Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance 9781780762982, 9781350116337, 9781350113275

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Allegory in Iranian Cinema

ii

Allegory in Iranian Cinema The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance Michelle Langford

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Michelle Langford, 2019 Michelle Langford has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Amin Palangi and Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Taraneh Alidoosti in About Elly (Darbare-ye Elly, Asghar Farhadi, 2009). © Cinema Guild/Courtesy Everett Collection All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7807-6298-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1327-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-1326-8 Series: International Library of the Moving Image Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my mother, in loving memory. 

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Contents Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

xii

Note on Transliteration

xiv

Introduction – Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance

1

1

Locating Allegory in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

13

2

The Allegorical Children of Iranian Cinema

61

3

Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman

105

4

Allegories of Love: The Cinematic Ghazal

135

5

Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Iranian War Cinema

169

6

Between Laughter and Mourning: About Elly as Trauerspiel of a Generation

193

Coda: Allegory Spills into the Streets

235

Notes

239

Bibliography

260

Index

268

Figures 1.1

Mr Haji is opposed to his daughter marrying a film-maker. Mr Haji the Movie Actor (Perse Film Studio, Ovanes Ohanian, 1933)  15

1.2

In the credit sequence, designed by Abbas Kiarostami, tattoos depict characters from the Shahnameh. Qeysar (Aryana Film, Masoud Kimiai, 1969)  22

1.3

For a flash, workers take on the appearance of standard bearers heading into battle. The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1978)  40

1.4

The peasant sells his loot to the greedy jeweller, who seeks to profit from the peasant’s new-found wealth. The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Studio Golestan, Ebrahim Golestan, 1972)  48

1.5

The lead surveyor gazing through his viewfinder. The combination of text and image functions as a self-reflexive gesture. The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Studio Golestan, Ebrahim Golestan, 1972)  51

2.1

The boy tells his story as if he has remembered it by heart. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967)  69

2.2

The film is interspersed with shots of the crew at work. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967)  70

2.3

Ethnographic scenes are treated self-reflexively. Villagers receive instructions from off-screen: ‘Higher, still higher. OK. That’s it. That’s what we call acting!’ The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967)  71

2.4

Closing image: ‘It’s all lies, it’s all lies’. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967)  72

Figures

2.5

A God’s-eye-view shot forges a connection between nation, education and religion. Children of Heaven (Kanun, Majid Majidi, 1997)  79

2.6

Through focalization, the children encourage viewers to gain an experiential understanding of socially desirable values. Children of Heaven (Kanun, Majid Majidi, 1997)  82

2.7

Mina’s gaze mediates and purifies the desiring gaze of the young couple. The Mirror (Rooz Film, Jafar Panahi, 1997)  89

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2.8a, b Inconsistent shadows belie the film’s temporal fallacy. and c The Mirror (Rooz Film, Jafar Panahi, 1997)  94 3.1

Havva is told that today she becomes a woman. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001)  111

3.2

Havva shares a lollypop with Hassan. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001)  113

3.3

The absence of a two-shot ensures that Havva and Hassan do not actually share the lollypop. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001)  114

3.4

Attention is drawn to the impracticality of the chador. Ahu must secure it from blowing away. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001)  119

3.5

Hura converses with girls from the bicycle race in her insideout mise en scène. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001)  121

4.1 ‘Hova al baghi’, ‘He [God] is eternal’. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990)  146 4.2

Extreme close-ups function as poetic utterances, like beyts of a ghazal. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990)  151

4.3

The erotic climax of the episode gives metaphorical expression to the forbidden embrace of the lovers. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990)  153

4.4

Latif discovers Baran’s true identity. The mise en scène protects her modesty. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999)  160

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Figures

4.5

The cinematic ghazal expresses Latif ’s longing for his beloved Baran, and his acceptance that his love will be lost forever. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999)  164

4.6

The first beyt of this cinematic ghazal conveys the passion of the lover and beloved. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999)  165

4.7

In the second beyt the lovers almost exchange direct glances. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999)  166

4.8

The third beyt provides a sign that Baran will always remain with him. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999)  167

5.1

Gilaneh uses every ounce of her strength to help her son. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005)  170

5.2

Reza entrusts his sister Samireh’s body to the pure soil of homeland, hiding her in a shallow grave. The Third Day (Ali Reza Jalali, Mohammad Hossein Latifi, 2007)  177

5.3

Evoking the past in the present. He Who Sails (Sima Film, Arash Moayerian, 2007)  181

5.4

Ismael, newly engaged, is called off to war. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005)  186

5.5

Gilaneh’s stooped and frail body encourages us to see her as the manifestation of vatan, figured as a 6,000-year-old dying mother trying in vain to care for her children. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005)  190

6.1

Elly’s smile provides an optimistic figure of young Iranians striving to express joy and freedom. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  194

6.2

The local boy Omid adopts a judgemental gaze. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  216

6.3

Elly’s pensive moment, a sign of equivocity. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  218

6.4

Mobile tracking shots capture Elly’s last moments of unbridled joy. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  224

6.5

Elly’s corpse does not carry with it any promise of transcendence. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  232

Figures

6.6

The morning after Elly’s disappearance, Sepideh awakens from a corpse-like pose, prefiguring the eventual revelation of Elly’s corpse. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  232

6.7

The final shot. If only transforming the habitus of a generation were as simple as dislodging a car from the sand! About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009)  233

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Acknowledgements Over the course of researching and writing this book, I have had occasion to turn to many people for guidance and support. I remain indebted to all the people who read and commented on the manuscript in whole or in part and those who contributed in other ways with assistance, advice, clarification and inspiration: Maryam Alavi Nia, Melis Behlil, Max Bledstein, James Donald, Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Sameera Durrani, Hossein Eidizadeh, Sanaz Fotouhi, Maryam Ghorbankarimi, Rosa Holman, Bruce Isaacs, Mazda Moraddabassi, Elham Naaej, Laetitia Nanquette, Hamidreza Nassiri, Setayesh Nooraninejad, Amin Palangi, Melanie Robson, Mahsa Salamati, Saeed Sourati, Reza Taheri and Fatemeh Tavassoli. This book may never have existed if it were not for an encounter with Babak Shokrian many years ago at the Berlin Film Festival. Babak’s encouragement of my early musing on Iranian cinema planted the seeds that eventually led to the blossoming of this work. My sincere thanks to George Kouvaros for his mentorship and to Hamid Naficy for our brief but inspiring discussions about the project. To Negar Mottahedeh, I owe a special level of gratitude for her generosity and advice. I extend my deepest appreciation to Adrian Tassie, whose love has sustained me throughout the process. I am particularly grateful to my dear friend Frances Calvert, who read and commented on the entire manuscript not long before her untimely passing. Her memory will forever be embedded within these pages. For many years, I have had the pleasure of exploring the wonders of Iranian cinema with my undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. How privileged I am to have found such a close nexus between teaching and research! I must also thank the various editors and the production team for their faith, diligence and patience: Philippa Brewster, Anna Coatman, Madeleine Hamey-Thomas, Rebecca Barden, Becca Richards, Amy Jordan, James Tupper and Rennie Alphonsa. I would also like to express my thanks to the four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and generous encouragement.

Acknowledgements

xiii

An earlier version of Chapter 3 has been published as ‘Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman’, which was originally published in Camera Obscura, Vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 1–41. Copyright 2007, Camera Obscura. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press (www.dukeupress.edu). Chapter 5 was published as ‘Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Contemporary Iranian War Cinema’, Screening the Past (2012) and parts of Chapter 4 have previously been published in ‘Negotiating the sacred body in Iranian cinema(s): National, physical and cinematic embodiment in Majid Majidi’s Baran (2002)’, in Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts, ed. Elizabeth Coleman and Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias MS (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2008).

Note on Transliteration For Persian words used in the text, I have followed the simplified transliteration scheme recommended by the Association for Iranian Studies. Some names do not follow this transliteration scheme. I have not altered transliterations in quotations or bibliographic citations. My thanks to Setayesh Nooraninejad for her invaluable assistance.

Introduction Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance

This book is the result of my long-term love affair with Iranian cinema. This love affair began in the late 1990s when Iranian art films began making their way to international film festivals and onto our local television channel, SBS, that broadcast various foreign language films. I remember being seduced and intrigued by just a handful of Iranian films, among them Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s Gabbeh (1996), Amir Naderi’s The Runner (Davandeh), Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e Gilas, 1997), Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (Badkonak-e Sefid, 1995) and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, 1997). At the time, I was completing my doctoral research on the allegorical films of the German film-maker Werner Schroeter. Underpinning my analysis of Schroeter’s films was a deep interest in questions of cinematic allegory. I was interested less in what allegorical films say across their multiple levels of meaning and more in identifying and theorizing the cinematic techniques and processes that give rise to allegory in a specifically cinematic register. Watching these Iranian films, I couldn’t help but feel that they were calling upon me to engage with them more deeply. At the time, I was poorly equipped to unpack their multiple layers of meaning, particularly those that emerged from the specificities of the Iranian social, cultural and political context; however, I felt that the films themselves were nudging me with their cinematic cues. Now, after many years of research, I hope to have adequately responded to that call. In this book, I explore the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema in order to better grasp the multiple dimensions and unique ways of seeing made possible by this mode of expression. In a series of selected case studies, I attempt to show how an allegorical aesthetics cues or prompts viewers to look for hidden meaning or to experience a film poetically beyond the literal level of story or

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obvious, manifest meaning. Indeed, the enigmatic, allusive aspects of Iranian films have frequently been noted by critics and scholars alike: from Abbas Kiarostami’s philosophically and poetically inflected ‘open images’1 to Jafar Panahi’s critical self-reflexive cinema and Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s gestures towards surrealism. Underpinning this is an aim to seek out correspondences between the medium of film and older forms of poetic allegorical expression in Iranian culture. By poetic, I mean not merely the citation of poems or the replication of literary poetic techniques in films, but rather, I attend to the capacity for cinema to engage in its own poetics: a cine-poetics. At times this poetics functions to support and at other times to resist dominant state ideology. By resistance, I mean not only resistance to political or ideological agendas, nor simply to evade censorship, but also aesthetic resistance, a playful or disruptive use of cinematic form that renders meaning ambiguous and calls upon viewers to actively engage in the process of interpretation. Throughout this book, allegory is considered both a mode of expression and a mode of interpretation. The presence of allegory in Iranian cinema has long been acknowledged by scholars and critics and occasionally by film-makers themselves; however, in the scholarly literature, allegory is most often treated as a response to censorship. Indeed, throughout the course of Iranian film history, filmmakers have been faced with sociopolitical conditions that have led to varying degrees of censorship. Because of its capacity to say one thing while meaning another, allegory has proven to be a powerful way of evading state censorship and expressing forbidden topics or issues. As Angus Fletcher has written, ‘Allegory presumably thrives on political censorship’; it ‘preserves freedom against tyranny’.2 Ismail Xavier echoes this view when he writes that ‘allegory has been a frequent weapon against authoritarian rules’.3 However, Negar Mottahedeh has offered a slightly different perspective in her theorization of ‘displaced allegories’. Moving beyond censorship as a singular motivating force, Mottahedeh argues that many films of the post-revolutionary era function as ‘displaced allegories’ of their very conditions of production.4 In doing so, film-makers have reinvented film language, something that I refer to more broadly as ‘film aesthetics’. It is important to recognize that for many Iranian film-makers, allegory is much more than a foil against haphazardly applied censorship rules, or an attempt to hide meaning under a veil of secrecy.

Introduction

3

This book takes a much more complex view of the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema. While acknowledging the enormous impact that censorship has had on Iranian film-making, particularly since the 1979 revolution, this book aims to ask a series of questions about the very nature of allegory in Iranian cinema. What if we think of allegory not only as a reactive, secretive or protective strategy but also as an integral part of the poetics of Iranian cinema? What if we think of allegory as a series of techniques that invite viewers into a filmic text, to read, to interpret, to interact, to be hailed and to haggle, even perhaps to engage with a film on a bodily, haptic level? What are the cinematic techniques used by film-makers to prompt such responses and how can we understand the theoretical, contextual and practical implications of these? By theorizing allegory in this way, we can begin to understand not just what allegorical films say but how they work. As such, this book aims to examine what I call an allegorical aesthetics of poetry and resistance in a selection of films from the very early years of feature film production through the rise of the New Wave in the 1970s and into the post-revolutionary era. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a comprehensive account of allegory in Iranian cinema; rather my chapters provide extended close readings of specific films paying attention to the relationship between cinematic texts and contexts. Allegory is not a genre, and as such there are no common rules to which allegorical films conform, although there are a range of common characteristics. In approaching each film, I attend to the unique ways that the films teach us how to read them from the perspective of both style and content. Indeed, one of the more consistent characteristics of allegory is a close connection between form, content and context. In each example, the allegorical techniques employed vary considerably, and as a result, in responding to them I have been compelled to draw on a wide variety of film-theoretical approaches in order to explain how their allegorical processes work, but equally, I attend to the sociocultural, national, historical and political frames of reference through, or even against which the films may be read. Each of the chapters may be read independently and also as a part of the whole. The chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, but are primarily thematic, with one or more films being taken as case studies. These case studies span a wide time frame, from the earliest years of Iranian feature

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Allegory in Iranian Cinema

film production in the 1930s through the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s and into the first three decades after the revolution. In my opening chapter, ‘Locating Allegory in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema’, I provide insight into the role of allegory in the pre-revolutionary period beginning with one of Iran’s earliest feature films, Ovanes Ohanian’s Mr Haji the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa Aktor-e Sinema, 1933). I argue that this self-reflexive silent feature film allegorizes the role that cinema played in the early twentieth century in the spread of modernity across Iran. The film emblematizes the clash between tradition and modernity through the transformation of the titular Mr Haji – a deeply pious man – from a film sceptic to a film lover. This is a good example of how popular entertainment cinema could employ allegory in a way that aligned closely with a broader sociopolitical agenda. If this early allegorical film seemed to promote the modernizing agenda led by Reza Shah in the early twentieth century, later in the century, the New Wave would deploy allegory as a means of critiquing this agenda, which was continued by Mohammad Reza Shah in the second half of the twentieth century, and in destabilizing some of the mythic formations upon which the Pahlavi dynasty was built. At the same time, these films allegorically figured tensions between tradition and modernity and treated the encroachment of the West with as much scepticism as they did the Shah’s nation-building efforts. The chapter argues that the sociopolitical conditions of the late 1960s and 1970s provided fertile ground for a very vibrant and multifaceted allegorical cinema, and almost all films produced by Iranian New Wave film-makers may in some way be considered allegorical. These films offer a bleak and oblique foreshadowing of the political unrest that would come in the late 1970s and eventually lead to the revolution that would bring down the Shah and see the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. In order to show the diversity of filmic styles and genres available to allegorical expression during this period, I take three very different films as my case studies. The first, Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar (1969), is a popular genre film that bears traces of the modernist aesthetic adopted by the New Wave film-makers. Through various cues, we are encouraged to read this film both against the grain of the national master narrative – Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings)5 – and through the lens of the typical tough-guy genre films that were popular at that time. Ultimately, the film focuses on the theme of allegorical degradation to point simultaneously to the failure of the

Introduction

5

modernizing project to deliver positive social transformation and the failure of age-old heroic stories to deliver redemption. Following my analysis of Qeysar, I turn to look at two very different New Wave films: Dariush Mehrjui’s socialrealist drama, The Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina, 1978), and Ebrahim Golestan’s black comedy, The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni, 1972). The Cycle is read as a resistant national allegory that serves as a cynical indictment of Iranian modernity, endemic corruption and the proliferation of informal circuits of exchange in 1970s’ Iran. Golestan’s film performs a similarly resistant gesture. I demonstrate how the film’s adoption of a carnivalesque aesthetic allows it to deploy a darkly comic form of satirical allegory to similarly critique the modernizing project and also to poke fun at the proliferation of ignorance, greed and corruption in contemporary Iran. Similar to Qeysar, The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley makes reference to the Shahnameh, doing so in such a way that represents the heroic past in a state of decay, performing a destructive, allegorizing action upon its legacy. It does so in order to critique Mohammad Reza Shah’s own tendencies to selfaggrandisement and invented imperial lineage. Ultimately, all three films use allegory to de-authorize myths, unmask corruption and blast open the mythic constructions of national ideology. As such, these films seem to dream of an uprising against authoritarian rule, a dream that would become a reality as the revolution took hold during 1978. In Chapter 2, ‘The Allegorical Children of Iranian Cinema’, I consider the multiple ways that Iranian film-makers have invested children with allegorical value. My first case study, Kamran Shirdel’s self-reflexive, satirical documentary The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Un Shab Keh Barun Umad … ya Hamaseh-ye Rustazadeh-ye Gorgani, 1967) forms an important bridge between the pre-revolution New Wave films and the cycle of child-centred films of the post-revolutionary period. Although the child, the Gorgan village boy, named in the title is absent for most of the film, Shirdel uses the figure of the child to critique the use of film, media and heroic legends in nation-building exercises. More specifically, I argue that Shirdel’s film takes the form of an allegorical palimpsest to mount a poetic and cinematically bold resistance to the kind of mythic narration of the nation promoted during the Pahlavi era. Following my analysis of The Night It Rained, I move into the postrevolutionary period. I argue that the cycle of child-centred films made during

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the first two decades after the revolution played an important role in the purification of the national cinema and in realigning the nation’s sensorium with revolutionary values. I take as my point of departure Hamid Reza Sadr’s discussion of the supposed reality effect of children on screen.6 I focus on Majidi Majidi’s Children of Heaven as a film that beautifully exemplifies this tendency. Majidi uses a simple tale of two small children to promote certain key values such as patience, compassion and forbearance. I demonstrate how this film functions as a didactic allegory that is closely aligned with the national project, but rather than telling viewers what or how to think, it uses immersive strategies of focalization to produce a highly affective form of personification allegory. In this way, the film encourages the viewer to experience its lessons by seeing, hearing and feeling through the perspective of the children who emblematize desirable values. In direct contrast to the experiential reality effect of Children of Heaven, Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror seeks to deconstruct this effect, questioning the ability for any Iranian film to truly reflect reality. I posit that The Mirror is a post-revolutionary counterpart to The Night It Rained, for it too is a self-reflexive film that attempts to disrupt the kind of unifying function performed by a film like Children of Heaven. The Mirror, which I argue consists of not one but two films, hinges on a disconnect between reality and representation. My close analysis of the film looks into several aspects of The Mirror that have yet to be considered in the existing literature on the film, including the way that little Mina’s traversal of the streets and squares of Tehran reminds us constantly of the city’s tumultuous history and how, like cinema, the streets have also been purified so that public space, much like cinema, may function as political allegory. I conclude that both The Night It Rained and The Mirror produce what Jean-Louis Baudry referred to as a ‘knowledge effect’.7 In doing so, they both allegorize the role of cinema in state-driven projects of nation-building. In contrast, it is through the classical concealment of the technical base of cinema that a film like Children of Heaven achieves its ideological work of habituating viewers to revolutionary values and plays its part in the purification of the nation. From a focus on children in Chapter 2, my attention shifts to consider a film that powerfully allegorizes the place of women in Iranian cinema and society: Marziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi Keh Zan Shodam, 2000). In Chapter 3, ‘Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman’, I theorize

Introduction

7

allegorical cinema very differently in response to a highly innovative film that calls upon its viewers to experience the film not only on a narrative level – as a simple collection of tales about three generations of Iranian women – but also through its various poetic dimensions that engage the viewer on an affective level. On one level, I argue that the film may be read as an allegory of Iranian cinema, a critique of the very structural limitations placed on filmmakers by rigorous censorship rules. Through close analysis, I demonstrate how Meshkini negotiates censorship by pushing film form to its allowable limits, making these limits visible within the form of the film itself. Beyond this fairly straightforward allegorical reading, I demonstrate how the film also functions in an even more complex allegorical register, one that consists of two intersecting axes – horizontal and vertical – that are roughly equivalent to narrative progression and poetic elaboration respectively. I argue that through these two axes, the viewer is presented with two very different conceptions of becoming – one that proceeds in a series of stages or states and another through which becoming may be experienced more genuinely as a process. I demonstrate that by activating a processual becoming that takes place not so much on-screen, but between film and viewer, The Day I Became a Woman palpably resonates with a conception of becoming-woman similar to that theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a concept that has been taken up for debate within feminist theory. In this way, the film manages not so much to evade Iranian censorship requirements pertaining to the representation of women but rather to exceed such limitations in such a way that these affective becomings-woman may be exchanged directly between film and viewer. In Chapter 4, ‘Allegories of Love: The Cinematic Ghazal’, I develop a very different understanding of the allegorical poetics of Iranian cinema. In this chapter, I coin the term ‘cinematic ghazal’ to refer to moments in certain films that may be considered cinematic analogues for the ghazal, a form of Persian lyrical love poetry. I argue that for some Iranian art film-makers, cinema and poetry are inseparable, and as such, we can discern in their work a quality that may be described as a ‘cinema of poetry’. In my analysis of the poetic moments of Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s A Time for Love (Nobat-e Asheghi, 1990) and Majid Majidi’s Baran (1999), I bring Pier Paolo Pasolini’s musings on the cinema of poetry together with Iran’s long tradition of love poetry to identify a very particular kind of cine-poetics. I demonstrate how

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Allegory in Iranian Cinema

the cinematic ghazal privileges the poetic over narrative modes of expression and makes use of what Pasolini referred to as the ‘free indirect point-of view’ that renders subjectivity ambiguous.8 I argue that A Time for Love is invested with an allegorical intention primarily through the film’s style and structure. As such, the film meditates on the creative possibilities afforded by a cinema of poetry. In the case of Majid Majidi’s Baran, I demonstrate how the cinematic ghazal is used to invest the image with a high degree of affective sensuality, combined with a kind of mystical lyricism that is also a prominent feature of many ghazals. Indeed, I argue that Majidi’s synthesis of the ghazal form into his cinematic practice works to engage the viewer in what Vivian Sobchack calls a ‘cinethestic’ mode of embodied spectatorship.9 He does this, on one level, to evoke the physicality and emotionality of young love and, on another, to forge an allegorical connection between character, viewer and nation. This allegorical connection between character, viewer and nation is explored through a very different thematic lens in Chapter 5, ‘Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Iranian War Cinema’. As the title suggests, the focus shifts from love to war. In this chapter, I consider three films that deal quite differently with the legacy of the eight-year Iran–Iraq war, known in Iran as the Sacred Defence. My focus is primarily on Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab’s Gilaneh (2005), a film that is unusual in the Iranian context, for it is concerned with the material and ideological effects of war from a maternal perspective. The film goes against the grain of most Iranian war-themed films because it refuses to idealize martyrdom in ways that have been commonly adopted by state-supported film and media and modelled on the Karbala paradigm. I contrast Gilaneh, which was made during a less conservative time in Iranian politics, with two Sacred Defence films made after the ascension of conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power in 2005: The Third Day (Ruz-e Sevvom, Mohammad Hossein Latifi, 2007) and He Who Sails (Anke Darya Miravad, Arash Moayerian, 2007). The three films evoke diverse variations on the Iranian concept of vatan (homeland) and the duty of all Iranians to protect the nation. All three films also establish a variety of gender roles in relation to the protection and preservation of khak-e pak-e vatan (the pure soil of homeland), forming distinct literal and allegorical clusters around soil, gender, territory and what might be described as the geo-body of the nation. In contrast with the other two films which are closely

Introduction

9

aligned with the post-revolutionary agenda of fusing patriotism and vatan with Islamic identity, Gilaneh adopts a decidedly matriotic perspective and refuses the tendency of Sacred Defence cinema to beautify, spiritualize and idealize the concept of ‘martyrdom’. Instead, Gilaneh is a melancholy allegory that mourns for a nation whose wounds have not been adequately tended. In my final chapter, ‘Between Laughter and Mourning: About Elly as Trauerspiel of a Generation’, I explore this idea of mourning for the nation through my close analysis of Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (Darbare-ye Elly, 2009). I take this film to be a particular kind of allegory, a Trauerspiel (mourning play), as theorized by Walter Benjamin.10 I argue that Farhadi invests the film with an allegorical dimension through which the film’s collective protagonist emblematizes a generation that was born around the time of the revolution and therefore have no memory of the revolution itself, but whose lives have been dominated by post-revolutionary discourse. Prominent among these discourses is the emphasis placed on sadness and mourning in Iranian culture and the coding of certain emotions as good or bad. Farhadi presents us with a sector of what Shahram Khosravi has called ‘the third generation’, an upwardly mobile group striving to express joy and freedom. The film’s narrative, however, conspires to correct these aspirations and plunges them into a state of sadness and mourning. This leads them to adopt more tradition-based and conservative modes of thinking, being and doing. In their state of mourning, they are not drawn together in communal sadness but torn apart in a state of conflict. I argue that throughout the film, Farhadi utilizes dissimulation as a key allegorical procedure that corresponds closely with modes of indirect communication that we see performed by the characters in the film. I call this the ‘dissimulating camera’, and through this, Farhadi achieves a close correspondence between filmic style and content. Just as the characters make use of dissimulation to negotiate the strict rules that impinge on their everyday lives, Farhadi utilizes the dissimulating camera to cue viewers to look beyond the surface of the narrative to observe patterns that emblematize broader sociopolitical concerns. Farhadi’s film was made prior to the mass protests and unrest that ensued in the wake of the 2009 presidential election, but like the New Wave films of the 1970s, About Elly seems to register the mood of the times and the sense of discontent and disillusionment felt by many of his own generation, a discontent that would soon spill out onto the streets.

10

Allegory in Iranian Cinema

In the decade since 2009, Iranian cinema has taken a considerable turn away from allegorical modes of expression, and it is largely for this reason that my study ends with About Elly. There are a number of factors that have led to this turn. For example, the international success of Asghar Farhadi’s drama of ethical complexity A Separation (Jodai-ye Nader az Simin, 2011) has arguably led to the rise of a new sub-genre of realist drama. These films, which include Farhadi’s own The Salesman (Forushandeh, 2016), as well as more recent acclaimed films such as Vahid Jalilvand’s Wednesday 9 May (Chaharshanbeh, 19 Ordibehesht, 2015), No Date, No Signature (Bedune Tarikh, Bedune Emza, 2017) and Mostafa Taghizadeh’s debut feature Yellow (Zard, 2017), use realist techniques to show characters caught in impossible situations that test their ability to think and to act ethically towards others. While these are films that encourage viewers to reflect on social relations in contemporary Iran, they tend not to invite deeper, allegorical readings. They also display little in the way of the poetic expression so prominent in films made during the first two decades after the revolution. Indeed, there has been a decided shift away from the kind of art film pioneered by the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In some ways, this suggests that Iranian film-makers are becoming more direct, emboldened to confront social issues head on, rather than relying on allegory and poetry. The last decade has also seen a number of prominent allegorical filmmakers move into exile, leaving Iranian cinema bereft of their contributions. Among the exiles are Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his entire film-making family, including Samira, Hana and Marziyeh Meshkini as well as the Kurdish-Iranian film-maker Bahman Ghobadi, whose uncompromisingly poetic allegories of hardship A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani Bara-ye Masti-ye Asbha, 2000) and Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha Ham Parvaz Mikonand, 2004) made a considerable impact on the international festival circuit and helped to draw attention to the plight of Kurds in the border regions of Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. And then there are the internal exiles. In 2011, Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof were both banned from making films for twenty years. In 2009 amid the post-election unrest, they had been arrested and charged with ‘assembly and collusion and propagation against the regime’.11 Of course, the two film-makers have continued to make films in spite of the ban, and while there is certainly a degree of allegory at work in those films, the new

Introduction

11

conditions under which they work and the new aesthetics they have adopted require more attention than I can possibly give them in this already lengthy volume. Indeed, there are several other recent films that could easily find a home among these pages, if only there were time and space. Perhaps the film that I most regret leaving out is Shahram Mokri’s stunningly poetic second feature Fish and Cat (Mahi va Gorbeh, 2013). Like About Elly, Mokri’s film paints a picture of a generation wishing to transcend a world tainted by the actions of an older generation, but instead being caught up in ever-repeating cycles that lead nowhere. It was filmed spectacularly by veteran Iranian cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari in a single long take, and structured so that the narrative loops back on itself several times, confounding our ability to make sense of space and time. Mokri constructs an elaborate cinematic moebius strip, which becomes a powerful emblem for contemporary Iranian society. During the writing of this book, I was deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Abbas Kiarostami, in July 2016. He was Iranian cinema’s poetic filmmaker par excellence, and it is unlikely that Iran will ever see an art film-maker of such unique importance again. My readers might wonder why his films, many of which exhibit exactly the kinds of allegorical aesthetics that I discuss here, do not feature among the case studies in this book. The simple reason is that his work is already the subject of so many excellent books, chapters and articles that I doubt my ability to add sufficiently new or original insight. That said, I should acknowledge that my understanding of allegory in Iranian cinema has nevertheless been deeply informed by watching and studying his films. In many ways, although our paths never crossed, he was one of my teachers, and my writing is infused with the numerous lessons I learned about Iranian film aesthetics from this master of Iranian cinema. I, therefore, offer this book in honour of his memory.

12

1

Locating Allegory in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

It is often said that allegory arises most powerfully at times of sociopolitical unrest or upheaval. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Iran, given its own tumultuous history throughout the twentieth century, should offer up a wealth of examples of allegorical film. While this book will focus primarily on allegory in films of the period after the Iranian revolution of 1979, this chapter provides a discussion of key allegorical films from the pre-revolutionary period. My discussion opens with what was arguably the first allegorical film in Iranian history, Ovanes Ohanian’s Mr Haji the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa Aktor-e Sinema, 1933). I argue that this is a self-reflexive film that plays on tensions between tradition and modernity and calls upon the viewing public to set aside their scepticism of the cinema and embrace the twentieth century’s newest art form. From there, I move on to pay particular attention to the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw sociopolitical tensions rising and was also rich in allegorical expression in both cinema and literature. I have selected three case studies beginning with Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar (1969), a toughguy genre film infused with New Wave tendencies that reworks traditional concepts of heroism, recasting them for a modern age. This is followed by a close analysis of Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina, 1978), a landmark New Wave film that allegorically critiques the proliferation of informal circuits of economic exchange and endemic corruption. This theme of corruption also features in Ebrahim Golestan’s darkly satirical allegory, The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni, 1972).1 We can find in these films the aesthetic and conceptual antecedents of the cinematic allegory that emerged with great force in the years following the revolution. In the pre-revolutionary period we observe film-makers

14

Allegory in Iranian Cinema

consciously employing modernist film aesthetics in order to fashion what we might describe as national and political allegories, but simultaneously we see film-makers drawing on popular legends. In this sense, the films I will discuss in this chapter are both poetic and resistant. This brief survey of the history of allegorical film production in Iran will lay the groundwork for the remaining chapters in which I undertake a closer examination of key films from the post-revolutionary era, while also forwarding a more extensive theorization and analysis of the particular aesthetic strategies that give rise to cinematic allegory. Here my interest lies primarily in identifying some of the cinematic strategies that enable these films to operate allegorically and in elucidating some of the modes of allegory employed.

Self-reflexivity and the birth of Iranian film allegory The emergence of allegory in Iranian cinema coincides with the very birth of feature film-making in Iran, which arrived slightly later than in some other countries.2 Ovanes Ohanian’s Mr Haji the Movie Actor, which was one of the first feature length fiction films to be produced inside Iran, was, despite its technical limitations, a complexly self-reflexive film that allegorized the uneasy intersection between tradition and modernity within the national context. The central character, Haji Aqa (Mr Haji), is a very pious man who objects to his daughter’s desire to marry the film-maker Parviz (Figure 1.1). Parviz is struggling to come up with ideas for a new film and so hatches a plan to secretly film Mr Haji, hoping that he may prove himself a worthy suitor for Mr Haji’s daughter. The film is largely structured as a chase film, which provides the opportunity for both Parviz (within the film) and Ohanian to string together a catalogue of ‘attractions’ typical of so-called primitive cinema.3 The film culminates in Haji Agha chasing one of Parviz’s associates into a movie theatre where the film in which he has unwittingly played a starring role is being shown. When a boy in the audience recognizes Mr Haji as the star of the film, he is greeted with the applause of his adoring fans and is miraculously transformed from a sceptic of cinema into a film lover. During the film, he is also tricked into agreeing to the marriage between Parviz and his daughter via a stage performance involving a conjuror that makes him believe that Parviz is

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15

Figure 1.1  Mr Haji is opposed to his daughter marrying a film-maker. Mr Haji the Movie Actor (Perse Film Studio, Ovanes Ohanian, 1933).

in two places at once. Thus the narrative drives towards a resolution that not only brings together the young lovers but also promotes a form of cinephilia, or love of cinema. From this brief synopsis, the self-reflexive elements of the film are obvious since the audience of the film proper are made aware of the act of filming taking place within the film. In addition, we are alerted to cinema’s means of construction via some early scenes of Parviz trying to write a screenplay. As he pores over his notes, he makes a series of histrionic gestures, but is satisfied with none of his ideas. Unlike other early self-reflexive films, such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929), Ohanian does not directly show the cinematic apparatus – camera and projector – although part of the chase sequence does take place atop the scaffolding of what appears to be a large outdoor screen under construction.4 The film shifts into the arena of allegory by codifying cinema’s role in modernity and the tensions that emerged between tradition and modernity in Iran in the early twentieth century. Just as Haji Agha views cinema with scepticism, based on his world view that is rooted in religion and tradition, and struggles to accept the new sociocultural role of cinema, so too did many Iranians struggle to reconcile the modernizing project instigated by Reza Shah in the early twentieth century with deeply embedded religious and cultural

16

Allegory in Iranian Cinema

traditions. In this sense, the film not only self-consciously aligns itself with this modernizing project but also attempts to teach Iranian viewers how to embrace one of modernity’s most emblematic media of mass spectacle: the cinema. Indeed, at one point in the film, Parviz tries to convince Mr Haji of the economic and educative potential of cinema, highlighting the important role a film can play in modernizing the nation. As such, the film functions as a form of didactic allegory, a kind of modern fable designed to promote and to some extent demystify the new medium. Mr Haji the Movie Actor cleverly builds in points of identification from a number of perspectives. On the one hand the depiction of the film-maker in the process of making a film serves to reveal and therefore partly demystify the processes of production. Similarly, the presentation of the young woman, Mr Haji’s daughter, who dreams of becoming a film actress, establishes a fanstar nexus which is condensed into a single emblematic figure. Finally, Mr Haji represents a figure that is initially opposed both to cinema and to his daughter’s marriage to a film-maker, but is dramatically transformed by his dual role as film viewer and unwitting star. In a reversal that is common both to comedy and to the allegorical mode, he becomes that to which he is initially resistant. Importantly, this allegorical dimension of the film speaks not only to budding film stars but is crucial in modelling a notion of spectatorship for Iranian film audiences. Thus, the film’s self-reflexivity expands beyond being a meditation on the making of cinema to modelling a practice of film viewing via an on-screen audience with which the film’s actual audience can identify and aspire to emulate. Even further, Mr Haji’s transformation emblematizes patriarchal consent on two levels: the literal familial sphere and the emblematic level of the nation. This was a clever move on the part of Ohanian because the successful establishment of a film industry in Iran would ultimately depend on acceptance by figures like Mr Haji and the religious establishment and also on the development of a film viewing culture among the masses. The question to be asked, however, is whether those like Mr Haji would really be persuaded to go to the movies? Effectively, the film does what most entertainment-oriented genre films do: it imagines an ideal world and proposes simple solutions to complex problems. In his article ‘Historical Allegory’, the Brazilian film scholar Ismail Xavier provides some useful definitions of different types of allegorical films.

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17

Mr Haji the Movie Actor operates as a form of ‘overt allegory’ where, according to Xavier, ‘the reference to national experience results from an intentional process of encoding’.5 Such encoding requires viewers to ‘perceive homologies’ between the private lives presented on screen and the public destinies of the nation.6 In the case of Mr Haji the Movie Actor, the film’s perceived national dimensions are far more cultural than political. The family unit and the tensions between the father’s conservative values and the daughter’s desire to engage in the modernist project – emblematized here by the cinema – provide a reflection, in condensed form, of similar tensions playing out in the nation. Hamid Reza Sadr has described the film as an ‘allegorical tale of a traditional man in conflict with the new artform’.7 He argues that the disagreements between Mr Haji and his son-in-law, the film-maker, reflect ‘the antagonistic societal forces that came into play over the issue of cinema. It also mirrored wider social concerns, with the clash between past and present, tradition and progress, giving the film dynamic relevance.’8 In a move that prefigures the self-reflexive cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf or Jafar Panahi from the mid-1990s onwards, the ‘new artform’ addressed by the film is cinema itself. Hamid Naficy supports this reading of the film as a national allegory by providing an insight into the historical context in which the film was made. Naficy discusses the fact that the tensions between a ‘traditional man’ and the modern medium of film assume a particularly national significance by implying that a broader conflict is being waged between tradition and modernity in political and public discourse. Indeed, according to Naficy, the film clearly supported the State’s agenda of ‘propagating Westernization and the state-decreed modern look as a marker of the new man and the new nation’.9 In addition to being one of the country’s first locally made feature films, Naficy describes Mr Haji the Movie Actor as Iran’s first ‘modernist’ film. His definition of ‘modernist’ here could easily apply to many of the ‘art’ films of the later Iranian New Wave and indeed those of the post-revolutionary era: ‘discontinuity of time, space, and causality, … self-reflexivity (incorporating the filming process into the narrative), selfinscription (of the director), and scepticism concerning its own ontology’.10 Additionally, by framing the central conflict over the new medium within the family unit, we see a common allegorical trope in which the family stands in for a larger social formation, such as the nation.

