). 26 See http://www.exilefilmfestival.com/index.php?id=77 (last accessed 2 December 2011). 27 For these, see the festival catalogs at http://noorfilmfestival.com (last accessed 28 February 2012). 28 See “First London Iranian Film Festiavl,” http://www.frontrowreviews.co.uk/ news/%E2%80%A8iranian-­festival%E2%80%A8/5883 (last accessed 29  January 2012). 29 See “Persian International Film Festival,” http://www.facebook.com/PersianFilm Festival (last accessed 29 January 2012). 30 For some of the subtext of this dispute, see “Defending the Iranian People,” Daily Bruin, 17 April 1981, which contains an interview with Rafigh Pooya. Also see Marsha Goodman’s subsequent letter, “Friday Bloody Friday,” Daily Bruin, 28 April 1981. 31 For more on the impact of this televisual military trial in feeding the revolutionary fervor during the second Pahlavi era, see volume 2. 32 In addition to producing Allamehzadeh’s movie The Guests of Hotel Astoria, Pooya directed his own feature fiction thriller, Broken Bridges (1996, starring Behrouz Vossoughi), which he filmed in the United States, Russia, and Azerbaijan. This film was driven by a return narrative that examined Azeri nationalism. It resonated autobiographically, as Pooya is of Azeri background. Among Iranian movies that Pooya’s company distributed were Naderi’s The Runner, Baizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger, and Mehrjui’s The Tenants.

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33 For more on the politics of the film and on the filmmaker, see Zavareei 1980. 34 For a detailed description of the film’s sequences, see Jafari Lahijani 2008a / 1387: 258–65. 35 “Dar Jarian-­e Nemayesh-­e Film-­e Gavaznha dar Salon-­e Daneshgah Eddehi Hez­ bollahi beh Tamashachian Hamleh Nemudand,” Iranshahr, 4 February 1983 / 15 Bahman 1361, 3. 36 See http://www.spentaproductions.com/Cyrus-­the-­Great-­English/cyruspreview_ english.htm (last accessed 28 February 2012). 37 See http://www.wmm.com/catalog/pages/c476.htm (last accessed 28  February 2012). 38 See http://www.internews.org/visavis/BtvPages/FAQs.html (last accessed 2 December 2011). 39 For more on art-­house films and videos and installations by Iranian and Kurdish exile artists, see Sara Raza’s review of the Second Bishkek International Contemporary Art Exhibition in Kyrgyzstan, “In the Shadows of the ‘Fallen’ Heroes,” 1 October 2005, Arte East’s website, http://www.arteeast.org (last accessed 28 February 2012). 40 From Farshad’s interview with Pari Esfandiari, the host of the Irandokht website, “Mystic Iran,” 1 August 2005, http://www.irandokht.com/tv/tvmore.php?PID=42 (last accessed 29 February 2012). 41 Michael-­Oliver Harding, “Sharing Her Iranian Jewels Concordian Anna Fahr Documents Another Side of Her Culture in Khaneh Ma: These Places We Call Home,” Link, no. 1 (2006), n.p. 42 These were Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (2001), Ramin Bahrani’s Strangers (1999), and Babak Payami’s One More Day (1999). 43 See her official website, http://www.zibakazemi.org. For a film about Zahra Kazemi’s story and about political repression in Iran, see Forbidden Iran (2004), an episode of the pbs series Frontline/World, produced and directed by Carla Garapedian and reported and filmed by Jane Kokan. 44 Instead, Moslem Mansouri directed Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty (1999), a sixty-­minute documentary on the poet, produced by Bahman Maghsoudlou. 45 “Nasl-­e Avval, Nasl-­e Chaharom . . . Iran Bara-­ye Hameh-­ye Iranian,” MSF, no. 250 (2000 / 1379), 49. 46 Foreign filmmakers also made films involving transgender passing, homosexuality, and homoeroticism among Iranians, such as Angelina Maccarone’s powerful film Unveiled (aka In Orbit/Fremde Haut, 2005), starring Jasmin Tabatabai. 47 The omnibus film, Tickets (2005), by three directors Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiar­ ostami, and Ken Loach, is interesting in this regard. The entire tripartite film takes place inside a European train traveling through Italy, offering a powerful treatise on contemporary displacement and globalization by using a train both as a vehicle and a symbol of these conditions. 48 For these works, see http://www.photoartifice.com/bazar.html (last accessed 28 February 2012). 49 This latter speculation is highlighted in Alexis Kouros’s fifty-­minute documentary about him, Waiting for Godot at De Gaulle (Seuraavaa Lentoa Odottaessa, 2003). 50 Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004) is based on the story of Mehran Nasseri without acknowledging it on the screen, although Nasseri admits that he signed

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a contract with Spielberg for $300,000 and a percentage of the film’s box-­office returns (Mehran and Donkin 2004:28). In addition, this film made some major changes to Nasseri’s story, including shifting the main character from an Iranian to the citizen of a fictitious Eastern European country whose motherland undergoes a revolution while he is in flight to Western Europe. See also another docu­ mentary on Nasseri, Waiting for Godot at De Gaulle (2004), directed by Alexis Kouros, which covers the same materials as Rahmanian’s film but extends them over a longer time (sixteen years at the airport), with an extra emphasis both on his developing media persona (he does not allow tourists to take flash photos of him) and on the concept of “waiting” as a general condition of millions of refugees. As he told me, Rahmanian and Hibbard filmed more than 150 hours with their subjects, inside and outside the center, some of them very intimate scenes, which because of ethical reasons Rahmanian decided not to include in the final film. He spent one year in New York editing the film, twelve hours a day. He was arrested twice in Tehran for filming scenes he should not have filmed, but was quickly released; his camera was confiscated, but it was returned to him within a week. With the exception of Sussan, the other main film subjects saw the finished film. Their commentary: “It was not sufficiently dramatic!” (Naficy 2009b). Tabatabai has exhibited her art in major European biennales, museums, and galleries. She is the cofounder (with Babak Afrassiabi) of Pages magazine/project, an innovative bilingual Persian-­English cultural arts magazine that publishes both on paper and on the Internet; see www.pagesmagazine.net. Passage is part of a series of videos, Approximate Measures, which focus on specific locations and their inhabitants. It is in these approximately measured locations that people’s intentions, thoughts, and relations to one another and to their living conditions are revealed in some clarity. The naming of this film project Kooch (migration) must tap into an ancestral story of Gharavi’s family, as she told me her ancestors belonged to the Bakhtiari tribe, who until the first Pahlavi Shah’s forced sedentarization of the tribes used to migrate bianuually. Her grandmother’s father was among those who left the tribe and became a settled person. “I have been fascinated by this nomadic cultural root,” she told me, and “no doubt it has shaped my present. I am rootless, a wanderer, and I am tied to the land in a way that I can only imagine comes from this ancestor-­memory” (Naficy 2012c). Born in 1956 in Tehran, Oskoui-­Babcock earned her bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Long Beach (1980), and her master of fine arts in theater directing from the University of Houston (1988). She directed several plays and films, including the documentary The Circuit (2001) and the narrative feature Someone Special (1995). Underground Zero (2002) contains short films by fifteen directors dealing with the 9/11 attacks. As Zahedi tells it, e-­mails were sent to one hundred filmmakers soliciting films; seventy-­seven films arrived, and fifteen were selected to form the seventy-­six-­minute omnibus film. From Abdorrahman Boroumand’s Foundation’s website, http://www.iranrights. org/english/foundation.php; Omid’s website, http://www.iranrights.org/english/ memorial.php (both were last accessed on 28 February 2012).

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57 To see the entire film and a slideshow of student victims, go to http://www.iran rights.org/student-­movie.php and http://www.iranrights.org/student-­exhibit.php (both were last accessed on 28 February 2012). 58 Apparently, this massacre was set off by two momentous political events: Ayatollah Khomeini’s acceptance of the UN Security Council Resolution 598, which instituted a ceasefire in the Iran-­Iraq war and the attack on Iran by the National Liberation Army, a military force created by the Iraq-­based pmoi, which the Iranian army repulsed. The ceasefire diverted world attention from the domestic issue of political prisoners, and the attack on the country by the mojahidin from the enemy’s soil gave cart blanche to the regime to liquidate its jailed supporters and other dissident prisoners. 59 See “Document—­Iran: Violations of Human Rights, 1987–1990,” 1  December 1990, Amnesty International, http://www.amnesty.org (last accessed 28 February 2012). 60 See Kanun-­e Zendanian-­e Siasi-­ye Iran (dar Tab’id), http://www.kanoon-­zendanian .org/History.html (last accessed 28 February 2012). 61 To see the full Blindfolded Witnesses film, go to http://www.kanoon-­zendanian.org (last accessed 28 February 2012). 62 See the film’s Facebook site, Iranian Taboo, http://www.facebook.com/iranian taboo (last accessed 28 February 2012). 63 For this program, see www.rahai-­zan.tv. 64 Mansouri’s and Maghsoudlou’s collaboration became poisoned and controversial, resulting in mutual public accusations and two film versions, one by each director. See the thirty-­eight-­page pamphlet about the making of the film and the controversy by Maghsoudlou, called Shamlu: The Master Poet of Liberty (2001), http://www.ifvc.com/ahmad-­shamlou.htm (last accessed 28 February 2012). My analysis is based on Maghsoudlou’s version. 65 Among the films about musicians and performers, Hayedeh, Legendary Persian Diva (2009) should be mentioned. Made by the exiled musician and journalist Pejman Akbarzadeh in the Netherlands, this one hundred–minute documentary focuses on the career and immense popularity of the late iconic singer Hayedeh, both before the revolution inside Iran and after it in exile, where she died in 1999. 66 She has directed several episodes for the Swedish television series; her only feature film is All Hell Let Loose (Hus i Helvete, 2002). 67 For an analysis of Neshat’s films, see Naficy 2000; for a discussion of the films and the careers of Tabrizian, see Naficy 2001a:253–57 and Naficy 20061; for Zahedi, see Naficy 2001a:266–69; for more on Fatemi, see Naficy 1993b; for more on Abdoh, see Mufson 1999. For Abdoh’s papers, see Reza Abdoh Collection of Papers, 1983–1995, T-­Mss 1996–010, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 8 From http://universes-­in-­universe.de/car/istanbul/2003/antrep02/e-­tour-­03.htm 6 (last accessed 28 February 2012). 69 From a typewritten statement by Shirin Neshat, which Karimi sent me, 30 August 2009. 70 In another work, The Wall (Mauer), Karimi built a small makeshift wall at the site of the U.S. Army’s Checkpoint Charlie that used to divide East and West Berlin

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during the Cold War. As he piles on stone blocks to rebuild the wall, young onlookers gather, some of whom come to his aid. 71 Unless otherwise noted, all biographical quotations are from this interview (Na­ ficy 2003a). 72 Neshat’s filmography, courtesy of the filmmaker, is as follows: Anchorage (1996), shot on video in New York, commissioned by Creative Times, ten minutes (loop); The Shadow under the Web (1997), shot on video in Istanbul, four separate videos, ten minutes each (loop); Turbulent (1998), shot on 16mm black-­and-­white film in New York, ten minutes; Rapture (1999), shot on 16mm black-­and-­white film in Morocco, thirteen minutes; Soliloquy (1999), shot on 16mm color film in Turkey and the United States, seventeen minutes; Fervor (2000), shot on 16mm black-­ and-­white film in Morocco, ten minutes; Pulse (2001), shot on 16mm black-­and-­ white film in Morocco, 7:20 minutes; Possessed (2001), black-­and-­white and color, shot on 16mm and 35mm film in Morocco, twelve minutes; Passage (2001), shot on 35mm color film in Morocco, 11:30 minutes; Logic of the Birds (2001), black-­ and-­white and color, shot on 16mm film in the United States, fifty-­five minutes; Tooba (2002), shot on 35mm color film in Mexico, thirteen minutes; Issar (2003), color, shot on video and with found footage in New York, ten minutes; The Last Word (2003), shot on 35mm color film in Brooklyn, twenty minutes; Mahdokht (2004), shot on Super 35mm color film in Morocco, ten minutes; and Zarin (2005), shot on Super 35mm color film in Morocco, twenty minutes. 73 In addition to collaborating with Neshat on all her videos and films, Shoja Azari (born in Shiraz in 1958) made several films of his own. The Story of the Merchant and the Indian Parrot (1998) is a thirty-­minute film shot in 35mm in New York. He also made Maria de Los Angeles (2003), a feature documentary filmed in Mexico, about the colonial and exploitive dimensions of filmmaking in foreign lands. His debut feature film, K (2002), is an ambitious trilogy adapted from three short stories by Franz Kafka—­“ The Married Couple,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Fratricide”—­which was shot in the United States and Morocco and which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2002. Azari’s latest work is Windows (2006–9), a series of nine short experimental films that investigate voyeurism and film language. 74 The Persian original, from Gozideh-­ye Ghazaliat-­e Shams, is “Bemirid, bemirid, dar in eshq bemired / dar in eshq cho mordid, hameh ruh pazirid.” 75 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Ghazel are taken from my correspondence with her (Naficy 2000). Some papers that Ghazel provided me bore letters of the alphabet, instead of page numbers; these are placed in parentheses. 76 From 1997 to 2000, Ghazel shuttled between Iran and France, spending seven to eight months in Iran, the rest in France. In November 2000 she moved to New York for six months on a French Ministry of Culture grant to continue making her Me films. Since her return from New York, she has been living in France with only occasional visits to Iran. 77 “Ba Naqqashi ru-­ye Divarha-­ye Shahr, Bacheh-­ha-­ye Khiaban Haqq-­e Hayat Khod ra beh Tasvir Keshidand,” Khordad, 20 September 1999 / 29 Shahrivar 1378. 78 “Kudakan-­e Khiabani ‘Hoquq-­e Kudak’ ra Amuzesh Midehand,” Sobh-­e Emruz, 17 October 1999 / 15 Mehr 1378.

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79 “Ba Naqqashi ru-­ye Divarha-­ye Shahr, Bacheh-­ha-­ye Khiaban Haqq-­e Hayat Khod ra beh Tasvir Keshidand,” Khordad, 20 September 1999 / 29 Shahrivar 1378. 80 Ghazel’s videography is as follows: 1998: Me 1 to Me 7, Wedding 1; 1999: Me 8 to Me 14, Wedding 2; 1997–2000: Me 15 to Me 24; 2001: Me 25 to Me 41; 2002–6: Me 42 to Me 64; 2003–2012: Me 65 to Me 71; 2008: Home; 2010: Road Movie I; 2011: Black Hole I, Black Hole II; 2012: Road Movie II (Naficy 2001f and Naficy 2012c). 81 For the manifestos of imperfect cinema and the cinema of hunger, see Martin 1997a. For the full text of the “vow of chastity,” see Cine Text Film & Philosophy site, http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/dogme_ct.html (last accessed 1 March 2012). For more on the Dogma movement, see Hjort and MacKenzie 2003. 82 Occasionally, when the camera has to be mobile, such as when filming the water skiing scene from a boat, Ghazel asks a friend to film for her. 83 Suzie (Sousan) Delshadian, an artist working principally in Amsterdam and London, made a self-­funded triptych video installation about the Iran-­Iraq war, Commemoration (Yadegari, 2003). On three side-­by-­side screens she provided footage of daily life in cities, taxis, mosques, offices, shops, and homes, as well as of a journey to the deserted war front, where debris and the half-­destroyed machinery of war haunted the land. She also included brief moving vignettes with veterans, medics, their families, and with ordinary people remembering poignant moments of the war and of its effects on them and their loved ones. These took the form of simple recollection, description, poetry, and song. Like Ghazel’s triptych, this installation encourages viewers to create their own interpretations of what they see to heal their wounds. As the director states on her website: “I am interested in the different lenses through which the interviewees, the audience and I as a film-­maker, filter experiences. Memory is a distorting lens, with stories changing over time. What is striking is how experiences of trauma are filtered through political, religious, cultural and personal lenses to arrive at a position where memories of war become bearable stories” (http://www.suziedelshadian .com). 8 4 For example, Me 1997–2000 was exhibited at Iranian Contemporary Art, Barbican Center, London, England, April-­June 2001, organized by Rose Issa (Issa, Pakbaz, and Shayegan 2001). 85 Two examples are offered here. One is a two-­minute, 16mm home movie of Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Forughi, filmed in 1931 in Geneva, that Farhad Sepahbody, the last ambassador to Morocco under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, posted on the Internet magazine Iranian. Sepahbody’s father was Iran’s representative at the League of Nations and had hosted the premier for a conference. An embassy staff member interested in photography, Abdollah Entezam, filmed shots of Sepahbody’s family and children, ending with a shot of the premier on the balcony smoking a cigarette. See Farhad Sepahbody, “Retrieving 1931: A Family and Prime Minister Foroughi on Film,” Iranian, July 2003, http:// www.iranian.com. Sepahbody also posted another brief home movie of Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh, the renowned writer, taken in his home in Geneva in 1997 shortly before his death at the age of 102. He is shown writing a note to Sepahbody on the occasion of his visit and reading it aloud to him. See “With Jamalzadeh at 102,” Iranian, April 2005, http://www.iranian.com.

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86 Me 1 to Me 7 were filmed mostly in Iran, Me 8 to Me 24 were filmed in Iran and France, and Me 25 to Me 41 were filmed in New York. 87 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this section are taken from Satrapi’s talk at Columbia College, Chicago, 3 April 2009. 88 See the Now Lebanon website, 27 March 2008, http://www.nowlebanon.com (last accessed 1 March 2012). 89 Using the example of four women in exile in Germany, the film by Fathiyeh Nag­ hibzadeh, Shina Erlewein, Bettina Hohaus, and Meral El, Headscarf as a System—­ Does Hair Drive People Crazy? (Kopftuch als System—­Machen Haare verrückt?; 2004), examines the “strict gender apartheid, discrimination, and the enforcement of Zwangsverschleierung (forced veiling).” The veil is regarded not only as a symbol of Islamic-­patriarchal domination but also an instrument of power with which the regime controls its opponents. Yet women are presented not as mere victims but as individuals with their own forms of resistance (see http:// forum.radiocorax.de/showthread.php?tid=132; see also http://metrozones.info/­ metrobuecher/kabul/lady_04.html [both were last accessed 1 March 2012]). Two male directors, Hossein Khandan and Shahin Yazdani, also engaged in the politics and poetics of the veil in their joint feature documentary, American Burqa (2003), which focuses on the burqa that all women were forced to wear under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Made in Chicago, the film, which its makers describe as a “docudrama,” focuses on three American women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds and artistic interests as they wear a burqa for one day while conducting their usual daily affairs. Chezere, an African American singer, works in an antique shop during the day and sings with a rock band at night; Maya, a flamenco dancer at night, teaches flamenco to her pupils during the day; and Renee, a white Anglo painter, works at a local television station as a graphics artist. The film charts with humor and a particular visual style the reactions of the participating women to the burqa and to the physical and social challenges it poses for them—­as they skate down the street, tend to customers, paint, teach dance, hail taxis, go to restaurants, and eat a meal—­and their reception by others, coworkers, bosses, customers, husbands, and friends. While successful in conveying the difficulties of wearing the burqa and the negative and startled reactions it invokes, the film does not fundamentally oppose the practice or attempt to culturally and historically situate it. 90 Ghadirian’s paintings, like Ghazel’s triptych Me films, were shown in the Iranian Contemporary Art exhibition in London in 2001. Other female artists who used the veil and computers to update and transform images in their art were Parastou Forouhar (http://www.parastou-­forouhar.de), Malekeh Nayiny (http://www .malekeh.com), and Soody Sharifi (http://www.soody-­sharifi.com) (all three were last accessed 1 March 2012). 91 For Saman’s cartoon series Those Eyes, see Iranian, 2 January 2001, http://www .iranian.com (last accessed 1 March 2012). 92 To view more of Amir Normandi’s photographs of veiled models, see Iranian, 20 October 2005, http://www.iranian.com (last accessed 1 March 2012). 93 In my presentation on Ghazel’s films at the “Unveiled Lives: Women in Iranian Cinema” conference in London in May 2001, I screened about twelve minutes of

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the Me films. An Iranian critic and conference participant, who later published a review of the conference, provided such a reading of Ghazel’s films. She characterized what she saw there of Ghazel’s films as “extremely simple-­minded” and “cartoonish,” and went on to criticize them for their “simple and superficial view of Iranian women” (Somaini 2001 / 1380:131). 94 Ghazel’s latest work is a return to her earlier workshop projects with disadvantaged artists, except this time it involves working not with Iranians in Tehran but with non-­Western immigrants in Paris. Her twenty-­minute Home (Stories) (2008) contains films of various art projects of immigrants in France about their ideas of home. 95 Shahid Saless claims that he spent three days in a Tehran orphanage located opposite the red-­light district (called New City), which was the site of Quarantine, and filmed forty-­five minutes of the film before the director of the establishment, who did not like the screenplay he had written, complained to Empress Farah’s mother about him attempting to create a negative image of Iran, causing the government to shut down the production (quoted in Sar Reshtehdari 1998:52–55). 96 This film is called Lotte H. Eisner’s Long Vacation (Die 1angen Ferien der Lotte H. Eisner, 1979). On leaving Nazi Germany by train for a permanent French exile, she had declared that she was going on a “long vacation.” 97 As Shahid Saless told me, to prevent him from making so many then costly international phone calls, his stepmother, with whom he lived in Southern California, had locked the number zero on their rotary home phone (Naficy 1997b). 98 For a description of Naderi’s films and career in English, see Golmakani 1993. For an extensive anthology of essays on his works, see Haidari 1991b/1370. 99 The interview with him was conducted over a two-­day session when I invited him to show his films and exhibit his photography in a show called New York City Walls 1990s: Photographs and Collages, at Rice Media Center, 24–25 October 1996. 100 As an example, the night before his New York City Walls 1990s: Photographs and Collages exhibition, when we finished hanging his art at the Media Center gallery, he said: “The Americans do not know the pride that you and I draw as Iranians from hanging such a professional-­looking show in the USA.” 101 Naderi’s films are quintessential examples of accented cinema’s massive multifunctionality. For example, Marathon and Sound Barrier credit him as co-­ executive producer, producer, director, screenplay writer, editor, and sound designer (as well as set designer in the former).

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i n de x

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. Abadan: foreign cultures in, 508; Rex Cinema fire, 22, 23, 414; siege of, 8; war documentaries on, 8, 14, 22–24, 31 Abadan, the Innocent City (Eslamu documentary), 8, 22 Abadi, Sou, 150 Abbasgholizadeh, Mahboubeh, 149–50, 357 a.b.c. Africa (A. Kiarostami film), 183, 188, 192, 249 Abdoh, Reza, 467–68 Abdolrahimi, Gholam, 33 Abdolvahab, Mohsen, 61 Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran (abf), 459–60 Abedian, Torang, 73 Abrams, M. H., 177 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 257 accented cinema: animated, 494–96; anti-Islamic Republic, 281; on arts and cinema, 461–66; autobiographical, 453–56, 491; characteristics of, 389–92; claustrophobia in, 401, 404–5, 405, 438, 448, 451, 469, 501, 506; cosmopolitan, 397–400, 500–512; defined, 393; denial and panic in, 400–405; diary films, 200, 422, 423,

467, 491–94; diasporic, 171, 297, 370, 394–95, 413; displacement and, 384; dissident, 466; documentaries, 4, 51; emergence of, 375–76; émigré, 395–96, 399; ethnic, 396–97; exilic, 338–39, 393–94, 399–400, 400–405, 413; film production, 378–81, 392; gender and, 377–80; global, 392–93; historical documentaries, 412–21; humor in, 451–52; identity documentaries, 422–59; international film festivals and, 253–55, 392, 407–12; mise-en-scène in, 401, 451; by ngos, 459–61; postmodernism in, 370–71, 389, 399, 449, 453; postrevolutionary, 51; reception of, 405–7; salvage documentaries, 464–66; self-inscription in, 473–74, 491; as transnational, 370, 375–76; types of, 393; women’s avantgarde, 467–500. See also ethnic cinema “Accented Cinema Film Series,” 408 Accompanied by Wind, into the Heart of the Desert’s Loneliness (Tayyab film), 81 Actor, The (M. Makhmalbaf film), 198 Adel, Gholamali Haddad, 100–101 Adelaide Film Festival, 70 Adineh, Golab, 163 Adnan, General. See Kassey, Adnan El adoption, 60–61 Adrekani, Tahmineh, 119 Aesthetics of Political Protest in Iran, The (Yusefi film), 352

Afarideh, Hadi, 333 Afarideh, Mohammad, 89 Afghan Alphabet (M. Makhmalbaf film), 228, 234 Afghan Children Education Movement, 242 Afghanistan, the Lost Truth (Maleknasr film), 239 Afghan refugees, cinema on, 233–35, 238–39 Afiyat, Naghemeh, 63 Afkhami, Behrouz, 126–27 Afravian, Adnan, 35 Afro-Iranian Lives (Mirzai/Ghelichi documentary), 427, 428 afrts. See American Forces Radio and Television After Thirteen Years (Yousefpour documentary), 431–32 Afzali, Mahnaz, 150–51 Agha-Soltan, Neda, 156, 328, 353–56, 355 Aghdashloo, Shohreh, 288, 289, 403, 426, 432 Aghdashlu, Aydin, 80 Agitator in the City (Zhurak film), 387 Agitprop art/films, 68, 288, 289, 486 Ahadi, Ali Samadi, 357 Ahamdi, Banafsheh, 63 Ahankhah family, 180–82, 193, 194–95, 198, 202, 203, 211 Ahdoot, Dan, 452 Ahmadi, Ahmad Reza, 219 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud: banned film festivals and, 89; on British Council, 309; criticism of, 40, 214, 335; disputed reelection of, 80, 87, 130, 156, 216, 250, 256, 271, 273, 300, 330, 337, 380; on Hollywood, 287; on independent cinema, 251, 337–38; on Iranian nationalism, 320; on Iranians in diaspora, 362; media under, 347; music videos on, 357–59; on protesters, 300, 460; public diplomacy and, 256, 269, 290, 327; retrenchment period, 4, 21, 65, 111, 149, 166, 438, 480; sartorial rules under, 166; on satellite tv, 346; security apparatuses of, 322–23; U.S. vs. regime of, 290 Ahmadinejad, Reza, 438–39

592

i ndex

Ahmadpur, Ahmad, 209 Ahmadpur, Babak, 209 Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty (Mansouri/Maghsoudlou documentary), 464–65 Ahmadzadeh, Habib, 81 Ahwazis, 298–99 aidfp. See Association of Iranian Documentary Film Producers Aish HaTorah, 289 Akbari, Mania, 134, 138, 139, 146–48, 188, 468–69 Akhavan, Payam, 357 Akrami, Jamsheed, 126, 179, 236, 462; essay films of, 185–86, 461; film piracy and, 267; Panahi and, 262; on politics in film industry, 247. See also specific films Akrami, Josef, 464 Al-Ahwaz tv (satellite channel), 298–99 A’lami, Mohammad Reza, 118–19, 120 Albright, Madeleine, 243 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 307 Alexander (Stone film), 286, 421 Al-Fath operation. See Operation Al-Fath Al-Faw Peninsula, 24 Ali (Imam), 331 Allahyari, Houchang, 304, 376, 396, 403 Allamehzadeh, Reza, 1, 463; documentaries, 461–64; exilic cinema, 394, 400, 403, 407–8; as film editor, 460; IraNeda Foundation and, 300; on Islamic Republic regime, 254; particularism of, 510; underground films, 65. See also specific films Allouache, Merzak, 508 All Restrictions End (Haeri film), 62 Al-Mahdi Army, 13, 19 Alone in Tehran (Kalantari documentary), 59 Al-Qaeda network, 261, 308–9. See also September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Althusser, Louis, 359, 476 Altman, Vivien, 348–49 America Held Hostage (tv program), 276, 277, 280 America So Beautiful (Shokrian film), 453 Amini, Abbas, 364 Aminian, Farshad, 467

Amirabadi, Fariba, 84 Amirani, Amir, 73, 434, 435, 436, 444 Amirani, Taghi, 434, 435, 436, 437, 444 Amiryusefi, Mohsen, 77 Amnesia (M. Makhmalbaf film), 228 Amnesty International, 156, 169, 358, 460 Ancient Iran (film series), 253 And Along Came the Spider (Bahadori documentary), 60 Anders, Wladyslaw, 33 Andersen, Christine, 60–61 Andrew, Geoff, 171 Angelopoulos, Theo, 332 animated film: lack of support for, 3, 90–91; Maghsoudlou collection of, 357; master’s degree in, 82; motion comic technique, 357; veil and, 494– 96; women directors, 94, 138 Anjoman-e Senfi-ye Ruznamehnegaran-e Zan, 96 Another Brick in the Wall (music video), 358, 358 “Another Brick in the Wall” (Pink Floyd), 358–59 Another Growth (Purmand documentary), 24 Antasian, Vartan, 75–76 anthropological studies, 72–73, 78–79 Anthropology and Culture (website), 78–79 Anvar, Fakhreddin, 140 Apadana International tv (satellite channel), 298 Apartment (tv series), 121 Apick, Mary, 288 Appadurai, Arjun, 273 Apple, The (S. Makhmalbaf film), 128–29, 129, 211, 218, 230, 252 Arab Film Distribution, 246 Arabpur, Abolfazl, 61, 62 Arab Spring (2011), 349 Arafat, Yasser, 284 Araki, Mohammad Ali, 345 Arasoughly, Alia, 154–55 Arbabi, Mansureh, 91 Arbain (Razzazifar film), 240 Ardalan, Jahanshah, 425, 427, 484 Ardeshir Mohasses and His Caricatures (Maghsoudlou documentary), 465

Arg-e Jadid Documentary Film Festival, 88–89 Army of Shadows, The (tv series), 325 Aronofsky, Darren, 287 Arslan, Yilmaz, 451 Arté cable channel, 148 art-house cinema: ambiguity in, 190; awards for, 142, 242–43, 257, 259–60, 262; banned films, 176, 226–28; censorship of, 176, 178, 223, 226–28, 240; children in, 206–7, 208–11, 213, 214; cinema vérité aesthetics, 201–4; claustrophobia in, 200, 219, 226; color, use of, 220–24; critical synesthesia in, 218–26; diasporic, 399; dissident, 466; documentaries about directors, 185–87; emergence of, 176–77; ethnic films, 237; export markets for, 176, 241, 245–46; family mode of production, 229–33; globali­ zation of, 251–61; humanist themes in, 208–9, 212–26; hybrid textuality in, 187–92; imperial nostalgia in, 233– 34; impressionist mode of, 218–21, 221; independent filmmakers, 246–51; international earnings for, 247–49; in international film festivals, 242–45, 251–61; intertextuality in, 142, 163, 176, 180, 193, 197, 232, 235; metarealism in, 177, 192–201; mise-en-scène in, 219, 226, 259; multiplexity of, 233–42; poetry in, 218–20, 225–26; postmodernism in, 176, 177–78, 191, 192, 195, 201; post-9/11 treatment of filmmakers, 261–64; private-sector financing of, 177–78; privatization of, 175, 177–78; progressive rating system and, 227; realism in, 177, 178; refugee films, 237; screenplays, 178; self-inscription in, 176, 189, 192–93, 198–99, 207, 211, 399–400, 448; self-referentiality in, 163, 189, 193; self-reflexivity in, 52, 110, 176, 177, 189, 192, 193–201, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 399–400; state-supported, 175, 177, 502–3; surrealism in, 177; as transnational, 175, 176, 233, 237–41, 246, 247, 249–50, 257. See also specific directors

i ndex

593

Article 61 (Sheikholeslami documentary), 73, 149, 457 artisanal production mode, 67, 181, 427, 491, 498–99 Art of Weeping (B. Kiarostami documentary), 62, 73 arts and crafts documentaries, 79–82 Arts Group of the Confederation of Iranian Students, 416 Art Stories (Mirtahmasb documentary series), 80 Asfur (tv series), 294 Ashraf (princess). See Pahlavi, Ashraf Aslan, Reza, 390 Aslani, Mohammad Reza, 53, 74 Aspen Institute, 318 Asr-e Azadegan (newspaper), 315 Assadi, Shahram, 434 Association of Iranian Documentary Film Producers (aidfp), 3–4 Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (in Exile), 460 Association of Islamic Unions of Students, 294 Astruc, Alexander, 182–83, 184 Atabay, Zia, 298 Atebbai, Mohammad, 247 At Five in the Afternoon (S. Makhmalbaf film), 170, 230, 232 Atlantic Monthly (periodical), 307 Atoor (tv program), 296 Attapour, Orod, 2 At the Pinnacle of the Victorious Mountain (Avini documentary series), 15, 18 audience. See spectatorship audiocassettes, 351, 417, 509 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 348 autobiographical documentaries, 453–56, 491 Autumn Alley (Sinai documentary), 81 avant-garde cinema, 167–69; accented, 467–500; color, use of, 223; manifestos, 205; self-inscription in, 454–55, 467 Avenue A, B, C . . . Manhattan (Naderi film), 398, 506, 509 Avini, Morteza, 12, 12, 76; background, 13; on cultural invasion theory, 307; death, 19; on Makhmalbaf, 142; war

594

i ndex

documentaries of, 13–21. See also specific documentaries Ayat Film Studio, 231 Ayatollah’s Seal, The (Sharafeddin film), 334 Ayyari, Dariush, 61 Ayyari, Kianush, 1, 119 Azadi tv (satellite channel), 304 Azari, Shoja, 468, 475, 479, 555n73 Azhari, Gholamreza, 417 Azimpur, Bahram, 74 Azimpur, Parisa, 48 Babcock, James, 452 Back Vocal (Mirtahmasb documentary), 73, 341 Badie, Fuad, 388 Badie Film Studio, 388 Badiyi, Reza, 396, 452 Bahadori, Mahmud, 22, 23, 60, 61. See also specific documentaries Baha’is, rights of, 233 Bahari, Maziar, 59, 301, 318, 319–20, 324, 332 Bahrani, Ramin, 434, 447–48, 451 Baitolmoqaddas Operation, 11, 24 Baizai, Bahram, 385; art-house cinema of, 176, 187, 190, 195–96, 208, 211, 215, 223; as auteur filmmaker, 323; banned films, 226, 227; on censorship, 113, 223, 226, 227; as film editor, 30, 509; as new-wave filmmaker, 39, 97; purification and, 313; representation of women, 171; as secular, 39; taziyeh in film, 194–96, 222; on unveiling, 124, 140–41; on visual duplicity, 190. See also specific films Bajoghli, Narges, 20, 21 Baker, Howard, 279 Bakhshi, 81 Bakhshi, Masoud, 72, 363 Bakhtavar, Parisa, 326, 347 Bakhtiar, Shapur, 463 Bakhtiari tribe, 78, 553n53 Balal-e Habashi, 216 Balkh, 239 Ballad of Tara (Baizai film), 226 Balnicke, Janelle, 426 Baloghie, Masumeh Soltan, 95

Baluchi Bread (Mokhtari documentary), 74–75 Baluchis, rights of, 233 Banietemad, Baran, 170 Banietemad, Rakhshan, 2, 50, 52, 53, 134, 138, 139, 157–66, 170; art-house cinema of, 176, 193, 195, 223, 229–30; awards, 142; on censorship, 256; critique of Islamic government, 332–33; documentary on presidential election, 45–46; evolution of, 170; family members in movies, 229–30; film festivals and, 256, 332; intertextuality in films, 163, 193; locations in films, 223; production company, 61; as screenplay writer, 178; self-reflexivity in films, 163; themes of, 224; veil, use of, 126, 159–60, 160, 163–64. See also specific films Banisadr, Abolhasan, 106 Ban Ki-moon, 302 banned films, 1; art-house cinema, 176, 226–28; cinematic haunting and, 32; dvd distribution of, 68, 70; feature films, 284; as pacifist, 177. See also censorship Banner (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Baran (Majidi film), 131, 133, 134 Barmak, Siddiq, 239, 242 Barthes, Roland, 105 Baser, Tevfik, 451 Bashu, the Little Stranger (Baizai film), 25, 30, 34–38, 35, 119, 134, 141, 213; assimilation in, 211; censorship of, 37–38; epistolary structure of, 37; expression of romance in, 140–41; languages in, 36–37; storyline, 211; taziyeh aesthetics in, 196 Basij Militia Force (bmf), 9, 15, 20, 321 Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore, 80 Batebi, Ahmad, 84 Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo film), 110 Bauer, Janet, 285 Bayat, Arezu, 45 Bazargan, Mehdi, 274 Bazdar, Shahram, 333 bbc (British Broadcasting Corporation): bbc-2, 436; criticism of, 302–3, 541n49; Persian Service, 4, 87, 302–3,

333–34; public diplomacy and, 333–34; World Service, 290, 436 bc. See British Council Bebin tv (Internet tv), 299 Beehive (Gole film), 187 Beers, Charlotte, 272 Beheshti, Mohammad, 229, 311 Beh Films, 342 Behind the Mountains (Olsen/Petersen documentary), 431 Behnejad, Behruz, 342 Behrangi, Samad, 313 Behraznia, Mahmoud, 235 Behzad, Feryal, 138, 434 Behzadi, Behnam, 78 Beirut International Film Festival, 337 Belfield, David, 239, 535–36n45 Be Like Others (Eshaghian documentary), 454 Bell, Catherine, 289 Bella ciao, Iran (Internet film), 351, 366 Berlin, 22, 372 Berlin conference on Iran, 315–16 Berlin International Film Festival, 259 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, 264 Bersabeh Hovsepian (Sarshar/Kardan documentary), 466 Best in the West, The (Kashani documentary), 457–59, 458 Bet Naharin (tv program), 295 Beverly Hills 90210 (tv program), 494 Beyond Fire (Ayyari film), 1, 119 Beyond the Veil (Internews program), 423–24 Beyond Words (Ardalan documentary), 425, 425 Bhabha, Homi, 383 Bibian, Manuchehr, 297 Bibiyan, Kourosh, 466 Bigham, Mahmud, 40 Bill Moyers Journal (tv program), 280 Bin Laden, Osama, 291 Binoche, Juliette, 134, 328–29 Birds, The (Hitchcock film), 477 Birthday, The (Kianfar/Mohr film), 363 Blackboard, The (S. Makhmalbaf film), 170, 230, 231, 232, 236, 256 Black Intelligence (tv series), 326

i ndex

595

Black Tape (Kamkari film), 199–201 Black Top (Naficy film), 408 Blair Witch Project, The (Myrick/Sánchez film), 200 Blindfolded Witnesses (Rahmaninejad documentary), 460–61 Blind Owl, The (Abdoh film), 467–68 Blind Owl, The (Hedayat novel), 81 Blockbuster (video store), 246 blogs in Persian language, 4, 86, 316–17, 348–49 Blood Will Triumph over the Sword (Dorudian documentary), 418, 419 Bloody Friday (Pooya/Goodman documentary), 413–14, 414 Blue Veiled, The (Banietemad film), 159, 162–64 Blurred Vision (rock group), 357–58, 358 bmf. See Basij Militia Force Body of Lies (Scott film), 335 Boese, Carl, 81 Bollywood movies, 342, 383 Bombay Cinema (Manhattan), 386 Book of Streets, The (Shamlu), 464 Boots, The (Talebi film), 213 Border Café (Partovi film), 363 Borjian, Maryam, 309 Born in Absurdistan (Allahyari film), 396 Boroumand, Abdorrahman, 459–60 Boroumand, Ladan, 459–60 Boroumand, Marziyeh, 138 Boroumand, Roya, 459–60 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 244 Bourguet, Christian, 442 Boycott (M. Makhmalbaf film), 39 Boyle, Danny, 383 Bozorgmehr, Mehdi, 382 Bozorgnia, Mohammad, 42–43, 119 Brand America, selling of, 272 Bravo cable channel, 248, 257, 290–91 Bread from Mud (Shafai documentary), 53–54 Breadwinners (Shafai documentary series), 53 Breaking Bread (Rahmanian documentary), 442 Brecht, Berthold, 200–201 Brick Factory (Moqaddasian documentary), 53, 54