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Allegory in Iranian Cinema

Ultimately, the film is about seeking the father’s approval and is therefore also about reassuring audiences that the embrace of the new medium does not threaten the primacy of the patriarchal order at the level of the family and by implication also the nation. While the film does mobilize tensions and contradictions between tradition and modernity, it does so for the purposes of staging a narrative (and comic) conflict and to legitimize this new form of entertainment. Like most narrative entertainment films, it does not seek to critique or complicate these tensions. In fact, it achieves what most genre films do: to disavow the conflict altogether through its drive towards a happy resolution, involving both the coupling of romantic love and the coupling of cinema and society. Mr Haji the Movie Actor serves as an important progenitor of national film allegory in the Iranian context. However, unlike many later Iranian film allegories, Mr Haji’s ideological frame is aligned rather than at odds with the national agenda. Feature film-making in Iran would cease with the onset of the Second World War and would not recommence until 1948 when Iran saw the burgeoning of its commercial, popular entertainment film industry, commonly known as film farsi.11

Allegory in popular genre films: Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar (1969) The film farsi era was typified by commercial genre films. These films have largely been criticized for their low production values and for their poor imitation of Hollywood conventions. However, as Hamid Naficy has shown, a number of local, uniquely Iranian genres did emerge during this period including family melodramas known as ‘stewpot films’ (film-e abgushti) and the ‘tough-guy’ genre, which was comprised of several sub-genres. While the majority of these genre films were of poor quality and could not be considered allegorical, genre films can, in the hands of a canny auteur, lend themselves to allegorical expression. This becomes possible where such genres are heavily codified through narrative conventions, iconography and stereotypes. Whereas most genre films use these conventions to reinforce the status quo through the playing out of social conflict and the restoration

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of order, allegorical genre films tend to use these same conventions for new purposes. In the Hollywood context, the Western, with its instantly recognizable iconography, codified characters and Manichean dynamic, was one such genre that could be deployed allegorically. According to Xavier, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) allegorizes territorial expansion through the ‘gradual occupation of the diegetic space by the US Army’, which brings with it law and order.12 The Western could even be used for critical purposes, as was the case with Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), a film that has elicited diverse allegorical readings.13 Like the American Western, which frequently served a nation-building purpose (through its rehearsal of the concept of manifest destiny and by staging narratives of territorial expansion and the taming of the wild west), the Iranian tough-guy film also contributed to the enterprise of building a modern nation by modelling processes and responses to social change throughout its main sub-genres: dash mashti and jaheli movies. They did this particularly by demonstrating how time-honoured values of chivalry and honour could be upheld in the modern world.14 As Naficy has shown, the heroic luti and villainous lat (lout) characters at the heart of these films hark back to bygone Iranian traditions, reanimating and reworking values of ‘inner purity, sincerity, and independence … protecting the weak and defending native soil’ in a modern context.15 Films of both sub-genres typically revolve around the exploits of heroic or chivalrous lutis and villainous lats, with narratives frequently driven by the taking of honour (usually a woman’s) and its restoration (usually to a family or community), thus adopting a Manichean dynamic not dissimilar to the American Western. Like Mr Haji the Movie Actor, the allegorical work of these films comes close to what Ismail Xavier calls ‘overt’ allegory, the kind of allegory most common to commercial genre films. He writes, ‘The representation of national destinies through an encoded storytelling process is a recurrent fact in film history.’16 A common strategy of encoded storytelling would entail an individual, a family unit or social group standing in for some aspect of the nation. Masoud Kimiai’s jaheli film Qeysar (1969) is a landmark film in many ways. It was one of the first to combine a popular genre and star performances with a more modernist approach to narrative style and visual aesthetics. In this sense, it is closely connected to the Iranian New Wave. Indeed, Kimiai

20

Allegory in Iranian Cinema

became a member of the New Film Group established in 1973, consisting of a loose collective of New Wave directors critical of mainstream cinema. Qeysar was Kimiai’s debut feature film, and not only did it catapult actor Behrouz Vossoughi to stardom in the title role but it also helped establish Kimiai’s status as a commercial auteur. Although Kimiai received no formal training in film-making, he was self-taught via his own ardent cinephilia.17 This is on display in Qeysar, which contains easily recognizable cinematic citations, from a reworking of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to the use of various stylistic conventions borrowed from both Hollywood and Spaghetti Westerns. The film also evidences the influence of contemporary European film movements such as the French New Wave through the occasional use of mobile hand-held camera work and jump cuts that help to give the film a modernist edge. In addition, the film closes with a freeze frame that withholds Qeysar’s ultimate fate from viewers and produces an open ending typical of many modernist films. Kimiai and his cinematographer/editor Maziar Parto also play extensively with unusual camera angles. Additionally, the film sometimes resists the logic of classical editing and narrative economy by leaving the camera to linger on a scene rather than cutting, a feature that is reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, a movement with which many Iranian films have been compared.18 In other moments, the film adheres – albeit haphazardly – to various classical conventions, such as continuity editing, promotion of the male gaze and the melodramatic use of music. While this stylistic cacophony betrays Kimiai’s directorial inexperience and produces a rather dissonant filmic text, these imperfections contribute to the film’s allegorical potential. Indeed, what is most interesting about this film is the way it both conforms to and resists classical conventions, producing an imperfect filmic text that compels interpretation. Qeysar tells a simple story of rape and revenge. The central conflict is propelled by the sexual assault and subsequent suicide of Fati (short for Fatemeh), sister to brothers Qeysar (Vossoughi) and Farman (Naser Malek Motiei). In a suicide note, Fati reveals details of the rape, the resulting pregnancy and the name of the perpetrator, Mansur Ab-mangol (Jalal Pishvaian), one of the three tough-guy brothers. Kimiai conveys the rape via a brief but explicit and chaotically filmed flashback intercut with shots of Fati’s uncle (Jamshid Mashayekhi) reading her letter that explains what had

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21

happened to her. Farman vows to take revenge in order to restore the family’s honour, but he is killed when he goes to confront the perpetrator and his two brothers. Qeysar returns home to find both his sister and brother dead, and his mother (Iran Daftari) and uncle grieving hysterically. The remainder of the film follows Qeysar as he sets about tracking down each of the Ab-mangol brothers – Karim, Rahim and Mansur – brutally murdering them one by one to avenge the deaths of his siblings. Hamid Naficy has read the film as a national allegory, locating its allegorical dimensions largely in terms of the way the highly codified characters mark a departure from the common luti typology and via the emblematic use of the family. He describes the film as a ‘condemnation of modern times in which the idealized luti values of generosity and compassion toward the poor, the weak, and women are replaced by unbridled thuggery, which the police are either unable or unwilling to contain.’19 In effect, the film resists the idealization of the chivalrous luti character and disrupts the conventional association of such characters with the noble warriors of classical folklore. The film seems to ask whether such chivalry is even possible in the modern era, but the allegorical dimensions of the film can also be perceived at the level of the film’s style and structure and are enhanced by its stylistic dissonance. Qeysar’s allegorical intentions are announced and complicated through the opening credit sequence, designed by Abbas Kiarostami, who would soon embark on his own directorial career. The sequence consists of a slow montage of close-ups of tattoos depicting various characters from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Persian epic book of kings.20 The characters are recognizable through the simple graphic depiction of their various exploits. In one tattoo, we see a depiction of Rostam slaying the dragon. In another, Zal (Rostam’s father) is carried by a mythical bird, the Simorq (Figure 1.2), and yet another depicts the hero Siavash (a character closely associated with innocence). In their invocation of the Shahnameh these images refer viewers to a text of particular import to the nation. As Naficy has highlighted, the references to the Shahnameh suggest a ‘bygone idealized world of luti chivalry’, which presents a sharp contrast to the modern world of unbridled thuggery depicted in the film.21 I would, however, suggest that these images serve an even richer function, what Xavier calls ‘indices of the allegorical intention’ that cue viewers to search for hidden or supplementary meaning.22

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Allegory in Iranian Cinema

Figure 1.2  In the credit sequence, designed by Abbas Kiarostami, tattoos depict characters from the Shahnameh. Qeysar (Aryana Film, Masoud Kimiai, 1969).

Abbas Kiarostami’s credit sequence functions on numerous levels and unleashes complex chains of associations that resonate through the film proper. The tattoos are filmed in such intimate close-ups that viewers are encouraged to focus not just on the images themselves but also on the muscular flesh upon which they have been permanently inscribed. In this way, they take on a figural meaning beyond the values and concepts personified by the heroes of the Shahnameh. Metonymically, the tattoos speak to the indelible inscription of the national epic onto Iran’s national body and consciousness. More concretely, the toned male bodies onto which the heroic figures have been wrought remind us of the wrestlers and bodybuilders of the traditional Iranian gymnasium, the zurkhaneh (house of strength). According to Philippe Rochard, the history of the zurkhaneh can be traced back at least as far as the thirteenth century.23 Still an important part of Iranian culture, these hyper-masculine spaces and the athletes who practice in them have become associated with a range of contradictory values. On the one hand, they are associated with traditions of chivalry, and its practitioners are bound by a range of social obligations including ‘generosity, mutual help, courage, loyalty, respect for elders, and keeping one’s word’.24 On the other hand, the zurkhaneh has been associated with criminal gangs and thugs.25 The lutis and lats of the tough-guy films are closely connected with and often modelled on the world of the zurkhaneh. In addition to visual and narrative references, the tough-guy films also frequently gesture sonically to it by incorporating the familiar zurkhaneh drumbeat into the soundtrack. A good example of a film that emphasizes this connection is Farrokh Ghaffary’s

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social-realist jaheli film South of the City (Jonub-e Shahr, 1958). In this film, the central character Farhad is depicted as an honourable luti who rescues a young widowed mother from a life of drudgery in a seedy café and from the affections of a lat from a rival gang. Although Farhad is never seen training in a zurkhaneh, he has a pair of traditional wooden weights in his apartment, and when he fights, he wrestles with his bare hands rather than with a weapon. In contrast, in the final showdown his rival stabs him with a knife, indicating that he does not abide by the same code of honour as Farhad. Throughout the film, the non-diegetic drumbeats of the zurkhaneh can be heard, lending pace, building suspense and further consolidating this connection. Unlike Qeysar, which ends on a particularly ambivalent note, the narrative in South of the City is resolved by good triumphing over evil. Indeed, Farhad appears to have left behind his luti ways and become a respectable citizen living in a modern apartment together with the woman and the child he rescued. South of the City was itself a landmark and controversial film for the way it introduced a high degree of realism and suffered severe censorship as a result.26 Despite this controversy, it serves as a good example of a dramatic film that upholds and reinforces conventional codes of the good luti triumphing over the bad lat that are entirely absent from Qeysar. The stark contrast between the two films also enables us to better understand the way that Qeysar operates allegorically. Kiarostami’s title sequence for Qeysar self-consciously reminds viewers of the conventional associations between the jaheli film and the traditions of the zurkhaneh, as well as the legendary heroes of the Shahnameh. This is further enhanced through the figure of Behrouz Vossoughi, who had been a zurkhaneh practitioner of some renown before embarking on his acting career. Vossoughi’s name appears beside an image of Rostam, one of the most revered heroes of the Shahnameh, thus activating a chain of allegorical associations: text ⇒ body ⇒ film. More cinematically, as the sequence continues, the muscles flex and ripple, quite literally animating the figures depicted and preempting the reanimation of the age-old story of violated honour and revenge that will play out in the film to come. This connection is further reinforced during the film via zurkhaneh posters visible in a coffee house, as well as in Qeysar’s family home. Thus, the title sequence invests the film with a selfreflexive dimension.

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It is also significant to note that the bodies displaying the heroic images are shown only in fragments: an arm, a leg, a chest. In this regard, they are both embodied and disembodied, a contradictory posture common to allegory, a mode that thrives on ambivalence. We never see the men whose bodies these parts belong to and these specific bodies never appear in the diegetic world of the film, ensuring that they remain de-individualized. Thus, they are released from literal signification, opening them up to the flexibility of allegorical implication. Here they serve as external reference points – intertexts – on the one hand, to the ancient, mythicized world of the Shahnameh and its abstractly personified values and, on the other, to the material world of the zurkhaneh where the battles between good and evil were first animated in oral storytelling and classical Persian literature and have been replayed in ritualized form over the centuries and live on in these contemporary bodies. These complex layers of intertextuality are further reinforced by the lively music that accompanies the credit sequence, which is underpinned by the typical drumbeat of the zurkhaneh. Here, towards the end of the credit sequence, do we first hear the dramatic musical refrain that will become Qeysar’s theme, announcing each act of vengeance he commits. In contrast to the use of zurkhaneh drumming in a more conventional film such as South of the City, here it serves a more defined and ostensibly melodramatic signalling function that adds to the film’s allegorical dimensions. I want to suggest that this opening credit sequence presents us with a ‘dialectical image’, a complex confluence of past and present rendered via what Walter Benjamin referred to as the Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’ of the cinematic image in which past and present combine in a single image.27 The images of the title sequence point to the way that the Shahnameh as national epic has been deeply inscribed upon the (national) body, literally through the persistence of heroic concepts of battle in zurkhaneh practice and figuratively through the time-honoured values enshrined in its pages. Qeysar does not simply transpose these values into the contemporary, urban world; rather it seems to signal their continued existence, but in a severely degraded form. Qeysar, therefore, becomes not so much an ‘anti-hero’ as a degraded hero in a world where society has lost its moral compass. Neither the chivalrous values of old, nor religion, nor the law provides any kind of redemption for the characters.

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Violence only begets violence; instead of salvation, religion produces only mourning, and the faltering actions of the police bring about no justice. The references to the Shahnameh in the credit sequence also act as a frame of reference through which to decode the film. As Xavier has asserted, most allegories refer us to some kind of pre-existing ‘Master Code or Narrative’ through which they can be read.28 In the context of the Iranian tough-guy film genre, which builds on values and codes of signification inherited from the national epic and other cultural practices, it would perhaps seem redundant to so overtly present the Shahnameh as the film’s allegorical master code. Its prominence in the opening title sequence and diegetic return later in a scene where Qeysar’s uncle is seen reading the book (indeed at one point he even appears to hide behind the book) seems to suggest that more than a straight homology is at play. Rather, I propose that the Shahnameh serves a dual function. On the one hand, it is offered as a master code, but as an allegory the film must be read against, rather than through this code: we must read for the way it departs from, rather than confirms its conventions. On the other hand, the film’s narrative engages in a process of allegoresis (allegorical interpretation), performing a re-reading of the Shahnameh, in as far as it functions as a metonym for the nation. According to Walter Benjamin’s theorization, fragmentation and degradation are defining elements of modern allegory: ‘Tearing things out of the context of their usual interrelation … is related to the destruction of the organic interrelations in the allegorical intention.’29 It is this destruction of the ‘organic interrelations’ or the conventional relationship between sign and signifier that enables a text or image to point to new or alternate meanings. By reminding viewers of the values enshrined in the Shahnameh, but then focussing on their violation and degradation through the unremitting violence that goes unredeemed, the film seems to question the ability for old signs and discursive practices, such as the stories of the Shahnameh, to sustain their conventional meanings. Ultimately Qeysar problematizes whether such master codes can ‘produce universally valid and stable interpretations with an organic and necessary connection to the ultimate truths of life’, particularly under the conditions of an already degraded and uneven modernity depicted in the film.30 The film proper also seems to signal this theme of allegorical degradation. The narrative is propelled by events affecting the hero that have taken place

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in his absence. Qeysar returns from work in another city to find his world in turmoil: his siblings are dead and his mother (already a widow) and uncle are in mourning. Appropriate to the modern setting of the film, he returns not on a valiant steed but on a train, a common signifier of modernity. As he walks along the alleyway towards home, his mother is alerted to his pending arrival via the familiar sound of his shoes scuffing along the pavement: like many lutis, he wears his shoes like slippers with the heels folded down. We don’t know it yet, but these shoes and the way they are worn will become an emblematic attribute of Qeysar, as he will stop to pull up his heels each time he is about to go into battle. Like each of the legendary Persian heroes who could be identified via a series of attributes or symbolic objects, Qeysar’s main characteristic is his shoes. The quotidian action of pulling up his heels functions as an ironically degraded version of a heroic gesture such as donning a helmet or unsheathing a sword. To further reinforce this, on the soundtrack, Qeysar’s action of pulling up his heels, which is always filmed in extreme close-up, is accompanied each time by his musical theme (composed by Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh) inspired by the beat of the zurkhaneh drum that has been set up at the end of the credit sequence. Cinematically, these moments recall the use of music as a signalling device in the Western, or more specifically appear to be inspired by Ennio Morricone’s emphatic soundtracks for Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Qeysar’s shoes are a good example of how in allegory, simple objects sometimes undergo a process of semantic slippage: meaning is unstable and relational, rather than fixed. Here they are transformed from being a sign of intimacy between mother and son – a non-verbal cue by which Qeysar’s mother can recognize his approach – into a metaphorically degraded battle shield. More broadly, the episodic structure of the film – which is divided into three murders in different locations with a series of interludes – also pays homage to the heroic fables such as those recounted in the Shahnameh. The heroic stories are often structured around a hero who must endure a formulaic series of challenges, trials or quests. Through these trials heroes must test their endurance, prove their nobility or seek retribution for a wrong done to himself or another. Perhaps the most well-known example is Rostam’s seven labours (Haft-Khan-e Rostam) in which Rostam is presented with seven challenges including overcoming extreme thirst in the desert, slaying a dragon and

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defeating an evil sorceress before he is finally able to achieve his ultimate goal, which is to rescue Kay Kavus. The episodic structure of Qeysar echoes and transposes this structural narrative device into a modern, urban environment. Qeysar seeks out and murders each of the Ab-mangol brothers in three different locations: a bathhouse, a slaughterhouse and a yard of discarded railway cars. Naficy has described these spaces as ‘emblematic of the country’s encroaching modernization’.31 Indeed, the mise en scène of these spaces seems to mark a trajectory from what might be described as tired tradition to a kind of disrupted or exhausted modernity. In between, Qeysar’s quest also takes him to a variety of other spaces that sit on the threshold between tradition and modernity, signalling perhaps a delicate balance between the two: the bazaar, a teahouse, a bar, a mosque, a cemetery and a cabaret. The first murder takes place in a traditional bathhouse. The space is dilapidated, suggesting a traditional practice in decline. Cinematically, this is reinforced as Qeysar spies on his victim, Karim Ab-mangol (Hassan Shahin), through a cracked mirror in which his own face is also reflected. Carrying no weapon, Qeysar opportunistically picks up a cut-throat razor, which he uses to enact the crime. It is here that Kimiai quotes the murder scene from Psycho, using extreme camera angles, chaotic edits and a close-up of the victim’s bloody hand against the tiles. The murder ends with a shot of blood flowing into the drain. However, at the same time as the film’s aesthetic announces its cinematic modernity, the scene also incorporates shots of the two men’s naked, muscular bodies locked in a wrestler’s embrace, yet another degraded reference to the zurkhaneh. This is yet another example of a dialectical image in which the now-time of the cinematic image brings about an encounter between past and present, tradition and modernity, into a violent embrace. The second murder takes place in a slaughterhouse, a space that seems emblematic of modernity brutally tugging away at the last vestiges of tradition. The sequence emphasizes mechanization and seems to suggest that traditional practices are on the verge of extinction, thanks to the adoption of modern processes of mass production. This is also one of several scenes that adopt a decidedly modernist film aesthetic. We are introduced to this space via a montage of lifeless animal carcasses being cut and skinned with motorized saws, as well as by hand. These are filmed in extreme close-up, confronting the spectator with scenes of abject brutality and serving as a prelude to the

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impending murder. The emphasis on flesh forms an uncomfortable and allegorically degraded visual homology with the human bodies shown in the opening credit sequence. Qeysar stalks his victim, Rahim Ab-mangol (Gholam-Reza Sarkoob), through row after row of animal carcasses that are suspended from meat hooks. These are shown in wide shots to emphasize the vast expanse of these halls of death. The space is populated with almost as many men as animal carcasses, highlighting the role that human labour also plays in the modernized mass production of death. The hand-held camera produces an uncomfortable intimacy between the viewer and the images, and it is here that several jump cuts are used, reminding us that film too is fashioned out of a process of cutting. The setting precludes any possibility of this being understood as an act of noble revenge, further undermining any claims Qeysar might have to the righteous legacy of classical heroes. The murder itself in which Qeysar grabs and then suffocates Rahim behind a curtain of carcasses employs dialectical montage, alternating shots of the actual murder with shots of a cow being grabbed and stunned with electric pincers. The film then cuts away to more images of animals being skinned before returning to show Rahim’s lifeless body: just another carcass among many. As Qeysar makes his getaway, an electric saw in the foreground slices through a carcass, further reinforcing the idea that this is an act of senseless slaughter, rather than noble retribution. Allegorically, this scene emblematizes modernity as brutal and dehumanizing. In line with this allegorical impulse to cast modernity in a pessimistic light, the episode that occurs immediately before Qeysar’s final showdown with the third brother, Mansur, also reinforces this idea. Film farsi tough-guy movies would not be complete without at least one musical sequence featuring scantily clad women singing in a nightclub or cabaret. Qeysar is no exception. Here, unlike numerous other tough-guy movies where such song and dance scenes break the narrative continuity, the sequence is structured into the narrative, as Qeysar’s enquiries as to the whereabouts of Mansur lead him to the cabaret. There he meets and is seduced by Mansur’s scantily clad and highly sexualized girlfriend, Soheila Ferdos (Kobra Saeedi aka Shahrzad), who performs in the club. It is from Soheila that Qeysar finally discovers where to find Mansur. Read against the heroic master code introduced in the opening credit sequence, we might see this as yet another trial that the hero must endure. The space of the

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cabaret is coded as morally transgressive, a modern equivalent of a situation designed to test the hero’s moral principles. However, here the hero neither resists the temptations of the beautiful woman nor attempts to rescue her. Instead, he nonchalantly accepts her invitation up to her apartment where she seductively undresses before him. In terms of its gender dynamics, this sequence must be read as a problematic product of its production context that in many ways undermines the film’s modernist pretentions in preference to delivering a concession to the tastes of commercial film-goers. While this sequence might simply be read for its adherence to a generic formula, in terms of the film’s allegorical dynamics, it also invites an emblematic reading. If the slaughterhouse sequence served to propose a homology between modern mass production and unbridled brutality, so too does the cabaret sequence speak to another kind of commodification of the flesh in which film farsi was also deeply imbricated. According to Hamid Naficy, the generic formula of the tough-guy film offered only two broad stereotypes of women: the virtuous and the vulgar. These were normally signified through clothing, behaviour and naming conventions.32 Here in Qeysar, the cabaret and the women that populate it are coded as ‘vulgar’. They are immodestly dressed in miniskirts and wear heavy make-up. At the centre of the scene is Soheila, who sings and performs a sexually charged dance for a predominantly male audience. The camera responds to this setting by adopting a voyeuristic gaze through which it objectifies the female body. At times, this is reinforced by the use of shot-reverse-shot structures that alternate between men leering and Soheila’s provocative performance. At one point the camera slowly pans down Soheila’s body, implying a male gaze caressing her as she twirls her belly, hips and buttocks. She is presented ‘to-be-looked-at’ as an object, a commodity. Another, extreme low-angle shot almost gives the impression of her dancing in the lap of a male patron, in a typical example of what Laura Mulvey referred to as the alignment of the three ‘looks’ of the cinema: the camera, the (male) gaze of a diegetic spectator and the gaze of the viewer, which is also coded as ‘male’.33 Lasting more than eight minutes, the entire cabaret sequence seems to be unevenly privileged within the film (by comparison, the final showdown between Qeysar and Mansur lasts less than two minutes). The scene emphasizes not only the way that certain social spaces, such as clubs and cabarets, contributed to the commodification of the female body

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but also indirectly highlights the crucial role film culture played in such commodification of gendered labour. As mentioned earlier, we can either read this as merely a genre convention, or we can, in the context of the film’s critique of modernity and the encroachment of the West, read it more allegorically. In his writings on modern allegory and the work of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin considered the prostitute the allegorical emblem of modernity par excellence: ‘In the prostitution of the metropolis the woman herself becomes an article that is mass-produced.’34 It is doubtful that Kimiai intended this sequence to carry a critical message regarding the representation of women. His directorial inexperience and proclivity for imitation suggests that he is merely perpetuating an element of the tough-guy formula that would have been expected by his audience. However, the nature of allegory is such that meaning is necessarily unstable and open to new interpretations. In as far as the sequence emphasizes the disenchantment of femininity under the conditions of modern commodity culture, it inadvertently functions in a similar way to the sequence in the slaughterhouse despite, or even perhaps because of, its role in the generic formula. Kimiai’s more overt critique of modernity continues into the final scene. This sequence forms an allegorical chain of associations with the other murders in the bathhouse and the slaughterhouse, as well as, I would argue, with the cabaret sequence. These spaces all signal a different aspect of modernity and code it in an undesirable way. The information that Qeysar obtains from Soheila leads him to a yard of discarded and rusting railway cars. As in many nations around the world, the expansion of railroads and the opportunities for travel and trade that these enabled became a key signifier of economic progress and modernity. In Iran this was no exception. If, earlier in the film, we saw Qeysar returning to Tehran by railroad and this functioned as a sign of his success (we see him alighting from a first-class carriage), here we have come full circle. The discarded and dilapidated railway cars seem to suggest the failure of modernity. This mise en scène is at once the setting for the fulfilment of Qeysar’s quest for revenge and also the scene of his own demise. His quest for retribution brings him to a literal and figurative dead end. Like the animal carcasses in the slaughterhouse, the disused railway cars are lined up in rows, emblems of a disenchanted or exhausted modernity. It is also here that stylistically Kimiai pays homage to the Western genre as the two men face

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off along railway tracks accompanied by Qeysar’s musical theme, which now plays even more dramatically. However, unlike the typical Western, the hero will not be effective in re-establishing order. This space fails to provide Qeysar with either a heroic outcome or a restoration of honour. While he does manage to kill Mansur, he himself is also stabbed by his adversary and then is subsequently shot in the leg by the police. In the penultimate shot, he sits in a disused dining car bleeding, while in the next and final scene, we observe the police descending on him. It is on this shot that the film finishes with a freeze frame as the word ‘End’ is superimposed over the image. Qeysar’s fate is ultimately left in a state of suspension as the film fades to black. In contrast to the heroic stories of the Shahnameh, many of which also end with the tragic death of the hero, the deaths of those heroes generally lead to redemption of some kind. For Qeysar, there is no redemption, just as there has been no restoration of virtue for Qeysar’s family. Indeed, even Qeysar’s mother has died of grief, signalling the ultimate disintegration of what was left of the family unit.

The allegorical turn: Iranian New Wave cinema The critical vision that Kimiai displayed in Qeysar was closely aligned with that of the New Wave. What they shared was a desire to improve the quality of Iranian cinema by establishing a film practice that engaged more directly with social reality and adopted innovative film-making techniques, using these for the most part to make socially critical films. For his part, however, Kimiai was primarily concerned with transforming the commercial cinema from within, rather than in establishing a new kind of film-making practice. Nevertheless, we can see his interventions into commercial cinema working as an important counterpart to the New Wave. This section of the chapter looks more closely at what can be identified as a major allegorical turn among the New Wave directors. I shall focus on two key allegorical films: The Cycle (1978), a socialrealist drama by Dariush Mehrjui and, secondly, Ebrahim Golestan’s raucous black comedy Treasure (1972). My choice of these two vastly different films will also help to demonstrate that there is no definitive allegorical style or genre. As we have already observed, allegory can be deployed in commercial

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entertainment and genre film-making and, as will be demonstrated, it can also operate in social-realist drama and absurdist satire. Before moving on to discuss these films, I shall provide a brief overview of some other key allegorical New Wave films. Around the same time that Kimiai directed Qeysar, Dariush Mehrjui made The Cow (Gav, 1969), a film that is often credited with kick-starting the New Wave. Aesthetically, it is influenced by earlier social-realist films such as Ghaffary’s South of the City and Golestan’s Mudbrick and Mirror (Khesht va Ayneh, 1965); however, like Qeysar, it is invested with an allegorical dimension that enabled it to manifest a critique of modernity. Naficy writes that The Cow dealt with a multitude of fears: ‘fear of modernity, of patriarchal traditions, of the totalitarian state, of foreign powers, of internal enemies, and of forces of the unconscious’.35 In true allegorical fashion, many of these fears are emblematized via the simple device of three shadowy figures that appear from time to time on a hill in the distance, their ominous presence setting fear into the villagers, who refer to them simply as the ‘Boluriha’ (Crystallines). This fear, however, seems to be out of proportion to their presence in the film as they only ever appear fleetingly as shadows that never quite crystallize into images. This vague allusion to an unseen but powerful force grants them even greater allegorical potential, allowing them to be interpreted in a multitude of ways including the long list of fears enumerated by Naficy. In this way they are allegorical, for there is no oneto-one relationship between their form and any specific meaning. Rather, they are part of a chain of allegorical associations that circulate throughout the film and its narrative. In typical allegorical fashion, The Cow tells a story that seems too simple to be taken only on a literal level. The film presents the story of a man, Mash Hassan (Ezzatollah Entezami), and his cow. On a literal level, the cow, being the only one in the village and therefore the sole source of milk, appears as a sign of impoverishment. It has also been read as emblematic of Iran’s dependence on oil as its main commodity. As Hamid Reza Sadr writes, ‘The analogy with an economy that was over-dependent on only one saleable commodity could not be clearer. The fear of a future without oil permeated all discussion, just as the fear of losing the cow taxed the villagers’ faith.’36 This reading presupposes a metonymic relationship between the village and the nation, a common strategy in national allegories.

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However, I think that this reading cannot be sustained for the duration of the film. The connotative connection between the cow, its milk, the village and the nation’s oil industry can only be made fleetingly. In the opening sequence, Mehrjui emphasizes the close, even loving relationship that Mash Hassan has with his cow as they bathe together in a dam. However, the cow suddenly dies while Mash Hassan is away from the village overnight. On his return, the villagers, afraid to communicate the tragic news, instead tell him that the cow has run away. Understandably, Mash Hassan is devastated and seeks in vain for his missing companion. Eventually, he seems to give up hope, suspecting that the villagers have lied to him about the fate of the cow and he undergoes a mental breakdown of sorts. While in body he remains a man, as the film unfolds, he comes to behave more and more like a cow. He will not leave the stable; he eats hay and eventually loses his capacity for language. It is through this figure of a man becoming a cow that Mehrjui inflects the film with its most interesting and complex allegorical dimension. If, earlier in the film, the cow could be read as an emblem of Iran’s dependence on oil, then later, we are compelled to modify such a reading. Through Mash Hassan, the cow becomes subject to the allegorical process of semantic slippage where original meanings are replaced or supplemented by new meanings. Here too, we see a new and innovative take on the typical allegorical device of personification, in the reversal of the usual representation of anthropomorphism. In personification allegory, abstract concepts or values are either conveyed by a human figure or such values are invested with human attributes. Anthropomorphism invests non-human things, including animals, with human characteristics. Here, Mash Hassan becomes the embodiment of fear in a highly generalized and abstracted sense as there is no single, identifiable cause for this fear. Additionally, this embodiment of abstract fear comes about only through his metaphorical metamorphosis into a cow. As the reverse of anthropomorphism, we might call this animorphism. The animorphism of Mash Hassan, which seems to have emerged out of Mash Hassan’s own fears, has the effect of spreading a series of irrational fears across the entire village. Read allegorically, the film seems to suggest that this state of fear has entered the national consciousness making it a prescient marker of the tense sociopolitical climate that would grow to a tumultuous climax over the next decade.

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In their desire to create films that would reflect and critique contemporary social reality, the New Wave film-makers would time and again produce cinema that in retrospect would seem not only to dream the downfall of the Shah’s regime but also to register the breakdown of the modernist project. I use the term ‘dream’ here instead of ‘predict’ for I do not wish to argue that these film-makers were in any way conscious visionaries capable of predicting the future. Rather, they used their critical lenses to highlight the destructive aspects of a modernizing project and with it looming Westernization that remained uneven and un-reconciled with traditional beliefs and practices. At the same time, they depict – often cynically – traditional aspects of Iranian culture and religion, which their films suggest were similarly subject to the forces of decay. They question the capacity for traditional practices to continue to play a natural or unquestioned role in society or in narrating the nation. As such, like dreams, their films were identifying and visualizing underlying tensions and forces that were already at work in Iranian society. This focus on the destructive, unsuccessful aspects of contemporary Iranian society was enhanced by their use of various allegorical modes of expression. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, allegory is the mode most suited to dealing with that which is ‘untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful’.37 It is also, as I have argued elsewhere, a mode that tends to arise with most force at times of sociopolitical tension or upheaval.38 It is therefore not surprising that we should see a concentration of allegorical films in the tumultuous decade leading up to the Iranian revolution of 1979. Furthermore, in its capacity to say one thing while meaning another, allegory could also be deployed as a means of evading state censorship. However, if allegory was indeed used as a way of dodging censorship it was not entirely successful, as the majority of the New Wave films were at some stage either banned or heavily censored. Stylistically, the works of the New Wave directors are vastly heterogeneous. As mentioned, Mehrjui’s The Cow and The Cycle are rooted in a form of social realism introduced a decade earlier. Similarly, Sohrab Shahid Saless’s first two feature films, A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, 1973) and Still Life (Tabi’at-e Bijan, 1974), maintain a commitment to bringing a stark and quietly critical view of contemporary reality to the screen, using a simple but powerful poetic realist style. Shahid Saless is perhaps the least allegorical of the New Wave film-makers, with his minimalist cinema that focuses on the

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quotidian lives of lower-class characters in remote settings. However, his films invite us to consider the conditions not directly presented on screen that nevertheless impact the lives of his characters. This need to access external points of reference opens his films to allegorical interpretation. His simple characters seem to have no control over their own destinies, suggesting that wider, invisible but no less concrete forces are at play. The allusive openness of his films seems to challenge our capacity to understand the simple situations presented in a straightforward way. Certainly, his characters are broadly sketched versions of the proverbial everyman (or everyboy in the case of A Simple Event). His films function as subtle allegories of the impact of broader historical and economic forces on the human condition. This is reinforced by Shahid Saless’s cinematic style. He structures his narratives into episodes based on his protagonists’ repetitious daily routines, punctuated by repetitive shot setups that vary only slightly as the films progress. Amir Naderi’s Tangsir (1974), based on a novel by Sadeq Chubak, is another New Wave film that even more explicitly dreams of popular uprising, while also drawing heavily on certain elements of the tough-guy formula. It tells the story of Za’er Mohammad (Behrouz Vossoughi), a hard-working villager who has invested his life’s savings with the wealthy merchant Abdoul Karim (Rooholah Mofidi). When Abdoul refuses to return the money, saying that it had been lost in a bad investment, Za’er decides to take revenge and sets out to murder Abdoul and his corrupt cronies: a lawyer, the local mullah and another merchant. Like Qeysar, the hero descends into a single-minded trajectory of bloody revenge. However, unlike Kimiai’s protagonist, whose acts of revenge also bring about his own downfall, Za’er’s actions are celebrated and even aided by the villagers, who are happy that someone is finally attempting to take on the corrupt elites.39 They even honour him with the title of ‘Shir Mohammad’ (Mohammad the Lion), which they chant repeatedly and are eventually inspired by his actions into a popular uprising against the police. Importantly, even though Za’er has accepted that his revenge would inevitably result in his own downfall, in the end he is able to escape by sea with his wife and son, and, therefore, the film seems to reward and even celebrate his brand of vigilante justice and the uprising that it inspires. Read against the tumultuous sociopolitical context in which it was made and with the benefit of hindsight,

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the film is yet another example of a New Wave film that is closely calibrated to the contemporary climate and seems to allegorically dream of radical change.

Cycles of corruption in Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle (1978) Among the New Wave social-realist films, Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle functions as a powerful indictment of corruption and the proliferation of informal circuits of exchange in 1970s Iran. It is also an important example of allegory in Iranian cinema for the way that it pushes the boundaries of the material world of its subject matter into the terrain of allegory through various structural and stylistic devices. While the film’s setting firmly roots it in the concrete conditions faced by the inhabitants of the country’s poorer urban neighbourhoods, other aspects of the film’s style and structure are responsible for its allegorical dimensions. Like The Cow, The Cycle was adapted from a story entitled ‘Garbage Dump’ (‘Ashghalduni’, 1968) by Iranian dissident writer Gholam Hossein Sa’edi. The film’s narrative revolves around and is structured by the extended metaphor of the circulatory system, which functions as an emblematic figuration of how public institutions, corrupt individuals, criminal gangs, drug addicts, alcoholics and other down-at-heel-types are connected by intricate networks – or cycles – of informal exchange. These form a vast shadow economy that is sustained by corruption and greed, while feeding off and profiting from the needy. The use of the bodily metaphor is important as it functions as a metonym for the nation – its body politic – suggesting that these cycles of corruption are systemically infused across all levels of society. At the heart of the narrative is Ali (Saeed Kangarani), an adolescent from a very poor background who is on the verge of manhood, making this also a suggestive coming of age story. As the film opens we see him bringing his ailing father (Esmail Mohammadi) to the city in search of a treatment for his chronic bowel condition. Ali soon finds himself in a dilapidated clinic run by Doctor Sameri (Ezzatolah Entezami) where the city’s dispossessed – among them many drunks and drug addicts – come to give blood in exchange for a measly payment. Later, we discover that the blood is being sold to the hospital and that patients are contracting deadly diseases from the tainted blood. Furthermore,

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the hospital administration, doctors and nurses are fully aware of the source of the blood and are either unwilling – or incapable – of doing anything about it. The blood that is transfused from one body to another via barely concealed black-market networks provides a powerful metaphor for both corruption and the pervasiveness of informal networks of exchange that, according to the film’s overarching message, perpetuate a state of underdevelopment that sits in stark contrast to the official image of Iran as a modern, developed nation. Like his fellow New Wave directors, Mehrjui’s focus on images of poverty and underdevelopment served as one of the most powerful means of aesthetic resistance to state ideology. In fact, the metonymic chain of associations might even be pushed further and be read in reference to another fluid substance that was vital to the lifeblood of the nation: oil, the country’s single most important commodity. The Cycle announces its allegorical intentions in the opening sequence. The film begins with a medium shot of several boys rolling used tyres across a dusty landscape. As the scene pulls out to a wider shot, the camera brings our protagonists, Ali and his father, into view as they make their way on foot towards the city. This wider shot also reveals a horizon littered with dozens of tall smokestacks spewing noxious smoke into the atmosphere. As far as the eye can see, the landscape is dry and barren: a veritable wasteland. On a literal level, the landscape works to anchor the characters in the material reality of the situation. On an allegorical level, it functions as a metonym for Iran itself, which here is characterized not as modern and developed, but barren and polluted. In certain contexts, the smokestacks might function as symbols of modernity, signs of progress and prosperity through industry. Here, however, in combination with the sterile landscape and the wretched souls that inhabit it, they seem to emblematize the opposite: decay and disintegration. In allegorical terms, the opening shots bring forth the idea of ‘petrified unrest’, a dialectical image used by Walter Benjamin to describe the way that allegory has the capacity to register the coexistence of the fleeting and the eternal. Benjamin wrote, ‘Allegory establishes itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely.’40 This is manifested through the film via the continual emphasis on the fleetingness of human life together with the ceaseless flows of corruption and the informal economy, which continue to cycle on regardless of who might be controlling them.

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Ali functions as a complex allegorical figure. Via Mehrjui’s cinematic language, Ali is depicted as a seer, whose role includes cueing the viewer to the allegorical dimensions of the film. Importantly, his figural function is not achieved via the use of literal point-of-view shots; hence we are not encouraged to identify with Ali in the conventional sense. By seeing with, rather than through, Ali we are provided with a vantage point by which we are encouraged to take a critical view of the events depicted. For the first twothirds of the film, Ali is presented as a kind of wandering character, floating aimlessly from situation to situation. All the while, he is observing and to some extent absorbing and being absorbed by all that goes on around him. Only late in the film does he begin to take an active role in events, and even then it seems that he does so only because he has succumbed to the contagion inherent in the situation, not because he has developed any real agency. In this sense, Ali corresponds closely to the seers that Gilles Deleuze recognized at the heart of Italian neo-realism and the work of other European modernist film-makers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Deleuze observes that in the aftermath of the Second World War, cinema in Europe becomes one of the ‘seer’ rather than of the ‘agent’.41 The emergence of such characters, faced with situations or spaces that they no longer know how to respond to, is indicative of the emergence of time-image cinema. He refers to such spaces as ‘any-spaces-whatever’, describing them as ‘deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction’.42 Iranian New Wave cinema is rife with anyspaces-whatever. We have already seen such spaces in Qeysar: the bathhouse, the slaughterhouse and the decaying railway yard. These any-spaces-whatever proliferate throughout The Cycle so much so that, at times, Mehrjui’s camera lingers on them or on the faces of those that inhabit them, in a way that exceeds the requirements of the drama, giving way to allegory. For example, just a few minutes into the film, Ali and his father stop near a building site where tall apartment blocks are rising out of the dusty landscape. They watch silently as workers are being searched as they leave the building site. A shot of Ali glancing skyward motivates a cut to a crane lifting a sheet of glossy metal, the sun glinting off its buffed surface. This is followed by a shot of a man seated in a chair at the entrance to the building site, his eyes also directed skyward, before cutting back to Ali, who looks on silently. After a momentary pause, his father

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passes through the frame, and they simply move on. This short sequence of shots serves no overt purpose in the narrative: the characters don’t respond; they merely see. This is one of numerous similar moments in the film where Ali and his father look without either reacting or becoming involved in the scene before them. Rather, their looks serve as an opportunity for Mehrjui to train his camera on a particular scene designed to build an image of the nation in ruins, even while it is under construction. Here, Mehrjui employs a form of dialectical montage in which he sets an image of modern development in juxtaposition with the evident distrust of the workers. Additionally, in terms of the landscape, the gleaming towers stand in stark contrast to the dusty wasteland surrounding them, which is dotted with small artisanal brickworks, their own tall smokestacks dwarfed immeasurably by the new, infinitely taller apartments under construction. The brickworks serve as anachronistic signs of older building practices as, ironically, the apartment towers are built of metal, glass and concrete rather than bricks. Rather than being built up from the earth, the modern towers seem to serve as signifiers of foreign interests. Deleuze attributes the any-space-whatever to the emergence of ‘a new race of characters … they saw rather than acted, they were seers.’43 Importantly, these seer characters do not operate according to the logic of cinematic identification. Rather, they invert classical processes of identification: ‘The character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts.’44 In The Cycle, just as Mehrjui depicts the city as a series of any-spaces-whatever, he constructs Ali as precisely this kind of seer. But more than this, I would argue that Ali functions as our on-screen representative, what Marvin D’Lugo has called, with reference to the allegorical films of Spanish film-maker Carlos Saura, a ‘spectator-withinthe-text’, whose role is to initiate us into the film’s allegorical ways of seeing.45 There are certain moments within the film where Ali’s gaze prompts us to see differently. One such moment occurs during the opening scene of the film described earlier. The extended opening shot ends when the camera draws in closer to Ali’s father, who collapses to the ground in agony. The film then cuts to a medium close-up of Ali, his head and shoulders centre frame. He gazes off-screen in the direction of his father, but his countenance does not seem to

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register concern. As the shot continues, his attention is drawn to something off-screen left, and he turns to profile, glancing out of the frame. The next shot provides us with the apparent object of his gaze. It is a truck with four men – day labourers perhaps – standing upright on the tray behind the cabin, shovels and hoes raised high towards the sky. These figures serve no overt purpose in the narrative; however, motivated by Ali’s gaze, the camera prompts us to notice them. These figures function on at least two levels. On one, they introduce us to the film’s themes of human labour and underdevelopment: like these day labourers, the people who go to give blood are also ferried to the blood bank on the back of a truck. On another allegorical level, the stiff, almost theatrical postures of these men, combined with the way they hold their tools raised high above their heads, make them appear, just for a flash, like standard bearers heading into battle (Figure 1.3). Mehrjui seems to be presenting us with a kind of rebus, an allegorical picture puzzle. Given the desert-like surroundings, we might momentarily think of the plains of Karbala, where the blood of Hussain and his followers was shed in the futile battle against the Umayyad Caliph Yazid in AD 680, or perhaps we might be prompted to see Ali as the film’s standard bearer, its emblem, but like the quotidian shovels and hoes, Ali neither points us to his namesake – Ali, the first Imam – nor to the fabled lion of Ali, a Shi’a symbol that adorned the emblematic standard of the Pahlavi regime. Combined with the desolate landscape, the smokestacks

Figure 1.3  For a flash, workers take on the appearance of standard bearers heading into battle. The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1978).