596

i ndex

Bride (Afkhami film), 127 Bridge to Iran (tv series), 362–64 British Ahwazi Friendship Society, 299 British Broadcasting Corporation. See bbc British Channel 4. See Channel 4 (British tv) British Council (bc), 309 British Museum, 335 Broadcast Middle East, 302 Brook, Yoni, 363–64 Brunette, Peter, 337 Bryan, Barbara, 416 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 276 Buddha Was Not Demolished in Afghanistan, It Collapsed from Shame, The (M. Makhmalbaf ), 241–42 Buenos Aires Film Festival, 262 Buñuel, Luis, 504–5 Burnt Generation, The (Mollaqolipur film), 128 Bush, George W., 421, 425; administration of, 290, 310–11, 319; Iran policies, 275, 309, 370, 438; Iraq invasion, 306; war on terror, 308–9 Butler, Alison, 94 But You Speak Such Good English (Safinia/ Taghizadeh documentary), 451–52 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (Wiene film), 81 Cahiers du Cinéma (periodical), 179 Calicomaking (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 calligraphers, documentaries on, 79 camera-pen cinema, 182–83, 184 Cameron, James, 341 campaign films, 41–50 Canary Yellow (Banietemad film), 158 Cannes International Film Festival, 71, 156, 184, 242, 245, 256, 328, 405, 415, 495 Captain Khorshid (Taqvai film), 118, 235–36 Caravan (Amiryusefi film), 77 Carnival of Flowers (Sani al-Saltaneh film), 369 Carriage Driver (N. Karimi film), 340, 387

Carson, Johnny, 278, 279 Carter, Jimmy, 275, 277, 280, 415, 416 Castro, Fidel, 284 Caught Between Two Worlds (Farkhondeh/ Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 432–33, 433 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 22 cbs Evening News (tv program), 278 cctc. See closed-circuit tv (cctv) Ceasefire (Milani film), 128 cell phone cameras, 4, 71 censorship: of art-house cinema, 176, 178, 223, 226–28; cinematic haunting and, 32–33; creativity and, 228; criticism of, 256; of documentaries, 2, 32–33, 54, 90, 151; filmic lying and, 126; gender masquerade and, 235; by Islamic Republic, 75, 176, 253, 319, 350; premieres and, 196; self-censorship, 75, 169, 250; of theses outside Iran, 319; veils and, 113; women in cinema and, 113, 114, 173. See also specific directors; films Center for Art in Exile, 410 Center for Experimental and Semiprofessional Development, 22–23 Center for Iranian Research and Analysis (cira), 310 Center for the Cinematic Arts of the Revolution and the Sacred Defense, 20 Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films, 2, 90 Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (cidcya): films produced by, 35, 207, 209; as studio system, 179; support of documentaries, 2, 53, 78 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 316, 323, 335 Centre Pompidou, 490 Certified Copy (A. Kiarostami film), 171, 188, 328–29 Chan, Jackie, 342 Channel One (vvir). See First Channel Network Channel Two tv (satellite channel), 298 Channel Two (vvir). See Second Channel Network

Channel 4 (British tv), 54–55, 151, 153, 436, 449 Charcoal Makers (Mehran documentary), 54 Charef, Mehdi, 508 Checkpoint (Sayyad film), 394, 403, 438 Chegini, Amir, 70 Cheshire, Godfrey, 180 Cheshmandaz (tv program), 296 Chicago Film Festival, 262 Chicken With Plums (Satrapi film), 495 Chigh (Aslani documentary), 74 Child and Imperialism (Aslani documentary), 53 child labor, 53–54 children in art-house cinema, 206–7, 208–11, 213, 214 Children of Divorce (Milani film), 138 Children of Heaven (Majidi film), 210, 213, 247, 258 Children of the Land of Iran, The (tv series), 74 children’s cinema, 114, 209 Chop Shop (Bahrani documentary), 448 Chorus, The (A. Kiarostami film), 224 Christians, rights of, 233 Christine (Jafari documentary), 60–61 Chronicle Foundation, 20 Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch/Morin film), 202 Chronicle of Victory (Avini documentary series), 12, 12, 13, 13–21, 14, 31; archives, 20, 21; availability of, 21; filming media, 15; production mode, 25; subjectivity in, 16; voice-over narration, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21. See also specific episode titles Chronicle of Victory Institute, 20 Chronicle of Void and Beyond (Ghazel/ Golestan performance), 486 cia. See Central Intelligence Agency (cia) cidcya. See Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults Cinema, Cinema (M. Makhmalbaf film), 185 Cinema, Cinema (Petgar documentary), 186

i ndex

597

cinema of idolatry, 312 cinemas. See movie houses; specific cinemas Cinematic Encounters in Tehran (SadeghVaziri/Spencer film), 364 cinematic haunting, 32, 81, 468, 482 cinema vérité aesthetics, 201–4, 352 Cinema Vérité International Film Festival, 89–90, 91, 364 cira. See Center for Iranian Research and Analysis Circle, The (Panahi film), 128–30, 145, 247, 252, 262 Circumstance (Keshavarz film), 69 Citizen Kane (Welles film), 341 city films, 22, 165 City of Mice, The (M. Boroumand film), 138 City of the Sacred Defense Cinema, 20 Clarion Fund, 289 claustrophobia: in accented cinema, 401, 404–5, 405, 438, 448, 451, 469, 501, 506; in art-house cinema, 200, 219, 226; of interior spaces, 85, 219; of Islamicate values, 58; in women’s cinema, 128, 163 clerical fashion, 61–62 Clinton, Bill, 350, 402 Clinton, Hillary, 293 Clooney, George, 286 closed-circuit television (cctv), 87 Closer (Gharavi documentary), 449–50 Close-Up (A. Kiarostami film), 67, 182, 185, 193, 204; cinema vérité aesthetics in, 201–2; inspiration for, 179–80; making of, 180–82; on purification, 101; self-inscription in, 192–95 Colored Whispers, The (Soft Security Strategic Think Tank), 323 Color of God (Majidi film), 222 Color of Paradise, The (Majidi film), 214, 221, 247, 249, 258, 313 Comedy Middle Eastern Style (Oskoui-Babcock/Babcock documentary), 452 Committee to Protect Journalists, 360 Conceal Your True Meaning (Behzadi documentary), 78 Concentration (Banietemad documentary), 165

598

i ndex

Confederation of Iranian Students Association, 416 Conrad, Joseph, 31–32 Controlled Chaos (Zendel film), 452 Conversations in Tehran (Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 363 Conversation with the Wall, A (Parto documentary), 63 Cooper, Anderson, 84 Cooper, Merian C., 78 Copperwork (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 copyright laws, 264–68 Corcoran, Mark, 348–49 Couros, Alexis. See Kouros, Alexis Cow, The (Mehrjui film), 224, 385 Crash (Yari/Haggis film), 452 Crash of ’78, The (Taheri documentary), 394 Crash of ’79, The (Erdman), 283 Crimson Gold (Panahi film), 129–30 Crisis in Iran: America Held Hostage: Day . . . (tv news program), 278 Crisis in Iran: The Turmoil Spreads (tv news program), 276 Crisis in Iran: Where Do We Go From Here? (tv news program), 276 Cristal, Linda, 283 critical synesthesia, 127, 218–26 Cronkite, Walter, 278 Cry of the Mojahed (Madanian film), 114 Culik, Liza, 460 cultural imperialism/invasion debate, 97; Berlin conference on Iran and, 315; filmmakers and, 55; Identity series and, 311; international film festivals and, 251–52; Iranian cultural exchange and, 268; Iranian satellite tv and, 344–45; officials affected by, 313; participants in, 307–8; public diplomacy and, 285, 306, 307, 317; reemergence of, 313–14, 316; school closing and, 484; Second Cultural Revolution and, 309 Culture of Consumption, The (Banietemad documentary), 165 culture of idolatry, 341 Cut (Tahaminejad documentary), 57 Cycle, The (Mehrjui film), 224, 234–35, 388

Cyclist, The (M. Makhmalbaf film), 40, 116, 117, 180, 234 Cyropaedia (Xenophon), 421 Cyrus the Great, 320, 420–21, 426 Cyrus the Great (Farzaneh film), 242 Dabashi, Hamid, 286–87, 300 Dad, Saifollah, 41, 42, 58, 90, 301, 313 Dadgar, Hosain, 288 Dadsetan, Javad, 410 Daftari, Iran, 166 Dalai, Mostafa, 15 Dance of the Standard (Shalilian documentary), 76–77 Daneshian, Keramat, 415 Daneshmand, Bijan, 146, 147 Daneshmand, Shapur, 186 Danks, Adrian, 231, 232 Darabi, Hasan, 186 darpa. See Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Daryaee, Touraj, 289 Daryai, Zinat, 95 Dash Akol (Kimiai film), 96, 186 Daughters of the Sun (Shahriar film), 131–33, 164 Davarnezhad, Shekufeh, 63 Davies, Taran, 404 Davudnezhad, Alireza, 128, 139, 143 Dawn of the Capricorn (Faruqi Qajar film), 242 Day Break (Rahmanian film), 445 Day I Became a Woman, The (Meshkini film), 128–29, 230, 231 Day My Aunt Was Ill, The (H. Makhmalbaf film), 230 Day of Crisis (tv news program), 276 Day They Went Hunting, The (Navab documentary), 439 Death of the Witness, The (Davarnezhad documentary), 63 Death of Yazdegerd (Baizai film), 215, 226 December ’80 in Bushehr (Tahaminejad documentary), 24 Deep Dish tv, 432 Deer, The (Kimiai documentary), 186, 420 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa), 293 Degas, Edgar, 218

Dehbashi, Hossein, 263 Dehdashtian, Ramin, 469 Dehghan, Saeed Kamali, 357 Delbar, Hosain, 332 Deldar (judge), 151, 153 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 107 Delnamak (Qavidel film), 138 Delshadian, Suzie (Sousan), 556n83 Delta Force, The (Golan film), 283, 288 Democratic Solidarity Party of Al-Ahwaz, 299 Derakhshan, Hosain, 359–60, 528n67 Derakhshandeh, Puran, 117, 119, 138 Der-Martirosian, Claudia, 382 Derrida, Jacques, 201 Desperate, The (Sepher film), 452 Deyhim, Sussan, 475, 478 Dezful, 14 Diamond Drawer (Rafia film), 408 Diary of a Lover (Shahid Saless film), 441 Diaspora Film Festival, 408 diasporic cinema. See accented cinema diasporic Iranians. See Iranians in diaspora DiCaprio, Leonardo, 312 Didar tv (satellite channel), 298 Did-e No Company, 61, 166 Different Moon, A (Saeed-Vafa documentary), 441–42 direct gaze. See under gaze disappeared ones, 29–30, 32–33 Discovery channel (Kavosh), 299 Dish, The (Rassoulof film), 346–47, 363 Dispodex (film exhibitor), 388 dissimulation doctrine, 105 Divorce Iranian Style (Mir-Hosseini/ Longinotto documentary), 151–55, 152, 428 Djalili, Omid, 451 Djamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali, 463 documentary cinema: accented, 4, 5; artisanal forms, 86; on arts and cinema, 461–66; arts and crafts, 79–82; autobiographical, 453–56, 491; banning of, 56–58, 90; campaign films, 41–50; censorship of, 2, 32–33, 54, 90, 151; circulation of, 2; compilation, 413; ethnographic, 72–79; film festivals, 4, 87–90; foreign markets, 5;

i ndex

599

documentary cinema (cont.) government regulation of, 4; historical documentaries, accented, 412–21; identity documentaries, accented, 422–59; Internet and, 86–87; Islamic government support for, 90; Maghsoudlou collection of, 357; mixed with fiction, 2; by ngos, 459–61; official, 9; resurgence of, 1–2; on Shiite mythologies, 76–77, 208, 426; social, 50–64; social consciousness in, 90; state support for, 2–3; by students, 82–87; technical quality of, 51; themes in, 5; transnational, 4, 151; truthfulness in, 85–86; underground, 65; wedding, 86. See also war cinema; specific documentarians; specific documentaries Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet film), 28 Dogme 95 group, 200, 490 Dome of Soltaniyeh. See Mausoleum of Il-khan Oljaitu Donia-ye Tasvir (periodical), 359–60 Donia-ye Yahud (tv program), 296 Door, The (M. Makhmalbaf film), 46, 231 Dorudian, Mahmud, 418 Double Six (Safarian/Ehsan documentary), 186, 187 Dowlatabadi, Abbas Jafari, 302 Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Mazursky film), 284 Downpour (Baizai film), 187, 216–17 Do You Know Mr. Kiarostami? (Haeri film), 61, 185 Dream of Color, The (Shahsavarani film), 223 Dream of Silk (Rezai film), 363 Dreams Betrayed (Akrami documentary), 186, 461, 462 dreamwork (Freud), defined, 273 drug use, 54, 60, 83–85, 148, 155, 165–66 dubbing, 227, 302, 342, 530n25 Dundes, Alan, 279 Ebadi, Shirin, 95, 288, 357, 361 Ebra Films, 404 Ebrahimian, Ghasem, 403–7, 478, 481, 484 Ebrahimifar, Ferdos, 220 Ebrahimifar, Said, 119, 218, 219–20, 221

600

i ndex

Egel, Daniel, 365 Ehsan, Ahmad Mir, 186 Ehsan, Homa, 296 Eighth Day of the Week, The (Rajaiyan film), 385 Eisenstein, Sergei, 478–79 Eisner, Lotte H., 32, 500 Ekhtiardini, Madi, 211 Elahi, Mahdis, 63 election documentaries. See campaign films Elegy (Naderi film), 505 Elegy for Innocent Children (Shalilian documentary), 76 11’09’01—September 11, 2011 (omnibus film), 170, 239 Elm va Erfan (tv program), 296 Elm va Honar (periodical), 372 Emigrant, The (Hatamikia documentary), 27 émigré filmmakers, 395–96, 400 Enamel (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Encyclopaedia Iranica, 310 End, The (Rajaiyan film), 408 Enqelab-e Eslami, 32 Entekhab (newspaper), 170 Entezami, Ezzatollah, 159, 313, 332 Epitaph (Mansouri documentary), 66 Erdman, Paul, 283 Ershadi, Homayun, 215, 220 Escape from Iran (Johnson film), 287 Esfandiari, Amir, 496 Esfandiari, Haleh, 318, 319–20 Eshaghian, Tanaz, 453–54 Eshkevari, Hasan Yusefi, 315 Eslamlu, Mohammad Reza, 8, 22. See also specific films Espinosa, Julio García, 205 Esther’s Children (Sarshar/Ardalan documentary), 466 Eta, Ahmad, 465 Etessam, Shirin, 451 ethnic cinema: art-house cinema and, 237; boundaries in, 438; comedic, 451– 52; filmmakers in diaspora, 396–97; identity and, 398–99, 453; identity documentaries, 422–59; imperial nostalgia in, 233–34; postrevolutionary, 51, 175, 235–36, 237–38; risk and, 455–56;

subjectivity in, 153; types of, 399–400. See also accented cinema ethnographic documentaries, 72–79; quasi ethnographic films, 73–74, 76; taboo topics, 73. See also specific documentaries ethnographic studies, 73–74, 77–79 Ettela’at (newspaper), 260, 465 Evin Prison, 148, 156, 170, 328, 434 exhibition permits, 38, 42, 57, 223, 266, 311–12, 327, 329 exile television: broadcast/cablecast, 295–98; changed social circumstances and, 382; commercials on, 267; ethnic programs, 296–97; evolution of public diplomacy on, 295–303; funding for, 87; Green tv, 300–303; Internet/ satellite-convergent, 299; piracy and, 267; risks of, 303–6; satellite, 298–99; U.S. funding for, 305 exilic cinema. See accented cinema experimental cinema, 176, 467–69 Exteriors (Rasoulinezhad film), 212–13 extraterritorial cinema, 240 Face of the Enemy (Ildari film), 401 Facets Multimedia, 169, 246 Fadaian, Farshad, 74, 81 Fahr, Anna, 428–30 Failure of American Rescue Mission in Iran, The (tv news program), 276 Fajr International Film Festival, 28, 41, 74, 141, 142, 159, 168, 196, 197, 217 Fakouhi, Nasser, 79 Fallahian, Ali, 324 Fall of Sahra, The (Niknejad tv series), 122–23 Families Held Hostage (tv news program), 276 family mode of production, 113, 229–33 Fanon, Frantz, 383 Farabi Cinema Foundation (fcf), 2, 139, 165, 242, 247, 249, 311, 312–13, 337 Farahani, Golshifteh, 220, 335 Farahani, Ramin, 77 Farahmand, Azadeh, 256 Faraji, Farshid, 420 Faranguis Yeganegi (Sarshar/Kardan film), 466

Farasati, Masud, 260 Farazmand, Hasan, 181 Farda Radio, 303, 313 Far from Home (Shahid Saless film), 398, 501, 502 Far from Iran (Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 395, 423 Farhadi, Asghar, 72, 139, 171, 259–61, 332 Farhang, Dariush, 117 Farjami, Farima, 158 Farkhondeh, Simin, 432–33 Farmanara, Bahman, 176, 199, 385, 434 Farman-e Panjom (tv program), 296 Farrahi, Farhang, 432 Farrahi, Bita, 125 Farrokhyar, Shahaboddin, 46–47 Farrokhzad, Fereydoun, 303–4, 403, 463 Farrokhzad, Forugh, 161, 225–26, 266, 440, 459 Farshad, Aryana, 425–27 Farshchi, Minoo, 159, 160, 332 Farsi 1 tv (satellite channel), 302 Fars News Agency, 139, 333 Faruqi Qajar, Ahmad, 242 Farzanegan, Kurosh, 77 Farzaneh, Mostafa, 242 Fatemi, Jalal, 61, 401, 467 Fath (newspaper), 315 Fath al-Mobin operation. See Operation Fath al-Mobin Fath al-Mobin Operation (Mollaqolipur documentary), 22 Fazeli, Bijan, 304 Fazeli, Reza, 304 fcf. See Farabi Cinema Foundation Fear of Heights (Allahyari film), 396, 403 Felse, Christine, 152 Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, 81 Fervor (Neshat film), 471, 472, 472 festival cinema, 178 fetishism, 99, 127, 135, 141, 232, 387, 402, 497 Few Simple Sentences, A (Allamehzadeh documentary), 438–39, 464 Few Simple Shots, A (Akrami documentary), 464 Fey, Jennifer, 164 ff. See Filmfarsi fhi. See Film House of Iran

i ndex

601

fiction cinema, 1–2, 4–5, 24–25, 53, 90, 94 Field, Sally, 285 15 Khordad Reform Movement, 58 Fifth Kilometer, The (Saifi documentary), 7 Fifth Reaction, The (Milani film), 134 Film Center of School of Art Institute of Chicago, 243 Filmco Films Studio, 387 film distribution, 68, 176, 241, 245–46, 247–49, 339–44, 354 Film-e Mostanad (Naficy), 112 film exhibition licensing, 57 Filmfarsi: exhibited in exile, 387–88; in Pahlavi period, 99, 140; women in, 97–98 film festivals: accented cinema and, 253–55, 392, 407–12; criticism of, 253–55; for documentaries, 87–90; international, 4–5, 68, 178, 242–46, 251–61; organization of, 3; parody of, 258; public diplomacy and, 257, 264. See also specific festivals Film House of Iran (fhi), 385, 388, 414 film importation: banned, 11, 90, 173, 345; veiling and, 112 Film International (periodical), 259 films in the humanities and sciences, 45 Film va Honar (periodical), 385, 461 Final Fitting (Haeri documentary), 61 Final Option, The (Sharp film), 283 Fire (Elahi documentary), 63 First Channel Network (vvir), 12, 53, 74, 78, 79, 165, 230, 325 First Cinema, defined, 205 First Run/Icarus, 246 First Search (Naderi documentary), 1, 29–30, 30, 32–33, 505 Fish (Partovi film), 119 Flag Bearer (Bohrani film), 7 Flames of Freedom (documentary by National Union), 416 Flaming Poppies (Shafti documentary), 78 flâneur, figure of the, 22 Flaskerud, Ingvild, 77 fod. See Foundation of the Dispossessed Fonda, Jane, 489 football. See soccer (football)

602

i ndex

Football Iranian Style (Bahari documentary), 59, 301 “For an Imperfect Cinema” (Espinosa), 205 Foreign Currency (Banietemad film), 138 foreign films. See film importation; specific films Foreign Press Association, 357 For Everything (Mohammadin film), 121 For Neda (Thomas and Dehghan documentary), 352, 355, 357 Forouhar, Dariush, 314 Forouhar, Parvaneh, 314 Forty Witnesses, the Second Narrative (Forty Witnesses documentary), 11, 24 Forty Witnesses Film Unit, 9–12 Forutan, Mohammad Reza, 163, 167 Foruzesh, Ebrahim, 76, 119, 177, 188, 213, 245 Foster, Hal, 280 Foucault, Michel, 109 Fouladvand, Dordaneh, 305 Foundation for Iranian Studies, 310 Foundation of the Dispossessed (fod), 6, 429 Four Minutes of Remembrance (Batebi film), 84 Four Star Cinema, 385 Fox Theater, 415 Franny and Zooey (Salinger), 265 Freedom Front, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 107, 273 Friedl, Erika, 209 Friendly Persuasion (Akrami documentary), 126, 186, 251, 267, 461, 464 From Karkheh to Rhine (Hatamikia film), 28, 29, 41, 72, 126, 237, 313 Gabbeh (M. Makhmalbaf film), 116, 124– 25, 125, 142, 221–22 Ganji, Akbar, 361 Gardun (periodical), 308, 308 Gatlif, Tony, 508 gaze: direct, 107–8, 127, 131–32, 134, 140–42, 141, 147; eyes as active, 106; Islamicate theory, 106–11, 115, 119–21; oppression/empowerment and, 172; public, 128. See also scopophilia

Geertz, Clifford, 59 gender: accented cinema and, 377–80; masquerade, 110, 130–33, 141, 235, 242; modesty and, 103; segregation, 101–2, 139, 209; subjectivity and, 102–6; taziyeh performance and, 132; transgender identity, 73, 132, 235, 242, 436–37, 454. See also women and cinema Gene Siskel Film Center, 243 George Polk Award for Videography, 356 Getino, Octavio, 205 gfw. See Golestan Film Workshop Ghadirian, Shadiafarin (Shadi), 497 Ghahremani, Siamak, 411 Gharavi, Tina, 395, 448–50, 492 Ghazel (Radpay), 483–94; as avant-garde, 467; high output of, 376, 392, 396; as returnee, 434; travel impediments, 263; on veil, 135, 171, 469, 498–500. See also specific films Ghelichi, Ali, 427, 428 Gheyrat, Farideh, 330 Ghobadi, Bahman, 69; Akrami film on, 461; art-house cinema of, 177, 210–11, 236, 247; award, 262; banned films, 68; criticism of, 326; exile of, 334–35, 341; films on dvd, 267; as iri critic, 72, 73; Kiarostami influence on, 188; pan-Kurdish cinema of, 236, 427; on satellite tv, 346–47; as student, 82; travel impediments, 261, 262. See also specific films Ghosts Project, The (tv series), 325–26 Ghotbzadeh, Sadegh, 111, 206 Gilaneh (Banietemad film), 165 Gilbert, Brian, 277, 284–86 Gilmore, Geoffrey, 243 Girl in Cotton Sneakers, The (Sadrameli film), 128, 144–45, 145 Gizzela (Sinai documentary), 81 Glass, Philip, 470 Glass Agency, The (Hatamikia documentary), 28–29, 41, 72, 237, 313 Glass House, The (Rahmanian documentary), 445–46 globalization: of cinema, 72, 171, 224, 245, 249, 251–61; effects of, 233; film distribution and, 68 Go-Between, The (N. Karimi film), 340

God, Construction, Destruction (S. Makh­ malbaf film), 170, 239 Godard, Jean-Luc, 202 Goethe Institut, 417 Golan, Menahem, 283, 288 Golbahar (Ardekani film), 119 Gole, Faraidun, 187 Golem (Boese/Wegener film), 81 Golestan, Ebrahim, 1, 55, 266, 323, 486 Golestan, Kaveh, 54–55, 486 Golestan, Lili, 486 Golestan Film Workshop (gfw), 61 Golestan Gallery, 486 Golha-ye Rangarang (radio program), 183 Golmakani, Houshang, 74, 186, 259 Golshiri, Barbad, 469 Golsorkhi, Khosrow, 313, 415–16 Gonabad, 76 Gonabadi, Shahab, 56 Goodbye Solo (Bahrani film), 448 Goodman, Marsha, 413 Goodnight (Afiyat documentary), 63 Google, 250 Googoosh, 263 Googoosh’s Music Academy (tv program), 299 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 284 Gorky, Arshile, 402 Gozaresh-e Film (periodical), 198 Gramsci, Antonio, 326, 330 Grand Conference of Iranians Living Abroad, 362 Grapes of Wrath (Kashani documentary), 55 Grass (Cooper/Schoedsack/Harrison documentary), 78, 306 Great Hossein. See Vaziri, Hossein Khosrow Green Ash (Hatamikia documentary), 28 Green Days (H. Makhmalbaf film), 337–38 Green Film Festival. See International Green Film Festival Green Movement: emergence of, 62, 70, 275, 367; filmmakers’ support of, 250, 300, 313, 328, 335–36, 341, 475, 480; Internet cinema and, 349, 351, 354, 357; protests, 62, 89, 130, 300, 319–20, 320, 366; television of, 300–303

i ndex

603

Green Wave, The (Ahadi film), 357 Guardian (newspaper), 62, 338, 354, 357 Guattari, Félix, 36 Gudarzi, Fatemeh, 332 guerrilla cinema. See underground cinema Guests of Hotel Astoria, The (Allamehzadeh film), 394, 403 Gulf Crisis tv Project (tv series), 432 Habermas, Jürgen, 317–18 Habib Levi (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Haeri, Mohammad Reza, 61–62, 86, 185 Haeri, Niloofar, 61–62 Haeri, Shahla, 44–45, 428 Haerinejad, Farid, 73 Haggis, Paul, 452 Haghighat, Mohammad, 243, 410 Haidari, Jamshid, 7. See also specific films Haim, Soly, 452 Haiva (Mollaqolipur film), 313 Hajibabai, Hamid Reza, 322 Haji Washington (Hatami film), 311 Hajjarian, Said, 314 Hakham Yedidia Shofet (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Halati, Marjaneh, 445 Half Moon (Ghobadi film), 236 Hall, Stuart, 105, 398 Hamburg Film Festival, 235 Hamidnezhad, Azizollah, 31–32 Hamoon (Mehrjui film), 125–26, 143, 215, 227 Hamz, Amir, 73, 341, 444 Hanai, Said, 60 Hand-Picked by the Khans (Avini documentary series), 14, 16 Hans—A Boy from Germany (Shahid Saless film), 502 Haqiqat, Nargess, 63 Haqiqat, Neda, 63 Haqiqatju, Fatemeh, 361 Haqiqi, Hosain, 23 Harrison, Marguerite, 78 Harvard Film Archive, 244 Hashemi, Amir Farrokh, 210 Hashemi, Fatemeh, 344 Hashemi, Mehdi, 157

604

i ndex

Hatami, Ali, 144, 176, 311, 387 Hatami, Leila, 124, 144 Hatamikia, Ebrahim, 30; art-house cinema of, 177, 237; evolution of work, 21, 26–29; filmic lying, use of, 126; as pro-regime director, 72, 313; as war filmmaker, 12–13, 41. See also specific films haunting. See cinematic haunting Hays Code, 146 Headless in the Alley of Love (Avini documentary), 15, 18, 18–19, 19, 23 Heap, Austin, 350 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 31–32 Heavenly Tower (Hatamikia documentary), 28 Heaven’s Path (Behraznia film), 235 Hedayat, Sadeq, 81, 404 Heimweh films, 29, 72 Heinrich Böll Institute, 315 Hekmat, Manijeh, 131, 138 Hekmati, Amir Mirzaei, 293–94 Hell, but Cold (Karkhairan documentary), 155 Hemati, Minoo, 461, 464 Heraldry (Panahi documentary), 76 Herat, 239, 242 Hernandez, Richard Koci, 460 Heroes (tv news program), 276 Hey, Executioner, Get Lost! (music video), 358–59 Hezbollah filmmakers, 21, 28 Hibbard, Melissa, 442, 443, 444 Hidden Half, The (Milani film), 167, 168 Higgins, Coleen, 404 High Council of Iranians Abroad, 362 High Noon (Zinnemann film), 186 hijab. See veils Hinduja, Nandlal, 387 Hispantv (satellite channel), 327 Hitchcock, Alfred, 477 Hitman, The (Norris film), 286 hivos, 149, 318, 357 hoc. See House of Cinema Hoder. See Derakhshan, Hosain Hojjat, Yousef, 88 Hojjatpanah, Abbas, 466 Hollywood cinema: banned films from, 173; brainwashing by, 194;

conservative, 402; Internet sales of movies, 342, 391; Iranian stereotypes in, 424; Jewish Iranians in, 391, 425–27; occupied cinemas by, 228; psychological warfare and, 287; public diplomacy and, 284; realism of, 195; satellite movie channels and, 301–2 Holocaust, 33 Holy Crime (Allamehzadeh documentary), 463 Homayoun, Nader Takmil, 186–87, 363 Home (Ghazel film), 396 Home at Last (tv news program), 276 home movies, 331, 441, 458, 492, 530n24 home videos, 86, 231 Homeward Bound (tv news program), 276 Homework (A. Kiarostami documentary), 206–7, 207 homoeroticism, 120, 126, 131–32 homosexuality, 73, 156, 215, 343, 436 Honarian, Mahbubeh, 153, 155 Honarmand, Mohammad Reza, 311–12 Hong Kong Film Festival, 262 honor killings, 156 Hoor on Fire (Hamidnezhad film), 31–32 Hosain (Imam), 6, 11, 57, 77, 240 Hosseini, Mohammed, 334 Hot, Israeli cable company, 294 hothouse cinema, 178, 241, 246–48 Hour of the Furnaces, The (Solanas/Getino film), 205 House Is Black, The (Farrokhzad documentary), 225–26, 266, 440, 459 House of Cinema (hoc), 3, 266, 333–34, 545n84 House of Sand and Fog, The (Perelman film), 288 House of World Cultures, 315 Houshiary, Shirazeh, 500 housing problems. See shantytowns Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 244 How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life (Ovanessian film), 402 How Samira Made The Blackboard (M. Makhmalbaf documentary), 186, 230, 231–32 Hughs, Stuart, 55

humanism in art-house cinema, 208–9, 212–26 human rights violations, 323–24, 360–61 Hunter (Pitts film), 336–37 Huntington, Samuel, 307 Hussein, Saddam, 346, 421; Ba’athist regime, 308–9; as documentary subject, 6; fall of, 63; Iron Sheik impersonation of, 283; toppling of, 316; U.S.-led war against, 248; video games about, 291 hybrid production mode, 187, 229, 232–33 I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen (Sadrameli film), 128 I Am a Sex Addict (Zahedi documentary), 397, 455 “I am Neda” (campaign), 355 iapac. See Iranian American Political Action Committee iatc. See Islamic Art and Thought Center I Call Myself Persian (Eshaghian documentary), 454 identity: Asian, 137; collective, 13, 16, 20, 102, 136, 191, 216, 383, 389, 453; diaspora and, 2; documentaries, accented, 422–59; ethnic cinema and, 398–99, 453; formation, 233; Islamic vs. Iranian, 365; masochistic, 20; national, 72; tradition and, 72; transgender, 73, 132, 235, 436–37, 454 Identity (Hatamikia documentary), 27 Identity (tv series), 310–11, 316, 324, 326, 361 I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi documentary), 397, 455, 456 ieff. See International Exile Film Festival iFilm (satellite channel), 326–27 If I Were President (Tabrizi film), 42 ifvc. See International Film and Video Center Ildari, Hassan, 401 I Love Vienna (Allahyari film), 304, 396, 403 Imbrie, Robert, 306 Immigrants and Housing Crisis, The (Tahaminejad documentary), 57 imported films. See film importation

i ndex

605

imposed war cinema. See war cinema Imposed War Film Festival, 7, 8, 87 improvisation, 64, 65, 67, 179–80, 181, 190, 191, 490 In Defense of People (Pooya documentary), 414–16, 415 Independent Focus (pbs tv series), 423 individuality: vs. collectivity, 27, 102, 136, 216, 453; documentaries and, 52; martyrdom and, 12–14; modernity and, 4, 12–13, 85, 175, 216, 354–55 injection thesis, 110 Innuendo (Rahmanian video installation), 442 In Search of Cyrus the Great (Kar documentary), 420–21 In Shantytowns (iatc documentary), 54 Inside Seyyed Qelich Ishan’s School (Fadaian documentary), 74 International Campaign for Human Rights, 323–24, 331 International Documentary Film Festival, 357 International Exile Film Festival (ieff), 410 International Film and Video Center (ifvc), 385, 388 International Green Film Festival, 88, 89, 91 International Persian Network (ipn), 298 Internet cinema, 70, 252; amateur videos, 86–87, 351–56; authored films, 356–57; cinema vérité aesthetics in, 352; defined, 271; documentaries and, 86–87; duality in, 86; Green Movement and, 349, 351, 354, 357; Islamic government on, 359–60; movie houses and, 354, 356; music videos, 357–59; postmodernism in, 355; protest and, 348–62; voice-overs and, 353. See also blogs in Persian; social networking Internet television, 299 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 273 Interrupted Lives (Migielicz/Hernandez/ Culik documentary), 460 intertextuality: in art-house films, 142, 163, 176, 180, 193, 197, 232, 235; in familial production mode, 232

606

i ndex

In the Bathtub of the World (Zahedi documentary), 397, 455, 455 In the Heart of Ruby (Tabrizi documentary), 47–48 In the Land of the Shah (documentary), 306 “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka), 335 In the Wind’s Eye (Jowzani film), 235 Into the Night (Landis film), 284 ipn. See International Persian Network iptv. See Iranian Internet Protocol Television Iran. See Islamic Republic of Iran Iran (Kampsax film), 430 Iran (Saliani documentary), 418–20 Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution (Homayoun film), 186–87, 363 Iran: A Struggle for Freedom (Payami film), 336 Iran; or, End of 1001 Nights, The (Rajai documentary), 416–17 Iran-Contra Affair, 274, 280 “Iran Corner” (Kabul University), 241 Iran Daroudi (Sarshar/Taheri documentary), 466 IraNeda Foundation, 300 Irangeles, 297, 388. See also Los Angeles IRANgeles (Keller film), 297 Iranian (Internet periodical), 317 Iranian American Political Action Committee (iapac), 391 Iranian Architecture (Sohaili documentary), 79 Iranian Association for Monarchy, 305 Iranian Carpet (A. Kiarostami film), 183, 225 Iranian cinema: globalization of, 72, 171, 224, 245, 249; international appreciation for, 242–44; international copyright and, 264–68; Islamization of, 21, 39; in Israel, 261, 376; marketing of, 259; nostalgia in, 72, 192, 219, 387, 399, 471, 474, 501; Pahlavi-era film exhibition, 385; political dimensions of, 100; privatization of, 175; protests by domestic filmmakers, 327–34; protests by exilic filmmakers, 334–39; publications in West on, 258; state involvement in, 175; as

transnational, 369; underground mode of production, 65–72. See also specific genres; specific organizations Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, 73 Iranian Diaspora Film Festival, 409 Iranian Digital Empowerment Act, 350 Iranian Film Festival (Houston), 244 Iranian Film Festival (UK), 411 Iranian Green Movement (Internet film), 320, 366 Iranian Internet Protocol Television (iptv), 299, 300 Iranian Jews. See Jewish Iranians Iranian Journey (Pachachi film), 95 Iranians in diaspora: Ahmadinejad on, 362; as art-house film market, 176, 241, 245; controversial subjects and, 151; deaths and suicide, 390; demographic profile of, 371–84; displacement and, 384; documentary on emigration, 156; emigration to U.S., waves of, 380–81; ethnicity and, 383; on international film festivals, 253; Internet and, 156–57; public diplomacy and, 272; reasons for displacement, 370; as safe from censorship, 250; self-employment rates of, 382–83; veil and, 171–73. See also accented cinema Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers (isdf), 3, 92, 332 Iranian Student Association in the United States (isaus), 253, 417 Iranian Taboo (Allamehzadeh documentary), 463 Iranian tv (tv program), 295–96 Iranian Women Filmmakers (Khairoldin/ Khabazan documentary), 186 Iran in the Throes of Revolution (documentary), 416, 417 Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), 13; initiation of, 6; movies/documentaries about, 2, 5–9, 41; preferential treatment of veterans, 40–41. See also war cinema Iran Is My Home (Kimiavi documentary), 434 Iranium (Traiman film), 288–89, 295 Iran Nameh, 310

Iran National Film Archive, 43 Iranophobia, 274, 276, 292, 306, 382, 397 Iran Prison (Shokof film), 338 Iran Railway (German documentary), 306 Iranshahr (periodical), 372 Iran: The Cyber-Dissidents (Altman film), 348–49 Iran: The Desperate Dilemma (tv news program), 276 Iran Times (newspaper), 387 Iran tv (satellite channel), 298 Iran tv (tv program), 296 IranX tv (satellite channel), 298 irgc. See Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps iri. See Islamic Republic of Iran irib. See Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic irib2. See Jam-e Jam (irib2 satellite channel) irinn. See Shabakeh Khabar (irinn satellite channel) irnn (satellite news channel), 87 Iron Sheik. See Vaziri, Hossein Khosrow isaus. See Iranian Student Association in the United States isdf. See Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers Isfahan, 34, 34 Isfahani in New York, An (Nazerian film), 387 Islam, five pillars of, 100 Islamic Art and Thought Center (iatc), 6, 21, 40, 54, 76, 78 Islamicate cinema: dark palette of, 127, 218, 223; values in, 10, 27, 39–40; war cinema and, 10, 13, 39–40, 226 Islamicate gaze theory, 106–11, 115, 119–21, 139 Islamicate values: cinema and, 10, 27, 39–40, 224, 341; claustrophobia of, 58; culture of duality and, 343–44; kinship, 229, 231; passion and, 15. See also martyrdom Islamic Center of Film Education, 82 Islamic cinema theory, 12, 117. See also specific types of cinema

i ndex

607

Islamic Propaganda Organization, 6, 21, 40, 54, 76, 92. See also Islamic Art and Thought Center Islamic Republic News Agency, 139 Islamic Republic of Iran (iri): attacks on intellectuals, 309–16; authoritarian tactics of, 293; censorship by, 75, 176, 253, 319, 350; cinematic critique of, 127–35, 252–53, 256; documentaries, support for, 90; on drug and alcohol use, 83; fiction films, support for, 90; imperial nostalgia of, 233; imprisonment of journalists by, 360; on Internet cinema, 359–60; on Israel, 15, 77, 275, 311, 359, 370; kinship in, 229, 231; as official name, 275; political change in, 84; propaganda against, 290, 298, 304, 331, 360; propaganda for, 255; public diplomacy of, 272, 306–9, 361–62; representation in U.S. mediawork, 283–91; representations of women, 101; satellite channels, 299, 326–27; secularization of nation, 364–67; sharia law, 94, 103, 129, 153–55, 239, 445; values of, 476. See also Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (irib). See Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc), 3, 15; defectors, 388; documentary on, 75; as intrusive, 85; militarization of culture by, 321–22; rise of, 214; war film funding by, 20. See also Basij Militia Force Islamization: of educational institutions, 322; of film industry, 39, 98, 112, 495; representation of women and, 111–14, 120–21, 172; syncretic, 72 Islamophobia, 382, 397, 401, 483 Isolation, Opus One (Shirdel documentary), 88 Israel: filming in, 280, 288; Iranian cinema in, 261, 376; Iranophobia and, 274, 292, 306; Islamic Republic on, 15, 77, 275, 311, 359, 370; public diplomacy of, 283, 286, 289, 294–95 Ivanov, Mehdi Rusi Khan, 369 I Was Possessed by God (Zahedi docu­ mentary), 397, 455