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and the sheer everydayness of the work implements, we are presented with an image that hints at glorious imperial symbols, but also points to their futility. It is also important that initially the shot of the truck which is motivated by Ali’s gaze appears to be a point-of-view shot. As the truck passes across and then exits screen right, Ali is revealed within the shot, but is almost obliterated by a veil of dust that has been stirred up in its wake. Ali thus becomes a part of the landscape, and it is through this image that he transforms into the allegorical witness to a broader story about the nation. Certain aspects of the film point towards a kind of coming of age story, as Ali gradually loses his youthfulness and naivety. Initially, his primary task is to aid his ailing father; however, as the story develops, he becomes deeply imbricated in and begins to play an active part in the shadow economy. However, this does not mean that he gives up his primary role as seer. Indeed, as Ali sees, he is also absorbing and being absorbed by the situations that he finds himself in, seemingly by accident. Thus, he only ever becomes a haphazard agent, never fully in control of his actions or his destiny. It is only by coincidence that Ali and his father find themselves in the blood bank. Here, we see Ali seeing and absorbing the various roles played by those in the shadow economy: the disenfranchised clients (the drunks and drug addicts), the drivers (who ferry the clients in the backs of trucks like day labourers), the tough guy or luti (in a felt hat with a handlebar moustache who provides security, enforces order and occasionally does a good deed by taking care of a screaming baby while a mother gives blood), the lab assistants (who hand around the bottles, insert the cannulas, collect the filled bottles and occasionally attend to a customer who has fainted) and of course Doctor Sameri (the crooked doctor profiting from the weaknesses of both the hospital system and the communities of the dispossessed who rely on him for a meagre income). Ali watches on, mostly in silence, as the busy, noisy scene goes on around him. This is emphasized through repeated medium close-ups of Ali that underscore his wide-eyed naivety. In this scene, Mehrjui’s camera adopts what Deleuze has called, in relation to time-image cinema, a ‘camera consciousness’. What he means by this is that the camera no longer serves a merely descriptive function; it is no longer ‘defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into’.46 The camera, continues Deleuze, ‘becomes questioning, responding, objecting, provoking, hypothesizing,

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experimenting … in accordance with the functions of thought in a cinémavérité, which as Rouch says, means rather truth of cinema [vérité du cinéma]’.47 Mehrjui’s camera forms these mental connections via his use of framing, camera movement and sound. As Ali is seated in the crowded room, having his blood drained, Mehrjui cuts from a wide shot panning around the chaotic room to a close-up of Ali. This close proximity allows us to see his eyes as they glance off-screen, motivating a cut to successive close-ups of two individuals, their faces wrought with the effects of time and poverty. These shots are invested with a kind of documentary quality, a certain truth value that seems to be in excess of the dramatic situation presented. This is followed by a wider shot that eventually brings Ali back into centre frame, as a white-coated clinician gives him a fresh bottle to fill with his blood. The camera begins to zoom in slowly on Ali, and as it does so, the noisy cacophony of ambient sounds gradually becomes softer, more selective, until the soundtrack has been stripped back to little more than the sound of clinking bottles and a single pair of footsteps. Just as the close-up isolates Ali from the space around him, this treatment of sound functions as a kind of sonic close-up, that picks up only on fragments of the diegetic environment. The coupling of these sounds and images provokes us to look, listen and observe beyond what we literally see and hear. Ali’s gaze offscreen then prompts a cut to a shot of another very frail man, appearing about to faint. The shot holds as an attendant vigorously moves the man’s corpse-like head and upper body back and forth until he regains consciousness; the matterof-factness of his actions implying this is a common occurrence. We cut back to the close-up of Ali as the sound of a violin becomes audible. Ali’s gaze shifts, pausing momentarily on various points off-screen, eventually coming to rest with a downward, unfocussed gaze. If the previous shot can be understood as a point-of-view shot from Ali’s perspective, the next is certainly not. It reveals the source of the violin, which is played by a blind drunk who enters the scene just ahead of another, similarly dishevelled man. It is here that the camera consciousness becomes most evident. As the duo enters the room, the camera pulls back in a slow track, reversing the movement that had brought us into close proximity to Ali. The second man recites a poem and dances awkwardly, as the other continues to play the violin in disjunctive accompaniment. The words of the poem are important, as they seem to poetically describe the situation before us:

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You drove a hundred secret arrows into my heart. Yet you ask why my skin has turned yellow. You, who knows all about me, why feign ignorance? Oh, I’m your slave, I am all devotion. I’m your servant.

The poem is formally and thematically reminiscent of a traditional Persian ghazal or love poem, which typically posits the lover as a victim of the beloved’s cruelty. Here, the lover’s slave-like devotion is answered not with tenderness, but with arrows to the heart. In its use of apostrophe, a figure of speech often used in allegorical poetry where the speaker uses a form of direct address to an absent person or personified concept, the poem allegorically alludes to the larger forces at play: the hospital management and by extension the government and even the Shah as the country’s highest authority. The poem suggests that these higher, all-knowing but unseen forces turn a blind eye to corruption, while the people remain enchained within a cycle of poverty. Later, one doctor will remark that yet another patient has contracted yellow fever from the tainted blood, thus actualizing the phenomenon of the yellow skin referred to in the poem. I would argue that these figures provide a political commentary on the shadow economy, adding a somewhat didactic element to the allegory, prompting the viewer to critical thought. The combination of word and image effectively produces a cinematic emblem, with the words of the poem serving as a kind of inscription that helps us to decode the images. This is similar to the emblematic processes that Walter Benjamin identified in the Trauerspiel (mourning play) of the Baroque era. Benjamin cites the German Baroque poet Sigmund von Birken: ‘The spoken word makes no pretence to be dialogue; it is only a commentary on the images, spoken by the images themselves.’48 I would argue, however, that these characters also produce something akin to a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (distanciation effect) in which songs are used to interrupt or break open a dramatic scene in order to prompt critical reflection on the part of the viewer. It is also worth noting that the practice of having characters within a drama commenting on the action is also a common element of the traditional Iranian form of religious theatre known as ta’ziyeh, which also contains such self-reflexive moments.49 Importantly, the blind musician, who serves no real narrative purpose, returns towards the end of the film. This time it is he who recites a few lines

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of poetry that work to underscore the entire film with an allegorical motto. He appears immediately after a brief shot of Ali’s father lying dead and alone by the side of the road. On one level, his words can be read as an epitaph for the old man. On another, they speak more broadly to the themes of the film. He says, Oh! Eternal wheel ever running here and there is killing us. Enslavement in the whirling of the wheel is killing us. One denial and all these tribulations. Oh Death! Come. For life is killing us.

Once again, apostrophe is used, this time appealing to death to come and free the speaker from life, which is figured as futile and enslaving. Significantly, the speaker now adopts the plural ‘us’, rather than the singular ‘I’ of the previous poem and as such reinforces the message of collective suffering and the inescapability of systemic corruption. Just moments earlier, we witnessed one of the few characters, who had so far resisted being drawn into the circuit of exploitation, finally succumbing to the relentless turning of the wheel. Doctor Davoudzadeh (Bahman Forsi), who has lobbied for the establishment of a sterile lab to manage and test donated blood at the hospital, has become so infuriated with hospital bureaucracy that he bribes the initially uncooperative hospital records keeper for a document he needs to push forward his idea. As mentioned earlier, the narrative of The Cycle presents a kind of coming of age story for Ali. At the hospital, he befriends the beautiful nurse, Zahra (Forouzan), several years his elder, with whom he apparently loses his virginity. She takes a liking to him and introduces him to various people, who not only employ him to do odd jobs but also eventually induct him into the shadow economy. Throughout this time, while he gradually becomes more active, he never loses his role as allegorical seer. One of the first tasks he is given by the hospital cook is to accompany Ismail (Ali Nassirian) to a poultry farm – bearing the allegorically suggestive name ‘Imaginary Bird’ – to buy eggs and chickens for the hospital kitchen. There, Ali watches as farm workers dump hundreds of live chicks into pits, leaving them to die. The owner explains that it costs more to feed them than he can get on the market for a grown bird, a clear comment on the state of the economy. In allegorical terms, the poultry farm seems to echo the cyclical themes of the film as it alludes to the cycles

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of life and death. However, in line with the camera consciousness introduced earlier, we are prompted to think of the unanswerable question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Mehrjui challenges us to apply this logic to the corrupt networks of exchange depicted in the film, provoking the following question: Is it even possible to attribute this to a single root cause or agent? Next, Ali is given the task of selling bowls of rice and stew in a poor neighbourhood. The hospital cook is skimming the kitchen’s food supplies and pocketing the profits, although perhaps it could be argued that at least he is providing a service by offering the poor a plate of warm food at an affordable price. However, there are some who are not even able to afford such a measly portion. It is only now, as Ali, together with the conscious camera, looks out onto the crowd of destitute men and begins to take a more active role in the shadow economy by becoming a middleman for the blood bank, rounding up new clients and arranging for them to be ferried to the clinic. Ali is successful and Sameri is pleased with his work, even inviting Ali to his lavish home, filled with the spoils of his ill-begotten profits, an allusion perhaps to the Shah and his cronies. Sameri offers Ali a salaried job in his office. Interestingly, however, Ali declines, deciding to continue to do odd jobs. He says, ‘I need those jobs to get clients,’ adding ‘it’s better this way. I work harder and get more clients’, but Ali has a proposition of his own for Sameri, one that shows just how much of the corrupt atmosphere he has absorbed in a very short period of time. Ali mentions the lab that Doctor Davoudzadeh is trying to establish and suggests that Sameri should let him set up his lab and then proceed to bring him down by making him lose face. Ali says, ‘You bribe some of his employees. Add five or six bottles of infected blood to his stock. Three or four people die, then he’s had it!’ Ali finishes, ‘And then you take back his lab.’ It seems that this kind of corrupt behaviour is too much even for Sameri, who answers with a resounding ‘no!’ This conversation can be read in generational terms, indicating a degradation of basic human decency from one generation to the next. The coming of age narrative is further reinforced through other details in the sequence including the way Sameri calls Ali a ‘son of a bitch’. Sameri has encouraged Ali to drink several glasses of hard liquor, something Ali is clearly not used to. This may in part account for the shift in Ali’s demeanour, which initially is characterized by polite deference to his elder, but soon transforms into casual familiarity, even cockiness and perhaps gives him the confidence

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to make his bold suggestion. Towards the end of the sequence, Ali gets up to leave, saying that his father is waiting. Sameri, who is dressed casually in a robe, reaches over to touch Ali’s leg while gazing and smiling suggestively, a gesture that seems invested with a sexual undertone. Sameri answers, ‘to hell with your father!’ At this, Ali throws himself back in the chair and laughs deeply, and it is with this laughter that the scene ends. The resounding quality of his laughter makes Sameri’s comment resonate more broadly, beyond the particular instance of Ali and his father and towards the national context and its patriarchal ruler, the Shah. This theme of generational conflict continues into the final scenes of the film. Ali’s father has died a lonely death while Ali is performing an urgent blood collection and delivery. Ali arrives late for the funeral, which takes place in a barren landscape that closely mirrors that of the opening sequence: we have effectively come full circle. He rides up on a motorbike, which noisily intrudes on the mullah’s prayers. Ali dismounts and stands apart from the mourners, among whom is Ismail from the hospital. Ali seems unwilling or unable to participate, and he displays no outward signs of mourning. Once the prayers have been said, almost comically, the coffin bearers rush to pick up the coffin and hurry to take it to the gravesite, a sign perhaps that the modern world spares little time for the dead, especially paupers. Ismail confronts Ali as the coffin is carried away. He says, ‘Ungrateful bastard, not even a prayer for your father?’ and proceeds to hit and kick Ali, who, in a graphic echo of the opening sequence, becomes covered in mud: dry dust has become sodden earth. Ismail punishes him for his utter lack of respect for his father and for his apparent ignorance of burial traditions. In the closing shots, Ali has limped towards the graveside where the funeral rites are continuing. Mehrjui closes on a sequence of six shots edited in a shot-reverse-shot pattern. These show Ismail and Ali – representatives of two generations – staring intensely at each other, finishing on a freeze frame of Ali. Mehrjui leaves it up to the viewer to read what they will into these faces, but in more general terms we can think of the closing freeze frame as a kind of open question mark about the future of the country. Mehrjui fought a four-year battle with the Iranian Medical Association before The Cycle was finally released in 1977. According to Naficy, high-level members of the association objected to the negative representation of ‘Iranian

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modernity and the medical professions’, although the Shah is said to have supported the film.50 The Cycle was not alone in its pessimism as the majority of the New Wave films made throughout the 1970s, right up to the revolution, were dominated by such cynical indictments of Iranian modernity. The Cycle achieved this through its gritty social-realist aesthetic. Other film-makers addressed similar concerns via different stylistic strategies. Several important allegorical films of the decade, including The Stone Garden (Bagh-e Sangi, Parviz Kimiavi, 1976) and Tall Shadows of the Wind (Sayeha-ye Boland-e Bad, Bahman Farmanara, 1978), engaged in what might be called ‘a form of critical mysticism’. Naficy has described such a mode as employing a ‘marriage of gritty realism and uncanny surrealism’.51 Others, such as Treasure, adopted a carnivalesque aesthetic to construct a darkly comic form of satirical allegory.

Ebrahim Golestan’s The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (1972) Ebrahim Golestan’s Treasure is a darkly humorous satire that critiques the ignorance, greed and corruption of contemporary Iran. Like The Cycle, it also suggests that the advent of modernization and the embrace of Western values has resulted in a wearing away of culture and tradition. Hamid Naficy describes the film as an ‘allegorical farce … that made savage, if broad, fun of the avarice and corruption of the newly rich, particularly the Shah and his longtime prime minister Hoveyda, with whom Golestan was friends’.52 Treasure tells the story of a rural peasant farmer (Parviz Sayyad) who accidentally discovers an underground treasure trove of gold, jewels and statuary while ploughing his land. To celebrate his new-found riches, he kills the village’s only cow, an act that seems inexplicable to his wife and fellow villagers, who know nothing of his find and conclude he has gone mad. Before long, the peasant begins making regular trips to the city to cash in the gold and other valuable ornaments, returning with all manner of modern appliances and kitsch home decorations, despite the fact that the village is not even connected to the electrical grid. In the city, the jeweller (Sadegh Bahrami) to whom he has been selling the loot is encouraged by his nagging wife (Loreta) to profit even further from the peasant’s mysterious wealth (Figure 1.4). The jeweller’s wife takes

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Figure 1.4  The peasant sells his loot to the greedy jeweller, who seeks to profit from the peasant’s new-found wealth. The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Studio Golestan, Ebrahim Golestan, 1972).

the peasant shopping to her favourite stores where she receives a kickback, and she eventually convinces him to marry a second wife, their servant (Shahnaz Tehrani), who masquerades as the couple’s daughter. The wedding is celebrated at his new home, an oddly phallic shaped building consisting of a tall tower flanked by two domes, which has been designed by Majid (Bahman Zarrinpour), the village teacher-turned-architect. The wedding is attended by a group of metropolitan hipsters, hangers-on who turn the celebrations into a day of orgiastic revelry. Finally, blasting work being undertaken nearby in preparation for a new highway causes not only the new building but also the underground treasury to collapse. This brings the peasant’s extravagant lifestyle crashing to the ground and his source of wealth to implode. To add insult to injury, both wives leave him, and the hangers-on promptly depart. Golestan uses a range of devices to deliver his heavily didactic or overt allegory. For example, the ambitiously modern building appropriates and re-fashions the elements of traditional Islamic architecture. Instead of two minarets and one dome, this building has one minaret flanked by two domes. The phallic structure serves as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on architectural projects undertaken throughout the reigns of both Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah. According to Talinn Grigor, throughout the Pahlavi period, both pre-Islamic and Islamic architectural styles and aesthetics were co-opted in

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the service of the modernizing project, but, as Grigor maintains, these were in fact ‘invented traditions’ appropriated in the service of inventing the nation.53 Indeed, Talin’s account of the bungled construction of Ferdowsi’s mausoleum ‘in the middle of nowhere’ in Tus in the 1930s at the behest of Reza Shah is comically echoed in Treasure. By the 1960s Ferdowsi’s mausoleum was in danger of collapsing. Indeed, as Talin writes, ‘Days after its completion, the tomb began to sink, in part due to humidity in the foundation.’54 In 1964 Mohammad Reza Shah decided that the entire monument should be disassembled and rebuilt, a process that took four years and included the expansion of the site to include space for research, exhibitions and performances of stories from the Shahnameh. The Shah himself, like his father, re-dedicated the monument in 1968.55 According to Naficy, the lavish and decadent wedding ceremony that also serves to inaugurate the peasant’s new home closely echoed the elaborate celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire held at Persepolis in 1971, an event that was of course presided over by the Shah.56 Almost every character in Treasure is a stereotype that personifies one or more of the film’s central concepts, with the pointedly witty and frequently ironic dialogue delivering key messages. More specifically, the central character of the peasant and the teacher-turned-architect Majid can be read as explicit allusions to the Shah and his Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. Like The Cycle, some of the minor characters provide moments of allegorical commentary, while features of the landscape and mise en scène encourage viewers to look for supplementary meaning. In addition, various subplots involving minor characters allude to additional layers of meaning or prompt us to modify our reading of the main storyline. In literary terms, allegory is sometimes referred to as ‘a tropological system’, that is, a mode of expression dependent on tropes or figures of speech that imply something other or more than is literally expressed. While the imagery employed in the construction of allegorical tropes tends to be very specific to a particular work, it is not uncommon for works produced in a closely contingent context to employ a conventionalized series of tropes. Many of the New Wave film-makers used landscape in a tropological fashion as a metonym for the nation. Films such as The Cycle, The Cow, Tall Shadows of the Wind, The Stone Garden, The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar be Mohr, Marva Nabili, 1977) and Treasure are all set in or dominated by barren, dry, rocky or seemingly unfertile

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rural or semi-urban landscapes that serve as more than mere backdrops to the narrative. In metonymy, the part – in this case the land – substitutes for the whole nation. In all of the films mentioned earlier, the modern aspects of the nation are either withheld from view or else figured as distant, threatening or alienating. Importantly, the rural or semi-urban landscape does not serve as an antidote or utopian alternative to the modern city. It is commonly figured as an alienating space that at times seems to oppress or marginalize those that inhabit it. As already mentioned, such spaces point to the concept of disjointed or uneven development that contradicts official narratives of the nation as modern and developed. They also tend to unmask the strategy of modern development that tended to be limited to urban areas. Such landscapes help to build the dystopian view of nation shared by the majority of the New Wave film-makers. In Treasure, the landscape plays several roles in the film’s tropological system. The dry, barren earth features first in the opening sequence, which also functions as a kind of allegorical framing story. As with the opening sequence of The Cycle, viewers are provided with a key to help them decode the narrative to come. The link between the landscape and the nation is made quite explicitly in the opening shots in which we see a group of men traipsing across barren hillsides. In a didactic fashion, a male voice-over explains that ‘a team of surveyors and road engineers left the valley for the trackless heights on the hills’. The voice-over continues, The man who was walking ahead of the line had begun with admiring the beauty of the mountains and had soon drifted into describing his love for this land. … This vast, open country that possessed a force of magic in all its serene and vacant hills and deserts, its broken villages and meagre fields. His friend agreed with him and said: ‘Yes. This is a beautiful region. Pity it is all so wild and lonely.’ The man who was now thinking of the road that was to be built looked around to find a suitable spot to place the surveying gear. It seemed to him that where he was, was good enough. So he ordered the tripod to be placed there.

As the voice-over ends, the film’s title appears, followed by the words, ‘A perspective by Ebrahim Golestan’. These words are superimposed over a medium close-up of the lead surveyor gazing through the viewfinder of his level (Figure 1.5). The way in which they are communicated by an off-screen

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Figure 1.5  The lead surveyor gazing through his viewfinder. The combination of text and image functions as a self-reflexive gesture. The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Studio Golestan, Ebrahim Golestan, 1972).

narrator grant them the quality of a parable and serve as the first hint that the film aims to be instructive. Together, the voice, images and text of this opening sequence form a kind of rebus that invites us to adopt an allegorical way of seeing. It does so by allusively pointing both outwardly to the national context and inwardly to the film itself in a self-reflexive manner. The film’s voice-over reports the surveyor’s love for the land and his admiration for its beauty in a way that suggests that the man, if he were speaking himself, may well have delivered his panegyric to the beauty of the land in poetic verse. We are, however, denied direct access to the surveyor’s words due to the mediating role played by the voice-over, which is delivered in a matter of fact way typical of didactic documentary. This has the effect of producing an ironic disjuncture in the sentiment further reinforced by the barrenness of the landscape through which the surveyors walk. Furthermore, this quality is echoed by the words of the second man: ‘Pity it is all so wild and lonely.’ Here, as in other New Wave films, landscape is configured in such a way that it stands in as a degraded metonym for the nation. This tropological treatment of landscape is further reinforced and granted particularity by the fact that the surveyors and engineers are looking for a suitable place to lay a new road, thereby also allegorizing a concept of progress directly associated with the national modernizing agenda. That the selection of a suitable place is made almost at random adds to the satirical critique developed throughout. As the sequence progresses, the lead surveyor comes to be associated with Golestan himself. This is conveyed by the text that is superimposed over the shot of the

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surveyor looking through a lens, which directly mirrors Golestan’s cinematic lens. In Persian the text reads, ‘Yek cheshm andaz az Ebrahim Golestan’, literally meaning ‘one perspective by Ebrahim Golestan’. The self-referential nature of this text is reinforced by the fact that between 1957 and 1962 Golestan had made a documentary series entitled Perspective (Cheshm Andaz) for the Iran Oil Consortium. Here in Treasure, Golestan at once parodies the documentary form, through the use of voice-over narration, and highlights the fact that the film to come is a ‘perspective’, or we might say a view or opinion put forth by its director. The image of the surveyor gazing through the lens of his level works to underpin this association between this on-screen character and Golestan. Like the fictional surveyor, who is tasked with expanding the country’s modern infrastructure, Golestan had been an integral, if also at times critical, part of the project of modernization as he had produced numerous documentary films for the Iran Oil Company and the Iran Oil Consortium. Such films were designed to showcase the benefits of modern development; however, Golestan returned to feature film-making to make Treasure, his second and final feature film, before leaving Iran for England in 1975. The bitter, satirical tone of Treasure may even suggest that Golestan’s perspective of the state of the nation had shifted significantly since he had produced documentaries such as A Fire (Yek Atash, 1958–61) and Wave, Coral and Rock (Moj o Marjan o Khara, 1958– 61) both of which celebrated modern industrial development and capability.57 Thus, Golestan announces his allegorical intentions and invites his viewers to adopt a similarly allegorical way of seeing. It is perhaps no coincidence that the surveyors and engineers, who, like a film’s director and crew, are an absent presence for the remainder of the film. They ultimately cause the explosion that brings the world of the characters crashing down around them, thus mirroring the director’s authorial power. But here too, the surveyors and engineers serve a double purpose, as they also stand in for the unseen forces of the national agenda of development and modernization, over which ordinary people, such as the peasant at the centre of the film’s fictional story, have little or no control. The allegorical dimensions of Treasure are achieved via a combination of story elements, stereotypical characters, dialogue and mise en scène. In addition, the darkly satirical tone of the film, which relies on exaggeratedly comedic performances, enhances the film’s capacity to destabilize meaning, prompting viewers to think more deeply about the seemingly nonsensical

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events depicted. Like other allegorical films of this period, Treasure makes allusions to a glorious, heroic past, but represents it in a state of decay, serving not as a moral guide, but as a trigger for the materialistic and corrupt behaviour of the characters. Like Qeysar, Treasure alludes to the legendary heroes of the Shahnameh and performs a destructive, allegorizing action upon their legacy. In doing so, the film engages in a cynical critique of how the Pahlavi regime had mobilized this and other aspects of Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage ‘for cultivating a national, imperial image’.58 The underground cavern of treasures featured in the film contains among its piles of golden coins several jewel-encrusted statues depicting mythical beasts and heroic characters reminiscent not only of the stories of the Shahnameh but also of the decorations adorning the ruins at Persepolis, another site that was used to cultivate the Shah’s invented imperial lineage. Throughout the course of the film, we see the peasant gradually dismembering the statues, without even a shred of reverence for the glorious past that they are supposed to represent. Numerous connotations emerge from this: the first and most obvious being the peasant as embodiment of both ignorance and greed. His quaint backwardness allows him to deface and plunder the artefacts purely for economic gain rather than see their cultural value as historic relics that might genuinely connect the past and the present, but we might even take this allegorical reading further if we understand the peasant as an allegorical figuration of the Pahlavi regime, or as a kind of degraded embodiment of the Shah himself. In this sense, we might think of the ideological reification of history and myth that is a typical strategy of most nationalist projects. As Susan Hayward reminds us, ‘Cultural artefacts are made … to represent a nation, to function as evidence of the nation’s distinctiveness.’59 Golestan, among other New Wave film-makers, sought to critique the deployment of Iran’s cultural past in the Pahlavi regime’s construction of its imperial legitimacy. Allusions to the Shahnameh, which narrates the exploits of kings and heroes, figure prominently in the film. This might refer not only to the epic poem’s continued cultural currency, but also to the intensified interest paid to Ferdowsi in the decade preceding the revolution: from the restoration of his tomb in 1968 to the establishment of the Foundation for Shahnameh Studies in 1972.60 That the peasant trades in the disfigured fragments of national culture for all manner of gaudy decorations and modern home appliances levels an indictment of

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frivolous, wasteful consumption against the ruling elite and the wealthy who benefited from the country’s resources and also from the country’s increasingly closer ties with the West. It also seeks to expose the constructedness of the nation’s and, by extension, the Shah’s grand claims to the nation’s cultural heritage. Much later in the film, Golestan dwells further on the idea of plundering the cultural heritage. Once the wedding celebrations are underway, the jeweller, the village mayor and the tea shop owner go out in search of the peasant’s secret treasure trove. A gendarme, who has throughout the film been trying to catch drug dealers, follows them. The jeweller is the first to stumble upon the underground cavern, followed closely by the tea shop owner. A comic struggle ensues, ending in the jeweller being buried under a pile of gold. Next comes the gendarme and finally the mayor. The jeweller, the tea shop owner and the mayor are all driven by greed. The gendarme emblematizes the law, and he becomes a mouthpiece for national ideology. Through him Golestan delivers his critique of the use of cultural artefacts for nation-building purposes. Naficy has criticized the film for its heavy handedness, as though the film-maker did not trust his audience to decipher the allegorical dimensions of the film.61 This is certainly true of the gendarme’s final speech, as he lies dying, having been hit brutally on the head with a golden bowl by the mayor. However, I would argue that, like the musician’s poetry in The Cycle, the gendarme’s words function allegorically as a commentary on the images, by the images themselves, giving his speech a self-reflexive dimension typical of overt allegories. The gendarme begins by chastising the tea shop owner and mayor for attempting to steal the treasures, saying, ‘These are archaeological relics. You should have informed the Ministry of Arts and Culture.’ He then asserts himself as a representative of the state, and as his speech continues he declares that the objects need to be safeguarded because ‘they are the Fatherland’. As he says these words, he raises a gold cup in the air, a likely allusion to the cup of Jamshid, an object that is mythically associated with the longevity of the Persian Empire. Later, the gendarme reinforces the role that such artefacts – and the legends that accompany them – play in the construction of a seemingly unbroken lineage from the past to the present. He appeals to the mayor, saying that he has a duty to ‘maintain the traditions of your ancestors and to hand them over to the next generation’. Next, the gendarme, who recognizes he

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is dying, begins to align himself with the legendary heroes. He says, ‘It’s an honour to die defending the glories of the past’ and in reference to a jewelencrusted dagger the tea shop owner has found, he exclaims, ‘Fratricide with paternal dagger!’ Here, the gendarme produces a mixed allusion, framing himself and the mayor as brothers, with the ‘paternal dagger’ referring in general terms both to the treasures of the fatherland and more specifically to the dagger with which Rostam is fabled to have killed Sohrab, his long lost son who he does not recognize until it is too late. In his final speech before he dies, the gendarme aligns himself directly with Siavash, another hero immortalized in the Shahnameh. Referring to the golden bowl with which the mayor hit him over the head, the gendarme says, ‘The head of our great legendary hero, Siavash, also rolled into a golden basin. For centuries we, the heroes, have been sacrificed but our line has lingered on and will endure.’ He adds, ‘Only, it’s a pity that the line of crooks such as you also lasts and lingers.’ He then promptly dies a histrionic death. Here the gendarme stands in as an emblem of the national armed forces as he self-consciously and unquestioningly sees himself as a direct descendant of the legendary heroes, whose exploits have been idealized in the service of nationalist ideology. In the context of the film, however, this is ironic as he is depicted as bumbling and paranoid, a far cry from the heroes he wishes to emulate. Golestan adds a further twist to the gendarme’s dying words, in his allusion to a ‘long line of crooks that’, paralleling the supposed longevity of the heroes, ‘also endure’. Another way that Golestan announces the film’s allegorical intention is through a conversation between the painter and Majid (the teacher-turnedarchitect) that occurs during the final minutes of the film. In the wake of the explosion that brings the peasant’s new home crashing to the ground and causes the underground treasure trove to collapse, the two wander off to reflect on the events that have occurred. The sequence begins with Majid lamenting the destruction of the work he had accomplished in helping the peasant to build his desert empire, which will now, in the wake of destruction, remain incomplete. He complains that it all came to an end ‘with a few shakes, just because roads are being built’. Majid’s lamentations are clearly self-serving, as the destruction also signals the end of his own upward mobility, which was achieved only by leeching off the peasant. The comment about the roads also indicates a broader level of self-interest over and above the benefit that the

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expansion of infrastructure might bring to remote communities. The painter answers Majid’s complaints with a reality check by saying, ‘Well, it was a sham, it was flimsy,’ a statement that could refer literally to the physical structures that have fallen and also figuratively to the scenario of the new-found wealth. Even further, the statement could also apply to the film itself as an allegorical work, ‘a sham’ in that it is not what it purports to be on the surface. As the dialogue continues, Majid then goes on to attribute the downfall and destruction to an external force: ‘No, the earth shook.’ The painter answers with the retort: ‘It didn’t shake by itself. It was shaken,’ and when Majid dismisses the difference between the two statements, the painter adds, ‘If it shakes by itself, it is fate. This was shaken by men.’ But Majid persists, ‘It comes to the same thing – destruction.’ At this point, the painter offers a further interpretation: ‘The first destruction is tragedy, the second is sometimes even a farce. Small people, when they’re caught up in farce, call it tragedy, to fool themselves, to brag.’ Later, the conversation turns to reflect on the motivations that brought each of them to work for the peasant. Majid suggest that they are similar in that the painter also came to work. The painter says, ‘I came to paint what I saw, the way I saw.’ In this sense, his role as an artist seems reminiscent of the role that Golestan establishes for himself at the beginning of the film. Yet, as the conversation continues, the painter offers an absurd and arguably intellectual and elitist explanation of how the scenario eventually unfolded. When Majid reminds the painter that his creation was also destroyed along with the building, the painter retorts with a series of platitudes saying that it was this act of destruction that finally allowed the painting to be finished. Earlier we had seen the painting fall to the ground and overturned pots of paint in various colours spilling out to transform it from a surrealist, figurative painting into a messy minimalist abstraction before it is finally buried beneath the rubble. He concludes excitedly, ‘It was a happening!’ At this, Majid returns to the question of causality that opened the scene, throwing the painter’s own argument back at him. Majid asks whether the painter can really take any credit for the work. According to the painter’s own logic it should matter who or what caused an event; however, now, in reference to his own art he applies a seemingly contradictory logic. The painter responds with yet another aphoristic statement that does little to answer Majid’s question: ‘Oh, what is my shame? Credit! The essential thing is doing the work, not working for the credit.’

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Like the gendarme, as emblematic stereotypes, these characters inflect the film with a further degree of self-reflexivity. In part, they serve as on-screen mouthpieces for Golestan by engaging in a quasi-Socratic dialogue that highlights the fact that any event or statement might be open to interpretation or, more importantly, filled with contradictory meaning. Indeed, the unresolved nature of their debate seems to bring into question the very capacity of the film-maker to provide a singular perspective: yek cheshm andaz. The meaning of any event is always unstable and open not only to multiple meanings, but susceptible to self-serving or ideologically inflected interpretations. Ultimately, the film hoped to unmask these, together with its own processes. Like many other socially critical and allegorical New Wave films, Treasure was affected by censorship, receiving only a short three-week run in the cinemas before it was banned. According to Abbas Milani, ‘It was a measure of the cultural illiteracy of the Iranian censors that Golestan’s film, in spite of its overt allusions to both Hoveyda and the Shah, was allowed to be shown in Tehran cinemas.’62 According to Naficy, ‘Golestan claimed high-level Savak officials and government dignitaries saw the film … but “they did not recognise themselves. They thought it was a continuation of Sayyad’s comic television series [sic] involving the character Samad.”’63 There are conflicting accounts of how the film was banned, one in which Hoveyda himself ‘decoded its subversive imagery to a confused royal audience’ and another in which the film’s ‘explosive message’ was explained in a fifteen-page report by a highranking security official.64 According to Golestan, ‘The spectators understood the film’s allegory, that is why they liked it.’65

Conclusion In this chapter I have shown that allegory has been an enduring mode of expression in Iranian cinema. A film like Mr Haji the Movie Actor was concerned with promoting the modern medium of cinema and was therefore aligned with Reza Shah’s ambitions to modernize Iranian society in the first half of the twentieth century. By the late 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers had emerged. They aimed not only to introduce greater quality to Iranian film production, but began to express dissent and resentment of

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Mohammad Reza Shah’s expansion of the modernizing project begun by his father Reza Shah. For many New Wave film-makers, allegory became the preferred mode of expression, in part because it provided some protection against censorship. More importantly, the New Wave films discussed in this chapter all utilize allegory as a mode of resistance, aimed at exposing the various contradictions and corruptions that had come with the rapid and uneven modernization under Mohammad Reza Shah. They also attempted to blast open the mythic constructions of national ideology, through which the Shah built an image of imperial heritage and legitimacy to underpin his bid for absolute power. In the early 1960s, the Shah had sacked the parliament (Majlis) in his attempt to push forward plans for further economic modernization and nation-building. This culminated in the White Revolution, a series of reforms that commenced in 1963. At the heart of this was a major land reform legislation designed to remove farmlands from the control of minority landowners and redistribute them via rural co-operatives to the peasants that worked the land. It is therefore no surprise that the land and landscape should figure prominently in the tropological system of these filmic allegories. As Ali Ansari has highlighted, ‘The Shah also tried to harness the White Revolution as a vehicle for unifying the country by ostensibly giving peasants a stake in the economic welfare of the state’ and in doing so ‘releasing them from their “servitude” to ruthless and exploitative landlords’.66 However, the reforms were met with opposition from a variety of sectors with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. This included the landed aristocracy and the clerical establishment (ulama). Historical assessments of this period highlight the fact that while the Iranian economy grew steadily throughout the 1960s, due in large measure to the increasing oil revenues, the broader socioeconomic benefits that the White Revolution was meant to deliver fell well short of expectation. The films discussed here all point to a variety of these shortcomings, some of them even expressing outright dissent, others dreaming of rising up against authoritarian rule. The 1970s would be a tumultuous period for the country, with waves of opposition to both the Shah and encroaching Westernization eventually rising to a crescendo in 1978 with the onset of the Iranian revolution that would bring about the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. This not only would

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cause enormous upheaval in the film industry but would also lead to the rise of one of the most creative and dynamic art cinemas in film history. I will turn my attention to the allegorical dimensions of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in the next chapter, where I examine the role of children. While my focus is primarily on the post-revolutionary period, I begin with an analysis of Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Un Shab keh Barun Umad … ya Hamaseh-ye Rustazadeh-ye Gorgani, 1967).