608

i ndex

Jackson, Michael, 340 Jackson, Mick, 283 Jafari, Behnaz, 59 Jafari, Mohammad, 60 Jafarian, Reza, 324 jag (tv series), 289 Jahanbegloo, Ramin, 318, 319–20 Jahangirian, Abbas, 209 Jalaeipour, Hamid Reza, 315 Jalali Sussan-Abadi (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah film), 466 Jame’eh (newspaper), 315 Jam-e Jam (irib2 satellite channel), 299 Jam-e Jam International tv (satellite channel), 297 Jam-e Jam tv (tv program), 297 James, C. L. R., 383 Jameson, Fredric, 241 Jamshid Kashfi (Sarshar/Bibiyan documentary), 466 Japanese Broadcasting Corporation. See nhk Japan Foundation, 137 Jar, The (Foruzesh film), 213, 245 Javadi, Feraidun, 204 Javaherian, Faryar, 229 Javid, Jahanshah, 317, 432 Jennatkhahdust, Gholamreza, 22–23 Jewish Iranians, 73, 77, 233, 382–83, 391, 425–27, 452–53 Jewish Iranians (Shokrian film), 395 Jewish Monuments in Iran (Sarshar/Bibyan documentary), 466 Jewish Retirement Home in Iran, A (Sarshar/Mojjalal documentary), 466 Jews of Iran (Farahani documentary), 77 Jezzini, Wafik, 496 Jihad Television, 12, 12, 19–21, 25, 26–27, 231; personnel, 15; planning and, 15–16; sacred subjectivities in, 20–21; series produced, 14–15. See also specific documentaries Jiran (Motamen documentary), 74 Jobrani, Maz, 432 Johnson, Lamont, 287 Jomeh (Yektapanah film), 235 Jonbesh-e Irani-ye Banitorah (tv program), 296 Jordan, Erica, 451

Joseph, Suad, 190 Joshua’s Garden (Fahr film), 428 Journal from Tehran (Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 395, 423 journalism: achievements under Kha­ tami, 95–96; female journalists, 96 Journeyman Pictures, 169 Journey of No Return (Tabrizian film), 482 Journey of Stone, The (Kimiai film), 187 Journey to the Land of the Traveler (B. Kiarostami documentary), 186 Jowdat, Shaqayeq, 142 Jowzani, Masud Jafari, 235, 236, 433 Joy Makers, The (Khakipour film), 363 Joy of Madness (H. Makhmalbaf film), 230 Just Battle, The (documentary series), 23 Kadivar, Jamileh, 313 Kadivar, Mohsen, 320, 357 Kafka, Franz, 335 Kajnazar (tv program), 296 Kakadu (Milani film), 113 Kakoli (Behzad film), 138 Kalantari, Pirooz, 2, 59, 61, 74, 155, 165 Kalhor, Mahdi, 336 Kalhor, Narges, 335–36 Kalibi, Jaber, 254 Kamkari, Fariborz, 199–201 Kamravani Saless, Farrokh, 503 Kandahar (M. Makhmalbaf film), 238, 238–39, 241, 242, 247 Kanimanga Heights (Dad film), 41, 313 Kar, Ana, 421 Kar, Cyrus (Kourosh), 420–21 Kar, Mehrangiz, 93 Karbala, Iraq, 6, 11, 18, 63, 77, 240, 294 Karbala operations. See Operation Karbala 4; Operation Karbala 5 Karbaschi, Gholamhosain, 47, 166 Kardan, Parviz, 432, 466 Kardavani, Kazem, 316 Kargar, Bahman, 346 Karimabadi, Mehrzad, 16 Karimi, Iraj, 188 Karimi, Mostafa Razzagh, 221 Karimi, Niki, 139, 168, 188, 340 Karimi, Nosrat, 340, 387 Karimi, Pejman, 325 Karimi, Reza Mir, 212

Karimi, Shahram, 467, 468 Kariminia, Hojjatoleslam, 435–36 Karkhairan, Delaram, 155–56 Karroubi, Mehdi, 335 Kashani, Ariana, 255 Kashani, Maryam, 457–59 Kashani, Mehrdad, 10, 11. See also specific films Kashani, Sirus, 55 Kasraian, Mani, 162 Kassey, Adnan El, 283 Katouzian, Homa, 101 Kaveh (periodical), 372 Kayhan (newspaper), 38, 406 Kazemi, Ziba Zahra, 73, 434 Kean, John, 317–18 Keller, Michael, 297 Kelley, Shannon, 243 Kesharvarz, Maryam, 69 Ketab-e Hafteh (periodical), 464 Ketab-e Jom’eh (periodical), 464 Key, The (Foruzesh film), 119, 213 Khabazan, Majid, 186 Khademi, Hassan, 73 Khademolreza, Atefeh, 364 Khadijeh, Molla, 74 Khadivi, Laleh, 456–57 Khairoldin, Hamid, 186 Khakipour, Maryam, 363 Khalatbari, Mitra, 357 Khalili, Nader, 104 Khalkhali, Abdolrahim, 463 Khalkhali, Sadeq, 206 Khamenei, Ali: on bbc, 302; on cultural invasion, 251–52, 307–8, 313; film on rise of, 333; on harmony in acting, 100; on international film festivals, 251–52; on messaging, 100; music video on, 357–58; Nurizadeh and, 330–31; persecution by, 314; on pop culture, 346; on protesters, 300; vs. reformist candidates, 42; Sharafeddin’s film on, 334; on social sciences and humanities, 317–18; YouTube video of, 359 Khaneh Ma (Fahr documentary), 428–30, 429 Khaneh-ye Film-e Iran. See Film House of Iran Khanom, Shahin, 288

i ndex

609

Khatami, Mohammad, 44; on Afghanistani refugees, 242; appreciation of cinema, 249; balance of society under, 438; clerical garb of, 61; on cultural invasion, 308, 313–14; culture of resistance and, 83; documentary on, 43–44; election of, 3, 28–29, 58, 59, 127, 144, 151, 311, 391; on importance of cinema, 260, 261; influence on media, 229; as liberal, 52, 311, 365, 424, 435; public diplomacy and, 309; on sartorial rules, 134; women’s achievements under, 95–96, 134 Khatibi, Reza, 437–38 Khayyam, Omar, 225, 468 Khiabany, Gholam, 348 Khomeini, Ruhollah: audiocassette use, 351; on averted look, 107, 110; on cinema, 100, 114, 122–23, 229; on cultural invasion, 307; death of, 72, 176, 269; fatwas of, 122–23, 136, 380, 407, 436; on guiding masses, 418; interview with, 278; Iranian migration and, 380; on Iraq invasion, 6; in mediawork, 229, 277–80; return from exile, 416–17; on transsexuality, 436; use of politicized Islam, 475; veiling campaign of, 100, 122–23 Khordadian, Mohammad, 342–43 Khorramshahr, 11, 23–24 Khorramshahr, City of Blood, City of Love (Bahadori/Lesani/Haqiqi documentary), 23 Khorsandi, Shappi, 451 Khorvash, Fakhri, 112, 118, 119–20 Khosravi, Shahram, 83 Kianfar, Negin, 363 Kian Foundation, 310 Kianian, Hayedeh, 121 Kianian, Reza, 121 Kianuri, Nureddin, 206 Kiarostami, Abbas, 1, 64, 119, 134, 193; art-house cinema of, 176, 178–84, 187–92, 198–99, 204–8, 218, 224–25, 247; autobiographical aspects to films, 183; awards, 89, 254; box office earnings, 249; censorship of, 130, 207, 227, 328–29; on children, 213; cinema vérité, use of, 201–4; on copyright

610

i ndex

infringement, 266; criticism of, 29, 254–55, 326; domestic inattention of, 249–50; on future of cinema, 184; influence on others, 188; on international film festivals, 243; on Iranian psychology, 201–2; Italian neorealism influence on, 187, 188–89, 191; newwave cinema of, 189; protest of, 332; representation of women, 171; research films, 204–8; short story paradigm, 177, 180, 188; on shot–reverse shot filming, 191–92; as star director, 61; on status of Iranian cinema, 243; travel impediments, 261–62. See also specific films Kiarostami, Bahman, 62–63, 73, 186, 232, 363, 448, 456, 461 Kiarostami 101 (Akrami documentary), 186, 461 Kidman, Nicole, 286 Killing Mad Dogs (Baizai film), 38 Kill the Shah (unfinished film), 283 Kimiai, Masud, 29, 39, 96, 176, 186, 187, 420 Kimiavi, Parviz, 1, 176, 313, 386, 434, 462, 468–69 Kino-eye, 184 Kino Video, 342 kinship, 229, 231 Kish Free Trade Zone Organization, 88, 91 Kish International Documentary Film Festival, 88, 89, 91 Kish Island, 2, 4, 88 Kish Tourism Organization, 46 Koker Trilogy (A. Kiarostami), 180 Kooshan, Kamshad, 408 Koppel, Ted, 278 Kouros, Alexis, 286 Kowsari, Baran, 45, 163, 229 Kowsari, Jahangir, 229 ksci-tv, 267 Kuma Reality Games, 291–93 Kurdistan: Iranian, 78, 235, 423, 425, 426; Iraqi, 16, 55, 334 Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, 84 Kurds: cinema of diaspora, 235–37, 427; rights of, 233 Kurosh (king). See Cyrus the Great

Kushan, Ismail, 369 kvea-tv, 295 Labor at the Crossroads (tv program), 432 Lacan, Jacques, 107 Ladies’ Room (Afzali documentary), 150 Lady (Mehrjui film), 143, 226, 311 Lady of the Roses (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Lahiji, Shahla, 95, 316 Lahze tv (satellite channel), 298 Lalehzar, 80–81 Lamorisse, Albert, 267, 426 Landis, John, 284 Langford, Michelle, 135 Larijani, Ali, 321 Larijani, Mohammad Javad, 338 Larijani, Sadeq, 331 Lashgaripur, Pezhman, 252 Last Bakhshi, The (Fadaian film), 81 Last Farewell to Dr. Saedi, The (Allameh­ zadeh documentary), 462, 463 Last Visit with Iran Daftari (Banietemad documentary), 166 Last Word, The (Neshat film), 471 Laughton, Charles, 495 Lavafipour, Ramtin, 2, 190 Lazarz, Mark, 73, 341 Leacock, Richard, 202 Leder, Mimi, 286 Legend of the Sigh, The (Milani film), 138 Leila (Mehrjui film), 124, 143, 144, 144, 160, 196, 223–24, 244 Leipzig Film Festival, 75 Lejeune, Phillipe, 492 Lesani, Farhad, 23 Lewis, Bernard, 307 Life and Nothing More . . . (A. Kiarostami film), 180, 181, 207–8 Life in Fragments (radio show), 509 Life in the Heights (Hamidnezhad documentary), 32 Limonadi, Ali, 296, 466 Lincoln Center, 244 Link tv, 362–64 Lioret, Philippe, 332 Lipstick Jihad (Moaveni film), 104 Little Bird of Happiness (Derakhshandeh film), 117, 119, 138

Little Ones, The (Shalilian documentary), 76 Little Stiff, A (Zahedi documentary), 397, 455 Living in Purgatory (Qaderi film), 7, 39, 101 Lizard, The (Tabrizi film), 47–48, 212 Loach, Ken, 332 Lochu (Antasian documentary), 75 Loneliness of a Passion-Play Actor, The (Razzazifar film), 240 Longinotto, Kim, 151–55, 152, 428 Loren, Sophia, 283 Lor Girl, The (Sepanta film), 369 Los Angeles, 254, 295, 372, 382 Los Angeles Herald Examiner (newspaper), 277 Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 278, 463 Lost Cinema, The (Akrami documentary), 186, 461, 464 Lost Requiem (Sinai documentary), 33–34, 34 Lost Time (Derakhshandeh film), 138 Lotfi, Mohammad Reza, 341 Love (Neda Haqiqat documentary), 63, 64 Lovers’ Wind, The (Lamorisse documentary), 267, 426 Lucid Linguistics, 293 Lumet, Sidney, 28 MacFarquhar, Neil, 339 Madani, Mehdi, 24 Madanian, Mehdi, 114 Madhouse (Ropelewski film), 286 Maghsoudlou, Bahman, 266, 385–88, 464–65; film collection, 387 Magnolia Films, 246 Mahdavi, Pardis, 127 Mahini, Hossein, 407–8, 410, 412 Mahjub, Hosain, 214 Mahmoody, Betty, 284–86 Mahmoody, Bozorg, 286 Mahmoody, Mahtab, 296 Mahmoud, Ahmad. See Eta, Ahmad Mahmoud M, 258 Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film (periodical), 8, 122 Mahshid Amirshahy (Sarshar/Taheri documentary), 466

i ndex

611

Mahvi Foundation, 310 Mainline (Banietemad film), 165 Majidi, Majid: aesthetics of, 221–22; arthouse cinema of, 176, 178, 210, 214, 221, 235, 247; awards, 313; banned films, 222; box office earnings, 249, 258; film ratings, 258; gender in films, 131, 133, 210, 235; internal exile of, 328; messianic structure, use of, 213–14; Oscar nomination, 247; synesthesia in films, 135. See also specific films Majles: on British Council, 309; documentaries on, 46–47, 466; housing problems and, 56; on Mohajerani, 311–12, 313; radio broadcasts of, 52; reformist factions in, 42; on satellite tv, 345; on violence in films, 114; women in, 95; on women in film, 123–24 Majles Representative, The (Sarshar documentary), 466 Makhmalbaf (Daneshmand documentary), 186 Makhmalbaf, Hana, 230, 232, 250, 336, 337–38 Makhmalbaf, Maysam, 186, 231–32 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 21, 30, 38–41; on amateur videographers, 87, 115; arthouse cinema of, 176, 194, 197–98, 211, 215–17, 234–35, 247, 252; as avantgarde, 469; awards, 335; banned films, 119, 126, 226, 230; box office earnings, 249; on censorship, 228; cinephilia of, 142–43, 228; contributions to women’s films, 231–32; criticism of, 232; on democracy, 46–47; educational activities, 241–42; exhibition permit for, 311–12; family mode of production, 230–33; as Green Movement spokesman, 250, 335; on Islamicate ideology, 29, 39–40, 116; on modesty rules, 116, 126; on no-touching rules, 124–25; representation of women, 171; romance films, 142; as seditious, 323; on success of Iranian films, 251; on women in performing arts, 115. See also specific films

612

i ndex

Makhmalbaf, Samira, 128–29, 138, 170, 252; in Afghanistan, 239; art-house cinema of, 177, 230, 236, 239; as avant-garde, 469; awards, 256; on censorship, 228; documentary on, 186; family mode of production, 230, 231; on future of cinema, 184. See also specific films Makhmalbaf Film House (mfh), 128, 230–32, 242 Malak Nafisi (Sarshar documentary), 466 Malekmakan, Gholamabbas, 15–16 Maleknasr, Yassamin, 138, 141, 239 Malekzadeh, Firuz, 509 Malekzadeh, Rafieh, 83–84 Manet, Édouard, 218 Man for All Reasons, A (Aria documentary), 43–44, 44 Manhattan by Numbers (Naderi film), 398, 506, 509, 510 Manoto tv. See Me and You tv Manoucheri, Nezam, 363 Man Push Cart (Bahrani documentary), 447–48, 448 Mansouri, Moslem, 39, 65–68, 254, 407–8, 464–65 Man with a Movie Camera, The (Vertov film), 22, 62 Marathon (Naderi film), 398, 506, 507, 509, 510 Marcus, George, 478–79 Marderosian, Shushanik der, 402 Marjan (Riahi film), 138 Marjan Television Network, 299 Mark, Laura, 509 Markazi tv (satellite channel), 298 Marooned in Iraq (Ghobadi film), 236, 247–48, 262 Marriage of the Blessed (M. Makhmalbaf film), 30, 40, 41, 118, 119 Marriage on Trial (Mir-Hosseini/Longinotto documentary), 151 martyrdom: culture of, 9, 15, 19; in film, 9, 19, 24; of Hosain, 6, 11, 77, 240; individuality and, 12–14; spirituality and, 12 Maryam and Mani (Saidi film), 138

Maryam’s Sin (Shahandeh documentary), 156 Mashayekhi, Jamshid, 313 Masters of Iran’s Classical Music (Tahaminejad film), 81 Masumi, Parvaneh, 157 Matini, Ali, 66–68 Mausoleum of Il-khan Oljaitu, 80 May Lady, The (Banietemad film), 134, 158–63, 160, 161, 223 Maysles, Albert, 202 Mazursky, Paul, 284 mbc Group, 301–2; satellite channels, 301 McGill, Hannah, 232 mcig. See Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance McLaglen, Andrew, 287 Me and You tv (Manoto tv), 299 mediawork: on assimilation, 287; components of, 279; defined, 269, 273; ethnic, 295; exile filmmakers and, 402; exilic treatment of Islamic Republic, 295–306; Internet cinema as, 271; Islamic Republic use of, 306–9; jingoism in, 288; Khomeini in, 277–80; modernity and, 274; national representation and, 273–74; nongovernmental/ private support for, 274; objectivity/ subjectivity in, 155; Pahlavi period, 253–54, 384; representation of Iran, 283–91; stereotypes in, 284–85, 287; underground cinema and, 66; on U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, 276–77; U.S.-Iran conflicts in, 370; U.S. public diplomacy and, 264, 269, 290, 402; U.S. treatment of Islamic Republic, 274–79; videogames, 291–95 Me films (Ghazel film series), 396, 487– 94, 489, 491, 498, 499, 499–500 Mehrabi, Masud, 81, 209, 259 Mehranfar, Farhad, 74, 82 Mehrjui, Dariush, 57, 103, 119, 141; arthouse cinema of, 176, 178, 196–97, 208, 215, 218, 220–21, 223; banned films, 226–27; on censorship, 228, 256; copyright problems, 265; on crises of humanism, 215; evolution of style, 180; exhibition permits, 311;

family members in movies, 229–30; films on mbc channels, 301; on intertextuality, 197; intimacy in films of, 125; new-wave cinema of, 385, 388; on postproduction process, 197; on representation of women, 171; romance films of, 142–44; on self-reflexivity, 195, 196, 198; synesthesia in films of, 220–24; on truthful cinema, 208; on veiling, 124, 160. See also specific films Mehr tv (Internet tv), 300 Mel Hoppenheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film Production, 428 Melville, Herman, 506 Meshkini, Ali, 106 Meshkini, Marziyeh, 128–29, 138, 177, 228, 230, 231, 468–69 Metal Engraving (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 metarealism in cinema, 177, 192–201 Me Yet (Zarrinqalam documentary), 83, 84 Meysey and Masan (Moqaddasian documentary), 74 mfh. See Makhmalbaf Film House Microsoft, 250 Middle East Broadcasting Center. See mbc Group Migielicz, Geri, 460 Migrating Birds (Hatamikia documentary), 27 mij Film, 69 Milani, Tahmineh, 128, 134, 138, 164, 167–69, 186, 255; arrest of, 167, 168– 69; art-house cinema of, 176, 230; box office earnings, 249; boycotted films, 168; censorship of films, 113, 167, 168–69, 256; criticism of tv coverage, 59; on her generation, 170–71; selfcensorship of, 169. See also specific films Milk (Van Sant film), 69 Miller, Ernest, 287 Millet, Kate, 109, 111–12 Mills, Margaret, 110 Minab, 76 miniature paintings, 103, 108–9, 218, 494

i ndex

613

Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (mcig): banned films, 329; censorship by, 230–31; Center for Experimental and Semiprofessional Development, 22–23; Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films, 2, 89–90; Documentary and Experimental Film Center, 332; documentary cinema of, 78; exhibition permits by, 38, 42, 57, 223, 266, 311–12, 327, 329, 436; progressive rating system by, 227; regulation of documentaries, 4, 64; support of documentaries, 2, 6–7, 54; Young Cinema Society, 2, 90 Ministry of Education, 207 Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, 56–57 Ministry of Intelligence, 309, 324–26 Ministry of Reconstruction Crusade (mrc), 12, 15–16, 17, 75, 348 Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, 319 Mirage (documentary series), 15 Miralai, Ahmad, 310 Miramax Films, 246 Mirbaqeri, Davud, 72, 133, 311–12 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 151–55, 152, 428 Mirjalili, Bahram, 435 Mir Qanbar, 47 Mirror (Internet film), 351 Mirror, The (Panahi film), 71, 129, 198, 211, 213, 266 Mirrorwork (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Mirtahmasb, Mojtaba, 2, 71–72, 73, 80, 328, 330, 333, 341. See also specific documentaries Mirzai, Behnaz A., 427–28 mise-en-scène: in accented cinema, 401, 451; in art-house cinema, 219, 226, 259; German expressionism and, 495; Islamicate, 115, 139, 223; modernity and, 221; montage effect and, 479; veils and, 128, 129, 158, 160; in war films, 6 Mission, The (Sayyad film), 340, 394, 400–401, 528n64 Mission 7—Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Part 1 (videogame), 291