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In his account of the role of children in Iranian cinema, Hamid Reza Sadr seems to suggest that the presence of children on-screen grants them a higher degree of realism, compared with adults. He writes, ‘Because children have an existence in the world independent of their film appearances, we can believe that they are more real than other characters. This guaranteed the reality of the values they embody.’1 This reading is based on an assumption that their film performances retain traces of their existence in the world outside the film and that they bring this authenticity to the characters they depict within the diegetic world. However, if we look more closely, Sadr is not suggesting that they are actually more real, but rather that they might instil in viewers a greater belief in their reality effect. By virtue of this, Sadr adds, the values they embody seem somehow more real. Indeed, it is this latter interpretation that I believe neatly encapsulates the kind of allegorical work performed by child characters in many Iranian films. While he does not name it specifically, Sadr is describing the allegorical process of personification, where a character stands in for, or embodies, a concept, theme or value. Importantly, as I will argue in this chapter, by virtue of this reality effect, children could be used to model desirable values and affirm certain nation-building processes. Alternately, they could be used to resist such processes, promoting sociocultural critique, prompting viewers to call aspects of dominant ideology into question. Others are, more self-reflexively, aimed at interrogating the very nature of representational realism itself. Within the field of Iranian cinema studies, much attention has already been paid to the burgeoning of films featuring child protagonists in the post-revolutionary period. This trend can be linked to various aspects of the sociopolitical and industrial context. For example, the Centre for the

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Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun-e Parvaresh-e Fekri-e Kudakan va Nojavanan or Kanun for short) played a key role throughout the 1980s as one of the few sources of training, funding and equipment available to young film-makers. Kanun was founded in 1966 under the Shah, well before the revolution, and is one of the few cultural organizations to survive into the post-revolutionary period. Its mandate is not only educative but also indirectly served as an important training ground for some of Iran’s most important art film-makers including Abbas Kiarostami, who made his first short film Bread and Alley (Nan va Kucheh, 1970) at Kanun. In addition, as Naficy has argued, Kanun ‘contributed to the formation of the culture and literature of resistance’.2 Protected from the demands of the commercial film industry, many of the productions countered the hegemony of the local industry. Aside from Kiarostami, numerous other prominent members of what would become the Iranian New Wave directed short films under the umbrella of Kanun, including Bahram Bayzai (Amu Sibilou/Uncle Moustache, 1969), Nasser Taghvai (Rahaei/Freedom, 1971) and Masoud Kimiai (Pesar-e Sharghi/The Oriental Boy, 1974).3 During the first decade after the revolution, Kanun was responsible for producing several of the most important child-centred films of that period including The Runner (Davandeh, Amir Naderi, 1985), Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak, Bahram Bayzai, 1987) and Where Is the Friend’s House (Khaneh-ye Dust Kojast?, Abbas Kiarostami, 1986). These films took the international film festival circuit by storm and helped to secure Iranian cinema’s place as one of the most innovative new cinema movements of the period. Aside from the important role played by Kanun in providing directors of post-revolutionary art films a conducive environment for producing quality films, the prevalence of child-centred films in the 1980s and 1990s has also been attributed to the impact of strict censorship guidelines. This was particularly true during the first decade after the revolution when filmmakers were still testing the limits of the rules, particularly as they pertained to interactions between men and women. These rules, which are in part based on Islamic guidelines regarding gender relations, prohibit close physical interaction and even direct eye contact between unrelated men and women. Some scholars therefore have argued that children often serve as surrogates for the unrepresentable intimacy between adults. As Sadr writes, pointing

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explicitly to their allegorical function, ‘Children have been cast in Iranian films as majestic statues of men and women, and sometimes as everyone’s alter egos.’4 As we will see in this chapter, children have been used both to affirm and resist dominant culture and ideology, and they would also play a decisive role in the purification of cinema in the Islamicate era. The chapter will begin with a close analysis of Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Un Shab keh Barun Umad … ya Hamaseh-ye Rustazadeh-ye Gorgani, 1967). I will argue that Shirdel’s film takes the form of an allegorical palimpsest to mount a poetic and cinematically bold resistance to the kind of mythic narration of the nation promoted during the Pahlavi era. In this sense, it bears close resemblance to some of the New Wave films discussed in Chapter 1 and can therefore be seen as an early progenitor of that movement, which reached its height in the mid-1970s and continued to resonate into the art film practice in the post-revolutionary period. I will then turn to look closely at two films of the post-revolutionary era: Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, 1997) and Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997). I will demonstrate the ways in which Majidi’s film utilizes personification allegory and immersive strategies of cinematic focalization to promote certain key values. In this sense, the film can be said to take part in the task of purifying the nation. By contrast, Panahi’s self-reflexive film, which was produced in the same year, works to deconstruct and subtly critique exactly the kind of reality effect that so many child-centred films, such as Children of Heaven, seem to produce. I also propose that The Mirror can be viewed as a post-revolutionary counterpart to Shirdel’s The Night It Rained, as it too casts a critical eye on the state project of using of film to monumentalize the nation.

The allegorical palimpsest: Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (1967) In 1965, Kamran Shirdel returned to Iran after studying architecture, design, fashion and cinema in Italy. Although he was never trained in documentary film-making, he was offered a position by the Ministry of Arts and Culture, one among a small army of film-makers ostensibly commissioned to document the outcomes of the Shah’s White Revolution.5 In reality, however, the kinds of

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films envisioned by the Ministry amounted to propaganda in praise of the regime in the lead-up to Mohammad Reza Shah’s self-coronation in October 1967. Shirdel, however, who had been inspired by the Italian neo-realist films he had seen during his studies, trained his camera on the dark side of Iranian modernity. His work thus revealed some of the contradictions of the White Revolution, such as the rising levels of poverty in urban centres, resulting from the influx of people from rural areas seeking work. His 1966 film Tehran Is the Capital of Iran (Tehran, Payetakht-e Iran Ast) never saw the light of day, and Shirdel was promptly fired from his position in the Ministry. However, in 1967, he was invited back and was offered the opportunity to redeem himself. He was ordered to make an epic film celebrating the heroic story of a village boy who had, according to a newspaper report, prevented a potential disaster by alerting a train driver to a collapsed railway bridge by setting his jacket alight and waving it above his head. Upon arriving in the village with his crew, Shirdel discovered that accounts of the event were highly contradictory, throwing the veracity of the newspaper report into doubt. Even the train in question was not a passenger train, but a freight train, thus exposing the media’s brazen exaggeration of the boy’s actions. Throughout much of the film, the eponymous boy is noticeably absent, having reportedly taken his father to the city for medical tests. This in itself can be read as an indirect commentary on the lack of medical care in remote areas of the country. The boy, therefore, functions as something of an absent protagonist throughout the film, making him all the more emblematic, not of mythic heroism, but rather of social conditions. This absent presence affords Shirdel the opportunity to produce a film that cleverly resists the terms of his contract and reveals much more about society than a newspaper report or a film about the actions of an apparently heroic boy possibly could. The resulting film is far from the ‘epic’ commissioned by the Ministry. Instead, it functions as a self-reflexive allegorical investigation aimed at highlighting the power of individuals and media organizations to construct their own version(s) of ‘reality’ in support of, or in resistance to, the prevailing ideology.6 Throughout the film, we are reminded of the power of institutions such as newspapers, schools and the government to shape so-called reality according to the overarching aims of the state. The evocation of the epic in the newspaper reports and the ministry’s commission of the film, which

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was supposed to produce a modern-day epic, with an ordinary village boy at its centre, reminds us of the ways that Iran’s cultural heritage was used for nation-building purposes throughout the Pahlavi dynasty.7 That the alleged actions of the boy were supposedly inspired by a story in his schoolbook also hints at the role ascribed to education under Mohammad Reza Shah. According to David Menashri, educational reforms introduced through the White Revolution tended to ‘equate education and patriotism’, the Shah maintaining that ‘education was a prime agent for developing national consciousness and safeguarding national unity’.8 Arguably, the documentary unit within the Ministry of Arts and Culture that had commissioned the film also played an important role in developing this national consciousness. As Hamid Naficy has argued, under the Shah a form of ‘statist documentary’ evolved as an ‘ideological apparatus to bolster the state ideology and the person of the Shah’.9 Shirdel’s film radically resists the formulaic statist documentary through his unique and innovative cinematic style that reveals his trenchant refusal to narrate the nation in the preferred epic and celebratory mode. The Night It Rained is a stylistically original and inventive film and cannot be easily classified as either a documentary or a fictional film. It shares characteristics with a range of innovative film-making practices and may be considered a precursor to later Iranian films that blur the lines between fiction and documentary such as Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, Abbas Kiarostami, 1990), A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996), The Apple (Sib, Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998) and of course Panahi’s The Mirror, which will be discussed later in this chapter. The film also performs a self-reflexive gesture by documenting and reflecting on its own process of production. In addition to this, Shirdel’s use of still and moving images, as well as dialectical montage, recalls Dziga Vertov’s landmark Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929). This is then blended with techniques reminiscent of the ethnographic film practice of Jean Rouch, particularly the self-reflexive approach taken in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été, 1961).10 In addition, Shirdel’s penchant for ironic juxtaposition closely echoes that of German film-maker Alexander Kluge, who is renowned for collapsing distinctions between fictional and documentary elements, use of ironically pitched voice-over and juxtaposition of conflicting perspectives. Importantly,

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like Kluge, Shirdel largely leaves it up to the viewer to fill in the gaps opened up by his disjunctive cinematic discourse. We might, following Christian Metz, say that the film engages in a unique process of ‘redoubling’, in which the film that Shirdel produced is shadowed or doubled by another film, which remains unmade but still somehow present as a virtual film within the film. While The Night It Rained does not fit neatly into any of the types of the ‘films within film’ discussed by Metz, it shares several elements with such films that make use of this reflexive figure. For example, Metz theorizes that some films consist of a primary film within which there exists a secondary film. In some instances, the secondary film consists of an invisible film that is ‘behind’ and no longer ‘inside’ the primary film.11 By adopting a style that makes use of a range of enunciative strategies and levels of narration, Shirdel’s film simultaneously shows the process of making a film and the ‘unmaking’ of what we might call the ‘primary’ film that he was commissioned to make, that is, The Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy. This redoubling, which I argue is used here as an allegorical strategy, is further evidenced by the fact that Shirdel’s film bears two titles joined by the conjunction ‘or’: The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy. Towards the end of the film we see (black text on a white screen) and hear (read in voice-over) a letter from Shirdel to the Ministry asking for consent for the film to be entitled ‘The Night It Rained’, in light of the ‘significance of the rain which occurred on the night of the incident’. Indeed, by the end of the film, the rain is the only detail that can be verified with any degree of certainty. That the completed film bears both titles suggests that viewers must decide for themselves which title best fits the completed film. The film’s allegorical intentions are announced in the very opening shots by a montage of massive reams of newsprint that suddenly burst into life as they roll through the presses. Aesthetically, these images closely mimic the format of the industrial documentary and recall the treatment of filmstrips in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. However, as the film progresses, we come to recognize these images as a metonym for the press, which the film also treats as a metonym for dominant ideology in the service of which stories are crafted in specific ways for nation-building purposes. This montage then cuts to a shot of the front page of a newspaper, with the headline announcing: ‘Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy’. A male voice-over

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reads both the headline and some of the text: ‘His bravery in saving 200 passengers calls to mind the heroes of antiquity.’ As discussed in Chapter 1, such appeals to the legendary heroes, whose stories were immortalized in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Persian national epic, were common during the Pahlavi era. The regime adopted these and other aspects of Persian history in the service of narrating a supposed lineage from the great Persian kings and heroes to their own rule, in order to provide an air of historical legitimacy. In this single shot, therefore, Shirdel presents us with numerous narrative levels that interact with one another in complex ways to produce a palimpsest of perspectives. In his discussion of post-modern allegory, the art critic Craig Owens argues, following Northrop Frye, that allegory is neither mere interpretation nor ‘rhetorical ornament or flourish’.12 Rather, allegory bears a ‘metatextual aspect’ by which the ‘allegorical work tends to prescribe the direction of its own commentary’.13 Like Frye, Owens emphasizes the importance of structure: ‘In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest.’ He explains further that the allegorist appropriates imagery: ‘The allegorist does not invent images, but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter.’14 This definition of the allegorical process provides important clues for understanding the various layers of Shirdel’s own complex allegorical discourse. On one level, the State’s commission of the film, which is selfreflexively, or we might say metatextually inscribed into the film, is revealed by Shirdel to be itself underpinned by appropriated imagery, a state-driven allegorical impulse. The invocation of the Shahnameh in the State’s project of constructing stories of modern-day heroism through figures such as the boy from Gorgan is in itself a form of allegory, albeit a heavily didactic and totalizing one. In The Night It Rained, Shirdel is keen to reveal the very mechanisms that are used to produce totalizing, nation-building allegories. He does so initially by revealing that the film he was commissioned to make should have been just such a nation-building allegory, in that it was supposed to bring to life an inspiring story of an ordinary village boy who became a hero through an act of selflessness and ingenuity. The film also points to a range of other

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means by which the nation is textually produced and how those texts are set to work within the nation. Late in the film, Shirdel films school children standing for assembly in the schoolyard. They sing the Imperial Anthem, Sorud-e Shahanshahi-e Iran, while the flag is raised. The lyrics of the anthem, which was commissioned by Reza Shah and inaugurated in 1933, celebrate the achievements of the Pahlavi dynasty in bringing ‘development’ and ‘peace’ to the country. They also reinforce the narrative of ‘rightful’ inheritance: ‘We are the heirs of Kianis’ line’, that is, the line of kings stretching back to the pre-Islamic period, those very kings that Ferdowsi had immortalized in the Shahnameh. Yet another layer of this palimpsest of state-commissioned textual production is introduced moments later as we cut to the schoolroom, where one boy is reading aloud a story from his third-grade Persian textbook. The story tells of Riz-Ali, a man who courageously set his jacket alight to alert a train driver of a collapsed railway bridge further along the track.15 While the boy reads, the rest of the pupils silently mouth the words – an allusion to rote learning – as the camera pans across their faces in imitation of an educational documentary. Earlier, the governor general had remarked how closely the boy’s heroic actions had been modelled on the story of Riz-Ali, while images of the illustrated schoolbook are shown. This coincidence between the schoolbook story and the boy’s alleged actions are reinforced even further several minutes later when we are finally introduced to the eponymous boy, and he is asked to recount his version of events. He delivers the story in a one-shot facing the camera (Figure 2.1). He speaks rapidly, barely stopping to take a breath as though he has remembered the story by heart. Once again, Shirdel cuts to images from the textbook as the boy explains that he had consciously tried to emulate Riz-Ali. This brings together a constellation of disparate details, including the original newspaper report, the testimonies of the Kayhan reporter, the governor general, the Imperial Anthem, the school textbook, the boy’s own version of the story, as well as the ‘epic’ film that Shirdel had been commissioned to make, which is textually inscribed into the film via letters from the ministry to the film-maker. Shirdel’s treatment of these elements serves to highlight the ideological work involved in the textual production of a national consciousness.

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Figure 2.1  The boy tells his story as if he has remembered it by heart. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967).

To reinforce the exposure of this manufactured consciousness, the film is structured to provide viewers access to a kind of double vision. Through one frame we are made aware of the ideologically correct reading of the boy’s actions, as an affirmation of the success of the state educational program, which is overseen by the gallant, muscular, almost heroic-looking Literacy Corps Officer. Shirdel generates a counter-view via a competing set of textual, visual and aural layers that interrupt, resist and call into question those nationbuilding efforts. The first, overarching layer is provided by Shirdel’s implicit resistance to producing the commissioned epic. This is achieved not only through the letters from Shirdel to the ministry that appear intermittently throughout the film but also through the disjunctive and self-reflexive structure of the film and by its use of a range of cinematic modalities: ethnographic, poetic, documentary, dialectical. Numerous times throughout the film we see the film crew at work, sometimes shown in still photographs, other times by way of moving images or by aural interjections from off-screen (Figure 2.2). In addition, at the beginning of several interviews, we see the clapperboard used to mark the scene and

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Figure 2.2  The film is interspersed with shots of the crew at work. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967).

take number. Through this detail, the processes of construction involved in film-making are laid bare, and we are reminded that even in documentary filmmaking, several takes or ‘versions’ of a scene might be shot: the documentary form is not in fact raw or unmediated. In one of the early ethnographic scenes we even hear directions being given from off-screen to one of the villagers who appears in a one-shot. A voice says, ‘Higher, still higher. OK. That’s it. That’s what we call acting!’ (Figure 2.3). This is repeated moments later with another villager. These details blur the distinction between fiction and documentary and in doing so call into question the status of so-called facts. The facts of the case are disputed more directly by several counter testimonies, as well as by inconsistencies between testimonies. The most compelling of these alternative perspectives comes from the editor of the Shomal-e Iran newspaper. Following several minutes of interview material with the Kayhan correspondent, the film cuts to the office of the Shomal-e Iran newspaper where we see three workers sorting the metal glyphs used for typesetting, before the camera pans right to reveal the editor of the newspaper. This shot functions in much the same way as the self-reflexive scenes of the

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Figure 2.3  Ethnographic scenes are treated self-reflexively. Villagers receive instructions from off-screen: ‘Higher, still higher. OK. That’s it. That’s what we call acting!’ The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967).

film crew by reminding viewers of the processes of construction that go into the production of a newspaper. This has the effect of subtly aligning Shirdel’s film with the decidedly sceptical perspective of the Shomal-e Iran editor, who vigorously challenges the veracity of the Kayhan story. His frustrations about what he sees more as a farce than an epic become evident through his gestures and words indicating that he is fed up being asked about the tale: ‘Always the blasted village boy!’ Throughout this section of the film, Shirdel employs a kind of dialectical montage as he cuts between the two newspaper editors and the governor general, placing their conflicting perspectives into direct contrast without, however, reconciling them into any synthesis. Interspersed within the interview material, Shirdel introduces another dissenting voice that becomes a kind of poetic refrain throughout the film. We see a close-up of a man’s hands fingering a string of prayer beads paired with a voice-over exclaiming, ‘It’s a pack of lies, sir!’ This image and anonymous exclamation recurs four times during this interview sequence. It is not until much later in the film that the identity of the man is revealed to be Amir Kamali, chief of freight trains at Bandar Shah station. He is interviewed together with another man. When asked what he thinks about the story of the Gorgan village boy, the other man replies that it was railway staff, not the boy that stopped the train. The image then cuts back to the close-up of the hands of Amir Kamali fingering his prayer beads, as an off-screen voice asks about claims that the boy had set his coat alight. Cutting back to a two-shot of both

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men we now see him voice the words that have been repeatedly uttered until now, only in voice-over: ‘It’s pure lies, sir,’ adding, ‘Do you really think that on that night when it was raining cats and dogs, anyone could have pulled out a match and set fire to anything?’ The off-screen voice then asks, ‘So you think it’s all a lie.’ The two men respond in unison: ‘A pure lie. Yes, sir, it’s all made up.’ It is with this sentiment that Shirdel begins to bring the film to a close. Shirdel cuts to a montage of shots around the railway yard, showing business as usual, accompanied on the soundtrack by the disjunctive and slightly mocking twang of a temir komuz (jaw harp) together with the atmospheric sounds of steam engines and train whistles. This is followed by Shirdel’s correspondence with the ministry asking that the film be titled ‘The Night It Rained’. The letters then give way to a disjunctive montage of fragments of the divergent perspectives gathered throughout the film, a kind of chaotic summation. The final images of the film show the boy running away from the camera along railway tracks towards a seemingly eternal vanishing point. The shots play out in fast motion while the words ‘It’s all lies, it’s all lies’ are repeated in a cacophony of echoes on the soundtrack (Figure 2.4). As the image collapses to a small letterbox framed in black, the final word is given to a song, sung by an elderly male voice in praise of the heroic boy and thereby reminding us of ways in which narratives of nation can be produced and disseminated, even far from the centre of power.

Figure 2.4  Closing image: ‘It’s all lies, it’s all lies’. The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Iranian Ministry of Arts and Culture, Kamran Shirdel, 1967).

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The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy is a good example of what we might call ‘aesthetic resistance’ used in the service of defying the representational systems of dominant ideology. Rather than placing the boy himself at the centre of the narrative and constructing him as the hero desired by the ministry, Shirdel’s film makes use of the boy’s absence to lay bare and undermine the use of film more generally, as an educative tool for fusing education and patriotism. Instead of delivering a patriotic and totalizing allegory, the film’s disjunctive and dialectical allegorical style produces a palimpsest of perspectives that encourages spectators to become part of the interpretive process, rejecting the formula whereby audiences are addressed as though they belong to a homogeneous pre-constituted national consciousness. In the post-revolutionary era, cinema would be used to simultaneously nullify the Pahlavi national consciousness critiqued by Shirdel and to establish a new collective consciousness appropriate for the newly established Islamic Republic. Films featuring children played an important part in this process, but, like Shirdel, other film-makers have used such films for more resistant purposes. I now turn to look at two key examples of these opposing tendencies.

Children as emblems of a new society: Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) During the tumultuous revolution of 1978/9, commercial cinema, which was seen by many as a symbol of immodest, despotic Westernization, came under violent attack. Cinemas across the country were ransacked, some of them burnt to the ground: across the country, film-making all but ground to a halt. However, in the wake of the revolution, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who returned to Iran from exile in early 1979, quickly recognized the powerful role cinema could play in reconstituting and re-educating Iranian society. Indeed, in his first speech after his return from exile in 1979, ‘he declared that he was not against cinema per se, but against its “misuse”.’16 Negar Mottahedeh has evocatively described how Iranian cinema in the post-revolutionary era played a key role in purifying and regenerating the national sensorium, which had been ‘raised on Hollywood’s voyeurism’. This involved, she argued, the ‘technological reconstitution of a body that would be modest and sacred’. Mottahedeh continues, ‘Sanctified and freed

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from global influences, the collective body would return to national labor by mimetically adopting the posture promoted by the newly purified gaze of the film camera.’17 Films featuring children played an important role in purifying the gaze of the camera and viewer alike. In addition to adopting the rules of modesty, many of these films also modelled a set of ideal values that could be mimetically emulated by the collective body and mind. Such films contributed to the establishment of a post-revolutionary cinema that conformed to the Islamic values that underpinned the formation of the Islamic Republic, although this did not lead to the formation of a strictly ‘Islamic’ cinema. Hamid Naficy uses the term ‘Islamicate’ to refer to the cinema of the post-revolutionary period to distinguish between cinema made in a ‘predominantly Muslim country’ and an ‘Islamic’ cinema, which would be one that ‘is about the religion of Islam and its tenets, characters, and stories’.18 While the majority of films produced in Iran since the revolution are not overtly about Islam, Iran’s Islamicate cinema would necessarily conform to and in many cases promote Islamicate culture and values. The defining concepts that underpin these values include theocracy, monotheism, ethics and moralism, modesty, martyrdom and purification, as well as political and economic independence. These form the basis of dominant ideology in the post-revolutionary era. Censorship guidelines played an important role in ensuring that films did not contradict or criticize these values, although as this book attests, many film-makers found indirect ways – including allegory – to resist dominant ideology and mount criticism of contemporary Iranian society. As I argue here, however, allegorical strategies can also provide ways of promoting and propagating dominant values. Just as the epic film that Shirdel was commissioned to make was intended to promote and uphold certain aspects of dominant ideology under Mohammad Reza Shah, so too many of the child-centred films of the post-revolutionary period functioned as didactic parables delivering to viewers – young and old – practical lessons on how to take their place in the newly imagined community. In some cases, these parables take on an allegorical quality when characters are used to personify values and concepts such as patience, honesty, compassion and ethics, as well as becoming national allegories when these values and concepts tend towards the promotion of national belonging.

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One film that perfectly exemplifies this tendency and also contributes to the purification and sanctification of the cinematic gaze is Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven. While the film is not overtly religious in its subject matter, it does at times foreground the religious environment in which its characters are immersed through the mise en scène and soundtrack. This is typical of Majidi’s cinematic practice more generally. All of his films feature characters faced by personal challenges and dilemmas and their ability to overcome adversity tends to be linked closely to their faith. Kanun produced the film, and it was widely screened and appreciated internationally. This demonstrates Majidi’s capacity to craft films that speak not only to specific Islamicate values but also to the values associated more broadly with a kind of universal humanism. Like the majority of films produced by Kanun, Children of Heaven features non-professional child actors in the lead roles, although it is not necessarily pitched only to young viewers. The film tells the simple story of a brother and sister, Ali (Amir Farrokh Hashemian) and Zahra (Bahare Seddiqi). Living on the edge of poverty, they are faced with a dilemma when Ali loses Zahra’s only pair of shoes, preventing her from attending school. Zahra’s first instinct is to tell her father; however, Ali is reluctant to do so, not because he might be punished. Rather, he knows his parents are short of money and does not want to contribute to their worries. Showing the characteristic resourcefulness and determination typical of other Iranian child protagonists, Ali hatches a plan to share his shoes with Zahra. She will wear them to school in the morning and then race home in time for Ali to get to his afternoon classes. Unfortunately, this means that Ali will inevitably arrive late at school each day and will be reprimanded by his headmaster. One day at school, Ali sees an opportunity to win a new pair of sneakers. To do so, he needs to be accepted onto the school’s running team and to come third in the district marathon. All of the running to school has prepared Ali well, and he is accepted onto the team, only to inadvertently take out first place in the race. He is devastated. However, his patience, forbearance and determination will ultimately be rewarded indirectly. In the penultimate scene of the film, we see his father out shopping new shoes for both children clearly visible on the rack of his bicycle. In the final scene, however, Majidi withholds from the viewer the moment when their father returns with the new shoes, instead ending on a peaceful and contemplative image of Ali soaking his blistered feet in the family’s courtyard pond, several

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goldfish appearing to tend his wounds. In winning the race, Ali certainly feels that he has failed his sister; however, he is not shown to be angry or bitter, but rather peaceful and resigned. The film uses melodrama as its primary cinematic modality, building emotional resonance largely through music.19 In addition, Majidi replaces the voyeuristic gaze of dominant cinema with one that is appropriately modest and purified. This is achieved by focalizing the narrative events almost exclusively through the perspective and experiences of the two young children. This blend of melodrama and focalization fosters emotional engagement and encourages viewers to tap into the experiential life of the children, thereby enabling the film to subtly align its audience with certain values that are coded as desirable. These ideals include cooperation, patience, forbearance, restraint, diligence, contrition, care, compassion, hard work, generosity and persistence. In allegorical terms, these values are not merely personified by the two children, but, through cinematic focalization, given experiential expression, and this is what makes them mimetically accessible to viewers. According to Edward Brannigan, cinematic focalization differs significantly from processes of narration. He writes, Focalization (reflection) involves a character neither speaking (narrating, reporting, communicating) nor acting (focusing, focused by), but rather actually experiencing something through seeing or hearing it. Focalization also extends to more complex experiencing of objects: thinking, remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing, desiring, understanding, feeling guilt.20

It is this experiential dimension that distinguishes focalization from narration: focalization shows rather than tells. I would argue that while Children of Heaven certainly has a pedagogical intent, it achieves this aim not by telling its viewers what to think or do, but rather by helping them to experience its lessons by seeing, hearing and feeling through the perspective of the children. Brannigan identifies two main types of focalization in cinema: external and internal. He writes, ‘External focalization represents a measure of character awareness but from outside the character. It is semi-subjective in the manner of an eyeline match.’21 Other techniques for achieving external focalization include the camera following or anticipating character movements, following a character’s attention while they are looking at something and observing their range of

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expressions. These expressions ‘invite us to imagine the character’s thoughts’. Often, we will see what a character looks at, but not from that character’s ‘unique spatial position’ so that we are encouraged to ‘infer that we have seen what [the character] has seen and how he [or she] has seen it’.22 In Children of Heaven, Majidi utilizes the full range of these techniques of external focalization, which also importantly includes shots framed from the height of a small child. This is combined with some literal point-of-view shots, which help to foster even closer alignment between the viewer and the experiential world of the characters. Indeed, this alignment is arguably so successful that even when the children are absent from a scene, an ostensibly objective shot (for example, a lingering close-up on a pair of shoes) can encourage us to experience those objects in anticipation (or recollection) of the child’s experiential perspective. A few examples will help to demonstrate Majidi’s use of external focalization. The film is peppered with sequences in which the camera tracks and anticipates the children’s movement, particularly as they are running to and from school to exchange Ali’s tattered sneakers. Majidi frequently uses fast-paced lateral tracking shots, which allow us to experience the sense of urgency felt by the children. These mobile shots are combined with still shots, positioned at the intersection of a street or alleyway that anticipate the child’s arrival and generate suspense. In some sequences, parallel editing is employed, enabling us to experience events from the perspective of both Ali and Zahra. Since the successful sharing of the shoes has a temporal dimension – if Zahra arrives late, Ali will be late to school – we experience Zahra’s noble efforts to arrive on time as an expression of responsibility to her brother. In one scene, approximately twenty-five minutes into the film, we see Zahra in her classroom. Focalizing shots show her fixating on her teacher’s watch trying to see the time. The sequence is drawn out through a series of shot-reverse-shots, so that we feel the temporal anxiety along with Zahra. Similarly, the lateral tracking shots of Ali show him trying in vain to get to school on time and are designed to express his genuine commitment to his schoolwork. Indeed, even though he inevitably arrives late to school several times and is caught by the headmaster, he receives recognition for his academic diligence from his teacher, who convinces the headmaster that punishment is unnecessary. While we are only told of Ali’s scholarly diligence via narrative information (dialogue), we

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may be convinced of his capacity for diligence via the experiential dimensions provided by cinematic focalization. So, when Ali’s lateness goes unpunished, we may be less inclined to read this as the result of luck, instead recognizing that he is being justly rewarded for practising genuine diligence towards his studies. Each struggle endured by the characters thus culminates in the validation of positive values such as commitment, diligence or responsibility. Indeed, we might modify Hamid Reza Sadr’s claim that the child’s presence in a film grants the values they embody a higher degree of realism. Rather, here in the Children of Heaven, the cinematic presentation of such values through focalization and an emphasis on experience grants them this reality effect. It also serves to affirm and validate these values. This strategy of cinematic focalization is most strongly and profoundly expressed through little Zahra’s longing for her lost shoes. This longing, however, does not transform into the negative emotions of jealousy, anger or spitefulness but rather results in positively coded values such as patience, empathy, forbearance and contrition. Although on several occasions Zahra threatens to tell on her brother for losing her shoes, Ali pleads with her not to do so because he does not want to cause further anxiety for their parents. The family is struggling to make ends meet, and their mother has a back injury, limiting her ability to do domestic chores. Zahra knows this, not only because Ali tells her (narration) but also through her own experience (focalization). Each afternoon after school, we see her doing household chores and taking care of her baby brother. At such times, we sometimes hear the voices of adults off-screen, focalized through Zahra’s aural perception. These include her mother being confronted by the landlord demanding the outstanding rent, as well as arguments between her parents. We could say that an ideal, moral compass guides Zahra. This is developed throughout the film, but is really brought to the fore when she discovers another girl at school wearing her lost shoes. Throughout the film, Majidi uses techniques of external focalization to help us experience Zahra’s longing to find her lost shoes. This is achieved through a combination of shots of Zahra’s face and panning shots that scan across the other children’s shoes in the playground. Majidi uses both literal point-of-view shots and semisubjective eye line matches, together with corresponding shots of Zahra’s face, that invite us to imagine what she is thinking and feeling. A specific example

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will help to explain this more fully. One particular scene, about thirty-seven minutes into the film, opens with an extreme high-angle shot looking down into the schoolyard where the girls are lined up for assembly. In the left foreground of the shot, we see the Iranian flag blowing gently in the breeze and on the soundtrack the children chant in unison: ‘I am the flower of this country. Obedient to the leader.’ Technically, this functions as an omniscient establishing shot, setting the scene for the sequence. However, in terms of the film’s overall cinematic design and the dominance of focalization, it also hints at the presence of a higher-being or spiritual force watching over the children, as it is one of only a few shots in the sequence that do not contribute to focalization. Such ‘God’s-eye-view’ shots occur several times during the film and are a common feature of Majidi’s style more generally. This is reinforced through the reference to the ‘leader’, Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Visually, sonically and in terms of framing, therefore, the shot fosters a synergistic relationship between education (the schoolyard), the state (the flag), religious leadership and the spiritual gaze of God (Figure 2.5). This shot, and others like it, invites us to recognize Zahra and Ali’s struggles in a broader sense as national and spiritual, rather than on a merely personal level. As the sequence proceeds, the camera cuts down to ground level and then cuts to a mid-shot of Zahra among the other students. Her eyes begin to wander, and as her gaze tends downwards, the camera cuts to Zahra’s point

Figure 2.5  A God’s-eye-view shot forges a connection between nation, education and religion. Children of Heaven (Kanun, Majid Majidi, 1997).

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of view, panning right, surveying the other children’s shoes. A reverse shot of Zahra, now more closely framed helps to further emphasize her act of looking as her head turns. This is answered by another point-of-view shot, scanning left before the film cuts back to Zahra’s face, this time glancing directly down and prompting a point of view of her feet clad in her brother’s tattered sneakers. The sequence proceeds with several more similar shot-reverse-shot combinations before Zahra’s gaze passes and then settles upon a pair of feet wearing her very own pink shoes. At this point, the literal point of view is disrupted as the camera zooms in closer to the pink shoes. Rather than simply expressing what Zahra actually sees – as human perception cannot zoom – the camera becomes more inwardly subjective, providing a perceptual marker of Zahra’s greater mental focus upon her lost shoes. The impression created by the subjective camera is reinforced as we cut back to Zahra, her eyes gazing across intently, her brow furrowed in confusion, suggesting that she is trying to make sense of what she sees. This shot-reverse-shot pattern is repeated again and upon the third shot of the shoes, the camera pans upwards to the face of the other little girl, who is visible only in profile, her white hejab obscuring her face and prompting the next shot of Zahra, who now appears frustrated that she is unable to properly see the girl’s face. After one more shot of the other girl, the film then cuts to an objective shot at the level of the schoolyard, before returning to the same high-angle shot that we recognize from the beginning of the sequence, this time followed by a slightly closer shot of Zahra from the same angle; her gaze still focussed intently towards screen left. To end the sequence, we return to a close-up of Zahra and another series of shot-reverseshots as the girls file away and into the school building. Throughout this sequence, Majidi’s strategy of focalization tends towards internal focalization, which is more subjective than external focalization. It is facilitated by camera movement that aligns not only with what the character sees but also with her subjective experience of the situation in a way that exceeds the bounds of literal perception. Majidi evokes not only Zahra’s longing for her missing shoes as she scans the various shoes in the schoolyard but also a range of other emotions, including confusion and subdued anger. Ultimately, however, this careful presentation of Zahra’s experience of the situation is couched overwhelmingly in the positive values of restraint and patience.

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Zahra’s exercise of patience and restraint is also encoded through the mise en scène, the teacher’s voice on the soundtrack and by the suggestion implied by the two God’s-eye-view shots, of a higher, benevolent force watching over the scene. The mise en scène of the schoolyard is dominated by the arrangement of the girls into neat rows. They wear identical school uniforms, consisting of a blue tunic with matching pants and a white hejab. In the opening shots, the girls are also shown engaged in coordinated arm movements, while they acknowledge their obedience to ‘the leader’. Thus, the scene is infused with a sense of order and modesty. This becomes relevant towards the end of the sequence when Zahra must remain standing in line, waiting her turn to file into the classroom, even though we know she desperately wants to follow the girl who is wearing her shoes. It is implied that Zahra’s schooling has contributed to her capacity for patience and restraint. This figuration of the school not merely as a place for academic instruction but as an education in these other values and qualities is also reinforced by the teacher’s off-screen voice. Throughout the sequence, the teacher can be heard providing practical advice for the students. This ranges from advice on how to prepare for exams to the importance of cleanliness. What is interesting about this sound/image combination is that together with the roaming camera that focalizes the sequence through Zahra’s visual perceptual experience, the voice on the soundtrack also seems to be focalized through Zahra’s perspective. Majidi’s use of focalization is therefore multi-modal and layered. In contrast to other child-centred films that take a more critical view of Iranian society, such as Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror, which as we will see hinges on a disjuncture between image and sound, a strong harmony and synergy is forged between the various layers of discourse embedded within the image and is given cohesion via focalization. The story of the lost shoes becomes an allegorical parable through which positive lessons may be learnt mimetically via an experiential frame of reference that is shared between the characters and viewers. Perhaps the most powerful and touching evocation of this takes place shortly after Zahra discovers the other girl wearing her shoes. Zahra follows the girl home after school and returns later with her brother. As they approach, they notice the gate of the girl’s home opening. Ali and Zahra run to take cover around the corner. Their movements mirror that of the other girl, who hides playfully as her father emerges calling her name: ‘Roya!’ Together with Ali

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and Zahra we recognize that the father is blind. In an expression of external focalization, the shot is framed from behind Zahra and Ali, so that we not only see what they see, but we are also made aware of them seeing. In a way, they are our eyes and ears embedded in the film, directing our gaze but not conjoined with it and therefore not voyeuristic. A cut to a medium close-up of Zahra and Ali reveals the sad and pitiful expression on their faces, which reinforces what the film’s ideal imagined viewer should feel (Figure 2.6). This is followed by another, closer shot – too close to be a literal point-of-view – of Roya being cuddled and kissed by her father, as her mother brings out a wooden peddler’s tray that she straps around his shoulders. As we cut back to the medium close-up of Zahra and Ali they turn to glance at each other in sad acknowledgement of the other family’s disadvantage. After a quick cut back to the family we are provided with an extreme close-up of Zahra’s face, the camera observing her as she slowly lowers her gaze in modest acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact that she cannot expect to get her shoes back. In this sequence, Majidi makes use of the Kuleshov effect, a device that uses associative montage to invest an otherwise neutral image with a particular meaning or feeling. Here, Majidi uses associative montage to invest Zahra’s neutral face, with particular thoughts and emotions. The preceding shots of poverty and disability are designed to prompt viewers to associate Zahra’s face with compassion, while the lowering of her gaze suggests resignation, even contrition. The combination of the Kuleshov effect and external focalization enables the viewer to experience the scene together with the children: with them although not literally through their eyes. I would argue, however, that this engagement of the viewer does not produce free or open interpretation, for the film’s adoption of the purified gaze via the focalization of the children’s

Figure 2.6  Through focalization, the children encourage viewers to gain an experiential understanding of socially desirable values. Children of Heaven (Kanun, Majid Majidi, 1997).

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perspective is designed to foster a correct or desired way of seeing, as modelled by the experiences of these idealized child characters. In terms of cinematic language, Children of Heaven is a good example of how films in the post-revolutionary period could be invested with a modest gaze. This is achieved, not only by situating innocent children at the centre of the narrative but by adapting other aspects of classical film style, such as melodrama and focalization. These allow the values personified by the children to be more directly experienced by the viewer through modes of sensory engagement that supplement the cognitive apprehension of the story. Children of Heaven functions as a didactic national allegory through its subtle engagement of the national sensorium. The lessons taught through these children are that those who practice patience, kindness, cooperation and forbearance will receive modest rewards. This national dimension is developed further by establishing an indirect connection between the values modelled in the film and Islam as the state religion. This is already implicit in the names of the children, Ali and Zahra, both very noticeably Muslim names that underscore their religiosity and their belonging to a poor, pious family. Majidi also does this by including various religious references, such as scenes in a mosque where worshipers are commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, one of the most revered figures in Shi’a Islam.23 During the ceremony, Ali and Zahra’s father prepares tea for the mourners, weeping as he performs the task and demonstrating his own capacity for charity and self-sacrifice. This quality is also demonstrated earlier in the film when he refuses to use even a single block of the sugar he has been given to break up for the mosque. We also see Ali, together with some other boys, tidying the shoes of worshippers outside the mosque. For this, Majidi uses another God’s-eye-view shot, which lingers on the shoes after the boys have exited the scene. Thus, the values upheld by the children in response to their challenging situation are informed by the tripartite institutional formations of religion, education and the family, which function together seamlessly to form the ideal national subject. Children of Heaven is therefore a useful example of a national allegory featuring children that works to provide an image of a unified nation. It does this by crafting an image of an ideal Iranian subject that aligns closely with and validates dominant ideology, encouraging emulation. Allegorically, the surface

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level of the narrative about a lost pair of shoes is in fact about something much deeper: the validation of key values. Numerous other child-centred films, however, utilize allegorical techniques to disrupt, critique and resist dominant ideology. One such film is Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror, his second film to feature child protagonists.