614

i ndex

Mission 8—Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Part 1 (videogame), 291–92 Mission 58—Assault on Iran (videogame), 292–94 Mitri, Tarek, 496 Mix (Mehrjui film), 196–97 Moaddel, Mansoor, 364–65 Moasesi, Gholamreza, 200 Moaveni, Azadeh, 104 Moby Dick (Melville), 506 moby Group, 302 modernity: duality in, 474–80; individuality and, 4, 12–13, 85, 175, 216, 354–55; mediawork and, 274; mise-en-scène and, 221; Shiite Islam and, 474–75; spirituality and, 208; subjectivity in, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 216, 218; triumph of, 216; veiling and, 94; war cinema and, 6, 20; women and, 94–95, 98, 134, 144, 147 Modiri, Mehran, 347–48 Mofid, Bahman, 407 Mohadessi, Javad, 100, 113–14 Mohajer, Masumeh, 45 Mohajerani, Ataollah, 268, 311–13, 314, 320, 361 Mohammadi, Mahnaz, 156 Mohammadi, Majid, 323 Mohammadkhani, Aida, 210 Mohammadkhani, Mina, 198 Mohammed (Prophet), 114 Mohasses, Ardeshir, 465 Mohr, Daisy, 363 Mohseni, Mehdi, 357 Mohseni, Nikchehr, 97 Mojjalal, Bahman, 466 Mokarrameh (Mokhtari documentary), 75 Mokhtari, Ebrahim, 2, 49, 76, 95, 363; case studies, use of, 55–56; on censorship, 75; as commercial filmmaker, 61; as ethnographic documentary maker, 74; first feature film, 48–49; on government support, 90–91; research documentaries of, 204. See also specific documentaries Mokhtari, Mohammad, 314 Molina, Alfred, 285 Molla Khadijeh and Her Children (Mokhtari documentary), 74

Mollaqolipur, Rasul, 13, 22, 128, 313. See also specific documentaries Moment of Innocence, A (M. Makhmalbaf film), 216, 217, 228, 230–31, 311–12 Monazzah, Kiumars, 24 Monde, Le (newspaper), 184 Monet, Claude, 218 Monfaredzadeh, Esfandiar, 335 Monica Cinema, 385 Moniroo Ravanipour (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Montevideo Film Festival, 262 Montreal Film Festival, 328, 329 Moqaddasian, Mohammad Reza, 53, 74, 75. See also specific documentaries Moradi, Ebrahim, 369 Moradinasab, Reza, 15 Moran, Jim, 350 Morin, Edgar, 202 Morris, Errol, 202 Morris, Holly, 168 Mortazavi, Ali, 385–86, 388 Mortazavi, Said, 305 Morteza Khan Neydavood (Sarshar/ Hajjatpanah film), 466 Moruzzi, Norma Claire, 160 Mosaddeq, Mohammad, 277, 306, 337 Moscow, films on, 22 Moshe Katsav (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Moshfegh Hamedani (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Moshiri, Manuchehr, 53, 61, 165, 166 Moslehi, Haidar, 324 Mossayebi, Mehdi, 387 Mostaghasi, Said, 324 Motamed Aria, Fatemeh, 43–44, 139, 159, 208, 328 Motamedia, Bahman, 73 Motamen, Farzad, 74 Motazedi, Khanbabakhan, 369 Mother/Country (Gharavi documentary), 395, 449–50, 450 Motion Picture Association of America, film rating system, 257–58 Mottahari, Morteza, 529n14 mourning: censorship and, 32–33; cere­ monies, 32, 62–63, 76–77, 109, 137, 223; Shiite paradigm of, 137

Mousavi, Mir Hosain, 99, 101, 167, 311, 327–28, 332 Moussavi, Granaz, 69–70, 72 movie houses: blackouts and, 11; destruction of, 93, 98; documentaries and, 78; Internet cinema and, 354, 356; Iranian exiles and, 266, 385, 388, 405–6; masculinization of, 114; screening of World Cup in, 527n55; shortage of, 245; veiling and, 94 Mowlana, Hamid, 137 mrc. See Ministry of Reconstruction Crusade Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Ohanians film), 101, 189, 212, 370 Mrs. President (Haeri documentary), 44–45, 428 msf. See Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film (periodical) Muharram in Muharram (Forty Witnesses documentary), 11 Mullah Variety Show, The (Fazeli video), 304 Mullah Vision, 112, 278 multiplex cinema: art-house cinema and, 233–42; defined, 233; imperial nostalgia in, 233–34; qualities of, 35 Mulvey, Laura, 106–7, 172 Murderer or Murdered (Sheikholeslami documentary), 146–49, 457 Murdoch, Rupert, 302 Murnau, F. W., 495 Murty, Govindini, 402 Musavi Khoi, Abolqasem, 107 music videos, 357–59 Muslim Life in America (periodical), 272 Mussolini, Benito, 330 Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, 217, 369 My City Abadan (Jennatkhahdust documentary), 22 My Iranian Paradise (Olsen/Petersen documentary), 430–31 My Mother Is Not Chinese (Kashani documentary), 458 Myrick, Daniel, 200 Mystic Iran (Farshad documentary), 425–27 My Tehran for Sale (Moussavi film), 69–70, 72

i ndex

615

My Tribe, Kermanj (Azimpur documentary), 74 My Uncle Napoleon (Taqvai tv series), 267 Nabavi, Ebrahim, 97 Nabili, Marva, 138, 438 Nadalian, Ahmad, 80 Naderi, Amir, 1; as accented filmmaker, 500, 504–10; art-house cinema of, 176, 211; California exhibits, 385–87; claustrophobia in films, 451; pacifist movies of, 25, 29–33; U.S.-made feature films, 398. See also specific films Naderi, Nader Afshar, 78 Nader Naderpour (Sarshar/Limonadi documentary), 466 Nadii, Zohreh Mahasti, 138 Naficy, Nahal, 109 Nafisi, Azar, 336, 343 Naipaul, V. S., 310, 383 Najafi, Mohammad Ali, 65, 115, 117, 119 Najeeb (Eshaghian documentary), 453 Naked Gun, The (Zucker film), 284 Nameh Farhangestan (periodical), 372 Namjoo, Mohsen, 336 Nandy, Ashis, 39 Naqdi, Mohammad Reza, 322 Naqshbandi, As’ad, 61 Naraghi, Ehsan, 307 Nargess (Banietemad film), 134, 142, 158–59, 163 Naser al-Din Shah, the Movie Actor (M. Makhmalbaf film), 143, 197 Nasseri, Mehran Karimi, 442–43, 446, 552–53n50 Nasser Ovissi (Sarshar documentary), 466 Nassibi, Bassir, 39, 232, 407–8, 409–10, 412 Nasuh’s Repentance (M. Makhmalbaf film), 39 National Endowment for Democracy, 318, 336 National Enquirer (tabloid), 280 National Film Archive of Iran (nfai), 43, 337 National Film Board of Canada, 408 National Iranian American Council (niac), 391

616

i ndex

National Iranian Radio and Television (nirt), 386, 465 National Iranian tv (nitv), 298, 332–33 nationalism: Azeri, 551n32; identity and, 72; monolingual, 36; secular, 310, 320 Navab, Farzan, 439 Nazari, Jalil, 235 Nazarian, Sam, 452 Nazempur, Kazem, 14 Nazeri, Shahram, 341, 475 Nazerian, Shaollah, 387 Neda (Internet video), 353–56, 355 Needlework (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Negahdari, Nasrin, 446–47 Neshat, Shirin: as avant-garde filmmaker, 467; dedications, use of, 337; on exilic trauma, 473–74; father’s influence on, 471; filmography, 555n72; gendered screens and, 470; as glocal, 471; selfinscription in films, 134; on Shiite Islam, 474–80; on veils, 135, 171, 396, 497, 500 Netflix, 246 network films. See multiplex cinema News Corp, 302 Newsnight (bbc World program), 435 new-wave cinema: dissident, 466; exhibition of, 385, 388; rehabilitation of, 1, 175, 176, 177; rise of, 462; state-­ supported, 502–3; women in films, 97. See also specific directors, filmmakers New Yorker Films, 246 New York Film Festival, 242, 261 New York Times (newspaper), 292, 293, 339 New York Times Magazine, 250 Next Chapter (tv program), 290 ngo documentaries. See nongovernmental organization (ngo) documentaries nhk, 136 niac. See National Iranian American Council Night after the Revolution, The (Allamehzadeh documentary), 462–63 Night It Rained, The (Shirdel film), 189 Nightline (tv newscast), 277 Night of the Hunter, The (Laughton film), 495

Nightsongs (Nabili film), 438 Nights on the Zayandehrud (M. Makhmalbaf film), 142, 217, 226, 228 Niknejad, Asadollah, 10, 11, 122–23, 123, 524n19. See also specific films 9/11 terrorist attacks. See September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Nine Hundred Women (Khadivi documentary), 456–57 1936 (Bozorgnia/Qolizadeh documentary), 43 1942 . . . Do You Remember. See Lost Requiem (Sinai documentary) nirt. See National Iranian Radio and Television nitv. See National Iranian tv Nobel Peace Prize, 288 Nodjumi, Sara, 454 No Illusions (Abedian documentary), 73 Nokia Siemens Networks, 360–61 Nonahali, Roya, 40, 131, 131 nonfiction cinema. See documentary cinema nongovernmental organization (ngo) documentaries, 459–61 No One Knows about Persian Cats (Ghobadi documentary), 68, 72–73, 188, 334, 341 Noor Film Festival, 411 Nordberg, Jenny, 235 Normandi, Amir, 497–98 Norris, Aaron, 286 Nose Iranian Style (Oskouei documentary), 73, 109 Nosferatu (Murnau film), 81, 495 nostalgia: in filmmaking, 72, 192, 219, 387, 399, 471, 474, 501; imperial, 233–34; for self, 306 Notes from Last Night (Ahamdi documentary), 63 Not Without My Daughter (Gilbert book and film), 276–77, 284–86, 444 Nourbakhsh, Mrs., 288 Nowrasteh, Cyrus, 284, 289, 397, 401–2, 406–7 Nuclear Baby, The (Fatemi film), 401, 467 Nuremberg Human Rights Film Festival, 335

Nuri, Azam, 95 Nuri, Fazlollah, 93, 206, 325 Nuri, Mohammad Mehdynejad, 319 Nurizadeh, Mohammad, 330–31, 337 Nye, Joseph, 271 Oasis in the Moment, An (Aminian film), 467 Obama, Barack, 275, 289, 350, 370, 380 Oberhausen Film Festival, 53–54 Obsession (Aish HaTorah film), 289 Occidentosis, 307 Occupations of Migrant Peasants in the City, The (Banietemad documentary), 165 October Films, 246, 257 Off-Beat (Mirtahmasb documentary), 73, 341 Offside (Panahi film), 132, 527n55 Off the Limit (Banietemad film), 138, 157–58, 165 Ogilvy & Mather, 272 Ohanians, Ovanes, 101, 189, 212, 369 Olsen, Annette Mari, 430–31 Olsson, Stephen, 363 Omid, 460 Omid-e Iran tv (satellite channel), 298 On Al-Faw Front (Jennatkhahdust documentary), 24 Once Upon a Time Cinema (M. Makhmalbaf film), 185, 228 One. Two. One (Akbari film), 147, 188 Ong, Walter, 478 Only the Hours (Cavalcanti film), 22 On the Subject of Nice (Vigo film), 22 On the Wings of Angels (Bahadori documentary), 22 On Wings of Eagles (McLaglen film), 287–88 Open Society Institute, 318 Open Source Center, 316, 323 Operation Al-Fath, 9 Operation Fath al-Mobin, 22 Operation Karbala 4, 13 Operation Karbala 5, 15, 19 Operation Valfajr 8 (Avini documentary), 14, 17–18, 20, 22, 25, 26 Ordeal, The (tv news program), 276 Order (Shahid Saless film), 502

i ndex

617

Organizing Committee for the International Women’s Day, 156–57 Orientalism, 284, 285, 286, 288 Oshin (Japanese tv series), 135–37 Oshlu (Avini documentary), 22 Oskouei, Mehrdad, 2, 73, 79, 109, 363 Oskoui-Babcock, Soudabeh, 452 Other Iran, The (Sheikholeslami documentary), 148 Other Side of the Burka, The (Oskoui film), 363 Other Women, The (Amirabadi documentary), 84 Our Homeland (Sohaili documentary series), 79 Our Times (Banietemad documentary), 45–46, 50, 165 Ovanessian, Arby, 402–3, 466 paaia. See Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans Pachachi, Maysoon, 95 Pacific Film Archive, 244 Pahlavi, Ashraf, 283, 284 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah, 279, 372; on bbc, 302; cultural idolatry of, 312; Hollywood movies on, 283; sister of, 283, 284 Pahlavi period: actors’ standing during, 101; British Council and, 309; documentary filmmaking in, 2; epistemic violence during, 306–7; exhibition of films, 385–89; exile tv and, 267; filmfarsi in, 99, 140; filmmakers, rehabilitated, 176; gender in, 132, 436; male directors as dominant, 52; mediawork of, 384, 385–89; public diplomacy during, 306; representation of women in film, 93, 96, 99; shamelessness of, 118; on soccer, 58; social criticism films in, 73; veiling during, 111 Pahlevan, Changiz, 316 painting, documentary series on, 80 Paivar, Homayun, 220 Pakshir, Mohammad, 504 Panahi, Jafar, 145; arrests, 130, 145, 328–30; art-house cinema of, 177, 184, 188, 195, 198–99, 210, 211, 247, 252,

618

i ndex

257; on censorship, 256; on copyright infringement, 265; criticism of, 252; film awards, 257, 329; film locations of, 116; filmmaker status of, 247; gender in films, 132; on Iranian football, 301; political aspects to films, 129–30, 257; self-reflexivity in films, 187, 211; travel impediments, 261, 262; underground filmmaking of, 71–72, 330; visa incident, 262–63; work for vvir, 76. See also specific films Par Foundation, 310 Pari (Mehrjui film), 103, 143, 265, 301 Paris, films on, 22 Paronnaud, Vincent, 494 Parsian Television (TV program), 394 Parsons, Talcott, 317–18 Pars tv (satellite channel), 298 Pars Video, 297 Pars Weekly tv (tv program), 295 Parto, Sara, 63 Partovi, Kambiz, 74 Partovi, Kambuzia, 119, 363 Pasdaran Army Television Unit, 24 Passage (Neshat film), 470, 472 Passage (Tabatabai documentary), 446, 447 Passing through Sedition, 323 passion plays. See Taziyeh Patai, Taifur, 427 Path of Life, The (Nargess Haqiqat documentary), 63 Path to 9/11, The (Nowrasteh tv mini­ series), 402 Payam-e Emruz (newspaper), 314 Payami, Babak, 336, 434 Payam tv (satellite channel), 298 Paykar, 54 Payman (tv program), 296 Pazira, Nelofer, 238 pbs. See Public Broadcasting Service Peaceful Sabbath (Shokrian film), 395, 453 Peacemaker, The (Leder film), 286 Pear Tree, The (Mehrjui film), 215, 218, 220–21 Peddler, The (M. Makhmalbaf film), 40, 117, 119 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 354

Pejman, Ahmad, 426 Peña, Richard, 242 Pentagon attack. See September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Penthouse (periodical), 279 pen tv (satellite channel), 298 People (Sadrzadeh film), 408 People & Power—Iran (Internet film), 320, 351 People’s Fadaian Organization of Iran (pfoi), 65, 418, 419, 475 People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (pmoi): mediawork of, 290; militia music videos, 19; propaganda by, 482; as revolutionary guerrilla group, 475; satellite tv channel, 298; underground filmmaking by, 65 Perelman, Vadim, 288–89, 290 Perhaps Another Time (Baizai film), 134 Perot, Ross, 287 Persepolis (Satrapi books), 494 Persepolis (Satrapi/Paronnaud film), 494–95 Persian, use of term, 290–91, 411–12 Persian Gulf (Purahmad documentary series), 78 Persian International Film Festival, 411 Persian News Network (pnn), 298 Pesiani, Atila, 168 Petersen, Katia Forbert, 430–31 Petgar, Mani, 186 pfoi. See People’s Fadaian Organization of Iran photography in documentaries, 82 Pilgrimage (B. Kiarostami documentary), 63, 383 Pink Floyd, 358–59 piracy. See copyright laws Pish (Taqvai documentary), 74 Pitts, Rafi, 336–37, 434 Place Called Home, A (Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 395, 423 Place of Documentary Filmmaking in the Islamic Republic Television, The (Arbabi report), 90, 91 Plaintive Song (Ardalan documentary), 425 Plasterwork (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80