Cracks in time: Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997) Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror was released in the same year as Majidi’s Children of Heaven; however, although both films feature child protagonists facing simple, everyday challenges, the two films differ significantly from an aesthetic, conceptual and ideological standpoint. Where Majidi’s film performs a unifying act of nation-building through the active personification of desirable values, Panahi’s film is arguably disruptive of that very project. It questions the very capacity for Iranian films, including his own, to adequately represent Iranian reality, either as it really is or as it is wilfully imagined by any political formation, new or old. Indeed, it could be argued that many of Panahi’s films hinge on this disconnect between reality and representation. Panahi is one of numerous post-revolutionary art film-makers, including Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Samira Makhmalbaf, that has kept alive the critical thrust of the New Wave, particularly through the adoption of self-reflexive techniques that produce a form of double discourse. Shirdel’s The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy is therefore an important progenitor of a style of post-revolutionary film-making that blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Like The Night It Rained, The Mirror is also discursively split into two films, one that is a distorted mirror of the other. However, where The Night It Rained is structured as an allegorical palimpsest, The Mirror’s two films are folded into one another, forming a complex mise en abyme. The Mirror begins, as do so many of the post-revolutionary Iranian films featuring children, with a small child faced with an everyday dilemma that they must overcome with little or no input from the adults around them. It is the end of the school day, and little Mina – her left arm in a cast – waits rather impatiently on the pavement in front of the school for her mother to

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collect her. However, when Mina’s mother does not arrive, she decides to find her own way home. Although she elicits some assistance from various adults along the way, the majority of them seem so absorbed in their own lives that Mina grows tired of waiting and continues on her own. Although Mina keeps insisting that she is not lost, she appears not to know her own address. All that she can remember is that the bus she normally takes with her mother terminates at a large square (of which there are many in Tehran). After taking a bus in the wrong direction, Mina ends up on what appears to be the right bus. However, soon after she boards the bus, she suddenly looks directly at the camera, pulls the cast off her arm and announces that she is not going to act anymore. This moment signals a profound shift in the film, as the image cuts to grainy video footage and reveals the cinematic apparatus: the camera, boom, microphone, crew and director. Mina divests herself of several items of her costume including her jacket, hejab and shoes, which she replaces with her own very similar ones and demands to be allowed to go home. Panahi makes a quick decision and instructs the crew to keep filming. They will finish the film by following the ‘real’ Mina as she tries to find her way home through the bustling city streets. Sara Saljoughi has argued that in the moment that Mina directly addresses the camera, The Mirror becomes a second film. She writes, The first is this seemingly simple narrative of a girl, lost without her mother, looking to make her way home. This film looks at Tehran through Mina’s eyes. The second film contained within The Mirror is everything that occurs after the moment when the fourth wall is broken and Mina declares that she no longer wants to act.24

While I agree with Saljoughi, the constitution of the two films and their relationship to each other can be further refined. Rather than consisting of two distinct films (a second that takes over from the first) I argue that The Mirror engages in a process of redoubling in the sense theorized by Christian Metz.25 The concept of ‘redoubling’, or more specifically, what Metz calls ‘double redoubling’ helps us understand how the first film is still somehow present within the second, in a similar sense that I argued that Shirdel’s film is redoubled by the epic film that he refused to make. In The Mirror, this double redoubling becomes a major allegorical strategy; one that hinges on the idea of allegory as

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a form of ‘double discourse’ and produces what Christian Metz has referred to as a cinematic mise en abyme. This allegorical strategy is also underpinned by Panahi’s use of sound, apparent, but ultimately false, temporal continuity and the geography of Tehran. This produces what Negar Mottahedeh has called a ‘displaced allegory’ of the very conditions of film-making in Iran.26 In his discussion of films within films, Christian Metz writes of different kinds of mise en abyme that arise out of various configurations of films within films. Some, he refers to as ‘simple redoublings’, and others, which he describes as the ‘strong variant’, involve ‘double redoubling’. These he describes as ‘metafilmic’. He writes, ‘This can be formulated in the following way: “the presence of a second film, which is the same film”.’27 That is, the film contains within it, a double of itself. Metz continues, In cases of perfect redoubling, the turning in on oneself, the ‘first’ film weaves itself through another which is not truly another, and which is not truly ‘within’ the other … the relation between the two textual layers is indeed that of a crossroads, imbrication, braiding or entanglement, at the limit of symbiosis.28

It is exactly this kind of imbrication that occurs in The Mirror. It is immediately after Mina looks directly at the camera and breaks the fourth wall that Panahi creates the conditions for the emergence of the second film. However, it is not this second film that constitutes a case of ‘perfect redoubling’. Mina’s gaze at the camera gives rise initially to what Metz would describe as an ‘embedded’ film. It is via this embedded film, or rather grainy video footage, that The Mirror reaches a crossroads of sorts, one that breaks the fourth wall and also pivots the axis of the image to reveal the apparatus, lights, camera, boom and crew. It is this qualitatively different footage that shows us behind the scenes of the film proper and performs the most obviously self-reflexive gesture of the film. We see Panahi behind the camera together with several crewmembers. He is heard instructing a female production assistant to persuade Mina into continuing the shoot, and we see her go to sit with Mina on the pavement. We can hear what they are saying because Mina is still wearing her microphone, a detail that will help to shift emphasis from image to sound for the remainder of the film. Ultimately Mina refuses to comply and insists on going home. The remainder of the film then follows the ‘real’ Mina as she attempts to navigate her way amid Tehran’s bustling traffic.

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Mina through the looking glass Like Saljoughi, it is tempting to focus on the moment that Mina breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera as the most important turning point in the film, the point at which the film begins anew. However, in my view, the crucial moment is hidden at the very end of the video footage, just before the 35-milimetre footage cuts back in. In little more than a split second, Panahi provides us with a subtle but important cue that encourages viewers to meditate more deeply on the status of the images and sounds that will unfold for the remainder of the film. Instead of providing us with some kind of higher order of reality, through the belief that we are now supposedly watching the ‘real’ Mina, Panahi gives us good reason to question what we see and hear. In fact, his film not only asks us to adopt a new way of seeing but also forces us to listen more carefully. Panahi very subtly invites his viewers to question the veracity of what we are seeing and hearing. At the very end of the video sequence, the video camera, which is positioned inside the bus, pans left, following Mina as she crosses the street in front of the bus. The image is framed in such a way that just as she reaches the opposite footpath she disappears behind the side mirror, which is itself framed by the window of the bus. The frames within frames in this image are visually suggestive of a mise en abyme, and of course we may be prompted to see this as a visualization of the film’s title: The Mirror. I argue that this moment is even more significant than the breaking of the fourth wall. It is here that the film truly splits in two. Mina’s disappearance behind a mirror – the first of many disappearances from this point forwards – is the key moment that we begin to register the double redoubling of The Mirror’s two films. This is the moment that we begin to enter the mise en abyme, opened up by the self-reflexive disruption of the realist-illusionist cinematic discourse that has dominated the first part of the film. In this sense, Mina’s disappearance behind the mirror is akin to Alice’s traversal through the looking glass.29 As such, we should be careful not to make too many assumptions about the supposed ‘reality’ of what we see and hear. Like the room into which Alice arrives once she passes through the looking glass, which is a mirror image of the room in her home, so too the Tehran that the ‘real’ Mina traverses is ostensibly the same as the Tehran that the ‘fictional’ Mina navigated earlier in the film. The

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film remains quite literally grounded in the sociopolitical space of Tehran, but our viewpoint – both visual and sonic – shifts as the soundscape begins to take on greater importance. As such, we need to listen as much as look. Just as Mina disappears behind the mirror, the film cuts back to 35-milimetre footage, which tracks her as she walks purposefully along the footpath. For the remainder of the film we follow Mina from the vantage point of a moving vehicle and cars, trucks, buses, trees, people and buildings frequently obstruct our view of her. We are, however, granted access to her voice and the voices and sounds in her proximity via the microphone that she still wears. This allows us to follow her, even when she disappears from view as she asks for directions and rides in taxis in a bid to make it home. One aspect that both differentiates and binds The Mirror’s two films is the use of distinct but complementary stylistic devices. In the first film, Panahi uses restricted narration and places an emphasis on the visual, keeping Mina as the central focus of attention in the majority of shots. Indeed, the camera is often placed at her height, eliminating the adults around her from view. This aligns it stylistically with the nation-building child-centred films such as Children of Heaven, which focalize the narrative through the experiences of the child protagonists. In The Mirror, Panahi also makes occasional use of focalization techniques, however, in comparison to Children of Heaven, these techniques serve quite different allegorical purposes. A good example occurs approximately twenty-eight minutes into the film. Mina has boarded a bus and is riding in the women’s section at the rear. Panahi makes use of her vantage point with a view of both the men’s and women’s sections as a way to prompt viewers to pay attention to a technique for purifying the male–female gaze. In the lead-up to this particular part of the sequence, Panahi uses a shot-reverse-shot structure alternating between Mina’s face and point-of-view shots from her perspective. These direct our attention to various conversations taking place among the women on the bus. The dynamics of sound closely echo her visual attention, so that when her gaze is focused on particular characters, their conversations are given prominence in the soundtrack, even when they are off-screen. At other times, Mina’s attention seems to drift and become unfocussed. In response, the various voices in the bus intermingle and overlap. As with Children of Heaven, the combination of sound and image and its close connection to the gaze and image of the child produces a focalizing effect.

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As the sequence continues, something at the back of the bus suddenly grabs Mina’s attention and she turns to look over her shoulder. The cut follows her gaze, revealing a young woman flanked by two older women, covered in black chadors. Initially, the young woman sits with her gaze lowered, but after a moment, she raises her head and glances off-screen past the camera. However, instead of cutting to show the object of the young woman’s gaze directly, Panahi uses Mina as an intermediary, cutting back to her and then cutting on her gaze, which follows the trajectory of the woman’s glance. Only then do we see a young man, the apparent object of the woman’s gaze. The sequence continues with a series of shot-reverse-shots, ostensibly between the man and woman, but each glance is mediated by a shot of Mina, whose head turns back and forth. It is her gaze that motivates each alternating shot of the man and woman, who (indirectly) smile coyly at one another. Towards the end of the sequence, Mina lowers her gaze, also smiling coyly to herself (Figure 2.7). In allegorical terms, this is a good example of what Negar Mottahedeh calls a ‘displaced allegory’, in which the formal elements of a film serve to allegorize the conditions of production. They do this by giving prominence to reflexive enunciation, which ‘bridges [the] gap between the industrial location of production and the film’s narrative statement’.30 This means that such films are as much about their industrial and national production context as their

Figure 2.7  Mina’s gaze mediates and purifies the desiring gaze of the young couple. The Mirror (Rooz Film, Jafar Panahi, 1997).

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ostensible subject matter. By so deliberately inserting Mina in between the romantic glances of a man and a woman, Panahi produces a cinematic detour, rerouting the potentially illicit gazes. He quite literally and overtly uses the gaze of the child to purify the film’s scopic regime and with it, the adult gaze of character and viewer alike. In effect, Mina serves the same purpose as the young siblings in Majidi’s Children of Heaven; however, there the cinematic illusion is presented as a natural or innate process, by disavowing the adult gaze altogether.31 By contrast, Panahi in The Mirror draws our attention to this very process, making us keenly aware of the gaze that may not be shown, while also revealing a cinematic trick through which the gaze can be purified. In line with the idea that allegorical films teach us how to read them, The Mirror encourages us to understand this as a commentary on and implicit criticism of the censorship guidelines and the tricks film-makers might resort to in order to comply with them. Additionally, by laying bare the very processes of national sensorial purification that are rendered invisible in many child-centred films, The Mirror also indirectly mounts a critique of the nationbuilding role often attributed to such films and the children that star in them.32 One of the most profound shifts that occur after the film splits into its own double lies in the fact that we no longer have access to Mina’s gaze: it has been unshackled from the camera. There are no longer any point-of-view shots, she no longer appears in close-up and she is frequently obscured by objects – cars, buses, trucks, trees, people, walls – and at times she is completely hidden from view for extended periods of screen time. The camera tries to track her movements from a moving vehicle – notably a car, rather than a bus – however its capacity to do so is severely limited by the heavy traffic, one-way streets and large squares, whose radiating alleys and avenues siphon and disperse the vehicles in multiple directions. Indeed, at one intersection, the car is stopped by a traffic cop. Although we can’t hear his voice, his gestures suggest that he is asking to see a filming permit, which someone in the car produces. The cop then directs the car down a small one-way street, with Mina nowhere in sight. Once again, we are reminded of the act of filming, the conditions of production and the state regulation of the industry. Just as the presumed innocence of children in post-revolutionary Iranian films grants them a high degree of mobility through a range of social spaces, as a pedestrian, Mina can move through the streets with a high degree of fluidity.

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In contrast, the camera is effectively shackled to another apparatus: the motor vehicle. The camera, for all its vehicular mobility, is still subject to limitations and restrictions defined by the trajectory of the roads, the traffic flow, the presence of traffic cops and the requirement of a permit. Mina, however, may move with fewer restrictions, allowing her to occasionally slip away from the camera’s and spectator’s gaze. However, since Mina is still wearing her microphone, we continue to hear her voice and the sounds around her, even when she disappears from view. On one level, this provides a meditation on the limited and limiting possibilities of the camera in Iranian cinema, which cannot be freely omniscient. On another, it effectively splits sound and image, dividing our sensorium. Each time Mina slips from our gaze, our attention is split between seeing and hearing. Gone is the harmonious focalization evident in the scene on the bus, described earlier. Mina’s voice still serves as our anchor; however, given the difficulty of maintaining close proximity to her, we might struggle to ascertain the source of the other sounds around her. Occasionally, the microphone falters, causing the sound to cut off and on.33 As such, the film begins to train us to both listen closely and also to search the image carefully: the camera alone cannot be relied upon to direct and focus our gaze. In contrast to Children of Heaven, which carefully directs its viewers’ thoughts and feelings, The Mirror forces us to look and listen for ourselves. So, what are we listening for and what elements are significant?

Close listening to disembodied voices I argue that far from presenting us with unmediated access to a ‘real’ girl trying to find her way home, the soundtrack provides us with a complex and carefully constructed commentary on Iranian cinema and society. At one point, Mina has a long conversation with a man she meets on a street corner. During this dialogue, we see neither Mina nor the man she is talking with. He explains to her that he had once been a famous film dubbing artist, the Persian voice of John Wayne. Since he can no longer get work in his field, he now survives by working as a wedding singer, spending his days standing on a street corner in front of a café touting for business.

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For viewers familiar with the history of Iranian cinema – or rather film distribution and exhibition in the pre-revolution era – this character emblematizes some of the profound changes that affected the industry with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. With the introduction of new censorship guidelines and protectionist measures designed to purify the cultural sphere, Hollywood films were no longer distributed in Iran, thus bringing to an end the lucrative dubbing industry. Beyond this, the scene quite literally references the profoundly changed cinematic landscape in the wake of the revolution, with the mention of the café also indirectly alluding to the popular local pre-revolution film industry known as film farsi. As discussed in the previous chapter, this popular entertainment industry was dominated by genre films, that invariably featured scenes in cafés and bars, where scantily clad women entertained a predominantly male diegetic audience. This was precisely the type of images and spaces that needed to be purged in the post-revolutionary period, so that cinema could be purified. It is doubly significant that this character appears only as a disembodied voice. On the one hand, through vocal presence, Panahi provides him with a clever way of momentarily reviving his old profession. On the other hand, through his visual absence, we are reminded of the many restrictions placed on Iranian film-makers and viewers alike, in terms of what can and cannot be shown in films and in cinemas. In the new cinematic landscape, a whole period of Iranian film history has been disavowed and thus erased. But beyond this, the Iranian ‘John Wayne’ character serves yet another purpose that can help us to better understand the entanglement of The Mirror’s two films. He also throws doubt on the premise of the second film as somehow being more ‘real’ or authentic than the first. During their conversation, ‘John Wayne’ tells Mina that he saw her ‘two weeks ago when you did that scene in front of the school. It was great! But the best thing was in front of the pharmacy today when you told that woman to go get your things. I was watching you. You were great!’ Like the self-reflexive break itself, the character reminds us once again of the act of film-making. He also draws our attention to the long duration of the shoot. While the reference to the scene in front of the pharmacy ‘today’ does not entirely negate the premise of the second film as the production of an unscripted event, this referencing of the shoot duration (at least two weeks), which differs considerably from story duration (an afternoon), does prompt us to look and listen for other possible disjunctures between shoot, story and screen duration.

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Another sonic element that allows us to perceive temporal disjuncture while also binding the two films in a symbiotic relationship is the intermittent occurrence of a radio announcer commentating a soccer match. These occur at various intervals in both parts of the film, and a character mentions the match during the video sequence. As such, the soccer match is an important strategy for constructing the illusion of temporal continuity. In fact, aside from the fact that the physical setting remains constant across both of The Mirror’s two films, this sonic element serves to bind the films together as one and also ironically reminds us that the entire film is a construct. Given the mention of the twoweek shoot duration, the commentary of the soccer match achieves continuity while also becoming a marker of the film’s false or illusory continuity. As early as two minutes into the film we hear the voice of a radio announcer commentating on a soccer match, with further commentary heard again some seven and then nine minutes into the film. While the source of the sound is not visible within the image, the sound mix presents this as off-screen diegetic sound emanating from radios within Mina’s vicinity. Snippets of this commentary continue intermittently throughout the entire film. These waft in and out amid a complex, naturalistic soundtrack that includes traffic noise, conversations between other characters and diegetic music. The particular soccer match was the 1996 Asian Cup quarter-final match between Iran and South Korea. The match took place in Dubai on 16 December and ended in a 6–2 victory for the Iranian team, who went on to take third place in the tournament. This temporal continuity not only works to place the two films – and indeed the embedded video – into symbiotic relationship with each other but also helps to reinforce the impression that the entire film plays out in ‘real time’ over a single afternoon. However, as mentioned earlier, this is certainly not the case since, according to ‘John Wayne’, the shoot has taken at least two weeks, making it almost certain that the soccer commentary was added in post-production. An important clue comes during the video sequence when a crew member wearing a red football jersey rushes onto the bus exclaiming that Ali Daei has scored a third goal.34 While it is unclear whether he refers to Iran’s third goal, which was scored about twenty minutes into the second half, or Daei’s third goal, scored around eighteen minutes later, we may be alerted to a rather obvious temporal disconnect. The match commenced at 4.45 p.m. Dubai time (4.15 p.m. Tehran time) with the second half of the match played under lights. By the time the third goal was scored, it would already have been

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dusk in Tehran with no sunlight hitting the pavement.35 However, at this point in the film, there is still considerable sunlight casting deep shadows across the image. And, indeed, an even closer inspection of the sequence reveals inconsistencies in the angle of these shadows, in similarly framed shots in both the video footage and a brief 35-milimetre insert (Figures 2.8a, b and c). a

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c

Figures 2.8a, b and c  Inconsistent shadows belie the film’s temporal fallacy. The Mirror (Rooz Film, Jafar Panahi, 1997).

After returning to the 35-milimetre footage, the remaining forty-three minutes play out in the afternoon light, which is clearly inconsistent with the actual time during which the Iran versus South Korea match was played. The man in the red football jersey can only be a ring-in, a clearly fictionalized element in what appears to be the most ‘real’ and ‘unscripted’ part of the film. The relationship between the two sonic elements – John Wayne’s voice-over and the soccer commentary – and the lighting not only draws attention to the disjuncture between screen time and profilmic time but also causes the very illusion of synchronicity between sound and image to unravel. With Mina periodically disappearing from view and with so many off-screen diegetic sounds, how can we be certain of the relationship between sound and image? These disjunctures work subtly to undo the strong effect of realism achieved by the film, ultimately calling into question the premise that the second part of the film following the ‘real’ Mina was unplanned and that it has been filmed exactly as events unfolded. In allegorical terms, the deliberateness with which the temporal disjuncture is at once hidden by techniques of continuity and revealed by other elements of sound and image functions as a cue to perceptive viewers to read more

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deeply into the allegorical layers of the film. Like Shirdel’s The Night It Rained, Panahi’s film produces a commentary on the production of nation-building narratives. This is evident in the way that the film’s narrative development towards the ‘real’ Mina’s eventual return home is mirrored or doubled by the victory of the Iranian national soccer team, producing an effect of allegorical parallelism. Towards the end of the film, Mina has finally managed to navigate her way home. She has left the microphone with the owner of a toyshop, and we watch from the end of a laneway as she waits for someone to open her front door. On the soundtrack, we once again hear the radio announcer. The broadcast is apparently emanating from a radio in the toyshop as we can hear it faintly in the background as the shop owner converses with a customer. There is a convenient break in the dialogue just in time to hear the following words: ‘An unprecedented score in the history of Iranian soccer. Our team has beaten South Korea 6-2. Let me congratulate our listeners and all soccer fans on this great victory.’ The word ‘victory’ (piruzi) here is important. Not only does the mention of the national team’s victory coincide precisely with Mina’s own small victory of reaching home but her home happens to be located in the vicinity of Piruzi Street, a large boulevard to the east of central Tehran.36 In this suspiciously neat coincidence, we can see an allegorical conceit at work. According to Jeremy Tambling, in literary allegory a conceit is ‘a concept, or an image applied to a figure of speech which finds an unusual parallel between two dissimilar things; an intricate metaphor, or witty (quickwitted) comparison’.37 The coincidence between Mina’s ultimate destination and the soccer team’s victory produces just such a parallel, which I read as a commentary on and subtle critique of the nation-building role ascribed to many of the child characters that have graced Iran’s post-revolutionary screens. In effect, this conceit critiques the kind of value-laden sensorial training performed by films like Majidi’s Children of Heaven.

National allegory and the revolutionary geography of Tehran If the film’s denouement leads us to an allegorical conceit that is linked to a feature of Tehran’s geography (Piruzi Street), the next question is whether

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any other geographical features of the city encountered by Mina might also be laden with layers of significance? Indeed, while Mina does not seem to know her address, or the names of the places she passes through, several of the adult characters identify and name particular streets and squares that hint at the tumultuous history and upheavals that have taken place in the city. This is yet another indicator that The Mirror’s two films are deeply imbricated within one another. It is crucial that both the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’ Mina inhabit the same space: the busy streets and squares of central Tehran. No matter which way she turns, Mina encounters city spaces that are inscribed with national and revolutionary significance. In the first part of the film, a kind bus driver helps the ‘fictional’ Mina by suggesting that she might be looking for Jomhuri (Republic) Square. This large, open square lies at the western end of Jomhuri-e Eslami (Islamic Republic) Street. Prior to the revolution, the square and street were both named ‘Shah’ and were among the numerous streets, avenues and squares that were renamed after the revolution.38 Such renaming was undertaken in part to erase traces of the Pahlavi dynasty that had been inscribed into Tehran’s geography as the city expanded and modernized. The renaming also helped to endow the city with a new, Islamic identity by commemorating the Revolution and, later, the martyrs of the Iran–Iraq war. Like the purification of Iranian cinema after the revolution, the city streets were also effectively washed clean, many with the blood (or at least the names) of martyrs that gave their lives for the revolution and war. Together with the constant reminder of the national soccer team through the radio broadcasts, the mention of Jomhuri Square helps to further invest the film with a national dimension and calls upon us to register the various ways in which nation is narrated – in sport, in street names, in film – and in turn how such narrations inflect day-to-day experience with a national dimension.39 Although The Mirror never overtly refers to the political history that gave rise to this renaming process, the repeated mention and appearance of these streets and squares, together with the fact that a significant amount of time is spent in and around another politically significant space – Baharestan Square – provides spectators with a subtle cue to reflect on the political dimensions of these city spaces. In particular, we are invited to meditate on the way that they, like film, have been used to re-frame post-revolutionary national identity, fusing it with purified values and discourses. Although it was not renamed

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after the revolution, Baharestan Square is one such urban space that has been written and rewritten with social and political significance over many decades. According to Ali Madanipour, Baharestan Square was one of many social spaces in Tehran that have witnessed sociopolitical upheaval. He writes that the square was one of several urban ‘nodes’ that developed during the Constitutional Revolution and ‘remained a sensitive place for more than two generations’.40 Situated directly in front of the old parliament building and the Sepahsalar Mosque, it had been described by Asma Mehan as ‘the first political square’ in Tehran.41 With the ascension of the Pahlavi dynasty to power in 1925, much of Tehran was transformed to accommodate modern modes of transport. Where the old squares had once been ‘the places of communication for pedestrians’, in the city’s new configuration, ‘the squares became traffic circles’.42 These squares became ‘showpieces for the state, many embellished by the rulers’ statues’.43 It was in this period that a statue of Reza Shah was erected in Baharestan Square, a fitting reminder of the role he played in driving Iran’s rapid modernization. Throughout the Pahlavi era, Baharestan Square, which was surrounded by theatres, cafés and bookshops, served as a vibrant cultural and recreational centre. In this sense, it signified ‘stability and modernity’.44 At the same time, due to its proximity to the parliament building and offices of various political parties, it became ‘a main focal point for public and political’ demonstrations and as such, at times, also became a locus of instability.45 For example, on 16 August 1953, large crowds of pro-government supporters gathered to denounce the attempted coup and decry the Shah with slogans like ‘Death to the treacherous shah’.46 The next day, the statue of Reza Shah was torn down in what Randjbar-Daemi has described as ‘a deeply symbolic gesture of rupture with the much despised Reza Shah legacy’.47 In the postrevolutionary period, Baharestan Square still serves as a social and political hub, once again the site of the Iranian parliament, a busy shopping district and public transport hub.48 In The Mirror, Panahi is not merely concerned with reminding us of how these spaces function as political allegories. On top of the layers of political struggle and social development already invested in Baharestan Square, he adds yet another, more quotidian layer of significance. Importantly, the square figures in both of The Mirror’s two films. In the first, while ‘fictional’ Mina is riding a bus, we overhear the story told by an old woman who is clad in a floral

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chador, a sign that she is traditional and pious. She tells another woman that she is treated so poorly by her son’s wife that she leaves the house every day under the premise of visiting her daughter. However, since she does not feel welcome there either, she spends the day sitting alone in Baharestan Square. Later, the ‘real’ Mina encounters the old woman again, this time sitting in the square. According to the dialogue, the story she told in the ‘fictional’ part of the film is ‘true’, a point that serves to further blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and forge a symbiosis between the film’s two films. Regardless of the truth value of this particular woman’s story, she becomes emblematic of generational fracture and class divide: she feels like a stranger to her own children, who it is inferred have attained some degree of upward mobility. She becomes the voice of an alternative history from below, just one of the thousands of individuals that pass through the square on a daily basis with little concern for the monumental history of kings, political movements or revolutions that have taken place there. Perhaps something even more important to the film’s allegorical discourse on concepts of nation may be found in the appearance and repeated mention of Shohada Square, which like Baharestan Square, witnessed much political unrest, particularly in the lead-up to the revolution. Prior to the revolution, Shohada Square had been known as Jaleh Square. On 8 September 1978 (17 Shahrivar 1357), thousands of demonstrators descended on Jaleh Square, despite martial law having been declared earlier that morning. These demonstrators were met by military forces with tear gas, initially causing the demonstrators to retreat. However, when they returned, soldiers began firing directly into the crowd with automatic weapons. According to Michael Axworthy, the estimates of demonstrators killed on this day vary widely from several hundred to thousands, although the ‘number that died was probably around eighty, with a larger number wounded’.49 This event came to be known as Jom’e-ye Siyah (Black Friday) and became a major turning point in the revolution. Axworthy notes that ‘from this point onwards street confrontations became more bitter and violent’, and ‘participation in the opposition and in demonstrations became normal’.50 Madanipour adds that ‘because of the large number of casualties, revolutionaries immediately renamed it Shohada (Martyrs) Square and its name entered the chants of the later demonstrations’.51 Shohada Square lies at the intersection of 17 Shahrivar Street (the date of Black Friday), Mojahedin

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Eslam (Religious Warriors of Islam) Street and Piruzi (Victory) Street. Thus, in its post-revolutionary configuration, commuters effectively trace the history of the revolution in their daily lives: with the revolution inescapably etched into the geography of the city. Panahi seems to be picking up on Madanipour’s assertion that the ‘contest over, and domination of, the public spaces of the city was the embodiment of the revolution: in a sense, this was the revolution’.52 As we follow the ‘real’ Mina on her journey to home towards Piruzi Street, observant viewers will perhaps notice the street sign marking Shohada Square, and later, it figures in a conversation between the toy shop owner and a customer. Near the end of the film, Mina has finally reached familiar territory. She rounds the corner from a side alley, and the camera pivots rightwards as she crosses the street and enters a toy shop. Her conversation with the shopkeeper, Mr Habibi, suggests that it was he who had introduced Panahi to Mina. This is another detail that rings false, since Mina is the younger sister of Aida Mohammadkhani, the young protagonist of his previous film The White Balloon (Badkonak-e Sefid, 1995). Mina has come to drop off the microphone before going home. This enables us to overhear a conversation between the shopkeeper and a customer, a young man who is decorating his car for a wedding. As Mina leaves, the camera follows her while we continue to listen to the conversation in the shop, once again splitting our attention between visual and aural elements. We hear the young man ask for some pink ribbon. After a few moments, the shopkeeper replies that he only has black ribbon. The young man responds, ‘Black? For a wedding?’ The shopkeeper advises him to ‘go to Shohada Square for other colours’. The young man says goodbye, and at this point we hear the radio announcer exclaiming the victory of the national soccer team, just as Mina arrives home. Although this discussion about ribbon might seem too mundane to be of any import, the contextual configuration of elements seems to suggest otherwise. It seems ironic that a toy shop should only have black ribbon in stock. Like many cultures, black is also a colour of mourning in Iranian culture. It is therefore doubly ironic that the young man is advised to go to Shohada Square, a site directly associated with mourning and Black Friday, to find other colours, while the colour of mourning is associated with a toy shop. In his essay ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’, Paul De Man theorizes the relationship between allegory and irony.53 For De Man, allegory and irony are ‘two faces of

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the same fundamental experience of time’.54 Both modes hinge on a disconnect between sign and meaning: ‘The sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning and has for its function the thematization of this difference.’55 They differ in that allegory, particularly in its narrative forms, is temporally extensive, whereas irony ‘takes place rapidly, in one single moment’.56 Importantly, De Man writes that irony ‘recaptures some of the factitiousness of human existence’.57 In its subtly ironic mapping of Tehran’s revolutionary geography, The Mirror seems to do just this. Mina moves through the city with innocent obliviousness to its social and political history. She is of a generation born well after the revolution, with no memory of it, or of the Iran–Iraq war. She doesn’t remember the names of streets and squares named and renamed to commemorate those histories. Nevertheless, her navigations through the city highlight the extent to which that history is inescapable. What the film also reminds us is that in postrevolutionary Iran, the city has been rendered allegorical – in a didactic, totalizing, nation-building sense. Thus, the city shares with state-driven, post-revolutionary cinema the task of purification, retooling the sensorium and spreading the values of the revolution. Both cinema and the city do this by subtly habituating their subjects to dominant ideology. However, through its self-reflexive turn, factitious continuity and its subtly ironic critique of the allegories of nation, embedded in the streets of Tehran, Panahi makes visible some of the work involved in producing the effect of cinematic realism that lies at the heart of many Iranian child-centred films.

Conclusion Some thoughts on the ideological effects of child-centred Iranian films Both The Mirror and The Night It Rained produce what Jean-Louis Baudry has described as a ‘knowledge effect’.58 This is achieved primarily through what I have described, throughout this chapter, as the films’ respective self-reflexive turns, that is, the inscription of the technical base of cinema, the apparatus, the processes within the films themselves. Through this, they allegorize the role of cinema in state-driven projects of nation-building. In his landmark essay

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‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Baudry argues that certain technical dimensions of the cinematic apparatus, including film’s basis in Renaissance perspective, the illusion of continuity and the relationship between the camera and subject enable the ‘concealment of the technical base’ of cinema. This concealment produces ‘a specific ideological effect’, inscribing the work with ‘ideological surplus value’.59 It is this kind of effect that a film like Children of Heaven capitalizes on, enabling it to perform the ideological work of habituating viewers to revolutionary values. For Baudry, films such as Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which are inscribed with their technical base, are capable of denunciating ideology and critiquing idealism.60 As we have seen, The Night It Rained is inscribed with a double ‘knowledge effect’. First, Shirdel makes visible the apparatus, thereby denouncing the ideological effect of cinema’s technical base. Second, he critiques the idealism and monumentalizing tendencies implicit in the heroic celebration of nation that the film was supposed to deliver. Shirdel’s project is driven by the same kind of allegorical resistance that we find in other New Wave films, such as those discussed in Chapter 1. Panahi follows closely in the footsteps of the New Wave film-makers, reinvigorating their resistant impulses. However, where Shirdel’s film functions very much as what Ismail Xavier describes as an ‘overt’ allegory, Panahi’s allegorical practice is somewhat more subtle, or should I say, concealed. Certainly, the self-reflexive break performs the same kind of revelation of the apparatus that we see in The Night It Rained. But following this turn, his film seems to achieve an even higher degree of realism by making it appear as though what we see and hear happened exactly as it appears on screen. In other words, he reveals the film’s technical base, only to once again conceal it. As I have shown, that technical base is never entirely concealed, for he has embedded subtle clues that make it possible for us to discern disjunctures amid the masquerade of continuity. Like The Night It Rained, The Mirror produces a double ‘knowledge effect’. The first is achieved through the breaking of the fourth wall, something that reminds us of the technical base that had, until this point, been concealed in the narrative techniques of the first film. The second knowledge effect only becomes available after certain indexical signs of the second film’s factitiousness are uncovered and recognized. These indexical signs – the soccer commentary, the man in the football jersey, the lighting, the old lady in Baharestan Square, the

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Persian ‘John Wayne’, the irony of the black ribbon at the toy shop – generate what Laura Mulvey has described as ‘a practical sense of uncertainty’.61 They have little meaning in and of themselves, but read cumulatively, they have the power to throw into question the ‘reality’ of what we have been shown. In addition, by shifting emphasis from the visual to the sonic, The Mirror’s second film mounts further resistance to the role normally played by perspective and continuity in realist narrative cinema. Instead, the viewing subject is thrown off balance by the splitting of the sensorium into disjunctive visual and sonic elements. In doing so, Panahi resists the construction of an ‘ideal vision’ or ‘hallucinatory reality’ that presupposes a ‘transcendental subject’ such as that constructed by Children of Heaven.62 I want to conclude by saying that while Panahi succeeds in producing a ‘knowledge effect’ (or two), he is under no illusion that it is possible ever to move outside ideology. Indeed, I think he is suggesting the very opposite. In The Mirror, ‘ideology’ is emblematized by the always already allegorical geography of Tehran’s streets, in which the nation’s struggles have piled up for more than a century. Mina’s refusal to act might initially be seen as a refusal to conform, a refusal to play her part in a nation-building performance, a refusal of didactic, monumentalizing, nation-building allegory. However, when she declares she no longer wants to act, she still cannot free herself entirely from the apparatus that she is always already a part of. After all, her ‘victory’ is also (ironically) the nation’s.63

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Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman

A wide-angle travelling shot of a vast landscape opens the second episode of Marziyeh Meshkini’s tripartite film The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi Keh Zan Shodam, 2000).1 The camera glides along at an exhilarating pace as it tracks a male horse rider from a number of different angles. He appears to be looking for something. ‘Ahu’, he calls, his voice scattering a small herd of gazelle. He searches yet further, calling again and again, his voice echoing through the landscape: ‘Ahu! Ahu!’ Eventually, on the horizon, we begin to discern a number of tiny black figures towards which we accompany the rider. It is revealed that these figures are in fact several dozen young women engaged in a bicycle race, their black chadors billowing in the wind. The breathtaking mobility of the camera is paradigmatic of the tale that is to unfold: the tale of a woman’s desire for social mobility. The mobility of the camera inflects and is inflected by the pace set by the cyclists. In fact, the camera is constantly mobile throughout this part of the film, like the protagonist, almost never pausing to rest. I choose to begin my discussion of this film in the middle – in mid-flight – rather than at the beginning, precisely because of the sheer mobility both in and of the image. The mobility exercised by the women on-screen is transmitted to the viewer through a sense of shared momentum, experienced by this viewer at least, as exhilaration. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that this virtual mobility may not reflect the actual mobility available to women in Iranian society. It is this problematic that forms one of the film’s central themes, a theme that also highlights the numerous limits placed upon women – physical, social, political and representational – in a patriarchal and religiously controlled society. The Day I Became a Woman explores this theme by focussing on three generations of Iranian womanhood.

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The film is structured as a set of three episodic narratives, each featuring and named after a central female protagonist. In the first instalment we meet Havva on the day of her ninth birthday, the day that she officially becomes a woman. She must adopt the Islamic codes of modest dress and will no longer be allowed to play with boys. In the second episode, we are introduced to Ahu, a young married woman attempting to test the boundaries of a patriarchal society by participating in a women’s bicycle race. In the third, we encounter Hura, an old, unmarried woman who has come to the duty-free island of Kish to buy all the modern household items she could never afford in her youth. These three stories are deceptively simple and a cursory viewing might lead one to read the film metaphorically as a grand narrative of a woman’s life, viewed sequentially from childhood to womanhood to old age, but, as I wish to argue in this chapter, beneath this deceptive simplicity lies a complex, multilayered allegorical film that invites numerous possibilities for interpreting and, even more important, engaging affectively with the film. I believe that despite its apparently simple and modest appearance The Day I Became a Woman is an enormously significant film from a feminist perspective, not so much because of the representations of women that it generates, but because of the way its filmic aesthetics and use of allegory set in motion a process of becoming-woman that has the potential to move viewers, thereby setting in motion their own becomings-woman. In doing so, I believe this film mounts a significant challenge to Iranian film censorship that contains and restricts representation of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema and, more generally, highlights the epistemological assumptions that structure much representational narrative cinema.

Towards an allegorical poetics As I have already discussed in the previous chapters, allegory is sometimes used by those in power to build nations and spread ideologies. Conversely, as I have also demonstrated, as a mode of hidden or veiled discourse, allegory carries with it an enormous critical, even subversive, potential. As a number of post-colonial theorists have noted, allegory has emerged as a force among postcolonial and the Third World authors and film-makers. According to Jean-

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Pierre Durix, magic realist writers such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez have used allegory to ‘bring into existence places and communities which traditional literatures had ignored or misrepresented’.2 In its ability to, as Bill Ashcroft writes, ‘disrupt the discourse of history’, allegory could and does provide a possible avenue for feminist artists, writers and film-makers to disrupt the discourse of History and to bring the ignored or misrepresented experiences of women into existence.3 This tendency is perhaps nowhere more visible than in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, where the image of woman is greatly controlled and constrained by censorship. In the postrevolutionary period, both the post-colonial and feminist impulses of allegory come together. Although it is arguable whether Iran can be considered a postcolonial nation, it is possible to claim that post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has indeed been colonized by Islamicate values, inscribing its codes of modesty into the cinema’s representational system and thereby greatly affecting the possibilities of truthfully representing women’s experiences. According to Negar Mottahedeh, women’s bodies may sometimes function as allegories of the nation, but in her conceptually rich readings of Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe … Some Other Time (Shayad … Vaqti Digar, 1988) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s Gabbeh (1996), woman does not so much represent the nation as allegorically reveals the contradictions presented by censorship. Mottahedeh argues that both the nation and woman are essentially un-presentable in contemporary Iranian film. She writes that ‘due to the problems posed by the issue of modesty in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, women’s bodies, as the historically repressed site of the national statement, have become the places in which the multilingual expression of the enunciation (production) of the nation takes place’.4 The pre-revolutionary history of Iran becomes literally un-presentable because it must conform to the present image of Iran as an exclusively Islamicate society. According to Mottahedeh, Bayzai uses allegorical techniques and cinematic language to generate what Walter Benjamin called a ‘dialectic at a standstill’ out of this impossibility. This process enables the present to be understood in a meaningful and ‘urgent conjunction with the past’.5 As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, Meshkini also uses allegory as a powerful mode of expression to highlight the limits of cinematic representation, but at the same time, she generates a similarly urgent conjunction between past, present and future. On one level, therefore, the film may be read as an allegory of Iranian

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cinema, a critique of the very structural limitations placed on film-makers by rigorous censorship rules. I will argue that Meshkini negotiates censorship by pushing film form to its allowable limits, making these limits visible within the form of the film itself. Beyond this interpretation of the film as an allegory of Iranian cinema, I wish to demonstrate how the film functions in an even more complex allegorical register. In order to see this at work we need to move beyond the basic understanding of allegory as a mode that says one thing while meaning another. We must develop a more specific conception of allegory suggested by the film itself. Rather than functioning on two levels of meaning – literal and allegorical – that run parallel to one another, The Day I Became a Woman may instead be approached along two intersecting axes – horizontal and vertical – both of which are allegorically interdependent. By reading the film in this way, I wish to argue that the viewer is presented with two very different conceptions of becoming – one that proceeds in a series of stages or states and another through which becoming may be experienced as a process. I will demonstrate that by activating a processural becoming that takes place not so much on-screen, but between film and viewer, The Day I Became a Woman palpably resonates with a conception of becoming-woman, similar to that theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a concept that has been taken up for debate within feminist theory. Before moving on to my detailed analysis of the film, let me explore the theoretical figures that will weave their way through this chapter in more detail. I have suggested that the particular allegorical work of this film takes place along two axes, the horizontal and the vertical. In 1953, the American avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren took part in a symposium on poetry and film along with some of the patriarchs of twentieth-century American literature.6 During the symposium, Deren outlined her conception of poetic cinema by distinguishing between what she calls the ‘horizontal’ development of drama and the ‘vertical’ investigation of poetry. Deren wrote, ‘In what is called a “horizontal” development, the logic is a logic of actions.’7 In contrast, Deren defined poetry and the poetic aspects of cinema – involving such elements as mood, tone and rhythm – as ‘vertical’. Deren stated, ‘The poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a “vertical” investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment and is concerned

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with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means.’8 Deren believed that cinema carried with it a great potential to interrupt narrative development at certain moments and open the viewing experience to the vertical or poetic axis, which has the effect of creating what I would call a voluptuous exploration of pure feeling. Deren theorized the possibility of a form of poetic cinema that offers viewers immediate access to affect, through the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. It is important to point out that during the course of the symposium, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Miller not only mocked Deren’s theorization but also absolutely refused to understand her. At one point Miller elicited applause from the audience, exclaiming, ‘To hell with that “vertical” and “horizontal.” It doesn’t mean anything.’9 I mention this altercation because it foregrounds a problematic that lies at the heart of some contemporary feminist theory, particularly those theorists who have, as Rosi Braidotti writes, embarked on a ‘quest for points of exit from phallogocentric modes of thought toward a more balanced approach’.10 It appears that Miller and Thomas failed to fathom Deren’s conceptual metaphor, which is both spatial and temporal, because they are incapable of thinking outside of the epistemological logic of phallocentrism. Although Deren had considerable trouble making her point to these men, it is clear that for her the vertical had nothing to do with action, although the two axes may well be combined, as I will argue is the case with The Day I Became a Woman. It appears that Deren was speaking several decades ahead of her time, for she might well have been talking about Deleuze’s conception of affect, or of the difference between what Deleuze and Guattari have theorized as the molar and molecular planes of organization. As Barbara Kennedy has summarized, the molar ‘plane of organisation is that area of our lives through which we are structured into behavioural roles, through specific moralities and principles; the molar line – the family, law, the state, education – where things have specific values and a specific place’.11 By contrast, the molecular is concerned with affect, sensations, vibrations, durations, modulations, resonances and intensities. The molar and the molecular are intimately linked in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages. Indeed, much as Deren did in her conception of poetic cinema, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of assemblages as similarly comprising two axes: the horizontal and the vertical.12 On the

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horizontal axis an assemblage comprises ‘content and expression’, while the vertical axis consists of stable ‘territorialized sides’ and ‘cutting edges of deterritorialization’, which work to destabilize the assemblage.13 According to Deleuze and Guattari, certain authors such as Franz Kafka are capable of making these axes function together. Allegories too may be thought of as assemblages. They at once appear to maintain the impression of an ordered, hierarchical world and simultaneously destabilize this order. In addition, allegories necessarily form an assemblage between authors and readers, and they are in a constant state of flux or becoming due to the fleeting and dialectical nature of meaning. For Benjamin, allegory is both a mode of expression and a ‘way of seeing’.14 It is a process that involves a dynamic engagement between writers and readers, artists and viewers. It is in the moments in which these ways of seeing intersect that the allegorical intention reveals itself. In The Day I Became a Woman, both the horizontal and the vertical, the literal and the allegorical, necessarily coexist and intersect, for it is in the very moments in which the allegorical cuts through the film’s literal or horizontal axis that we may begin to perceive the various becomings generated by the film. Despite the film’s rather conventional and deceptively simple narrative structure and the apparently hierarchical logic of images, there lies within an allegorical film that palpably resonates with critical potential and brings into focus the complexities and contradictions embedded in the very concept of becomingwoman in contemporary Iranian cinema. My analysis will be divided into two movements: horizontal negotiations and vertical explorations.

Horizontal negotiations Havva – Negotiating continuity A black scarf secured by its four corners to form a crude sail that undulates restlessly in the wind. Rendered translucent by sunlight, this veil-become-sail only partially obstructs our view of the vast, rippling expanse of the ocean. This image is shortly followed by a title, ‘Havva’. We first meet Havva, the protagonist of this story, as her grandmother wakes her up, and she steps out of a little white tent. Initially, we see only Havva’s sleepy face, the flaps of the tent’s opening forming a kind of a veil around her body (Figure 3.1). Her grandmother tells

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Figure 3.1  Havva is told that today she becomes a woman. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001).

her that today she has become a woman. Havva’s seemingly inconsequential and playful gesture of veiling herself with the tent prefigures the central role that the chador – the long, black Islamic veil designed to modestly conceal a woman’s hair and body – will play in this episode. Literally meaning ‘tent’, the chador has been described as the single most defining article of women’s clothing in Iran since veiling was made compulsory in 1983. It has also become a regular fixture in Iranian cinema, helping to ensure that censorship rules governing the modest representation of women are maintained. Hamid Naficy has explained how Islamic rules of modesty have been adapted to the cinema and affect the representation of women quite profoundly.15 In Iranian society, rules of modesty involving dress, behaviour and eye contact are designed to protect women (and men) from the male gaze.16 Central to these rules of modesty is the practice of veiling, designed to conceal a woman’s body: to hide her hair and her figure from the eyes of unrelated men. In order to further conceal the shape of a woman’s body, she should wear long pants, a headscarf and a loose tunic. Moreover, in many public places, such as mosques, shrines and government institutions, she should additionally wear a chador. Unrelated men and women should also lower their eyes in order to avoid eye contact, because the eyes are considered to be very powerful organs. Rules of modesty are also even encoded into the design of the traditional dwellings, which, like the home we see in the Havva episode, consists of an exterior wall

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and a series of rooms with an inner sanctum that enables the segregation of women from unrelated men who might enter the home. As Naficy writes, ‘Before entering a house, men are required to make their presence known by voice in order to give the women inside a chance to cover themselves, or to organise the scene for the male gaze.’17 This idea of ‘organising the scene for the male gaze’ within the home takes on even greater complexity when applied to the cinema and the organization of women in the mise en scène. Naficy continues his discussion by pointing out that the codes of modesty applying to women in society apply equally, if not more, to women in the cinema. He argues that in the cinema, the code ‘tends to distort the portrayal of family life and love relationships because women are shown covering themselves from even related kinfolks’.18 In the cinema, not only must women remain constantly veiled, but physical contact between men and women is also forbidden. These codes create the conditions for a cinema that is incapable of producing either veracity in its representations of relationships between men and women or accurate representations of certain historical periods. In this first episode of The Day I Became a Woman, the practice and concept of veiling is recruited for allegorical purposes. Through Havva’s simple gesture of pulling the tent around her, an allegorical slippage takes place between the literal tent and the chador. Just as the tent, which is also a kind of living space, can figurally signify a chador, so too the chador is prepared for emblematic purposes, in this case as a border or boundary between men and women encoded into all aspects of Iranian society and cinema. On the threshold of her own socially determined womanhood, it is Havva’s job, in this episode, to negotiate the limits of this threshold. In this respect, Havva is much like the child protagonists of many other Iranian films, including The Mirror (Ayneh, Jafar Panahi 1997) and Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, Majid Majidi 1997), discussed in the previous chapter. Told by her mother and her grandmother that today she has become a woman, that she must begin to veil and may no longer play with boys, Havva pleads with them to allow her just one more hour to play with her friend Hassan, since she was not born until noon. During the course of her last hour as a child, we are made aware of various obstacles that come between her and her friend Hassan and will, it is suggested, come to determine the rest of her life.

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The most notable of these obstacles is introduced by Hassan’s sister, who has called him home to do his homework, thus preventing him from coming out to play during Havva’s last hour as a child. The final touching exchange between them takes place with Hassan quite literally locked behind the bars of his home. We see him framed by a barred window, showing that borders and boundaries may be just as limiting to men as they are to women. Havva, however, manages to transgress the limits of this walled (and by implication veiled) convention, demonstrating her sophisticated but simple skills of negotiation. Hassan tells her to go and buy some ice cream, but she returns with a lollypop and some tamarind. In a scene that suggests a great deal of intimacy between the two children, Havva shares the lollypop with Hassan through the bars of his window. Much like the scene in The Mirror, discussed in my last chapter, in which Mina mediates between the gazes of a young couple, Meshkini is careful to use continuity editing, cutting alternately between Havva’s arm movements and the faces of the two children as they share the lollypop. Havva’s hand reaches into the shots of Hassan to pass him the lollypop. This technique, however, merely suggests the sharing of the lollypop, for in the absence of a two-shot of the children, we cannot be sure that they actually share it (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). This is further emphasized in what appears to be a rather deliberate lapse in continuity, with the size of the lollypop varying considerably and inconsistently between cuts: the children are in fact not sharing the same lollypop at all! In this one scene, therefore, the film allegorically figures the capacity of film to simultaneously transgress

Figure 3.2  Havva shares a lollypop with Hassan. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001).

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Figure 3.3  The absence of a two-shot ensures that Havva and Hassan do not actually share the lollypop. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001).

and maintain borders by disrupting continuity and inserting a gap between the two figures. Importantly, where in The Mirror, the child functioned as an intermediary, enabling the image to be purified; here, it is the discontinuity edit that serves this purpose. Although the codes of modesty that apply to adults would not necessarily prevent Havva and Hassan, as children, from actually sharing the lollypop on-screen, because Havva is conceptually being represented on the verge of womanhood, it would be in principle forbidden. On one level, it is this principle that the film highlights. But on another, allegorical level, Meshkini demonstrates cinema’s ability to transgress censorship through a virtual renegotiation of cinematic codes of continuity. Just as the lapse in continuity allows us to say the characters never actually shared the lollypop, we are still left with the impression that they did, an impression made even more palpable by the way Havva is seen rubbing the lollypop on her lips and through the exaggerated close-miked sucking noises we hear on the soundtrack. Furthermore, these sounds, in their uncanny resemblance to a kiss, stand in for and bridge this gap, separated by the chain of allegorically connected signifiers – edit, wall, tent, chador – to virtually connect male and female bodies. Meshkini’s premature separation of the children’s bodies further highlights the extent to which film-makers in Iran must test the cinematic codes and techniques in order to negotiate the limits placed on them by censorship.

Ahu – Negotiating narrative agency and the male gaze In the second episode, Meshkini pushes this allegorical reflection on the limits and possibilities of cinematic codes even further, as she shows Ahu as a young

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woman attempting to renegotiate her place in society. If the tone of the first episode was playful and childlike in its mode of negotiation, the second is filled with urgency. The opening scenes of the episode, described at the beginning of this chapter, visually set up a highly traditional and conventional conception of woman. The scenes of the man seeking out Ahu visually represent the meaning and connotations carried by the Persian term ‘zan’ (woman) present in the film’s title. According to Farzaneh Milani, zan means both ‘woman’ and ‘wife’.19 This implies, Milani argues, that linguistically, woman is always defined in relation to man, since there is no distinct terminology, as there is for a man, to signify a woman independently of her relationship to a man. She writes, ‘Woman is defined with reference to man, whereas a man is described as a person and not with reference to her.’20 Indeed, structurally, the beginning of this episode seems to apply these connotations of the word ‘zan’ to the visual image, for it is only through the man’s gaze, enacted by shots of him searching the landscape for his wife, that the female cyclists are introduced into the scene. Furthermore, as the man approaches the group of women, there is little to distinguish one young woman from another. They are all identically dressed in black chadors, and as they participate in the race, they frequently change positions, suggesting that one may easily be substituted for another. It is not until the husband, who brings his horse close to the group of cyclists in order to survey their faces and identify his wife, that one woman in particular is singled out from the rest by way of a close-up of her face. She is only identified individually for the viewer once her relationship to this man – her husband – is established. Thus, according to cinematic conventions the spectator is initially encouraged to identify with the male perspective. Indeed, the active nature of the husband’s gaze is further emphasized by the allegorical nature of Ahu’s name, which means ‘gazelle’. He is the hunter, and she the hunted. It is therefore only through his active, almost predatory, gaze that Ahu may be introduced into the story, and it is perhaps for this reason that she is shown constantly struggling to establish and maintain her position in the race and to take on the narrative agency of the tale. Until this point in the episode, the film quite literally extends the rules governing association between the sexes in Iranian society to the processes of cinematic narration and characterization. The codes of modesty discussed earlier also affect the kinds of roles available to women in the cinema and their ability to actively drive narratives.

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Indeed, as Naficy points out, until the early 1990s, in narratological terms, women were rarely cast as ‘bearers of the story or the plot’. Instead, they were confined to static roles, and further, censorship has encouraged women to ‘avoid activities and movements that show even the contours of their bodies through their modest attire’.21 This point in itself makes The Day I Became a Woman significant as one of the first Iranian films to show women engaged in a highly physical activity, such as cycling. It is interesting that Naficy draws on ideas developed in psychoanalytic feminist film theory, not only to explain the codes that govern the representation of women in Iranian cinema but also to describe the rules of modesty that govern interactions between men and women in Iranian society at large. These revolve around containing and controlling the male gaze by way of covering and concealing women’s bodies. Drawing explicitly on ideas introduced to film theory by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,22 along with the work of other feminist film theorists, Naficy concludes that in Iranian society, the male gaze is not so much articulated from a position of power, neither enacting a voyeuristic nor a fetishistic gaze, but rather from a position that acknowledges men’s inherent weakness. This means, for Naficy, that veiling in Iranian society implies a male gaze that is masochistic. I would argue, however, that while it may be true that the male gaze in such a context is potentially self-destructive (as in Freud’s theory of fetishism in which the female body presents to the male viewer a lack and a threat of castration – which must be disavowed, covered over, made whole) so too must we remember that the veil works to cover and to disavow man’s inherent weakness and inability to control his inwardly penetrating gaze. Rather than disavowing woman’s lack of a penis, as in the Oedipal scenario involved in fetishistic scopophilia, the veil serves a dual function: first, to protect women from a man’s voyeuristic gaze and, second, to disavow man’s own lack (weakness) and to protect him from being placed in a masochistic position. This does tend to complicate the male–female, active–passive binaries constructed by psychoanalytic feminist film theory, since some Islamic feminists have pointed out that the veil can actually help to facilitate women’s entry into the public sphere23 and, by implication, women’s entry into Iranian cinema as protagonists with a high degree of narrative agency.24 But, as we shall see, this agency may only be attained by careful negotiation of the

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limits of representation imposed on cinema by censorship and must remain within the physical restrictions presented by the veil itself. With this in mind, returning to the second episode of The Day I Became a Woman, the very fact that Ahu is engaged in a bicycle race and exhibits a degree of narrative agency as the episode’s protagonist indicates that the film negotiates some of the limits of representation imposed by these codes. The sheer physical activity and mobility displayed by Ahu can, therefore, be seen in part as a reflection of the loosening of these restrictions, and we might in part attribute the film’s wide appeal at international film festivals to the fact that never before in a post-revolutionary Iranian film have women appeared with such mobility. However, I argue that Meshkini is not simply celebrating the apparent expansion of these limits of representation; rather, she is allegorically testing their flexibility. This may be demonstrated by examining the development of the narrative more closely. The narrative develops according to processes of repetition and intensification, which are complemented by the rhythm of Ahu alternately gaining or losing ground in the race. These are directly related to the entries of men into the scene. While her husband is pleading with her to stop and return home with him, Ahu is passed by many of her fellow competitors and remains surrounded by other women, struggling to keep up the pace as long as her husband is present. Once she refuses, by uttering an almost imperceptible ‘no’, her husband departs, and Ahu appears to regain her drive, begins to pedal harder, pulls ahead and takes command of the image as she rides through the landscape in a highly mobile one-shot. Her feeling of liberation is expressed and transmitted to the viewer through her sole command of the image and her movement through the apparently boundless landscape. That is, until we again hear the resounding gallop of horses’ hooves signalling the return of Ahu’s husband, this time with the mullah who had performed their marriage ceremony. Once again Ahu loses ground and falls back into the pack of cyclists. The mullah pleads with Ahu to return to her husband or agree to a divorce. She agrees to the divorce and, as the men depart, Ahu once again appears to take a solitary flight into the limitless landscape. Three more times Ahu is approached by significant men in her life: her father and grandfather accompanied each time by the elders of her tribe, followed finally by her brothers. Until the arrival of her brothers, this rhythmic pattern of loss and gain, struggle and freedom

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repeats. Thus, the narrative progression takes on the elastic quality of a rubber band, stretching and contracting repeatedly. Ahu’s freedom still seems to be constrained by the limits of a highly codified world whose flexibility is brought into question by the arrival of her brothers. The effect of Ahu’s brothers’ arrival on the scene does not simply cause her to lose ground; it brings her to a grinding halt. She brakes abruptly as her two brothers encircle her threateningly on their horses. As Ahu dismounts, the camera begins to pull away swiftly, leaving her stranded and at the mercy of her brothers. At this point the film must abide by censorship rules, and physical violence is merely suggested rather than represented, since the camera has pulled so far away as to render the scene between Ahu and her brothers virtually indiscernible. This episode ends, therefore, at a point of indecision as to the fate of Ahu, a fate apparently unknown even to the other cyclists. The ambiguity of Ahu’s narrative closure is carried through into the next episode of the film, when two of the other women cyclists relate Ahu’s story to that episode’s protagonist Hura. One young woman believes that Ahu’s brothers took her bike so that she would be unable to finish the race, while the other believes that Ahu took another girl’s bicycle and did indeed complete the race. This ambiguity reveals the limits of female narrative agency. Women’s social mobility can only be taken so far in cinema because the rubber band of social and moral constraint will eventually reach its limit of flexibility and snap. The camera leaves Ahu and therefore takes away her narrative agency, precisely because Iranian cinema has limits – representational, social, political and religious – that constrain its efficacy as a medium for challenging the traditional roles of women in Iranian society. Ahu is attempting to escape the constraints of cultural, religious and moral expectations. However, rather than simply offering a utopian vision of female liberation, Meshkini works the notion of struggle into every element of this episode including costuming. Ahu is further distinguished from the other women in the race through the way that she struggles to keep her chador in place. While the other women appear to have their veils secured firmly against the force of the wind, we continually see Ahu having to rescue hers from blowing away, sometimes even holding it in place with her teeth (Figure 3.4). Our attention is drawn to the impracticality of such an item of clothing, something that restricts and hinders women’s participation in certain activities. Nevertheless, the film also seems to be saying that women still

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Figure 3.4  Attention is drawn to the impracticality of the chador. Ahu must secure it from blowing away. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001).

manage to participate, despite such imposed limitations. In a number of other Iranian films featuring women released around this time, including The Circle (Dayereh, Jafar Panahi, 2000) and Secret Ballot (Ra’ye Makhfi, Babak Payami 2001), the chador figures similarly as a metaphor for the struggle of women against the constraints of society, as the various female protagonists attempt in vain at times to keep their chadors in place. I do not believe, however, that these examples of struggle with the chador represent simplistic arguments against veiling, but rather posit the veil as itself a site of negotiation. In her book, Veils and Words, Farzaneh Milani discusses at length the concept and practice of veiling in Iran. She writes, In recent years, a major shift has occurred in the meaning of the veil, which no longer signifies women’s segregation but, on the contrary, facilitates their access to the public arena, a means to renegotiate boundaries. … Veiled or unveiled, Iranian women are reappraising traditional spaces, boundaries, and limits. They are renegotiating old sanctions and sanctuaries. They are challenging male allocations of power, space, and resources.25

This is precisely what occurs in The Day I Became a Woman. Ahu’s chador, a literal limit, boundary or gap between male and female, allegorically figures her struggle to renegotiate the limits of her mobility in the public sphere.

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Hura – Negotiating the domestic mise en scène And so, we finally arrive at the third and final episode of the film. This is the story of Hura, an old, unmarried woman who has come to the duty-free island of Kish to purchase all the modern consumer goods that she could never afford to buy before now, having inherited a significant sum of money. She enlists the help of a small army of young boys to trolley the items she has purchased – which include a bedroom suite, a lounge, a refrigerator and a washing machine, along with a range of other domestic items including a wedding dress – around the shopping centre for her and one to push her in her wheelchair. Hura appears to be something of a contradiction in the sense that her age and her immobility appear to link her directly to the past, while her desire for modern consumer goods figures her as a woman very interested in the future. The allegorical nature of her name is also highly ironic, given her visual appearance. ‘Hura’ (a Persian girl’s name meaning nymph) recalls the huri (Arabic for female angels), the beautiful young women who offer themselves to good men in heaven.26 She may not be the ideal image of one of the seventy-two virgins allegedly welcoming martyred young men into paradise, but she is the epitome of the modest Iranian woman, a stereotypical fixture of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. It is also implied that she is illiterate, as rather than coming to Kish with a list, she has tied onto her fingers many pieces of coloured cloth to remind her of all the things she wanted to buy. But, true to the allegorical nature of this film, the cloth takes on multiple meanings. On the one hand, it serves as a rather antiquated device for aiding memory, and on the other, it reminds viewers that in some parts of Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, women tie coloured strips of cloth to shrines or on nearby trees to signify a prayer or wish to the saint.27 Indeed, towards the end of the episode, Hura laments that she never had children, asking a little Afghan boy if she can adopt him. Perhaps this last strip of cloth signifies her wish. One particular piece of cloth is the catalyst for the scene I wish to discuss here. Hura has managed to match each piece of cloth with an item that she has bought, that is, all except one. No matter how hard she tries, she is unable to think of that one last thing, so she asks the boys who have been helping her to set up all the furniture and white goods on the beach. The effect is the creation of a rather surreal mise en scène that literally transposes an inner,

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normally hidden space – the inner sanctum of the home – into an open, public space. The enclosed and private space of the home is literally turned inside out (Figure 3.5), but this does not mean that the scene is no longer organized for the male gaze. Hura remains veiled, as do the two cyclists who arrive from the second episode to relate the story of Ahu to Hura. Furthermore, a kind of implicit wall is still maintained around the space of this outer–inner sanctum by the fact that, apart from the boys who help her, men are entirely absent from the scene. It still remains a space of exclusion and seclusion despite Hura’s attempts to renegotiate the limits of such a domestic space. In a rather humorous way, Meshkini also appears to point out the very impossibility of realistically representing a domestic environment in Iranian cinema. The contradiction of inner and outer is further emphasized through a highly emblematic object: a transparent teapot, which Hura labels ‘indecent’ and which builds on the allegorical significance of limiting devices (edit, wall, tent, chador) already discussed. The teapot does not conceal (veil) its contents; however, its seemingly invisible walls still function as a barrier, as a boundary no less capable of containment than the invisible walls of her seaside living room. Significantly, Hura gives this object to two young women from the previous episode’s bicycle race and who sit for a while in her living room on

Figure 3.5  Hura converses with girls from the bicycle race in her inside-out mise en scène. The Day I Became a Woman (Makhmalbaf Film House, Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001).

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the beach to talk with her. It is they who have inherited the task of negotiating, not merely visible and physical boundaries but invisible boundaries as well. The final scenes show Hura floating on the sea towards the horizon, with her consumer goods perched precariously on makeshift rafts. Little Havva, now concealed beneath her chador, watches over her; she, too, is an inheritor of this task of negotiation. Here, just as in the other two episodes, Meshkini makes allegorical use of various cinematic techniques in order to render visible some of the limits by which the representation of women in Iranian cinema is bound.

On the way to becoming Each of these episodes addresses the question of women’s negotiations of limits and borders on the levels of narrative and cinematic representation. Allegorically speaking, this is emblematic of the negotiations that contemporary Iranian women must undertake in the course of their daily lives. In fact, the way the film draws our attention to certain aspects of cinematic representation through its emphasis on continuity editing, narrative agency, regimes of looking and mise en scène leads me to read these codes of cinematic representation – which, as I have demonstrated, all have significant limits in an Iranian context – as allegories of the condition of women in contemporary Iranian society. In an allegorical fashion, Meshkini draws our attention to the highly constructed nature of cinematic representation. Viewing the film as a horizontal series from beginning to end, we might say that the three parts of the film form a kind of grand narrative of a woman’s life, viewed sequentially from childhood, to womanhood and to old age; with Havva, Ahu and Hura respectively representing various stages in her life. We could imagine that each episode is an image laid out one after the other in linear succession, three images in a strip of film perhaps: Havva – Ahu – Hura. In such a configuration, becoming is represented as a series of states or stages, rather than as a vital, dynamic process. Between each of these images lies a gap, an interstice, a blank space that falls between the moments of representation. True becoming lies in these gaps, excluded from the image that purports to present it. As in the film’s title, becoming is rendered in the past tense as became: inert and static, always already passed. In the first episode in

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particular, Havva became a woman at a predetermined point in time, imposed on her by social and religious convention, rather than through an experiential process of becoming. The division between child and woman is marked simply and artificially by the chador, an outward signifier of womanhood. Indeed, in a sense, none of the three women in the film are actually shown in the process of becoming-woman. All tend to exist in a state of not-woman in the linguistic sense expressed by the term ‘zan’; Havva is not yet woman, Ahu, who receives a divorce, is no longer woman and Hura, the old woman who never married, has never become woman/wife. In fact, perhaps this is what Hura has forgotten, the thing represented by the remaining piece of cloth. But, we could ask, ‘Did she simply forget to marry, to become woman/ wife?’ If so, we could say that she is emblematic of the social impossibility of becoming-woman in her own right without reference to man. When examined along this horizontal axis, the film’s narrative impulse, while apparently celebrating women and granting them the status of protagonists, also points to the failure of cinematic representation and the limitations inherent in any attempt to represent the becoming of woman in Iranian cinema. I do believe, however, that there is another, more complex, allegorical level to this film, which can be accessed only if we turn away from the superficial narrative level and our tendency to accept that these three supposedly successive states of womanhood tell the whole story of The Day I Became a Woman. Before I turn to explore how the film operates very differently along the vertical axis, a more detailed understanding of the concept of becoming will be useful. In his book, Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson wrote of the difficulties of representing true becoming to the intellect. Although we ‘change without ceasing’, we tend to ‘disregard this uninterrupted change and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction on the attention’.28 The problem, according to Bergson, ostensibly lies in the nature of the intellect itself, in our mode of thought, which privileges states over processes. In his introduction, he writes that ‘our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids’.29 As such, these concepts and this logic, which proceed by way of constructing a series of categories in a mechanistic way, are not able to fully take into account ‘the things of life’.30 As such, the ‘essence of things escapes

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us’.31 Here, Bergson is pointing to an inadequacy in Western philosophy and the sciences; the disciplines that have most profoundly informed the epistemological structure of our intellects and ways of seeing the world. Indeed, in Chapter 4 of his book, Bergson, who was writing in the decades immediately following the invention of cinema, goes so far as to describe our ‘apparatus of knowledge’ as ‘cinematographical’, that is, cutting between a succession of discrete ‘images’ of the world, excluding the transformation that takes place between these.32 Continuing the metaphor of optical devices to describe human thought processes, he writes, ‘there is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture.’33 Reading The Day I Became a Woman in a linear or horizontal manner, therefore, we see only a series of these new pictures, the stages in a woman’s life, rather than the shake or the transformation and modulation (becoming) that take place between these culturally and linguistically imposed stages. Time and the variable durations of bodies in process, which give rise to the continual and multiple becomings that constitute all life, are excluded from such a reading of the film. Moreover, in its insistence on showing how the women must negotiate the limits that constrain them without, however, exceeding these limits, the film reveals how the women are contained within and controlled by an epistemological structure that also includes representational narrative cinema. Becoming, therefore, is presented along this horizontal axis as a state imposed from the outside, as with the veil designed at once to hide the processural body of woman and to set up a clearly visible barrier between women’s bodies and the becomings of other bodies (especially those of men) that might interact with it and create assemblages. Indeed, according to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, such a reading of the film deals only with the molar plane of organization, which concerns itself with specific categories, with states rather than processes, and it is for this reason that at this level it is impossible to locate any sense of becoming as process in the film. According to Bergson, the task of perceiving and representing true becoming requires a certain ability to transcend or transgress the epistemological structures on which our intellects and social structures are based.

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Of course, as a representational system, cinema may only effectively represent becoming as reconstituted movement, rather than showing an actual process or change. Change may only be captured as a series of stages limited to twenty-four frames per second. While I am not trying to argue that The Day I Became a Woman transcends this limited ability for film to represent true becoming, I do believe that the film offers an alternative solution to this ageold bind. It does this, not on the level of representation at all but aesthetically and allegorically by developing a vertical movement that cuts through the more rigid horizontal and molar axis of the film. Whereas the horizontal emphasizes borders and limits and a chronological passage of time, the vertical presents the possibility of other kinds of temporal experience. According to Maya Deren’s conception of the vertical, this poetic axis is inscribed with a particular kind of temporality, not a temporality in which one moment follows the next but one in which an entire life may be contained in a single vertical exploration of a moment. Deren states, ‘The chosen moment should be of such significance that one can deduce all history from it.’34 Rather than simply stopping narrative progression and exploring the vertical at certain moments, as described by Deren here, the vertical axis of The Day I Became a Woman is co-extensive with – that is, forms an assemblage with – its horizontal axis. It is this vertical axis that opens up a voluptuous space within the film and not only allows us to begin to see the hidden (veiled) meanings that are embedded within the film but opens the viewer to a more molecular experience of the film. It is only at this molecular level that a true process of becoming-woman may be perceived. For Deleuze and Guattari the concept of becoming-woman is the key to all becomings, which include becoming-child, becoming-animal, becomingintense and becoming-molecular. The term ‘woman’ in the phrase ‘becomingwoman’ does not refer to a specifically feminine or female biological or psychological subject but rather to a process that displaces or disorients any kind of fixed subject position. Becoming is not aimed at becoming something; instead, ‘becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own, it does not reduce or lead back to “appearing,” “being,” “equalling,” or “producing”.’35 Furthermore, the idea of becoming-woman does not presume a binary conception of sex or gender, since Deleuze and Guattari conceive of ‘as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis’.36 As Claire Colebrook has written, ‘If man is the concept of

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being then his other is the beginning of becoming.’37 Becoming-woman always exists in process, in the in-between, not aimed at an end point of being-woman, but rather, in the words of Jerry Aline Flieger, ‘it aims at tensile transformation and transgression of identity’.38 In The Day I Became a Woman, therefore, it is not so much the bringing into being of female subjects or identities that is effected but the instigation of a process of becoming-woman that is part of the cinematic assemblage of the film and its becomings with other bodies, such as that of the film viewer.39 This occurs through the opening up of a vertical axis or plane, an allegorical momentum, which disturbs and displaces the seemingly neat division of woman into a series of states or stages and splits this into a series of multiple becomings. The film, therefore, generates a force that intersects dynamically with some debates on becoming-woman in feminist theory. The concept of ‘becoming-woman’ has received a great deal of attention from feminist theorists.40 Rosi Braidotti describes the ‘affinity’ between Deleuzian thought and feminist theory as a shared impulse to ‘undo the straight-jacket of phallocentrism’ and dualistic thought and in doing so to generate a ‘moving horizon of exchanges and becomings, towards which the non-unitary subjects of postmodernity move and by which they are moved in return’.41 The concept of ‘becoming-woman’ offers feminism another way to think of sexual difference by affirming ‘the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation’.42 Furthermore, this conception of difference, which is not only sexual, is not constructed as a binary where woman is the other of man. Deleuze’s emphasis on embodied, affective entities, rather than biological ones, according to Braidotti, enables the ‘embodied subject’ to be thought in terms of ‘a process of intersecting forces (affects), spatio-temporal variables that are characterized by their mobility, changeability, and transitory nature’.43 This is of enormous value in an Iranian context, where feminism has, according to Shahrzad Mojab, become a site of contestation between Muslim women and Western feminists. Mojab argues that Western feminism has constructed an imagined category of Muslim women that ‘ignores the heterogeneity of women in Islamic societies and constructs them into a universal category shaped by one particular characteristic, a common religion: Islam’.44 This, according to Mojab, generates an adversarial relationship between Western feminism and its others. Rather

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than the divisive binary generated by such universalizing particularisms, Mojab advocates adopting a ‘dialectical approach’ that recognizes both the particularities of a given historical context and the commonalities shared across diverse cultural contexts.45 This may be achieved through a more transnational approach, moving fluidly between ‘national, regional, or global levels’.46 But, I would ask, why stop at the dialectical? I believe that The Day I Became a Woman helps to posit a becoming-woman of a multitude of feminisms, one in which vital, productive and embodied encounters may take place across both space and time. Film’s capacity to move fluidly across borders offers a productive opportunity for setting such a process in motion. The Day I Became a Woman does this by motivating the viewer to take an epistemological turn, to consider not only the literal, horizontal or molar reading of the film that I have outlined earlier. Instead, it encourages us to entertain the possibility of a further allegorical encounter that is situated along a vertical axis and which then becomes suggestive of a more processural and time-laden conception of becoming-woman, generated as an intimate and immanent encounter between two bodies: the body of the film and the body of the film viewer.

Vertical explorations In order to see how the film generates a vital, time-laden process of becomingwoman, we must turn away from the chronological structure by which the film is presented to us in the cinema. There is evidence within the film to suggest that each episode takes place simultaneously. However, we may not become aware of this until towards the end of the third episode, when the two young women from the bicycle race arrive on the scene to tell their conflicting version of events to Hura, or even later, when Hura is floating out to sea on her raft of consumer goods, and we see Havva on the beach with her mother. She still wears the same dress and chador that her mother had given to her at the end of the first episode. Even more subtly, simultaneity is suggested through the use of shadows, to which our attention was drawn in the first episode through a crude sun-dial (a stick placed in the sand) rather than with a mechanical timepiece that enables Havva to know it is midday and thus time

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for her to officially become a woman. In the second episode, we observe the gradually lessening shadows cast by the cyclists on the road, and, in the third, the shadow of the large tree on the beach indicates a time close to midday.47 These indications of simultaneity suggest to the perceptive viewer that an alternative to the sequential ordering of the episodes might be possible. In fact, I believe we are asked to view the film as a layering of the ages of a woman’s life, rather than as a progression from one (st)age to another. We should therefore turn our minds to consider how each image might affect the other when placed one over the other, in layers or sheets that may touch; then we are faced with a very different film, a film pulsating with traces of allegorical temporality and becomings-woman. Indeed, a crucial aspect of Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory is relevant here. For Benjamin, it is allegory’s ability to capture conflicting temporal states or processes within a single figure, emblem or image that sets it apart from other rhetorical forms. He describes this quality with the evocative phrase ‘petrified unrest’.48 Benjamin writes, ‘Allegory establishes itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely.’49 Allegories are dialectical in a specifically Benjaminian sense for they contain multiple levels of meaning circulating between abstract and literal poles. These coexist and enter into exchanges, but do not collapse into a single, final idea. Allegories are therefore not dissimilar to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of assemblages. Although homologies are constructed, there is always a gap that prevents a full metaphorical translation from taking place between the two things or ideas. This gap produces a degree of ambiguity that cues the reader or viewer of an allegorical text to work at the production of meaning. Translated into a temporal concept, the dialectical nature of the allegorical mode of expression not only allows for parallels to be established between distinct temporal periods but also enables different temporalities or durations to rub against and inflect one another in a highly dynamic way.50 Benjamin conceived the notion of ‘dialectical images’ as a way of understanding history, not as a succession of events in time but rather as fleeting constellations of past and present. For him the past is never simply past, but is made palpable in the present. Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image and what he has elsewhere called the ‘dialectic at a standstill’ describes the moment of virtual stasis when, like ‘lightning’, an image of the past ‘flashes up in the now of its recognisability’, before

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‘in the next moment [it] is already irretrievably lost’.51 Allegorical texts frequently produce these moments of dynamic contact between disparate things and times. In doing so, filmic texts in particular produce what I call ‘allegorical-images’.52 These are ‘time-images’ in the sense coined by Deleuze in his second volume on cinema, images in which time is presented directly rather than subordinated to movement.53 Allegorical-images are, however, a very specific kind of cinematic time-image in that they are capable of sustaining seemingly incommensurable temporalities or durations as captured in Benjamin’s image of ‘petrified unrest’. This conception of an allegorical-image capable of sustaining multiple temporalities simultaneously enables us to move beyond the conception of time as a succession of moments marked by the seconds and minutes on a clock face (mechanical time) – or indeed the days, weeks, years or ages marked by calendars and chronicles – to a different kind of temporality that is more processural and experiential and based on the specific durations of bodies. By conceptualizing the temporality of The Day I Became a Woman as simultaneous and its structure as episodically constituting a layer or temporal sheet, we can see possibilities rather than limits, as each of these women’s individual durations rub against one another, affecting and informing each other in the way that Benjamin’s dialectical image allows past and present to come into direct and dynamic contact. Vertically layered in this way, each woman in the three episodes comes to embody a very complex set of temporalities both in relation to the other women and within herself: each bears within herself past, present and future simultaneously, with complex temporal flows being exchanged between each of them. Hura, for example, as an old woman can be seen as both past and future to Havva and Ahu: a generalized past that also bears witness to the history of Iran, particularly as it relates to women and modernity. She has lived through the periods of forced unveiling under the Shah and the subsequent introduction of forced veiling that followed the Islamic revolution. Hura has also been a witness to the vast project of modernization under the Shah, the subsequent criticism of ‘Westoxification’ (gharbzadegi) and the return to Islamic tradition that came with the revolution.54 We must understand that she has not simply passed through these periods of Iran’s history, but that these conflicting forces remain within her, embodied by her and evidenced in

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a number of contradictory ways. Her body is figured as crippled by the passage of time – twisted, stooped and gnarled – yet she has flown to Kish by aeroplane, thus utilizing a mode of transport that alters the relationship between time and space. She employs a rather antiquated method for remembering the things she wishes to buy, yet the strips of coloured cloth she has tied to her fingers lead to the purchase of the most modern of domestic appliances. Despite her apparently wholesale entry into consumer culture, Hura remains mildly critical of consumerism and attached to tradition by not allowing the ‘immodest’ translucent teapot to violate her modesty. Her attachment to the past is figured evocatively through the final coloured thread, the meaning of which she has forgotten and her interest in the future is figured through the gift of the teapot to the two young women cyclists who she hopes will have opportunities that she never had herself. Hura’s is a duration that brings together past, present and future, not in a flash in the Benjaminian sense but in a duration that is long, heavy, voluptuous and languid like her own movements. Watching her sit on the beach trying to remember, to sift the vast recesses of her memory for the forgotten item, we become aware that time has welled up within her body causing it to slow down, to become heavy with time. Time, therefore, does not force her body to go somewhere, but to reflect on where it has been. Her duration is not driven by a pressing goal but remains an intensive force within her body: this intensive force is her becoming-woman. Similarly, Havva and Ahu have their own specific durations. Havva’s duration is perhaps the closest of them all to what we might call an instant, an almost imperceptible fleeting moment of time. As our youngest protagonist Havva virtually has no history at all, her duration is a tiny insignificant fragment when compared to Hura’s vast, seemingly eternal duration. But Havva, too, has her own eternal duration, resonating from her name, which means Eve: the biblical/Quranic first woman. As an allegorical figure, therefore, Havva captures the entire history of womanhood into an instant; she is the epitome of Benjamin’s petrified unrest. Perhaps even more interesting is not so much what Havva’s duration means in relation to any other, but what Havva herself does with her duration. Havva is figured right on the threshold of womanhood, but rather than passing instantaneously and unquestioningly from a state of girlhood to womanhood, Havva stretches out this moment. In doing so she

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demonstrates her virtual capacity to manipulate time, not so much in order to delay her departure from childhood but so that she may begin to consciously experience her own becoming-woman. Havva negotiates one hour for herself to experience becoming, by imposing a gap or delay in her predetermined accession to womanhood. In doing so, she opens up a vertical space in which she is able to engage in simple and seemingly inconsequential acts of play. We observe Havva’s joy in playing with a wind-up fish at the edge of the sea, in the taste sensations of the sour tamarind and the sweet lollypop that she shares with Hassan and in the tactile way she scoops sand around the stick, measuring time by walking her outstretched fingers along the shadow. We are also provided with sufficient reaction-shots of Havva experiencing these things to remind us that everyday experience is not empty and homogeneous, but minutely and infinitely diverse and textured. Havva’s becoming-woman, therefore, involves first and foremost a becoming-child. Ahu’s duration is perhaps the most complex of the three, for it is subject to the most pressure directly from the molar plane of family, society, religion and the law. As mentioned earlier, her flight from this horizontal plane – like that expressed in Maya Deren’s conception of poetic cinema – involves a struggle to push onwards and upwards despite the pressures holding her back, represented by the presence of the male figures that seem to inhibit her progression in the cycle race. In this episode, we are presented with the most potent of allegorical-images, in which fleetingness and eternity confront each other most urgently. Ahu, mounted on her bicycle, forms a powerful allegorical assemblage with the landscape through which she moves. This landscape, a seemingly vast desert bordered by an apparently limitless ocean, along with the male and female figures that exist within it, effectively serves to represent some of the many tensions between tradition and modernity that have run throughout Iran’s history since the early twentieth century. The tension is expressed here through the contrasting representations of men and women and the modes of transport associated with them. All the men in this episode appear mounted on noble Persian horses, signifying a pre-modern mode of transport. Galloping across the vast landscape, they recall hunting scenes from traditional Persian miniature paintings. The insert of the scattering gazelle helps to reinforce the allusion to a mythic past and seems to embed the men quite decisively in the world of tradition, a world

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that is temporally petrified, frozen in an indeterminate pre-modern past. The landscape seems to take on a mythic quality as an indeterminate space: an archetypal no man’s land where the land meets the sea. Although vast and open, this landscape at times appears to engulf and overwhelm the group of women cyclists. The mythic quality attached to the men is further heightened cinematically by shots of the horses’ legs galloping through the dusty earth in slow motion. Certainly, a highly clichéd image, the contrast between the mounted men, wearing traditional, tribal dress, and the women mounted on ultramodern bicycles and covered modestly in their chadors is telling. The mobility that Ahu seeks on the bicycle is at once a resistance to being drawn back into a patriarchal (mythical) version of history, where women are concealed and silent and an attempt to write women into the future, where they can actively engage with the terms of a modernity that still finds only an uncomfortable and contradictory place in Iran, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the film was made.55 Ahu is approached by every living generation of men in her family requesting that she return to the fold. Regardless of the generation, these requests associate the men with cultural stasis, which contrasts dramatically with Ahu’s mobility on the bicycle. We are confronted, therefore, with a powerful image of petrified unrest – the petrified, mythical landscape being sliced through by the pedalling women, motivated perhaps by their own unrest in the face of their social mobility. Through her constant, furious pedalling, Ahu experiences fleeting moments of liberation, in which her very own duration – a duration of urgency – is made palpable to the viewer, not only through the visual movement within the frame but also through the non-diegetic twanging of a mouth harp, the diegetic mechanical whirring of bicycle wheels and the close-miked sound of Ahu’s breath. These sounds bring us into intimate contact with Ahu, so that we may feel her urgency and her desire to speed up the pace of change, to generate multiple transformations and to effect a true process of becoming-woman. Much more than either Havva or Hura, Ahu serves as the site of a constellation of the past, present and future of Iranian women, but in a sense these women are not separate identities meant only to represent individual selves. Together, they form a vast and heterogeneous allegorical becoming-woman assemblage, each one the present, past and future of the other. This is inferred through the verbal resonances evoked by their names. Spoken aloud, their names become

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an unbroken and undulating wave: havva​-ahu-​hura-​havva​-ahu-​hura-​va-ho​ u-ra-​va-ho​u-ra. Their names, therefore, become less linguistic signifiers than pure sounds, aesthetic affects ingested and aspirated by the body that utters them. In doing so, we, the viewers, become a necessary and integral part of this filmic assemblage. This is where the process of becoming-woman is activated – between the viewer and the film. This is a space that, when not limited to the realm of the gaze, or to representation, has the capacity to push well beyond the limits of film censorship. This is an affective becoming-woman registered aesthetically. This process has nothing to do with reaching states or passing through stages, but everything to do with the shake; the between-states of the moving kaleidoscope, with the minute modulations of life forming multiple assemblages – like the wind that turns Havva’s veil into a delicately modulated surface when two boys divert it from its social function and use it as a sail for their homemade sailboat – reminding us of the image that opened the film. The veil is therefore conceived no longer as a limit or as a boundary but as an infinitely textured surface that may conduct the energy produced by bodies (human, animal and elemental), without, however, ever having to show the contours of that body.