Plastic Flowers Never Die (Varzi documentary), 9 Playing with Life (Mir-Hosseini/Longinotto documentary), 155 pmoi. See People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran pnn. See Persian News Network poetry and cinema: in art-house cinema, 218–20, 225–26; intimacy and, 120; politics and, 139–48; recitation in, 157–58; voice-overs and, 160–61, 161, 183–84, 225–26, 467 Polanco, Alejandro, 448 polygamy, 124, 144, 158, 531n34, 535n33 Pomegranate and Reed (Ebrahimifar film), 119, 218, 219–20, 220 Pontecorvo, Gilo, 110 Ponti, Carlo, 283 Pooya, Rafigh, 413–16 pornography, 107–8, 110, 170, 172, 340 Portrait of Love (Parsipur film), 142 postal cinema, defined, 176. See also arthouse cinema; experimental cinema postmodernism: in accented cinema, 370–71, 389; art-house cinema and, 176, 177–78, 191, 192, 195, 201; colonial language and, 383; culture of cynicism in, 214; in exilic cinema, 399, 449, 453; Internet cinema and, 355; ludic, 201; subjectivity in, 241 Pourjavady, Nasrollah, 112 Pouyandeh, Mohammad Jafar, 314 Powell, Colin, 272 Pratt, Mary Louise, 241 Predator, The (Tabrizian film), 482–83, 483 President Mir Qanbar (Shirvani documentary), 47, 363 Press Law, 123 Press tv (satellite channel), 299, 324 Press tv (tv program), 87, 304–5 Prison Break (tv series), 302 Problem, First Case . . . Second Case (A. Kiarostami documentary), 1, 205–6 propaganda: in campaign films, 42; Internet and, 322; against Islamic Republic, 290, 298, 304, 331, 360; for Islamic Republic, 255; from pmoi, 482; U.S., 316; war, 21, 137; Zionist, 288

i ndex

619

prostitution, 54, 60, 66, 96, 155 Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (paaia), 391 Public Broadcasting Service (pbs), 419, 432 public diplomacy, 270–73; Ahmadinejad and, 256, 269, 290, 327; cultural invasion and, 285, 316–27; defined, 270; of Dubai, 302; exile filmmakers and, 402; film festivals and, 257, 264; of Green Movement, 300–303; instrumentalization of culture, 321, 326; Internet and, 339, 349–50; Iranians in diaspora and, 272, 298; Islamic government use of, 241, 306–9, 361–62; Israeli, 283, 286, 289, 294–95; militarization of culture, 321–27; protestors and, 319–20; protests by domestic filmmakers, 327–34; protests by exilic filmmakers, 334–39; public’s role in, 339–64; Saudi Arabia, 302; show trials, 318, 323; as soft power, 271; state–private sector overlap and, 272; targets of, 317–21; U. S. mediawork and, 264, 269, 290; video and, 339–44 Pulse (Neshat film), 472 Purahmad, Kiumars, 24, 78, 139, 208, 230 Purarab, Abolfazl, 127, 158 purification of film industry, 98, 319; women and, 100–101, 111–12, 120–21, 172–73 Purmand, Homayun, 24 Purmohammad, Masud, 115 Qaderi, Iraj, 7, 39. See also specific films Qaemmaqami, Rokhsareh, 156 Qaisar (Kimiai film), 186 Qajar period: absence of women during, 93, 99; artisanal mode of production in, 67, 511; black slaves and, 428; mediawork in, 384; public diplomacy during, 306 Qanbari, Mokarrameh, 75 Qarun’s Treasure (Yasami film), 96 Qasemlu, Abdolrahman, 463 Qashqai tribes, 14, 235, 533n15 Qavidel, Amir, 138 Qeshm Island, 2, 49, 88, 95, 190

620

i ndex

Qolizadeh, Hosain, 42–43 Quarantine (Shahid Saless film), 500 quasi ethnographic films. See under ethnographic documentaries Queen and I, The (Sarvestani film), 363 Quran, 101, 105, 107, 113, 141, 239, 539n14 Rad, Feraidun Sanagu, 97 Rad, Mehdi Mohsenian, 137 Radio Farda, 290, 334 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 303, 313 radio stations, clandestine, 303 Radpay, Ghazel. See Ghazel (Radpay) Rafia, Bozorgmehr, 408 Rafsanjani, Ali Akbar Hashemi, 274, 308, 311; on cultural invasion, 314; documentary on, 47–48; influence on media, 229; reconstruction era of, 111; on violence, 114; on women’s roles, 101, 121 Rafsanjani, Mohammad, 311 Rahimzadeh, Makhameh, 122 Rahman, Fazlur, 105 Rahmani, Bahram, 432, 433 Rahmani, Shilan, 200 Rahmanian, Hamid, 139, 409, 442–46 Rahmaninejad, Nasser, 460 Rahmanipour, Arash, 304–5 Rahnavard, Zahra, 99–100, 102 Raisian, Alireza, 177, 188 Rajai, Masud Ahmad, 416 Rajaiyan, Hosain, 385, 388, 408 Rajavi, Kazem, 463 Rake, The (Kalhor film), 335–36 Ram, Haggai, 274 Ramezani, Mohsen, 214, 249 Rangarang tv (satellite channel), 298 Rapping in Tehran (Khademi documentary), 73 Rapture (Neshat film), 472, 476–77, 479 Rasa tv (Internet tv), 300 Rashidi, Davud, 313 Rasoulinezhad, Alireza, 212 Rassoulof, Mohammad, 71, 139, 249, 328, 330, 346–47, 363 Rastegar, Hasan, 83 Raveh, Yair, 261 Ray, Satyajit, 39–40, 179

Razavi, Atefeh, 158 Razavipour, Neda, 133–34, 469, 530n24 Razmara, Ali, 186 Razvi, Ahmad, 447, 448 Razzazifar, Alireza, 240 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 343 Reagan, Ronald, 274, 276 Recapturing Khorramshahr (Pasdaran Army tv Unit documentary), 24 Reconstruction Crusade. See Ministry of Reconstruction Crusade Recording the Truth (Golestan documentary), 54 Red Home Installation iv (Ghazel video installation), 484–85 Red Lines and Dead Lines (Amirani documentary), 437 Red Ribbon, The (Hatamikia film), 41, 313 Refuge (Mokhtari/Tahaminejad/Javadi film series), 204 Refugee (Kalantari documentary), 61 Règle du Jeu, La (periodical), 328 Regulations Governing Exhibition of Movies, Videos, and Slides, 101, 111 Religious New Year, A (Tabari documentary), 77 Remembering Doctor Fatemi (Tahaminejad documentary), 57 Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québécois, 430 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 218 Report, The (A. Kiarostami film), 183 Report of a Murder (Najafi film), 115, 117, 118, 119 Requiem (Naderi film), 385 resistance: culture of, 83; émigré filmmakers and, 395, 400, 411; ethnic filmmakers and, 397; to government oppression, 83, 344, 380; Internet and, 339; against mainstream culture, 201; veil as, 104; to war, 8 Return (Panahi film), 329 Revolution and Sacred Defense Film Association, 20 Revolution and Sacred Defense Film Center, 20 Revolution and Sacred Defense’s Theater Association, 20 Revolutionary guards. See Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office, 55 Revolution of Stones (Avini documentary), 15 Rex Cinema fire (Abadan), 22, 23, 414 Reynolds, Frank, 277, 277 Rezadad, Alireza, 495 Rezai, Nahid, 363 Riahi, Shahla, 138 Riazi, Homaira, 163 Rice, Condoleezza, 290 Rice University Cinema, 244, 245 Riefenstahl, Leni, 39 River Still Has Fish, The (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Road, The (Avini documentary), 15–17 Road to Mecca (Davies documentary), 404 rock music, 83, 458 Rodger, Annelise, 449 Rohter, Larry, 69 Roland, Gilbert, 283 Rooney, David, 403 “Roots of Muslim Rage, The” (Lewis), 307 Ropelewski, Tom, 286 Rorty, Richard, 317–18 Rosen, Miriam, 243 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 208 Rosenbaum, Mark, 421 Rosenberg, Howard, 278 Roses for Africa (Shahid Saless film), 501, 502, 503, 505 Roshanak, 183–84 Roshd Educational Film Festival, 87 Rouch, Jean, 202 Rourke, Mickey, 287 Rowshangaran, 95 Roya and Omid (Shakerifar documentary), 73, 437 Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 467, 472, 475 Runaway (Mir-Hosseini/Longinotto documentary), 155 Runner, The (Naderi film), 30–31, 211, 213, 505, 507, 509, 510 Rushdie, Salman, 305, 383, 407 Russell, Mark, 279 Rusta, Homa, 115 rvu Television, 463

i ndex

621

Saba, Sadeq, 333–34 Sabagh, Georges, 382 Saberi, Roxana, 318, 319–20, 334 Sabzian, Hosain, 67, 180–81, 185, 192– 95, 193, 202, 211 Sacred and the Absurd, The (Davies film), 404 sacred defense war. See Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) sacred subjectivity. See subjectivity Sadegh-Vaziri, Persheng: as diary filmmaker, 422–25, 492; as diasporic filmmaker, 395, 427, 432, 433; mediawork of, 363–64; as returnee, 434, 444. See also specific documentaries Sadoul, Georges, 187–88 Sadr, Musa, 21 Sadrameli, Rasul, 128, 144–45, 332 Sadredin Elahi (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Sadrzadeh, Mohammad, 408 Saedi, Gholamhosain, 313 Saedzadeh, Zara, 152 Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, 94, 439–42, 503–4 Safarian, Robert, 82, 186 Saffar-Harrandi, Mohammad Hosain, 321 Saffarian, Nasser, 333 Saffron (Mokhtari documentary), 75, 76 Safi, Hojatollah: war films, 7, 8. See also specific films Safinia, Marjan, 451 Sage of Shaliar, The (Varharam documentary), 78 Saharkhiz, Isa, 360–61 Saharkhiz, Mehdi, 360–61 Sahebjam, Freidoune, 401 Said, Edward, 276, 383 Saidi, Kobra, 138 Saint Internet (Haeri documentary), 86 Salaam Cinema (M. Makhmalbaf film), 142, 197–98, 198, 207, 245 Salaam tv (satellite channel), 298 Saleh, Joseph Jamiel Menashi, 396 Salehi-Isfahani, Djavad, 365 Saliani, Bigan, 418–20 Salinger, J. D., 265 Sallaheddin, Dawud. See Belfield, David Sally Jesse Rafael Show (tv program), 285 Salon (Internet magazine), 261

622

i ndex

Samadian, Saifollah, 58, 301, 469 Saman, 497–98 Samineh Baghchehban (Sarshar/Kardan documentary), 466 San’atizadeh, Homayun, 80–81 San’atizadeh, Mahindokht, 80–81 Sánchez, Eduardo, 200 Sani al-Saltaneh, Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, 217, 369 Sanpaolesi, Luca, 80 San Sebastian Film Festival, 330 Santner, Eric, 32 Saqafi, Ali Akbar, 251 Sara (Mehrjui film), 141, 143 Sarandon, Susan, 457 Sarkisian, Aida, 464 Sarris, Andrew, 178 Sarshar, Homa, 395, 432, 466 Sartorial rules, 134 Sarvestani, Nahid, 363 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 305, 407 Satellite (tv program), 347–48 satellite television, 267, 298–99, 302, 326–27, 344–48, 345. See also specific channels Satrapi, Marjane, 467, 492, 494–96, 498 Saturday Night Live (tv program), 279 Saurel, Ghazel, 487 Saurel, Jean-Marc, 487 Sayyad, Parviz, 403, 501; international film festivals and, 253–54, 407–8; as Islamic Republic critic, 288, 340, 394, 400, 438; particularism of, 510 Sazegara, Mohsen, 361 sbe Entertainment Group, 452 Scattered Seeds of Hanareh (Akrami documentary), 186, 236, 461 Scent of Yusef ’s Shirt, The (Hatamikia documentary), 27, 30 Scharres, Barbara, 243 Schoedsack, Ernest, 78 School of Cinema and Theater, University of Art (Tehran), 82 School We Went To, The (Mehrjui film), 226 scopophilia, 20, 107, 108, 126, 133, 140, 141. See also gaze Scorpion, The (Matini documentary), 67

Scott, Ridley, 335 Seacrest, Ryan, 348 Sealed Soil, The (Nabili film), 138 Second Channel Network (vvir), 74, 80, 135–36 Second Cinema, defined, 205 Second Cultural Revolution, 309 Second Search (Naderi documentary), 29, 30, 32, 505 Second World War: mourning and, 32; Poles displaced during, 33–34; Qashqai tribes and, 235 Secret Ballot (Payami film), 336 Secret of Armageddon (tv series), 324, 325–26, 361 Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley, The (Golestan film), 266 Sedeh, 77 Sedition Documents (tv news series), 361 self-inscription: in art-house cinema, 176, 189, 192–93, 198–99, 207, 211, 399–400, 448; in avant-garde cinema, 454–55, 467; in exilic cinema, 473–74, 491 self-referentiality in art-house cinema, 163, 189, 193, 232, 235 self-reflexivity: in art-house cinema, 52, 110, 176, 177, 189, 192, 193–201, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 399–400; in exilic cinema, 481; in taziyeh, 193–94, 195; in women’s cinema, 116, 143 Sentry (Hatamikia documentary), 27 Sepanta, Abdolhosain, 369 Separation, A (Farhadi film), 72, 259–61 Sepasi, Mohammad Taqi, 429 Sepasi Films, 429 Sepehri, Sohrab, 467 Sepher, Ben-Hur, 452 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 261, 286, 289, 391, 426–27, 433, 553–54n56 serial murder cases, 310, 314 Serkanian, Reza, 156 Setareh Sinema (periodical), 385 Seven Blind Women Filmmakers (Shirvani documentary), 63 Seven Days in Tehran (Khatibi documentary), 437–38 Seventh Day, The (Rahmanian animation), 442

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh film), 200 Sex and Philosophy (M. Makhmalbaf film), 228 Sex My Life. See Tedium (Motamedia documentary) Seyhoun Gallery, 75 Sfinx Film, 430 Shabakeh Khabar (irinn satellite channel), 299, 324 Shaban Jafari (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Shabkhiz, Hamid, 296 Shad, Luna, 290 Shadman, Fakhr al-Din, 307 Shadow of Imagination (Dalir film), 142 Shafai, Farideh, 2, 53 Shafti, Hushang, 78 Shah, The (tv series), 283 Shahabi, Katayoun, 139, 147, 333–34 Shahandeh, Parisa, 156 Shahba, Mohammad, 10, 53, 85 Shahbazi, Parviz, 213 Shahid Mohebbi Institute for the Blind, 249 Shahid Saless, Sohrab, 500–504, 504, 505, 507, 535n44; on alienation, 398; claustrophobia, use of, 451; high output of, 376, 392; national disavowal of, 508; Saeed-Vafa film on, 441; universalism of, 510 Shahosseini, Aniseh, 138 Shahrbanoo (Rahmanian/Hibbard documentary), 444, 444 Shahriar, Maryam, 131–32, 138 Shahrnazdar, Mohsen, 333 Shahrokhi, Talieh, 255 Shahrzad. See Saidi, Kobra Shahsavarani, Farideh, 223 Shahs of Sunset (tv reality series), 290– 91, 348 Shaibani, Ebrahim, 163 Shaikh al-Eslami, Mohammad Ali, 10 Shaikhi, Jamileh, 123 Shajarian, Mohammad Reza, 341 Shakerifar, Elhum, 73, 437 Shakhsar (tv program), 296 Shakibai, Khosrow, 125, 196 Shalilian, Abdolrahman, 76

i ndex

623

Shamaghdari, Javad, 260–61, 287, 327 Shamlu, Ahmad, 47, 434–35, 464–65 Shamsai, Mozhdeh, 124, 223, 229 Shamsolvaezin, Mashallah, 315 shantytowns, 53, 55–57, 165–66, 234 Sharafeddin, Bozorgmehr, 334 Shared Plight (Maleknasr film), 140–41 Shared Values Initiative, 272 Sharia law, 94, 103, 129, 153–55, 239, 445 Shariati, Ali, 307, 475 Sharif, Majid, 314 Sharp, Ian, 283 Shayda (Tabrizi film), 141 Shayegan, Daryush, 307, 497 Sheherazad Media International, 139, 147, 333 Sheikholeslami, Mahvash, 2, 73, 74, 148–49, 457 Shelter (Mokhtari documentary series), 55 Shemr, 240 Sheney, Khalifa, 426 Sherkat-e Resaneh-ye Puya, 61 Sherman Cinema, 385 Shiite Islam: clerical regime, 72, 365, 496; dissimulation doctrine, 105; distorted view of, 310–11; Hosain martyrdom and, 6, 11, 77, 240; layered nature of, 62; Lebanese youth and, 15; modernity and, 474–75; mourning paradigm, 137; mythologies in documentaries, 76, 208, 426; propaganda for, 326–27; vs. Sunni Islam, 6; waiting concept, 25, 29–30, 225. See also Islamicate values; martyrdom Ship Angelica, The (Bozorgnia film), 119 Shiraz, 77 Shirdel, Kamran, 1, 2, 51, 88, 89, 148–49, 279, 457 Shirin (A. Kiarostami film), 134, 171 Shirvani, Mohammad, 2, 47, 63–64, 363 Shofar (tv program), 296 Shojanoori, Alireza, 249 Shokof, Daryush, 338 Shokrian, Babak, 395, 453 Shore, Ralph, 289 Siah Darreh, 225 Sight and Sound (periodical), 232 Silence (M. Makhmalbaf film), 126, 211, 221–22, 228, 230, 238, 249, 335

624

i ndex

Silence between Two Thoughts (Payami film), 336 Silent Majority Speaks, The (film anthology), 357 Silver Carnation (tv program), 303–4 Sima-ye Azadi tv (satellite channel), 298 Simin Behbahani (Sarshar documentary), 466 Simon, Alissa, 243 Simple Event, A (Shahid Saless film), 441, 500 Sinai, Khosrow, 2, 22, 23, 33–34, 51, 74, 81, 176. See also specific films Sinema Video (periodical), 252 Sinema-ye Azad, 68, 409–10 Sir Alfred of Charles De Gaulle Airport (Rahmanian/Hibbard documentary), 442–43, 446 Six Days in Turkmen Sahra (documentary series), 14 Sixty Minutes (tv program), 84, 278, 280 Six Video Arts (Akbari video series), 147 Sketch (B. Kiarostami documentary), 186 Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle film), 383 Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Farmanara documentary), 199, 434 Smith Richardson Foundation, 318 Snowman, The (Mirbaqeri film), 72, 133, 311–12 Snyder, Zack, 286–87, 421 Sobchack, Vivian, 135 Sobh-e Emruz (newspaper), 314, 486 soccer (football), 58–59, 285, 301, 527n55 social networking, 87, 299, 300, 349–50, 353–54, 361, 461 social-problem films, 5, 127–28, 145, 252, 367; women’s documentaries, 148–57 Society for the Sacred Defense Cinema, 41 Society of Photographers of Revolution and Sacred Defense, 82 Soderbergh, Steven, 200 Soft Security Strategic Think Tank, 322–23 Sohaili, Hamid, 79–80 Sohrab Shahid Saless: Far From Home (Saeed-Vafa documentary), 441, 504, 504

Solaimani, Qorban, 81 Solanas, Fernando, 205 Soleiman, Masjed, 443 Soleiman Haim (Sarshar documentary), 466 Soleimani, Mohammad Reza, 42–43 Soliloquy (Neshat film), 472, 473, 477–78, 478, 479, 482, 498 Sollors, Werner, 398 Soltaniyeh Dome and Santa Maria del Fiore (Taidi documentary), 80 Someone Is Coming (Farzanegan documentary), 77 Songs of My Motherland, The. See Marooned in Iraq (Ghobadi film) Sony Classic Pictures, 246 Sorcerer’s Wind, The (Taqvai documentary), 427–28 Soros Foundation, 318 Sorush (periodical), 181 Sorush, Abdolkarim, 361 sos in Tehran (Abadi documentary), 150 Soul on Fire, A (Vaezinejad documentary), 465–66 Soul’s Children, The (Mohammadi documentary), 156 Sound Barrier (Naderi film), 398, 506, 509, 510 Sounds of Silence (Hamz/Lazarz documentary), 73, 341 Speak Up Turkmen (Allamehzadeh documentary), 65 Special Operation Eighty-Five (videogame), 294 spectatorship: of art-house films, 189, 192, 203–4, 221, 249; cinema as literature and, 184; direct gaze and, 134; ethically ambivalent, 126; exilic filmmakers and, 338–39, 405–7; gender masquerade and, 110, 130–33, 141, 235; identification and, 160; language and, 36–37; self-awareness and, 192; transnational, 249; truthfulness and, 85, 100; veiling and, 116, 147; of war films, 8, 9, 20. See also subjectivity Spell, The (Farhang film), 117 Spencer, Kim, 363–64 Spielberg, Steven, 552–53n50 spirituality, Islamic: displacement and,