No conclusion: Towards a molecular becoming-woman In my opening paragraph, I attempted to convey something of the exhilaration I felt on viewing this film for the first time and indeed every time I have viewed it since. This feeling, however, runs contrary to much of the detailed analysis I have performed on the film in this chapter, particularly the argument that, far from delivering scenarios in which women are presented as liberated from the societal, religious and regulatory structures that define and contain them, it is the very limited situations faced by women in Iranian cinema that have in fact been brought to light here. I have argued that by highlighting its own mode of construction, the film can be read as a complex allegory of the status of women in Iranian cinema and of the censorship regulations that seek to contain and control the image of woman in Iran. At the same time, I have attempted to show how each of the female figures in the narrative, separately and together, assume complex and varying durations that open vast and potentially limitless

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(vertical) possibilities of becoming-woman, rather than a singular, aspirational state. It is thus that the horizontal, literal or molar plane is exceeded, interrupted and transcended by the film’s openings of multiple vertical, allegorical or molecular spaces, which bring forth affective becomings-woman between film and viewer. Although the flights of each woman in this film appear literally to be horizontal movements, parallel with the landscapes and seascapes through which they move, the film does in fact generate the kind of upward, vertical movement evoked many years before in a poem by the female modernist poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Why should I stop, why? The birds have gone off to find water ways the horizon is vertical and moving is rocketing. Shining planets spin at the edge of sight why should I stop, why?56

In The Day I Became a Woman, the horizon is indeed vertical and moving, providing evidence that becoming-woman has and continues to take place in Iranian cinema(s).

4

Allegories of Love: The Cinematic Ghazal

‘In poetry we have had a tremendous amount of experience with this matter [love], but in cinema we have no expertise.’1 When film-making recommenced in the post-revolutionary period after a brief hiatus, Iranian cinema underwent a process of purification. This meant first purging dominant cinema’s inherently ‘voyeuristic gaze’ from screens and then establishing a new, Islamicate-national cinema into which ‘a new national subject-spectator severed from dominant cinema’s formal systems of looking’ could be safely and modestly inscribed.2 One way of achieving this was through the introduction of strict censorship guidelines. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, in addition to proscribing certain topics, these rules drew upon Islamic codes of modesty. This had a major impact on the representation of romantic relationships. Under the censorship guidelines, men and women are not permitted to touch, and desiring looks between the sexes is also forbidden as is the depiction of male–female intimacy. As a result, censorship has severely limited the treatment of love and relationships on screen. In a bid to combat these restrictions, film-makers resorted to ‘metaphors, symbols, and poetry for expressing love’.3 However, poetry, symbolism and allegory have not always been used merely as a foil against censorship, especially in matters of love. For some Iranian art film-makers, cinema and poetry are inseparable. In this chapter, I attempt to tease out some details of this inseparability by turning to two examples of what can be described as a ‘cinema of poetry’: Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s A Time for Love (Nobat-e Asheghi, 1990) and Majid Majidi’s Baran (1999). The aim of this chapter is to identify, analyse and theorize the key cinematic techniques that allow these essentially narrative films to operate in a poetic register. In my

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endeavour, I take inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s musings on the cinema of poetry and bring this into contact with Iran’s long tradition of love poetry. More specifically, I propose that at the heart of this cinema of poetry lies a deep affinity with the Persian ghazal, a genre of lyrical love poetry. Building on Pasolini’s concept of the ‘cinematic styleme’, which for him is the basic unit of the cinema of poetry, I coin the phrase ‘cinematic ghazal’ to describe certain moments in films that privilege poetic over narrative modes of expression. At these moments, I identify structural and thematic characteristics of the cinematic expression that approximate those of the ghazal. These include the use of rich, sensual imagery and the presentation of love as at once sweet and painful. Importantly, I draw on Pasolini’s understanding of ‘free indirect pointof-view’, to show how the films, like the ghazal, are invested with an ambiguous subjectivity that enhances the films’ shift into a poetic register. In the case of A Time for Love, I argue that the film is invested with an allegorical intention that is manifested primarily through the film’s style and structure. This allegorical intention calls upon us to read the film not only in the political terms proposed by Eric Egan, as ‘a call for greater freedom of personal action and choice in a highly centralized society’.4 I argue that the film also works as an allegorical meditation on the creative possibilities offered by a poetic cinema. Makhmalbaf does this both through his resistance to and critique of narrative conventions and by drawing very consciously on the structural elements and metaphorical imagery of the ghazal. In the case of Majid Majidi’s Baran, I demonstrate how the cinematic ghazal is used to invest the image with a high degree of affective sensuality, combined with a kind of mystical lyricism that is also a prominent feature of many ghazals. Indeed, I argue that Majidi’s synthesis of the ghazal form into his cinematic practice works to engage the viewer in what Vivian Sobchack calls a ‘cinethestic’ mode of embodied spectatorship. He does this on one level to evoke the physicality and emotionality of young love and, on another, to forge an allegorical connection between character, film-maker, viewer and nation. Like his child-centred film Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, 1997) Majidi is interested in using both character and the stylistic features of his films to model an idealized form of Islamic citizenship. The two films complement each other well. Where Makhmalbaf presents us with a kind of formal, modernist exploration of the possibilities of the cinematic ghazal, Majidi embraces its more traditional spiritual and mystical tendencies.

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From a cinema of poetry to the cinematic ghazal Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini put forward his thoughts on the ‘cinema of poetry’ in a lecture he presented in 1965 at the New Cinema Festival in Pesaro. This was later published as an essay entitled ‘The Cinema of Poetry’.5 The essay itself is rather disjointed and numerous scholars have debated its merits, particularly in light of other semiological film theories, such as those of Christian Metz, that were being actively developed at the time.6 Underlying Pasolini’s theory and practice of the cinema of poetry is a belief that because cinema does not have its basis in a pre-existing linguistic system, it is always potentially poetic. In testing this idea, he identifies four conditions that are necessary for this potential to be realized.7 The first two conditions – that a cinema of poetry should be both concrete and irrational – are considered by Pasolini to be qualities of all cinema. It is only with the addition of the third and fourth conditions – an emphasis on formal expression and the adoption of an individual point-of-view – that cinema truly becomes poetic. For Pasolini, films are composed of images which are necessarily concrete and denotative. They primarily serve the purposes of communication. Despite this, concrete images may also carry connotations, enabling them to be invested with abstract meaning. However, as we will see, this capacity for abstraction is largely brought about through techniques of formal expression: editing, framing, camera movement. We have already seen this in Chapter 2; in the case of Children of Heaven, Majid Majidi uses formal techniques of cinematic focalization to enable the concrete images of the children to personify abstract values. Importantly, for Pasolini, as Keating reminds us, the addition of abstract qualities to an image does not erase its concrete qualities. The two necessarily coexist. In reference to Pasolini’s film The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, 1966), Keating writes, ‘Pasolini’s abstract allegory is built on concrete, specific images.’8 Indeed, as I have argued throughout this book, allegorical expression in cinema relies precisely on the capacity of the cinematic medium to shift the meaning of images, to set in motion the process of semantic slippage, to extract abstract meaning from a seemingly concrete signifier. As we saw in the last chapter, the task of poetic cinema is to unhinge images from their concrete referents, so that they can resonate with new, and sometimes resistant, meanings.

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Pasolini’s assertion that cinema is also essentially irrational stems from his argument that the ‘language of cinema’ differs fundamentally from literary languages. He says, ‘Whereas literary languages found their poetic inventions on the institutional basis of an instrumental language, quite common to all who speak, cinematic languages seem not to be founded on anything like this.’9 Pasolini remarks, ‘The cinema author has no dictionary but infinite possibilities.’10 Instead, the film-maker borrows from other pre-existing language systems: gestures, the environment, dreams and memory. Because, according to Pasolini, ‘cinema will never attain a grammatical normativity’, each time a film-maker makes a film, a new stylistic grammar is invented,11 but, this irrational dimension does not mean that all cinema is poetic. Despite its lack of an institutionalized grammar, ‘the cinematic tradition which was formed seems to be that of a “language of prose”, or, at least, of a “language of narrative prose”.’12 Arguably, the dominance of this language of narrative prose has in fact led to some semblance of grammatical normativity within realist-illusionist cinematic practice and is best exemplified by films that employ an invisible style. In fact, as Negar Mottahedeh has argued, the process of purging post-revolutionary Iranian cinema of ‘dominant cinema’s scopophilic and voyeuristic procedures’ required that films also be purged of certain conventions of film grammar. This led, Mottahedeh argues, to the invention of new cinematic grammars by film-makers such as Bahram Bayzai, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and many others.13 In most cases, these film-makers removed, disrupted or reinvented the grammatical units of dominant cinema, such as the close-up, eyeline match-cut and shot-reverseshot, or drew on alternate signifying systems and formal structures found in local Iranian cultural traditions such as ta’ziyeh theatre (Bayzai) or rug-weaving (Makhmalbaf ’s Gabbeh), both of which might, according to Pasolini’s criteria, be considered ‘irrational’ systems of signification. What becomes evident in Mottahedeh’s account of these film-maker’s work is the degree to which these films foreground the formal, stylistic elements, which in turn enables the filmmaker to incorporate their own, unique point-of-view into their films.14 These are the final two and the most crucial conditions of Pasolini’s cinema of poetry. This emphasis on stylistic qualities results in the camera’s presence being felt. For Pasolini, the cinema is composed of ‘stylemes’, units of style and specific cinematic techniques such as camera movements, edits or framing.

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The most important styleme for the cinema of poetry is the free indirect pointof-view shot. These are point-of-view shots in which the subjectivity of the shot is rendered as both ambiguous and multiple. This ambiguity enables a shot, or indeed an entire film, to be infused simultaneously with the pointof-view of a character and the point-of-view of the film-maker: a perspective that is doubly subjective. In developing this idea, Pasolini draws an analogy between the free indirect point-of-view in cinema and free indirect discourse in literature. This is where an author ‘adopts not only the psychology but also the language’ of a character.15 It sits between indirect discourse through which an author communicates story information – Paul walked down the street – and direct discourse, words spoken by a character and indicated by quotation marks – Paul said, ‘I walked down the street’. In cinema, indirect discourse is approximated by omniscient camera narration, while a literal point-of-view or subjective shot could be considered a kind of direct discourse. However, importantly, because free indirect discourse ‘necessitates the use of the character’s language’ and relies on ‘interiorization and abstraction’, this, according to Pasolini, ‘prevents the “free indirect subjective” [in cinema] from corresponding perfectly to what the free indirect monolog is in literature’.16 In cinema, the free indirect subjective can be expressed in a single shot or even across an entire film. One technique that can achieve this is ‘obsessive framing’, which becomes the ‘inner law of the film’.17 At the extreme a kind of ‘contamination’ occurs. Pasolini gives the example of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964). He writes, ‘What there has been is a contamination between the vision of the neurotic woman … and that of the author, which are inevitably analogous, but difficult to perceive, being closely intermixed, having the same style.’18 We have already seen this kind of contamination in The Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina, Dariush Mehrjui, 1978), discussed in Chapter 1, in which Ali becomes a kind of ‘spectator-within-thetext’, and whose role is to initiate us into the film’s allegorical ways of seeing. This is a way of seeing shared between character and film-maker and is also intended to contaminate the viewer’s perspective. According to Pasolini’s criteria, it is not difficult to identify examples of the cinema of poetry among Iranian film-makers, particularly the New Wave film-makers of the pre-revolution era and the art films of the post-revolution period.19 Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn have applied Pasolini’s concept

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of the free indirect subjective, combined with Paul Schrader’s understanding of stasis and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image to the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and others, to argue for the emergence of a form of ‘poetic realism’ in post-revolutionary art films.20 And while she does not draw on Pasolini, Khatereh Sheibani, in her book The Poetics of Iranian Cinema, expands our understanding of Iranian cinematic poetics by showing how certain post-revolutionary film-makers have drawn deep inspiration from Iran’s long history of literary, theatrical and poetic traditions. Most relevant to this current chapter is Sheibani’s analysis of the structural and thematic affinities between Abbas Kiarostami’s fragmented, unfinished style and the ghazals of the medieval poet Hafez. Sheibani argues for a close correspondence between Kiarostami’s film style and Hafez’s poetry based in their ‘deliberate manipulation of form’. She writes, What makes a poem into poetry is the arrangement of words or formal structure, and this is the most essential element of Hafiz’s ghazal. Similarly, what makes Kiarostami’s films poetic is their formal structure, the editing or lack thereof, the mise-en-scéne and cinematography. As in Hafiz, the meaning in Kiarostami’s films is mainly signified by form.21

I too am interested in the structural and formal affinities between a cinema of poetry and the ghazal, but unlike Sheibani, I am also interested in questions of love, the ghazal’s pre-eminent theme. More specifically, I highlight the importance of observing the interactions between form and content in recognizing the allegorical dimensions of the poetic utterance that are common to the ghazal and also to the cinema of poetry. This necessitates a brief summary of the thematic and formal characteristics of the ghazal. The ghazal is a genre of lyric poetry that thrived in the Persian courts of the medieval period and reached its peak between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.22 The form has also spread widely over the centuries to different cultural and linguistic contexts.23 The most prominent practitioners of the Persian ghazal include Hafez, Rumi, Sa’di and, in modern times, Simin Behbahani. Typically, a ghazal is a short poem composed of seven to fifteen lines. Each line, known as a beyt, ‘consists of two hemistiches (meṣraʿs) with a distinct caesura between the two’.24 A beyt is therefore similar to a couplet, however a rhyme or word repetition will usually occur only at the end of the

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second hemistich of each beyt. Additionally, according to Ehsan Yarshater, ‘as a rule, each line contains a complete statement; sometimes the entire poetic statement is contained in one hemistich’.25 In effect, each beyt can function independently as a short poem lending it a fragmented, disjointed quality. While earlier ghazals displayed ‘thematic unity’ and may have expressed a sustained narrative, with Hafez ‘a multiplicity of themes becomes prevalent’.26 Sheibani also emphasizes the non-narrative and non-linear characteristics of Hafez’s ghazals, noting that his ‘verses look semantically fragmented’.27 Yarshater notes that this disunity of theme became more common under the influence of Hafez ‘and many ḡazals were composed with a number of separate poetic strokes, each containing a different idea’.28 Another common characteristic of the ghazal is the inclusion of the poet’s name, or a pen name (takhallos), in the final beyt. Often, the poet will refer to himself in the third person, and these final lines might consist of a lesson, a warning, a reminder or even a note in praise of his patron. Given that the majority of ghazals are written from the perspective of the lover and in the first person, this slippage into the third person introduces something of a self-reflexive dimension. As J. T. P. de Bruijn notes, ‘The purport of such conclusions is to suggest that the lyrical statements made in the poem are the expression of emotions experienced by the poet himself.’ However, this does not necessarily amount to a ‘personal confession; it is no more than a literary device’.29 It is this kind of subjective ambiguity that we also see in the use of the free indirect point-ofview in the production of the cinematic ghazal. The dominant themes of the ghazal revolve around both romantic and mystical love, and often these themes are ambiguously intertwined. Love is typically characterized in dichotomous terms: as beautiful and sensual and also painful and cruel. Most commonly, the ghazal is written in the voice of the lover whose words lavish praise upon the beloved, who responds either with indifference, or by dealing the lover cruel blows. The semantic fragmentation at a formal level aids in the expression of this duality. The dichotomous character of love is frequently personified in the figures of plants, animals and inanimate objects: the rose is beautiful, but its thorns may prick; the candle’s dazzling flame will seduce the moth, but almost certainly lead it to peril. The most common setting is the garden, a place which is secluded and thus perfect for a romantic rendezvous. The garden also provides a rich source for metaphorical

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imagery. Like other forms of Persian narrative poetry and prose, love in the ghazal tends to be either unsuccessful or remain unrequited: consummation remains always just beyond the lover’s reach. In ghazals that have a spiritual or mystical dimension, this quality reflects the ineffability of God, the divine Beloved. Traditionally, both lover and beloved are male; although since the Persian language lacks gendered pronouns, this has been some cause for debate among scholars. Julie Meisami has noted that some critics prefer to allegorize the male beloved, or invoke ‘sociohistorical factors [such] as the prohibition on the open reference to women in love poems’ in order to arrive at a heteronormative interpretation of this aspect of the ghazal.30 In line with moral codes of the post-revolutionary period, the cinematic ghazals of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema that I discuss below are distinctly heterosexual, although Baran might be considered to allude obliquely to the non-heterosexual origins of the genre. The ghazal’s rich metaphorical imagery, combined with its formal structure also made it an ideal vehicle for allegorical expression. In her study of the allegorical features of Hafez’s ghazals Julie Meisami writes, They involve giving concrete and tangible form to something intangible: an abstraction, a general truth, a moral or spiritual principle, a force of nature or of society, an emotion or a state, or in some cases providing a metaphorical vehicle for personal or topical allegory: the indirect reference to events or persons affecting the poet's own life or observed in his surroundings.31

We will encounter all of these characteristics in the cinematic ghazals discussed below. This capacity for topical allegory also makes its way into the ‘modernist’ ghazals of twentieth-century poets and is perhaps best illustrated by the work of the prominent female poet and activist Simin Behbahani. According to Dominic Brookshaw, one of Behbahani’s major contributions to the ghazal was to add ‘depiction and discussion of daily events, social problems, and everyday conversations to the Persian ghazal’.32 In doing so, she was able to reinvest the ghazal with critical purpose, using it to discuss pressing ‘social issues such as poverty, political corruption, and the struggle for freedom of speech’.33 As I have already indicated in my introduction to this chapter, both Makhmalbaf and Majidi employ the cinematic ghazal for allegorical purposes, using it as a way of investing their images with an aesthetics of poetry and

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resistance that relates to the social and political context of the times. With their focus on social issues, both Makhmalbaf and Majidi’s poetic expression shares close correspondences with the modern form of the ghazal as practiced by Behbahani, although imagery of the classical ghazals still resonates strongly throughout their work.

Seeking the cinematic beloved: Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s A Time for Love (1990) Mohsen Makhmalbaf was one of the first film-makers in post-revolutionary Iran to treat the theme of love through direct and indirect allusions to Persian poetic traditions. We can find numerous gestures towards the romantic themes familiar from the ghazal in three of his films of the 1990s: A Time for Love (1990), Gabbeh (1996) and A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun, 1996). A Time for Love quite literally pays homage to the legacy of Persian love poetry. Made soon after the end of the Iran–Iraq war, the title of the film suggests, rather hopefully, that perhaps now that the times of revolution and war are over, the next era will be a time for love. A Time for Love has remained a fairly marginal film in Makhmalbaf ’s oeuvre, not least for the fact that it is not strictly an ‘Iranian’ film. Although it was supported by the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance, the film was set and filmed in Turkey with a predominantly Turkish cast. This location and casting decision might have been intended to skirt some of Iran’s strict censorship regulations. If this is the case, however, it was a tactic that failed, for it was banned in Iran soon after its premiere at the Fajr film festival in 1991, ostensibly because it featured an adulterous relationship. The banning of the film may also be considered a consequence of what Blake Atwood has referred to as the ‘Islamic Republic’s anxiety about love’. He writes, ‘Representations of love challenge the government’s role as moral compass, and the notion of love threatens the very existence of the Islamic Republic, which established itself on war and violence.’34 Thus, Makhmalbaf ’s film seems to overtly challenge this national anxiety. The film is structured into three episodes. In the first, a young woman named Güzel (Shiva Gered) is married to a taxi driver (Aken Tunj). She is

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in love with another man, a poor shoeshine, with light-coloured hair (Abdurrahman Palay). They meet each day at the cemetery where an old man (Menderes Samancilar) also goes to record birdsong. The old man, however, tells the woman’s husband of the affair. Soon after, the husband kills the lover, and he is sentenced to death for the murder. In the second variation, the roles of husband and lover are reversed, with the light-haired man now playing Güzel’s husband. The lover is a simple peddler. The story plays out similarly; however, this time the lover kills the husband, and the lover is sentenced to death. At the end of both of these episodes, Güzel takes her own life, rendering love as a fateful affliction. In the third story, the roles of husband and lover are once again reversed. This time, after hearing of the affair from the old man, the husband confronts the lover, but in this version neither character is killed. Instead, the husband relinquishes his wife to the light-haired man, and they are married. After the wedding reception, the ex-husband gives his taxi to the light-haired man as a wedding gift, but this is not quite the end of the story. Güzel proclaims to her new husband that she is still not happy. She says, ‘I feel that my heart is with him.’ Her new husband responds, ‘Wait, I will go and get him.’ We see the new husband chasing after the ex-husband who is walking along the railway tracks. When he reaches him, he places his hand on the man’s shoulder. As the man turns, the film cuts. Unexpectedly, the face we see turning towards us is not the ex-husband, but the old man. He apologizes for leaving the wedding saying ‘I couldn’t bear it any longer’ and asks ‘Where is Güzel?’ The film then ends with a visual refrain that has announced the beginning of each episode thus far: an old wooden house, a train rushes past, Güzel appears. Already, from this brief synopsis we can identify a few elements of A Time for Love that correspond to the themes and tropes of the Persian ghazal as well as the treatment of love in other Persian literary traditions.35 These include the love triangle, the tragic fate of the lovers and of course the structural use of repetition and variation. The first two episodes bear the closest correspondence to the ghazal; in that they figure love and the beloved as inherently unattainable, leading all involved to a tragic end. When, in the third episode, the characters appear to come to a mutually agreeable arrangement, this becomes intolerable, and Güzel proclaims that she is still not happy! Like the ghazal itself, she longs to return to a state of unfulfilled desire that is a driving force of the genre.

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Güzel can be understood as an emblematic personification of the ghazal. As the only named character in the film, her name, which means ‘beautiful’ in Turkish, is only the most obvious clue to her allegorical identity. The sound of her name forms an unmistakable homophonic resonance with the Persian word ghazal, encouraging semantic slippage to occur, and we might also be reminded that the ghazal form was also adopted by Turkish poets, thereby justifying the slippage of context.36 Just as the ghazal has developed as a transnational form of poetic expression, so too the ghazal has slipped across media. By the end of the film, we come to see her not only as the physical embodiment of the poetic beloved – at once beautiful and cruel – but also as a personification of the poetic form itself. The prospect of finding narrative closure – the proverbial ‘happily-ever-after’ – at the end of the third episode is anathema, not only to the beloved but also to the ghazal as a genre. Her heart lies with neither the husband nor the lover, but with ‘him’: the poet, who I argue is embodied in the figure of the old man. By professing that she misses him she expresses her desire to be reanimated in the only form of expression that is proper to her: poetry rather than prose. The insertion of this subtle twist at the end of the film helps us to understand that the old man is also the poet, the one that gives poetic form to the love story. In terms of the formal elements of the ghazal, this surprise ending in which the poet reveals himself is reminiscent of the final beyt of a typical ghazal in which the poet might make reference to himself, or use his pen name (takhallos). This moment of revelation prompts us to read back over the film and to seek out additional moments in which the poet’s subjectivity comes to the fore. This is strongest at moments in which Pasolini’s conditions for the cinema of poetry are met. The opening sequence of the film provides us with an excellent example. It also helps to demonstrate ways in which Makhmalbaf ’s cinematic form shares a close correspondence with the formal characteristics of the ghazal. It is a good example of what I call ‘the cinematic ghazal’. Prior to the commencement of the film proper, Makhmalbaf presents us with a short pre-title sequence. It functions as a kind of prelude or prologue that both introduces the character of the old man and provides us with a preview of the poetic logic that structures the first two episodes of the film. The image opens on a close-up of an elaborately decorated white marble gravestone. In the foreground, sharply focussed blades of grass wave gently

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in the breeze. Although only a fragment, this image helps to set the literal scene for the sequence, the Aşiyan Asri Cemetery in Istanbul, which is also the secret meeting place for the film’s lovers and a garden of sorts. Beyond that, it serves another, more allusive function. The gravestone features a calligraphic centrepiece. It is inscribed with elaborate Arabic letters, repeated in reflection and spelling out ‘Hova al baghi’, ‘He [God] is eternal’ (Figure 4.1). This is a phrase commonly used on gravestones, a reminder that while human existence is fleeting, God, the creator is eternal.37 In the context of a film about love, it may also remind us that physical love is fleeting, while divine love endures. Poetically, the delicate blades of grass in the foreground might connote human transience, as does the sound of birdsong that we hear on the soundtrack. While the gravestone is effectively a found image, its audiovisual treatment by Makhmalbaf grants it a poetic dimension. In its evocation of both God and the transient physical world, it correlates closely with the frequently ambiguous status of the beloved in the ghazal. Here, in this opening image, we have a cinepoetic gesture, a styleme, the first hint of a cinematic ghazal in the making. As the sequence continues, the cine-poetic gestures accumulate further. In the second image, we cut to a wide shot of the cemetery, and an old man emerges from the depth of the image, wandering among the gravestones. He is carrying a birdcage, and the sound of birds is heard prominently on the

Figure 4.1  ‘Hova al baghi', ‘He [God] is eternal’. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990).

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soundtrack together with a tinkling bell and distant traffic. The volume and careful layering of the sounds draw our attention to the aural layers of the image, awakening our multiple senses. A ship’s horn sounds, bridging the cut to the third shot. The image shows us a view of water – the Bosphorus – framed by the archway of a marble shrine. The old man enters, screen left, and the camera pivots right to follow his path. The sound of a motorboat draws our attention to the water where a boat passes by in the distance. In acknowledgement of his surroundings, the man turns towards the water. His glance seems to motivate the cut to the next shot, which shows a rocky outcrop protruding from the water, gulls squawking noisily as they flock around in search of fish. Although seemingly motivated by the man’s glance, the image is but a fragment, spatially impossible, a sonic perspective perhaps, but not a literal point-of-view shot. The next image brings us back to the cemetery with a shot of the headstone of General Ömer Fahreddin Türkan. He is remembered for leading the Ottoman forces during the Siege of Medina during the First World War. The old man carefully places his birdcage in front of the headstone. Ambient bird sounds continue. The fifth shot brings us an extreme close-up of the birdcage. There is no bird, but a small bell and a string of prayer beads hangs within. The man’s hand reaches into the frame, carefully attaching a small lapel microphone to the cage. The constellation of concrete items in this shot – cage, bell, beads, microphone – seem significant, not so much in a narrative sense, but rather in an abstract, poetic sense. The microphone in particular carries multiple meanings. As a device for detecting and recording sound, it concretizes something we may have already sensed intuitively during the first few shots: orienting our senses to the sonic dimensions of the cinematic image. The microphone might also make us aware of the cinematic apparatus and therefore also serves as a self-reflexive gesture – highly typical of Makhmalbaf – reminding us of his status as auteur, and also, significantly, aligning the old man with the film-maker’s authorship. The next two shots provide further compelling examples of the film’s cinepoetic style. The first is an extreme close-up of the old man’s ear, in which he wears an earphone. As the man turns his face towards the camera, he glances upward, looking around, as though scanning the trees for birds, attempting to match together the visual and the sonic elements of his environment. This shot presents him as a kind of seeker, a figure very typical of the ghazal.

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Indeed, numerous times in the film we will watch him seeking out birdsong in the cemetery, and at these moments he will also witness the lovers’ secret meetings. A corresponding low-angle shot, panning across the tree canopy, implies a point-of-view. However, as the camera pans downwards to ground level, we see the old man wandering among the graves, using his listening device to search for birdsong. Crucially, this shot provides us with a shifting perspective. The eyeline look and matching camera movement initially codes it as a literal point-of-view from the old man’s perspective. However, this initial impression is altered when the old man himself comes into view, rendering the subjectivity of the image ambiguous. While technically, according to conventions of cinematic grammar, this can no longer be considered a pointof-view shot, it remains nevertheless invested with the old man’s subjectivity. It is a free indirect point-of-view of precisely the kind suggested by Pasolini. Gilberto Perez has identified exactly this poetic configuration of the free indirect subjective in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, describing such shots as no longer subjective from the character’s perspective, ‘but a shot in which the impression of an observing subjectivity remains’.38 Here, in A Time for Love, the impression is of a subjectivity that is capable of seeing itself. As in the ghazal, the poet is both the subject of the discourse – the lover – and also its originator – its author. The first two episodes are heavily ‘contaminated’ with the old poet’s subjective perspective. This is emphasized through both image and sound. Early in the first episode, after we have been introduced to Güzel and follow her as she playfully wanders the city, we cut to an extreme close-up of the old man. He is sitting in the cemetery, his listening device in his ear. We watch him as he scans the trees with his eyes, listening to the birds. He is distracted by the sound of footsteps, motivating a cut to a wide shot across the graves. A very slow pan left brings the lover into view. A conventional shotreverse-shot sequence ensues, cutting back and forth between the old man and point-of-view shots of the lover from the old man’s perspective. However, convention is soon ruptured when the lover bumps into the bird cage, causing a loud noise. A reaction shot of the old man shows him clearly affected by the noise and removing his earpiece. With this gesture, the soundtrack abruptly becomes silent and we realize that we have been listening to the old man’s sonic perspective all along. What seems initially to be external diegetic sound (sound emanating from within the physical world of the film) is revealed to

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be filtered through the perspective of the character. This is similar to internal diegetic sound (sound that comes from inside the mind of the character), but not quite. The sounds exist within the environment, but are heard from the technologically mediated perspective of the old man. This particular cinematic styleme is the sonic equivalent of the free indirect subjective shot described above. It is the first of several similar moments and helps to give the impression that the film is infused more generally with the old poet’s subjectivity. Crucially, in the second episode, the old man gives his tape recording of the lovers to the husband as proof of the affair; however, when the husband plays it, all that can be heard is birdsong. On one level, this is a poetic gesture: the lovers are metaphorically represented by the birdsong. On another level, Makhmalbaf invests both sound and image with a floating, ambiguous subjectivity that is a key quality of the cinema of poetry. The absence of the lovers’ voices on the tape invests them also with an ethereal quality, suggesting that they exist, not in the physical realm but rather only in the poets’ imagination. Of course, the ‘poet’ is both the old man and Makhmalbaf as he is the one that grants them concrete, human form. The two share a single authorial consciousness. As Pasolini asserts, ‘The “free indirect subjective” in the cinema of poetry is only a pretext enabling the author to speak indirectly – through some narrative alibi – in the first person.’39 So, this begs the question. What is Makhmalbaf trying to say? If we attend closely to the stylistic elements of the film, we can discern that Makhmalbaf is perhaps trying to say something about the cinema itself. Or, more specifically, he is saying something about the differences between a cinema of poetry and a cinema of prose: the film is, in effect, performing a meta-filmic commentary. In order to understand what is going on, we need to look both at the film’s overall structure and also at the expressive logic of individual episodes. As already mentioned, the film is structured into three episodes, each telling a different version of the same basic story. In itself, this repetitious episodic structure works to frustrate narrative development, and other structural elements work to further fragment the cinematic discourse. Before the first episode commences, we see the poet’s prologue described above. Additionally, a brief lyrical interlude is inserted between each episode. These interludes tear images from the flow of story time and are presented as dreams or hallucinations emanating from the poet’s imagination. The same image with subtle variations is used to open each episode. This provides the film with

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its overall, episodic structure. At first, we are shown a wide-angle shot of an old wooden house situated on a grassy hill. A train rushes past, parallel to the image, obscuring the house from view. After the train has passed, Güzel appears standing in front of the house, frame right. She pauses for a moment and then walks left, in the same direction as the train. The camera holds until she has left the shot. This image, a cinematic styleme, recurs for a fourth time at the very end of the film. It serves as a structuring device, a lyrical refrain and, by its fourth iteration, invests the film with a circular logic, a logic that is not uncommon to the ghazal. Its repetition, with only slight variation, recalls the rhyming scheme of the ghazal. The percussive sounds of the train provide a rhythm, a poetic metre, and as the train speeds past, the gaps between the carriages mimic the shutter of a film camera. Güzel seems to appear from nowhere, from somewhere in the gaps between these ‘frames’. She is nothing other than a ‘material ghost’, a hallucination, born time and again out of this very synergy between cinema and poetry, ephemeral like the ghazal’s beloved.40 The first two episodes share a similar expressive logic and, together with the interludes, correspond most closely on a formal level to the ghazal. Makhmalbaf resists cinematic narrative conventions by largely avoiding the use of continuity editing and camera narration. This has the effect of loosening the impression of cause and effect and destabilizing space and time. At certain moments, this effect of fragmentation is heightened further by stringing together sequences of extreme close-ups: obsessive framings. These sequences function as self-contained poetic utterances and are most commonly used for the expression of love. The first of these occurs around five minutes into the film. The lovers are in the cemetery, watched over by the old poet. From a wide shot of the lovers conversing, we cut to a spatially disorienting image of unfocussed greenery. Slowly, the camera pans right, bringing the poet’s face into extreme close-up. The soundtrack is silent until the poet replaces the earpiece enabling us once again to hear the twitter of birdsong. With the return of the sound, the film cuts to another extreme close-up, this time of the male lover in profile. We feel the presence of the camera as it swings left and right several times between his eye and his ear, behind which he wears a sprig of white flowers. Cut to a close-up of the end of Güzel’s black scarf, which dangles from above into the left side of the frame. To the right, out of focus, we can just make out some pink wildflowers. A hand in extreme close-up reaches

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in from frame right to delicately fondle the tassels of the scarf, and the camera follows as the hand lifts the tassel, bringing the lower portion of Güzel’s face into view as she sensuously plays with the fabric between her teeth. In the next shot, we see an extreme close-up of a pink wildflower, the background a blur of green and pink. A hand reaches in from screen right to pluck the flower, but the gesture is interrupted by a cut back to another extreme close-up of the old man. As we hear Güzel saying, ‘I wish you had done military service. I wish you were a taxi driver. Then my mother …’, the camera pans right towards a close-up of the old man’s hand, gently touching a headstone bearing an old photograph of a beautiful young woman, a premonition perhaps of Güzel’s fate in this story. Güzel’s voice-over continues, ‘… would have allowed me to marry you’, as we cut back to the shot of the hand plucking the delicate pink flower. This sequence of shots seems to express a complete poetic utterance, much like the beyt of a ghazal. The next shot begins a new utterance. An extreme close-up of a woman’s shoe is perched upon the shoeshine’s footrest. The shoeshine sensuously polishes the shoe with his scarf in a metaphorical embrace while saying in voice-over, ‘I polish everyone’s shoes, thinking of your steps’, a line that would not look out of place in a ghazal (Figure 4.2). Later in the episode, another sequence of shots allusively refers us back to these ones. Güzel is at

Figure 4.2  Extreme close-ups function as poetic utterances, like beyts of a ghazal. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990).