427; expressed in films, 21, 140, 208, 214, 219, 221, 425–26, 474; martyrdom and, 12; modernity and, 208 Spiritual Revolution, The (tv series), 296 Spivak, Gayatri, 383, 416 sports. See soccer (football) Sreberny, Annabelle, 348 Standard (Foruzesh documentary), 76 Standard-Bearers of Hussein (Flaskerud documentary), 77 Stardust Stricken—Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Golmakani documentary), 186 Still Life (Shahid Saless film), 500, 502 Stone, Oliver, 286, 421, 452 Stone Garden, The (Kimiavi film), 189, 386 Stone Lion, The (Jowzani film), 235 stoning of adulterers, 73, 149–50, 170, 289, 401 Stoning of Soraya M., The (Nowrasteh film), 289, 397 Stoning of Soraya M., The (Sahebjam book), 401 Stop Women’s Oppression! (Internet film), 157 Stories of the Island (omnibus film), 231 Stranger and Fog (Baizai film), 385 Strangers (Bahrani film), 447 Streetwise (Saleh documentary), 396 student documentaries, 82–87 student unrest, 59–60, 168 subjectivity: collective vs. individual, 27, 102, 136, 216, 453; of filmmaker, 153; gendered, 102–6; in mediawork, 155; modern, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 216, 218; in postmodernism, 241; sacred, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20; self-criticism/self-­ appreciation and, 199 Sufi (tv program), 296 Sufi principles, 100, 208 Suitors, The (Ebrahimian film), 403–7, 405, 481 Suleiman, Elia, 332 Summer 1979 in Today’s Tehran (Ayyari documentary), 1 Sundance Film Festival, 449 Sunni Islam, 6, 54, 326 Sunshine tv (tv program), 298 Sureh (periodical), 19, 38

i ndex

625

Surf Is at Rest, The (Allamehzadeh documentary), 462 Susangerd, 14 Swank, 246 Sweet Agony (Davudnezhad film), 128, 143 Sydney Biennial, 487 Syeed, Musa, 363–64 Symphony of a Great City (Ruttman film), 22 syncretic Westernization. See westerni­ zation synesthesia. See critical synesthesia Tabari, Manuchehr, 74, 77 Tabatabai, Ali Akbar, 239, 535–36n45 Tabatabai, Nasrin, 446–47 Tabatabai, Zhazeh, 81 Tabe-Mohammadi, Shahram, 408 Tabrizi, Kamal, 13, 42, 47–48, 141, 212 Tabrizi, Sheila, 255 Tabrizian, Mitra, 467, 481–83, 484 Taghani, Altinay Ghelich, 131 Taghizadeh, Parisa, 451 Tahaminejad, Mohammad, 1, 2, 24, 51, 57, 81, 204 Taheri, Barbod, 1, 394, 407–8, 466 Tahmasebi, Khalil, 186 Taidi, Farzaneh, 288 Taidi, Parviz, 80 Tajbakhsh, Kian, 318, 319–20 Tajik Woman, A (Saeed-Vafa documentary), 439–40, 440, 441 Talebi. Mohammad Ali, 188, 213 Tales of Majid, The (Purahmad tv series), 230 Tales of the Island (film), 46 Taliban regime, 84, 124, 238–39, 309, 316 Talking with a Shadow (Sinai documentary), 81 Tall Shadows of the Wind, The (Farmanara film), 385 Tamasha tv (satellite channel), 298 Tambourine (Bakhtavar film), 87, 326, 347 Tangsir (Naderi film), 386, 505 Tapesh tv (satellite channel), 298 Tapestry of Time (M. Karimi/Varahram film), 221

626

i ndex

Taqvai, Naser, 51, 74, 118, 176, 235–36, 267, 427–28 Taraghi, Goli, 220–21 Taraz Route (Varharam documentary), 78 Taslimi, Susan, 141, 389–90, 465, 466 Taste of Cherry (A. Kiarostami film), 183, 186, 448; awards, 254–55; bootleg copies of, 266; box office earnings, 247; as ethnically coded, 235–36; impressionism in, 218, 221; improvisation in, 191–92; poetics of, 225; provocation as technique in, 203; research filming and, 207–8; self-inscription in, 192; self-reflexivity in, 207–8, 215 Taste of Her Mouth, The (Bahrani film), 447 Tasvir-Iran tv (satellite channel), 298 Taxi Bisim-e Banovan, 95 Tayyab, Manuchehr, 81 taziyeh: in film, 11, 57, 62, 76–77, 193, 194–96, 195, 223, 240; martyrdom of Hosain and, 11, 77, 240; mourning and, 43; self-reflexivity and, 193–94, 195; transgender performance in, 132 technology in filmmaking, 51, 67 Tedium (Motamedia documentary), 73 Tehran: attack on university dorm, 315; child labor in, 53–54; embassy hostage situation, 44, 274, 276–81, 291, 370; health services in, 165; shantytowns, 53, 55–57; student unrest in, 59–60; war film lots, 6, 20 Tehran: 11 pm (Langer/Nasrin film), 109 Tehran, the Twenty-Fifth Hour (Samadian documentary), 58, 301 Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (Bakhshi documentary), 72, 363 Tehrani, Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi, 511 Tehrani, Mohammad, 417–18 Tehran in Photographs (Safarian documentary), 82 Tehran University Video Club, 340–41 television: Green, 300–303; Internet, 299; Persian channels, 2, 4; satellite, 267, 298–99, 302, 326–27, 344–48, 345; on women in public, 58–59. See also exile television; specific stations Temple of Darkness (tv series), 325 Temporary Marriage (Serkanian film), 156

Ten (A. Kiarostami film), 64, 130, 130, 134, 146, 171, 183, 261 Tenancy (Mokhtari documentary), 55–57 Tenants, The (Mehrjui film), 57, 119, 226–27 Ten Plus Four (Akbari film), 147, 188 Terminal, The (Spielberg film), 552–53n50 Tervo, Kari, 286 Testament of the Phoenix, The (Allamehzadeh documentary), 464 Testing Democracy (Makhmalbaf/Farrokhyar documentary), 46–47, 228, 231 That’s Life (Kalantari documentary), 59 Third Cinema, 65, 204–5, 399 Third Jihad, The (Aish HaTorah film), 289 Third Woman, The (Tabrizian film), 481–82, 483 This Is Not a Film (Panahi/Mirtahmasb documentary), 71, 130, 330 This Prison (Aminian film), 467 Thomas, Anthony, 357 Thompson, J. Walter, 272 Thorn and Riffraff (music video), 359 Threads (Jackson film), 283 Three Hundred (Snyder film), 286–87, 342, 421 Thriller (music video), 340 Through the Olive Trees (A. Kiarostami film), 194 Tickets (A. Kiarostami film), 188 Tight Spot (Naderi film), 505 Tilework (Mirtahmasb documentary), 80 Till Revolution (Tehrani documentary), 417–18, 418 Time (periodical), 277 Time Bomb (Rastegar documentary), 83 Time for Drunken Horses, A (Ghobadi film), 210–11, 213, 214, 236, 237 Time to Love, A (M. Makhmalbaf film), 119, 126, 142, 217, 226, 228, 238 tin cities. See shantytowns Titanic (Cameron film), 312, 341 Todorov, Tzvetan, 512 Tohidi, Farhad, 332 Tokomo, Susumo, 419 Tonight Show, The (tv program), 278 Tooba (Neshat film), 472, 473 Torabi, Hosain, 2

Toronto International Film Festival, 38, 242 torture, documentaries on, 84, 460–61 “Torture in Iran” (tv program), 84 Tous (newspaper), 315 Touzie, Houshang, 305–6, 400, 403 “Towards a Third Cinema,” 205 Toward Simorgh (Aghdashlu documentary series), 80 Towhidi, Farhad, 61 To Whom Will You Show These Films? (Banietemad documentary), 46, 165, 166 Towqi (Hatami film), 387 Traces (Karimi film), 468 Traiman, Alex, 288–89 transgender identity. See under gender transnational cinema: accented films, 370, 375–76; art-house films, 175, 176, 233, 237–41, 246, 247, 249–50; copyright and, 267; documentaries as, 4, 155; film festivals and, 257; filmmakers’ education and, 51; as “glocal,” 471; Iranian cinema as, 369; unauthorized films, 266; underground films as, 65, 67, 69 transsexuality: banned films, 530n22; in fiction films, 132; identity, 73, 132, 235, 436–37, 454; Islamic doctrine on, 435–36 Trans-sexuality in Iran (Amirani documentary), 73, 435–37 Traveler, The (B. Kiarostami documentary), 186 Traveler from the South, The (Shahbazi film), 213 Travelers (Baizai film), 38, 124, 124, 195, 223 Travelogue (Mohammadi documentary), 156 Trial (Mansouri documentary), 66–67 Triumph of Blood (documentary series), 14 True Stories (Channel 4 tv series), 153 Truth (documentary series), 14–15 truthfulness in documentaries, 85–86 Tunnel (Abbasgholizadeh documentary), 149 Turbulent (Neshat film), 472, 475–76, 477, 479

i ndex

627

Turkey, emigration via, 380–81 Turkmen rebellion, 14 Turtles Can Also Fly (Ghobadi film), 236, 346 tv Guide (periodical), 278 Twenty Fingers (Akbari film), 146–47, 188 Twenty-Four (tv series), 288, 302 Two Feeble Eyes (M. Makhmalbaf film), 39 Two-Legged Horse (S. Makhmalbaf film), 170 Two Women (Milani film), 164, 167–68, 168, 249 underground cinema, 65–72, 252; arrests for, 70–71; as guerrilla filmmaking, 68, 70; production licenses and, 66, 69–70. See also specific films Underground Zero (Zahedi film), 455 Under Siege (Young film), 283 Under the Moonlight (R. Karimi film), 212, 212 Under the Olive Trees (A. Kiarostami film), 180 Under the Skin of the City (Banietemad film), 163–64, 166 unicef, 485 Union of Blessed (Hatamikia documentary), 27 Union of Islamic Societies, 9–10 United Nations Human Rights Commission, 96 United States Embassy in Tehran, hostage situation, 44, 274, 276–81, 291, 370 United States Information Agency (usia), 270 United States Information Service (usis), 270 Universal Copyright Convention, 266, 267 University of Art (Tehran), 80, 82, 83 Unlimited Cinema award, 357 Unwanted Woman (Milani film), 255 Ureh’i, Akbar, 9 Urgent (Ghazel art production), 486–87 usia. See United States Information Agency usis. See United States Information Service

628

i ndex

Utopia (Mansouri documentary), 66 Utopia (Shahid Saless film), 398, 501, 502, 503 Utopia Cinema, 243 Vaezinejad, Mehrad, 465–66 Vafamehr, Marzieh, 70–71 Valfajr Operations, 13. See also Operation Valfajr 8 (Avini documentary) Van Sant, Gus, 69 Varahonar Films, 28 Varahram, Mojalal, 221 Varamin brick factories, 53, 66 Varga, Gizzela, 81 Varharam, Farhad, 61, 78 Variation (Razavipour film), 133–34, 469 Variety (periodical), 277–78, 286, 403 Varzi, Roxanne, 9 Vaziri, Hossein Khosrow, 281–83, 282, 288 Veil (Houshiary film), 500 Veiled Threat, The (Nowrasteh film), 284, 397, 401, 406–7 veils: in accented cinema, 496–500, 497; animated film on, 494–96; anonymity of, 110; campaign by Khomeini, 100; censorship and, 113; cinema and, 93, 113, 115–21, 171, 446–47; as compulsory, 101, 104, 157, 365; as fetishized, 99, 135, 497; hermeneutics of, 102; improper, 122–23; internalization of, 104–5, 124; Iranians in diaspora and, 171–73; Islamicate gaze theory and, 106–11, 119–21; mise-en-scène and, 128, 129, 158, 160; modernity and, 94, 104; modesty and, 103–6, 107, 111–27; during Pahlavi period, 111; as political criticism, 127–35, 446; power and, 557n89; as resistance, 104; sexuality and, 106; status and, 104; voyeurism and, 147 Venice Film Festival, 480 Vertov, Dziga, 22, 61, 184 Vesta Company, 61 Via Satellite tv with Love (Touzie play), 305–6 Victory Bridge, The (Madani documentary), 24 video and public diplomacy, 339–44

videogames as mediawork, 291–95 Vigo, Jean, 22 Vis-à-vis (pbs tv program), 424 Visit, The (Honarmand film), 311–12 Visit tv (tv program), 296 Visual Media Institute, 344 Vizheh-ye Sinema va Te’atr (periodical), 385 voa. See Voice of America Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir): on Berlin conference on Iran, 316; as censor, 57, 122–23; copyright violations by, 265–66; Culture, Literature, and Art Group, 79; documentary cinema, 2, 3, 29, 57, 74, 78, 240; extraterritorial cinema of, 240; First Channel Network, 12, 53, 74, 78, 79, 165, 230, 325; human rights violations by, 323–24; on international film festivals, 252–53; as Mullah Vision, 112, 278; Second Channel Network, 74, 80, 135–36; war films and, 9, 24; women’s social protests and, 111–12 Voice of America (voa), 4, 87, 290, 298, 303, 316 Voice of Assistance, 150 voice-over narration: in documentaries, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 160–62; Internet films and, 353; in narrative films, 220–21; poetry and, 160–62, 183–84, 225–26, 467; by women directors, 45–46, 51, 76, 165, 426, 427, 440–41, 449, 453–54, 458 Volkoff, Nikolai, 281–82 Vossoughi, Behrouz, 255, 281, 283, 288, 305–6, 385, 387, 407 voyeurism, 107–8 vvir. See Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic waiting concept, 25, 29–30, 225 Walk with Kiarostami, A (Akrami documentary), 186, 461 Walls of Sand (Jordan/Etessam documentary), 451, 451 Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 280, 380 Wanted (Ghazel art production), 486–87 War Children (Purahmad documentary), 24

war cinema, 4–9; censorship of, 24; cine­ matic haunting in, 32; criticism of, 24–25; decline of, 41; dissemination of, 20; feature films, 24–25; fiction films, 25; film festival, 7; as Islamicate, 10, 13; official documentaries, 9; planning and, 15; resources for, 6–8; sacred defense, 5–9, 41; spectatorship of, 8, 9, 20; storage conditions, 11; wartime city films, 22–24. See also documentary cinema; specific films war culture industry, 8–9 Warner Bros. Pictures, 335 War Propaganda Command, 9 Washington Post (newspaper), 321 Waste in U.S. (Pooya documentary), 413–14 Water, Wind, Dust (Naderi film), 31, 32, 33, 213, 505, 506, 510 Water and Traditional Irrigation in Iran (Moqaddasian documentary series), 76 Water Distributor’s Night (Tahaminejad documentary), 57 Weak Point, The (A’lami film), 118, 119 We Also Exist (Malekzadeh documentary), 83 We Are Half of Iran’s Population (Banietemad documentary), 46, 167, 363 Weaving a Persian Rug (documentary), 306 Weber, Max, 317–18 Weblogs. See blogs Wedding (Ghazel film), 485 Week in Green, The (tv talk program), 300 Wegener, Paul, 81 Weimar Republic, 372 Welcome to Dinner (tv program), 299 Welles, Orson, 341 Wellspring Media, 246, 247–48, 262 westernization, 72, 97–98, 208, 308, 369, 380 Wexner Center, 244 What Has Befallen Us, Barbad? (Golshiri film), 469 “What I Saw in Tajrish” (“Looker” photo essay), 172 When a Man Falls in the Forest (Haim film), 452

i ndex

629

Where Is the Friend’s Home? (A. Kiarostami film), 119, 180, 207, 209–10, 210, 213, 225 Where To So Fast (tv series), 326 White Balloon, The (Panahi film), 115, 129, 210, 213, 257, 548 White Cane Institute, 64 White Meadows, The (Rassoulof film), 330 White Station, The (Samadian film), 469 Who Dares Win. See Final Option, The (Sharp film) Who Gives Kisses Freely from Her Lips (Farkhondeh documentary-fiction film), 433 Wide Angle (pbs tv series), 437 Wiene, Robert, 81 William Patterson University, 461 Willie (Ebrahimian film), 404 Willow Tree, The (Razavipour/Dehdashtian film), 469 Wind Will Carry Us . . . , The (A. Kiarostami film), 192, 198, 224–25, 236 Wiseman, Frederick, 90, 153, 202 With Dust . . . to Dust (Moshiri documentary), 53 Without My Daughter (Kouros/Tervo documentary), 286 women and cinema: absence of men in films, 119; absence of women in films, 93, 111–14; accented films, 467–500; achievements under Khatami, 95–96, 134; animated films, 94, 138; background presence of, 114–21; campaign films, 44–46; censorship of, 113, 114, 173; children as stand-ins, 114, 115, 140, 159, 209, 222; claustrophobia in, 128, 163; directors, emergence of, 138–39; documentaries, 148–57, 186; ethnographic films, 81; evolution of, 170–73; fiction films, 94; in filmfarsi, 97–98; filmmakers, 52, 63–64; foreground presence of, 121–27; Islamization and, 120–21, 172; Majles on, 123–24; modernity and, 95, 134, 144, 147; during Pahlavi period film, 93, 99; professions in, 98; purification of, 100–101, 111–12, 120–21, 172–73; representation of women, 93, 96–102, 111–27, 171–72;

630

i ndex

resexualization and, 122–23; roles, 93–94; self-reflexivity in, 116, 143; social documentaries and, 52–53, 60–64; stereotypes, 96–98, 122, 144, 151, 194, 453; stoning and, 73, 149, 289, 397; voice-over narration and, 45–46, 51, 76, 165, 426, 427, 440–41, 449, 453–54, 458. See also veils; specific actors; specific directors Women in Shroud (Haerinejad/Kazemi documentary), 73 Women Like Us (Sadegh-Vaziri documentary), 395, 424–25, 425 Women Make Movies, 246 Women of Allah (Neshat photographic series), 470, 470, 497 Women’s Film Festival, 154 Women’s Liberation Television (tv program), 464 Women’s Prison (Hekmat film), 130–31, 131, 148 Women’s Prison (Shirdel documentary), 457 Women Without Men (Neshat film), 337, 396, 470, 471, 474, 475, 479–80 Women without Shadows (Mohammadi documentary), 156 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 318 World Between (Manoucheri film), 363 World Cup (1998), 285 World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, 264 World Is a Classroom, The (Zahedi film), 455 World Trade Center attacks. See September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks World Trade Organization (wto), 264 World War II. See Second World War Wrestler, The (Aronofsky film), 287 Writers’ Association of Iran, 310 wto. See World Trade Organization Yard behind Adl-e Afaq School, The (Mehr­ jui film), 226 Yasami, Siamak, 96 Yazdi, Ebrahim, 206 Year in Captivity, A (tv news program), 276

Years Away from Home. See Oshin (Japanese tv series) Yektapanah, Hassan, 235 Yellow Cruise, The (documentary), 306 Youna Dardashti (Sarshar/Hojjatpanah documentary), 466 Young, Roger, 283 Young Iranian Film Group, 42 Young Journalists’ Club, 333 Young People’s Cinema Society, 2, 82, 90 Your tv (satellite channel), 298, 304 Yousefpour, Abbas, 431–32 youth bulge, 365–66, 366, 367 Yusefi, Hamed, 352 Zahedi, Caveh, 390, 397, 454–56, 467, 490–91, 492 Zahra, Fatemeh, 136

Zam, Mohammad Ali, 21, 55 Zamani, Reza Ali, 304–5 Zanan (periodical), 123–24, 149, 150 Zare’i, Marila, 167 Zarghami, Ezzatollah, 302, 321, 361 Zarin (Neshat film), 470, 479 Zarrinqalam, Mehdi, 83, 84–85 Zeitgeist Films, 246 Zendel, Azita, 452 Zhurak, Feraidun, 387 Zinat (Mokhtari feature film), 48–50, 49 Zinat: One Special Day (Mokhtari documentary), 48–50, 95, 363 Zinnemann, Fred, 186 Žižek, Slavoj, 107, 110 Zucker, David, 284

i ndex

631

Hamid Naficy is a professor of radio-television-film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University. He is the author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993), and Film-e Mostanad (Documentary Film, 2 volumes, 1979). The Library of Congress has catalogued the first volume in this series as follows: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Naficy, Hamid. A social history of Iranian cinema / Hamid Naficy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4754-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4775-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Iran—History. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Iran. I. Title. pn1993.5.1846n34 2011 791.430955—dc22 2011010869 Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 isbn 978-0-8223-4866-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4878-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)