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home. Her husband has arrived with a bunch of white carnations. He wanders the house singing, looking for his beloved Güzel. When he finds her seated in the living room, he plucks a blossom and places it gently behind her ear, forming a visual rhyme with the earlier shot of the lover, a blossom behind his ear. At this point, the temporal and spatial logic is disrupted with a cut to an extreme close-up of Güzel’s eyes as they slowly open. After a few seconds, the film cuts to a blurry image, another extreme close-up. Güzel sways her head from side to side across the image and, in the process, reveals and hides the right side of the lover’s face. This rocking motion forms another visual rhyme with the earlier shot of the lover in profile, the camera swinging left to right. The pendulous motion is carried into the next shot, a static close-up of Güzel as she rocks her head side to side. Finally, a wider shot, back in the cemetery shows the old man gazing down upon the lovers. Each of these sequences of extreme close-ups work as independent poetic expressions, but together they seem to take on a thematic harmony, through a constellation of concrete image fragments – flowers, hands, eyes, lips and scarves – that assume abstract, poetic meaning. Rather than telling a narrative of love, the images themselves are invested with a sensuous and affective quality that travels not only between the lovers but also between the screen and the bodies in the audience. Makhmalbaf also bring this affective, tactile quality to the highly erotic climax of the episode. Güzel is riding in a horsedrawn buggy. In the distance, we see the lover running towards her from the depths of the image. He finally catches up and hops into the buggy beside her. Güzel is unmoved, even turning her back on him in a gesture of indifference. He responds by also turning his back to her. As the film cuts to a close-up of the heads of two white horses trotting rhythmically, we begin to hear the sound of heavy breathing, which blends together with the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves. A few shots later, the lover’s hand reaches into the shot, his scarf blowing in the breeze. Güzel raises her arm into the shot, covered by her own shawl. A series of increasingly abstract cross-cuts ensue. Shots of the horses trotting are interspersed with shots of the lover’s scarf and the beloved’s shawl becoming intertwined. The quickening pace of the editing, together with the movement of and within the image and the continuous sound of the horses’ hooves, creates a highly eroticized image: the shawls embrace, giving metaphorical expression of the forbidden embrace of the lovers (Figure 4.3).

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Figure 4.3  The erotic climax of the episode gives metaphorical expression to the forbidden embrace of the lovers. A Time for Love (Green Film House, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1990).

The final shot in the sequence shows the lovers lying splayed out in the forest. But this is not an image of post-coital bliss, for, as we shall soon learn, Güzel’s husband, who hovers ominously at the edge of the frame, has just murdered the lover. Once again, the purpose of these images is not the linear telling of a story but rather the evocation of an emotional event through a series of cinepoetic gestures. Both the first and second episodes favour this non-linear poetic storytelling aesthetic; however, the third episode is constructed via a completely different cinematic logic. Gone are the allusive, fragmentary close-ups. Instead, Makhmalbaf pays greater attention to techniques of cinematic narration using action-friendly wide shots, continuity editing, chase sequences and by directly representing confrontations between the husband and the lover. Indeed, the style is highly reminiscent of many of the popular, revenge-driven, tough-guy films of the pre-revolution period. In one shot, the husband leans ominously over the lover, forcing him to shine his shoes. As he does so, he threateningly pushes his knife into the can of shoe polish and wipes it across the lover’s cheek. The poet is still present, but his influence on the aesthetic is now minimal; he is now merely a spectator. Gone too are the free indirect subjectives and

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with them the dual consciousness of the poet and the film-maker. This episode seems to present us with a cinema of prose; the very opposite of the cinema of poetry. But form and content are no less interdependent in this newly adopted style, for it is in this version that the most dramatic transformation in the story occurs. Instead of the tragic ending of the first two versions, this one ends with Güzel marrying her lover, all with the blessing of her now ex-husband. This ending at once violates the very logic of the ghazal and emphasizes the drive in narrative cinema towards a happy ending. However, ultimately, like Güzel and the poet, Makhmalbaf seems dissatisfied with such a resolution. Although the free indirect subjective is absent from this episode, Makhmalbaf does find another way of voicing his opinion. During the wedding reception, the judge, who had presided over the sentencing of the husband and lover in the first two episodes, appears as one of the wedding guests. While throughout the sequence he remains a diegetic character, his dialogue serves a didactic function, explaining to us what lesson we might take from this episode. Sitting together with all of the main characters, he turns to the selfsacrificing ex-husband and says, ‘You know, we are not real characters. No one believes us. You should have killed this man and I should have sentenced you to death. And Güzel should have ended up with a bad destiny.’ Combined with Güzel’s longing for the return of the poet in the final coda, the judge’s self-reflexive commentary seems ultimately to point towards the failure of the cinema of prose, especially when dealing with matters of love. The film seems to suggest that, for Makhmalbaf, even though poetic expression might require adherence to certain ‘rules’, a cinema of poetry is far more preferable to the alternative. His innovative style, which places emphasis on formal qualities and narrative fragmentation, makes use of the free indirect subjective, unlocks the connotative dimensions of the concrete image and thrives on the illogical, dream-like qualities of cinema. In short, A Time for Love gives vital life to the cinematic ghazal.

Majid Majidi’s Baran (1999) and the cinesthetic ghazal For a few seconds, a black screen immerses us in darkness. Despite being deprived of vision, other senses are awakened. We hear a sound, something

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like a hand gently rubbing and slapping against bare flesh. This impression is enhanced by the sound of breathing, which is pushed to the very front of the soundscape. Our ears allow us not only to imagine but also to feel the bodies that have apparently been screened by the darkness. As the image slowly fades in, however, we realize that we have been mistaken. The sounds are indeed caused by hands, but there is no bare flesh. Instead, we see a baker busy at work, kneading dough, rolling it out and slapping it onto a hot stone to be cooked. This is hot and heavy work, causing him to breathe heavily. For the few short seconds that our access to vision is withheld, our minds have been encouraged to wander, and perhaps our flesh has even begun to tingle. In these opening few seconds of Baran, Majid Majidi engages both our minds and our senses. With this simple but effective cinematic styleme, he invites us to take part in the polyvalent and affective world created by his own unique cinema of poetry. Baran is a coming of age story focussing on a young man, Latif (Hossein Abedini), discovering love for the first time. While Majidi’s depiction of this story is presented through images that are deeply modest and adheres fully to strict censorship, the film also indirectly provides suggestions of Latif ’s burgeoning sense of sensual desire. Latif works on a building site on the outskirts of Tehran. Following an accident on the site in which one of the illegal Afghan labourers breaks his leg, another young Afghan, Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami), arrives to take his father’s place. Rahmat is apparently too young and weak for labouring jobs, and so Latif, who had been doing light chores such as shopping, cooking and making tea, is forced to take on more of the menial labouring jobs. Latif sees Rahmat as a rival and begins acting erratically, exhibiting spiteful, adolescent aggression. One day, however, Latif discovers that Rahmat is really a woman, disguising herself as a man in a desperate bit to support her family. From this point forwards, Latif begins to swoon in her presence, clearly struck by love’s arrow, and goes out of his way to please her. Although she barely acknowledges him openly, the young woman, whose real name is Baran, begins to show her interest indirectly through small acts of kindness, for example, by leaving an extra cube of sugar with his tea. Eventually, however, when inspectors arrive at the building site in search of illegal workers, Baran is forced to flee, losing her livelihood in the process. Latif becomes despondent and searches for her everywhere, eventually finding

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her living in poverty in a small village among other Afghan refugee families. He resolves to help Baran and her family by giving them all of his savings. Things do not go to plan, however, for Baran’s father, Najaf (Gholam Ali Bakhshi), gives the money to his friend, Soltan (Abbas Rahimi), who urgently needs to return to Afghanistan. Latif is not embittered by this turn of events, instead respecting Najaf for his own act of self-sacrifice. Latif ’s love for Baran, and desire to help her family, does not stop there, for he finally decides to sell his own identity card – the ultimate self-effacing gesture – and donate the proceeds to Baran and her family, who he learns must return to Afghanistan. He does this with the knowledge that he will never see his beloved Baran again. Like so many Persian love stories, this love will remain forever unrequited. The film functions simultaneously as a story of burgeoning love and also as a national allegory. Latif ’s self-sacrificing nature not only models acts of love and charity, but he also becomes emblematic of a kind of idealized subject of the Islamic nation. Latif ’s devotion to Baran and her family serves as a powerful role model for the Islamic principle of welcoming mohajerin, involuntary religious migrants.41 Indeed, on one level, Majidi’s film can be understood as a plea to Iranians to welcome Afghan refugees at a time when the legal status of such refugees in Iran had changed, preventing many of them from working, and providing them with little access to social services such as education and health care.42 Like the little children in Majidi’s Children of Heaven, discussed in Chapter 2, Latif personifies ideal national values through his actions, and Majidi uses similar strategies of cinematic focalization to achieve this. Arguably, however, in Baran Majidi moves well beyond the kind of focalization used in the earlier child-centred film. Instead, he intersperses the narration with highly affective cinematic ghazals that allow viewers to both see and feel Latif ’s deep love and youthful desire for Baran. Long before the moment that Latif discovers Baran’s true identity as a woman, Majidi introduces the viewer to his growing romantic sensibility and interest in the opposite sex. We see Latif as he is returning to the building site after shopping for bread. His attention is drawn by the sound of a woman giggling suggestively. We see him looking wistfully for a few seconds, before the object of his gaze is revealed to be a young couple in a park playfully throwing a hat to one another. Such a playful but mediated tryst serves frequently in Iranian cinema as a coded substitute for a more intimate exchange, which

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is proscribed by censorship. The shot-reverse-shot structure of this brief scene leaves the viewer with no doubt that Latif also longs for such female companionship as he chews distractedly on a piece of Afghan bread. Where the hat serves as a playful indirect signifier of forbidden physical contact – a reminder that the couple are not permitted to hold hands in public – the fleshy bread may be read as a poetic metaphor or allegorical hieroglyph of Latif ’s burgeoning desire to connect with another body. In fact, the bread has already been charged, prepared for taking on such allegorical meaning by the opening moments described above. The unusual configuration of sound and image attunes us to the inherently fleshy qualities of raw dough and predisposes the viewer to understand the sensuality expressed by Latif ’s absent-minded consumption of it. In terms of the ghazal, these two short sequences, which function as poetic stylemes, might even be considered to work as cinematic equivalents of a beyt, the compositional building blocks of the ghazal. The bread, which has already been invested with metaphorical value in the opening, returns and is invested with additional meaning, its poetic meaning far in excess of its narrative meaning. The next series of shots provide us with another styleme that seems to continue the construction of this very simple cinematic ghazal. Moments after we see Latif gazing longingly at the playful young couple, he pauses to admire himself in a highly reflective glass door, fixing his hair, smiling and humming to himself, imagining perhaps that a girl might find him attractive. However, this moment of what may be described as narcissistic scopophilia – where he already perceives himself to be more man than he really is – is interrupted, metaphorically shattered, when a man pushes open the door from the inside and pauses to look at him suspiciously. This brings Latif ’s moment of selfreverie to an abrupt end. His self-image is not yet fully formed as he balances on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. Thus, within the first few minutes of the film, we are presented with a collection of three stylemes that are loosely arranged into a poetic expression approximating a series of three beyts of a ghazal. In the first we, the viewers, are invited into the scene and encouraged to activate our senses through the enigmatic sounds and the emblematic fleshiness of the raw dough being kneaded and slapped. In the second, we are presented with a romantic view of young and playful love, a scene for our young would-be lover to aspire to.

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In the third, the lover suffers a minor blow, his path to love is momentarily interrupted. The logic of these stylemes is structured less by narrative causality, and more by an associative, poetic logic. As viewers, we grasp them as we might grasp a few lines of poetic verse. As the film develops, Majidi provides further poetic clues that hint at the awakening of Latif ’s romantic, even sexual, desire. On the building site, we witness other signs of his faltering and often misplaced attempts to assert his burgeoning masculinity. The guiding metaphor for this desire is fire. Since the film is set during winter, there are numerous heat sources visible in the mise en scène that function as outward signs of Latif ’s burning desire. At times, this fire that is burning inside him seems to function as a calm, warming sensation, such as the moment described above when he gazes at the playful couple, but at other times this fire will flare out of control and provoke violent outbursts. Latif frequently fights with his co-workers over highly insignificant matters, particularly once the young Baran, disguised as Rahmat, comes to work on the building site. These outbursts become more frequent, and more intense after Rahmat is given a job in the kitchen preparing meals and tea, and Latif is forced to join the ranks of the labourers. Gradually, his outbursts become more directly focussed on Rahmat, showing ironically that he is learning to direct his adolescent rage, and it is here that we may perceive a subtle allusion towards the traditionally male characterization of the beloved in the ghazal. This rage, however, is suddenly turned to desire in a key moment when Latif discovers that Rahmat is really a woman. This moment is structured as yet another cinematic ghazal, and this time it is more complex than those we have previously encountered. This sequence is important for the way it is structured into a collection of poetic stylemes. In addition, through Majidi’s careful use of cinematic techniques, the sequence also generates a powerfully affective experience for the spectator while it reveals the emotions that are being stirred up deep within Latif ’s being. It also cleverly negotiates the censorship rules regarding the portrayal of women in Iranian cinema. The sequence opens with a shot of Latif going to fetch a heavy bag of cement. As he moves towards the camera, struggling to carry this burden, a mysterious breeze blows a wave of white smoke across the screen, which irritates Latif ’s eyes, causing him to be momentarily blinded. The sound of the wind generates a highly mystical

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effect, appearing as a kind of energy that draws Latif towards the kitchen area where Rahmat works. The soundtrack is then further layered with the distant sound of thunder, rain and the faint sound of a woman humming. As Latif blinks, a reverse shot of a curtain blowing in the wind briefly reveals the distant silhouette of a woman. Cut back to Latif, still blinking as he throws the bag of cement to the ground and rubs his eyes. The sound of wind continues to intensify, and, having regained his vision, Latif peers intensely towards the blowing curtain, the camera zooming towards him to indicate the sharpening of his vision. This movement is answered in the next reverse shot of the curtain, which now blows in slow motion, teasingly lifting and lowering, providing another brief shot of the distinctively female silhouette glimpsed earlier. But, the curtain refuses to yield for more than a second or two. The movement and placement of the camera suggests a point-of-view shot; however, when Latif enters from screen right we realize that Majidi has in fact placed us not with Latif but beside him. This use of the free indirect subjective shot implicates us both within Latif ’s subjectivity and within the scene: we are both within him and beside him at the same time. Latif simultaneously looks and sees himself seeing, thus, like the example from A Time for Love discussed above, aligning his gaze with that of the cine-poet, Majidi himself. The following shot, however, does not yet reveal to us a clearer view of the scene behind the curtain; we see Latif seeing, his eyes widening, fixing his gaze upon the scene before him. Finally, Majidi provides us with a shot of Baran brushing her long black tresses, humming to herself wistfully as she does so. She is framed and ‘veiled’ by a frosted window that barely separates either Latif or the viewer from her modesty. Backlighting provides a further distancing effect to protect the modesty of all (Figure 4.4). The sequence also makes use of sonic triggers together with the movement of the camera and movement within the frame to activate the affective dimensions of the image. Through these extra-narrative dimensions, we are encouraged not only to feel and empathize with Latif ’s passion but also to experience those images and sounds on a visceral level. This invests them with an additional poetic dimension that far exceeds the narrative dimensions of the film. In Majidi’s cinema of poetry, this affective dimension uses combinations of sound and image to engage the viewer in what Vivian Sobchack refers to as a ‘cinesthetic’ mode of embodied spectatorship.43 Sobchack has argued that to

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Figure 4.4  Latif discovers Baran’s true identity. The mise en scène protects her modesty. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999).

experience a film is not simply a matter of ‘seeing it’. Rather, our body functions as ‘a “third” term that both exceeds and yet is within representation’.44 That is, although our bodies are ostensibly located outside and separate from the representations that appear on screen, through the cinema’s engagement of our multiple senses, our bodies are necessarily also inscribed into or take part in the representation itself. In addition, she writes, ‘All the bodies in the film experience – those on-screen and off-screen (and possibly that of the screen itself) – are potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally.’45 In coining the term ‘cinesthesia’, Sobchack draws on two psychoneurological conditions: synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. Synaesthesia is an extreme but rare condition in which the stimulation of one sense provokes a perception in another sense. Sobchack explains, ‘Synaesthetes regularly, vividly, automatically, and consciously perceive sound as colour, or shapes as having a taste.’46 A less extreme form of this ‘cross-modal transfer’ also takes place in the kind of figural language that we find in poetic forms such as the ghazal. According to Richard Cytowic, because metaphors originate in concrete, physical experience, ‘metaphor is experiential and visceral, an irrational transfer of connotations from one thing to another’.47 Indeed, many ghazals employ highly sensual metaphors, transferring sensate experiences from one thing to another and also across and between bodies.

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I would argue that the highly metaphorical film language used in Baran, combined with the clever use of off-screen sound, helps to engage the viewer in just this kind of cross-modal transfer, which might also be considered a cinematic analogy of the ghazal’s dependence on figural language and highly evocative and often sensuous poetic imagery. In Baran, not only does bread metaphorically evoke flesh, it does so largely because we have already heard and possibly felt the potentially erotic fleshiness of the dough in the opening moments of the film, well before our sense of sight is brought into play. Similarly, in the scene in which Latif discovers Baran’s true identity, the enhanced sound of wind serves simultaneously as a metaphor for the swell of emotion being experienced by Latif and may also cause a cross-modal sensation in the viewer, allowing them to experience the sensation of being touched by such a breeze. The dominant role played by sound in producing these cross-modal sensory affects in Baran also evokes the second bodily condition discussed by Sobchack. According to Sobchack, coenaesthesia is a common, yet underrecognized perceptual experience in which ‘our equally available senses have the capacity to become variously heightened and diminished’.48 This capacity is more evident in children where the hierarchical socialization of the senses has not yet fully taken place, but given the right stimuli, this may also occur in adults. Cinema has the most wonderful capacity to do this, and certainly Majidi’s complex use of sound in Baran functions to retrain the viewers’ sensorium to privilege sound over, or in addition to vision. This adds a highly affective and sensual dimension to the film that even verges on the erotic. It is my contention that a figurative and literal exchange between potentially erotic bodies takes place in Baran. However, couched as it is in a deeply poetic tradition, such erotics of the image never in fact violate the viewer’s modesty. As in the scene discussed above, Majidi deploys complex cinematic techniques (sound, editing, camera and character placement) and stimulates our sensory organs (through evocative sounds and images) in order to weave the viewer into the very texture of the film. In doing so, he effectively allows the viewer to experience that which cannot be literally represented on screen. Our bodies effectively fill the gap imposed by censorship between the characters’ bodies. Throughout the film, the sounds of wind, rain, thunder, running water, the fluttering of fabric and birds’ wings, human breath, footsteps, voices, laughter

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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 close-up of Latif ’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. In the lead-up to the closing scene, Majidi introduces yet another, this time more extended and more complex cinematic ghazal, through which he also invests the image with a mystical dimension. In doing so, he embraces the irrational and hallucinatory qualities of the cinema of poetry described by Pasolini. Around ten minutes before the end of the film, Latif visits Baran and her father and discovers that they are leaving the next day for Afghanistan. The sound of a drum beat announces the cut to an image of Latif as he runs along a dirt pathway that is framed by tall mudbrick walls. The shot holds, patiently watching Latif as he runs, eventually disappearing into the vanishing point at the depth of the image. In the next shot, he enters an area that we have seen him pass before: a small courtyard through which a stream runs. Earlier, as Latif was first searching for Baran, he encountered an old cobbler, who had fixed a hole in his shoe. Latif asks him about the Afghans that live nearby and whether he is living with anyone in the area. The cobbler responds enigmatically, in the manner of a sage-like poet: ‘A man alone is a neighbour of God.’ A close-up of Latif shows him reflecting thoughtfully on the words before suddenly reacting as his sock, which he had been dangling over the fire, catches alight. As Latif attempts to retrieve his sock from the fire, the old cobbler continues, ‘From the hot fire of being apart, comes the flame that burns the heart.’ As Latif returns to this familiar spot, he pauses momentarily, looking at the now abandoned space, perhaps remembering these poetic words, before continuing his journey. Eventually, Latif arrives at another familiar space, a graveyard that had previously been alive with Afghan women in brightly coloured burkas and shawls. This time, as he enters the gates, he looks around, taking in the emptiness. Latif ’s heavy breathing presses to the front of the soundscape, accompanied by simple melancholy music, the sounds of the occasional bird and the haunting sound of a mystical breeze. Catching his breath, Latif kneels before a small pool of water, the camera adjusting the frame as he kneels so that

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we see only his reflection in the water together with several goldfish gathered below the surface. Latif ’s breath now completely dominates the soundscape as he removes his cap and reaches into the water with his hand to splash his face. As his hand breaks the glassy surface of the water, he disappears. Echoes of earlier moments in the film return to haunt this image: he has matured greatly since he admired himself in the mirrored door in the opening scene, and he has already renounced his earthly identity by selling his identity card to provide for Baran. He is no longer in need of a physical self; now he is one with nature and the elements. This sense of mystical transcendence is reinforced in the next images. A close-up of Latif shows him slowly turning as though to look at something beyond the frame as haunting vocals immerse our senses. We are then provided with what can only be a free indirect subjective image showing us not what he actually sees but rather what he imagines. It is an image of the porch of a neat little mudbrick house decorated with brightly coloured rugs. In contrast to the bleak wintry landscape of the previous shots, potted plants thrive and sunlight seems to stream out from the inside as a curtain blows in the doorway. This image of the curtain is paired with the whooshing sounds of a gentle breeze and soft music. It transports us back to that moment when Latif first realized Baran’s true identity. The camera gradually tracks in, reinforcing the sensation that the image is invested with a floating subjectivity. In the context of the narrative, it is a painfully beautiful image: an image of the home he imagines for himself and Baran, but a home that will never be. Eventually, the long-held shot cuts back to Latif as he stands and, we suppose, moves towards his own mental image. The camera responds, not by following Latif, but by gently panning down to bring his cap into close-up, drawing even closer to show us Baran’s little diamante hairpin that Latif had earlier found on the roof of the building site. Majidi draws out this moment in a long handheld shot. The image is invested with a sense of hope and happiness through the accompanying non-diegetic music, which gradually increases in pitch, the melancholy strings joined by the tinkling of little bells, which glisten sonically like the light reflecting off the hairpin (Figure 4.5). Finally, the scene ends with another shot of Latif ’s imaginary house at night. Light emanates from behind the curtain and candles flicker from a nook in the wall. The sweet song of a Eurasian pygmy owl pining for its own beloved resonates over the image from some distant place, creating a sound bridge to the final scene of the film.49

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Figure 4.5  The cinematic ghazal expresses Latif ’s longing for his beloved Baran, and his acceptance that his love will be lost forever. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999).

In the Persian poetic tradition, the owl is a low-born, inauspicious bird that typically lives in cemeteries and ruins. While the bird most associated with love in Persian poetry is the nightingale, the owl seems appropriate here as it emblematizes the station and fate of these poor lovers. Each scene in this sequence accumulates with a poetic density similar to the beyts in a ghazal. Indeed, we might even recall these lines penned by Rumi: In separation from his beauty, my flesh is in ruins, my soul hoots like an owl.50

Together with the metaphorical qualities of the imagery, the limited use of dialogue and careful use of camera, framing, lighting and sound all add to the enigmatic quality of the scenes, de-emphasizing narrative development in favour of cine-poetic expression: each shot forging a different perspective on Latif ’s love and acceptance of the impending loss of his beloved. In the film’s final scene, Baran and her family are preparing to leave for Afghanistan, and Latif has come to help. In the second shot, Baran crosses the grey, muddy pathway. Suddenly she trips, and the contents of her wicker bag spill out onto the ground. This functions as a moment of metaphorical explosion, betraying perhaps the feelings she has kept hidden throughout the film. We see among a variety of other fruits and vegetables, several bright red

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tomatoes, and some dried figs, a fruit that has distinctively erotic connotations. Latif rushes to Baran’s aid, and Majidi cuts to a close-up filmed in slow motion of Baran and Latif picking up the spilled items. As their hands slowly and gracefully enter the frame a moment of tactile pleasure may be experienced by the viewer. Although, according to the rules of modesty, the characters do not physically touch, the framing of the image enables their images to overlap as they each reach for a ripe red tomato. They therefore ‘touch’ virtually in this brief and silent parting exchange, which is heightened by the contrast between the grey earth and the redness of the tomatoes, which metaphorically conveys their passion. Here, the modest, restrained emotions depicted on screen overflow into the space between the viewer and the screen, into the dark space of the cinema where we may even ‘steal’ a publicly forbidden tactile moment. The almost direct looks of the protagonists towards the camera that immediately follow this scene invite us to share in this intimate moment, further charging this affective relationship between the screen and the viewer (Figures 4.6 and 4.7). The cinematic ghazal that is formed by this sequence consists of three distinct beyts. The first conveys the passion of the lover and beloved through the spilled and collected fruit. The second is conveyed in the almost direct exchange of glances between lover and beloved. The third not only shows the departure of the beloved but also provides a sign that she will always remain with him. Following their exchange of glances in a shot-reverse-shot sequence,

Figure 4.6  The first beyt of this cinematic ghazal conveys the passion of the lover and beloved. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999).

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Figure 4.7  In the second beyt the lovers almost exchange direct glances. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999).

Baran elegantly pulls her burka over her face, and in the subsequent shot, she rises and pauses for a moment to look at Latif, who lowers his gaze in a modest gesture. As she walks towards the truck that will take her home to Afghanistan, a close-up shows her shoe becoming stuck in the mud. In a wider shot, Latif attentively retrieves the shoe, cleans it and then, in a close-up, we see him delicately placing it on the ground so that Baran may slip her foot into it. As she turns, her burka sweeps the ground, the swooshing sound of fabric foregrounded in the soundscape. The camera holds for a moment after she has left the shot to reinforce the fact of her leaving. We then watch in a wide shot as she takes her place in the back of the truck. The next shot, a close-up of Latif shows him lifting his gaze, reluctantly capturing his last glimpse of Baran, who peers back at him – in extreme close-up – through the aperture of her burka. After the truck has disappeared down the winding road, in an image that forms a visual rhyme with the shot of Latif running earlier, Latif wanders solemnly across the muddy earth, stopping suddenly, his attention drawn to something on the ground. A medium close-up shows a gentle smile waft across his face. We then see the object of his gaze. It is a footprint, a fragile trace of Baran left behind in the mud, Latif faintly reflected beside it in a pool of water – yet another visual rhyme (Figure 4.8). The shot holds as rain begins to fall. Echoing the earlier shot of Latif ’s reflection in the pool, his image becomes obscured by the falling rain, which fills the small indentation left by Baran’s footprint. She has left an earthly trace, but this is ultimately transient: it will be washed away. Here, in this image, while physical love will remain forever unconsummated, lover and beloved become finally entwined in a pool off rainwater. Nature cries at the sad ending of this love story, but we might also remember that the name ‘Baran’ means ‘rain’, enabling us to recognize

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Figure 4.8  The third beyt provides a sign that Baran will always remain with him. Baran (Fouad Nahas, Majid Majidi, 1999).

that in a spiritual and mystical sense, lover and beloved will always be together. But, with Baran’s departure, a significant transformation takes place, for in this final, poetic image, Latif ’s quest becomes one, not for the physical, but rather for the divine Beloved.

Conclusion As with Makhmalbaf ’s A Time for Love, Majidi generates a series of powerful cinematic ghazals, gathered together as in a divan, a collection of poems. More precisely we might call them ‘cinesthethic ghazals’ – that infuse this strongly narrative film with a highly affective, sensuous poetic dimension. Like Makhmalbaf, Majidi employs the free indirect subjective, investing the film with the subjectivity of the film-maker-poet. However, the ultimate effect is somewhat different in Baran. Whereas Makhmalbaf ’s free indirect subjective invests the film with a highly self-reflexive dimension that calls on us to think critically about cinematic form, Majidi’s use of such techniques work to provide a deep sense of identification with the lover, Latif, and beyond that to experience a kind of mystical enlightenment. This is an intensified form of focalization in which we are not only invited to experience what a character may feel, we are also encouraged to experience the poetic and cinesthetic capacity of the film medium itself, which in Majidi’s hands attains a spiritual dimension. Majidi not only successfully renders an image of love through his own form of the cinema of poetry but also inspires in his viewers a modest love for the cinema itself, a purified cinema. Baran affirms that love can indeed be felt in the purified cinema of the post-revolutionary era particularly

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when it can also uphold national values. Both A Time for Love and Baran are effectively allegories of love: allegories not only for the kinds of love that have long been animated in the ghazal but also for the great potential possessed by a cinema of poetry to convey love in a myriad of ways. Unfortunately, such attention to matters of love is few and far between in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, the cinematic ghazal the exception rather than the rule. In the next chapter, I must turn to the subject of war and its aftermath, a topic that has long preoccupied Iranian film-makers and, as we will see, that provides fertile material for cinematic allegory.

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Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Iranian War Cinema

Black screen, indistinct voices, the sound of laboured breathing. Cut to the image of a young man, Ismael (Bahram Radan), his body writhing uncontrollably, overtaken by a sudden violent seizure. An old woman, Gilaneh (Fatemeh Motamed-Arya), Ismael’s mother, rushes to his side to comfort him and to protect his body from further injury, but she is herself struck with such force by Ismael’s flailing arm that she is propelled out of the shot. The camera remains steady, forcing the viewer to witness the trauma of this convulsing body. Undaunted by the injury inflicted on her own head, Gilaneh struggles to lift her son back onto the bed from which he had fallen during the seizure. Unblinkingly, the camera observes the heaviness of his dead weight as she wraps her arms around his body, hugging him tightly and proceeds to heave this awkward and helpless body with all her might, with every ounce of strength left in her own stooped body, weakened by age (Figure 5.1). Her pain is palpable, but her commitment to her son’s care is greater than any pain she could possibly endure. In the next shot, we see her hobbling out into the cool dawn air to wash his soiled clothes. Life goes on. The above scene opens the second half of Gilaneh (2005), co-written and co-directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab. Never before in a post-revolutionary Iranian film have I witnessed such intensely embodied performances. In fact, throughout the film, bodies – male and female – are foregrounded as sites not only of pain and suffering in the face and aftermath of war but of ideological struggle. Bodies are also represented as the construction of very powerful gendered symbolism around the wounds inflicted on the Iranian nation – land, body and consciousness – as a result

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Figure 5.1  Gilaneh uses every ounce of her strength to help her son. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005).

of the Iran–Iraq war, which lasted eight long years. In order to understand more fully how Gilaneh engages in this ongoing struggle, it is necessary to situate the film in the context of discourses around shifting allegorical and emotional configurations of the concept of vatan (homeland).1 In addition, the material and ideological effects of the war and the treatment of these in other contemporary Iranian war films must be considered. It is my contention that Gilaneh evokes a particularly matriotic concept of vatan in order to not only emphasize the persistent effects of the Iran–Iraq war, but also highlight the duty of care needed to tend to the nation’s wounds. In the genre of Iranian war cinema, Gilaneh presents a perspective that is ostensibly new and remarkably different both in the task of mourning and in its critique of the state of the nation in the early twenty-first century. Importantly, through its complex allegorical approach, Gilaneh not only reflects upon the effects of the Iran–Iraq war but also provides a meditation on war more generally, by setting the second half of the film on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This effectively opens the film up to a broader, more global or universal view of war, which is significantly different from the inward-looking, patriotically unifying and mobilizing visions of war commonly represented in Iranian Sacred Defence cinema (sinema-ye defa-e moqaddas).

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The Sacred Defence genre and the logic of the wound There can be no doubt that the Iran–Iraq war generated incalculable suffering on both sides. In terms of Iranian national discourse, representations of the war were predominantly filtered through Islamic ideology – primarily what Hamid Dabashi refers to as the ‘Karbala paradigm’.2 This ideology was aimed at justifying and sanctifying the war as an imposed war and one around which Iranians could unite in defence of the homeland – the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran. Metaphorically, such moments of crisis may be described as wounds, which contribute to the founding myths of new and vital phases in a nation’s becoming. For example, according to Chris Berry, within Chinese revolutionary discourse the logic of the wound became a powerful way of transforming ‘local stories of personal suffering into collective narratives of blood and tears’.3 Furthermore, ‘it simultaneously constructs nation and subject, blending individual stories into collective memory that claims – or counter-claims – to be “truth written in blood”’.4 In such cases, national history tends to be ‘imagined’, ‘as beginning from some sort of low point of crisis when integrity and survival of the national body comes under threat’.5 Indeed, the martyrdom of Hussain, his family and companions fighting on the battlefields of Karbala against the Umayyad Caliph Yazid and his army is the most persistent and defining personal story to be transformed into an enduring ‘collective narrative of blood and tears’ for Iranian Shi’ite Islam. Furthermore, the numerous wounds suffered by Hussain prior to death are generally described in rich and bloody detail in the Shi’ite sources about these events, which effectively prepare his body for collective mourning and emulation for martyrdom.6 Hussain’s personal suffering is memorialized in the traditional mourning ceremonies on Ashura (the tenth day) during the Muslim month of Muharram, and this story provides the central narrative for Iranian ta’ziyeh theatre. Through its repetition, according to Hamid Dabashi, this traumatic event has helped to construct an ‘injured Islamic-Iranian identity that may be poised against a hostile Other’.7 Since the 1960s, argues Haggay Ram, the Karbala paradigm has shifted from an ‘ethos of passivity and accommodation’ to an ‘activist-revolutionary approach’ drawing upon the heroic aspects of

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Hussain’s martyrdom to provide a model for the ‘Shi’ite-Iranian self … to take vengeance … against the oppressive Other’.8 In part, therefore, the invocation of the Karbala event during the Iranian revolution of 1979 may be seen as a collective, performative act drawing inspiration from the wounds of the past and binding together the Shi’ite community in the present. The significance of this paradigm as a unifying event was further heightened when Iraq transgressed Iran’s territorial borders, thus beginning the Iran–Iraq war, which is generally referred to in Iran as the imposed war or the Sacred Defence (defa-e moqaddas). Certainly, coinciding so closely with the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Iran–Iraq war played an important role in consolidating the revolution and in forming a collective consciousness around a set of Islamic values that were reinforced in official discourse during the war. According to Farhi, the Shi’i values of martyrdom, mourning, purity, devotion and ‘spiritual rewards in the afterlife’ were propagated on the home front through loudspeakers, radio and television broadcasts, ‘that literally brought the details of the war into people’s living rooms every night’ and with these details came the ‘encroachment of the values of the war front into the daily lives of all Iranians’.9 Given the educational importance placed on film by the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, as a means of helping to consolidate the revolution,10 it is not surprising that cinema was accorded a key role among these other media, in the attempt to form a collective public consciousness and unity around these values. Indeed, according to Roxanne Varzi, the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) established the War Films Bureau in 1983 in order to show the ‘truth’ about the Sacred Defence by employing and training directors who had experience of the front.11 Varzi argues that following the establishment of the War Films Bureau, the films came to be dominated by spiritual, rather than military themes, with cultural producers appropriating, in particular, the ‘history of martyrology and the practice of mourning in Shi’ism’, the ghosts of which, she says produced a ‘space of haunting’, yet another kind of ‘wound’. Varzi continues, ‘This move from action to narrative films is marked by the presence of Islam, which serves to promote the war as Sacred Defence rather than as a matter of cold-blooded strategy.’12 This is carried on into the post-war films, which take up the task of

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mourning using images, writes Varzi, ‘to beautify and spiritualize a war-torn environment’.13 She continues, While presenting the nation with its deaths in a beautiful and artistic way, war cinema opens up a whole new, safe realm for mourning. It is a project in controlling images, controlling emotion and regulating the boundaries of the nation – that place of ultimate return, dead or alive.14

I would add here that such cinema additionally serves as a site where bodies are also highly regulated, not only in terms of the war but also more broadly in terms of the regulation and Islamicization of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. As discussed in previous chapters, these regulations pay particular attention to the control of relations between the sexes and also serve to promote appropriate Islamic role models for men and women.15 In the terrain of some recent Iranian war films, to be discussed below, we may see strong allegorical parallels emerging between this regulation of the boundaries of the nation and that of ideal Islamic bodies. Of particular interest here are how, if at all, these films deal with the nation’s wounds or whether they merely ‘beautify’ and ‘spiritualize’ them for the purposes of allegorizing the threat to the ‘national body’, transforming it into a proudly worn wound, endured for the greater good of the Islamic nation. By contrast, a few socially responsible films have sought to address the very real and material nature of the aftermath of the war.16 Gilaneh is exemplary in this regard, paying close attention to the need for Iranian society to ‘tend’ to the much-neglected physical, psychological and social wounds inflicted by the war.17 The trend, however, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – elected in June 2005 on the platform of returning Iran to revolutionary values – was to return to films that perpetuated the glorification and spiritualization of the war. This was facilitated by government incentives, led by Mohammad Hossein SaffarHarandi, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance (2005–9), which were designed to promote and support Sacred Defence cinema. This became evident at the 25th Fajr International Film Festival in February 2007 where Sacred Defence and spiritual films dominated the official selection.18 In this chapter I shall compare Gilaneh to two such films, examining the various ways in which a sense of the national body is evoked allegorically through two key Iranian concepts: the homeland (vatan) and the ‘pure soil of Iran’ (khak-e pak-e Iran).

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Gender, Vatan and the Sacred Defence genre Gilaneh (2005), The Third Day (Ruz-e Sevvom, Mohammad Hossein Latifi, 2007) and He Who Sails (Anke Darya Miravad, Arash Moayerian, 2007)19 all evoke diverse variations on the Iranian concept of vatan (homeland) and the duty of all Iranians to protect the nation. All three films also establish a variety of gender roles in relation to the protection and preservation of khak-e pak-e vatan (the pure soil of homeland), forming distinct literal and allegorical clusters around soil, gender, territory and what might be described as the ‘geobody’ of the nation. The concept of vatan literally refers to ‘one’s birthplace, homeland, town or province’ and has undergone many important shifts of meaning throughout Persia’s long history.20 Afsaneh Najmabadi has traced the shifting meanings of the term from its use in Sufi thought through to the early twentieth century.21 An important aspect of Najmabadi’s study is to identify the developing and shifting relationship of vatan to both gender and nationalism. Najmabadi explains, Vatan in Sufi thought … was an allegorical concept denoting the world beyond the material and the mundane, the spiritual world, the abode of unity with the divine … Some defined it as the otherworld. Others wrote of the grave as one’s vatan: the return to earth, to one’s original substance, marking the beginning of the return to the divine. Here the Sufi concept touched the concept of vatan as mother. The grave/earth denoted the mother to which one returned.22

The dual material and spiritual meaning of vatan persisted into the nineteenth century; however, as the modernist movement – and with it the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1909) – began to gain momentum towards the latter half of that century, the term tended to shed its spiritual aspects and came to refer primarily to ‘its concrete, earthly materiality’, in that ‘the modern vatan was to be the actual territory of Iran’.23 The concept of love of one’s vatan is retained, but this love is secularized and translated into a duty of Iran’s citizenry (mellat) to protect their country against foreign transgression. Failure to protect vatan would lead to a loss of honour. ‘People who understood vatan in these terms, united as one soul against invasions, would sacrifice all that was dear to them to regain their rights and reclaim their honor.’24

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As both Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi and Najmabadi have shown, during the nineteenth century, a crucial shift in the allegorical configuration of vatan took place. Tavakoli-Targhi writes, ‘In the official nationalist discourse, vatan was imagined as a “home headed by the crowned father”.’25 This was contested by a counter-official matriotic discourse that imagined vatan as a dying 6,000-year-old mother suffering from a variety of potentially fatal diseases.26 The feminization of vatan as a dying mother figure, during the modern period enabled the allegorical extension of the highly affective dimensions of filial love within the family into discourses around nation. This provided for the possibility of the ‘fraternal bonding of male citizens’, who all became ‘sons’ of a common female vatan and whose duty was to protect their vatan as they would protect their own mothers who had given them life.27 According to Farhi, drawing upon the work of Tavakoli-Targhi, this re-fashioning of national identity, in terms of ‘6,000 years of presumably uninterrupted history,’ during the modern period, came at the price of dissociating ‘the people of Iran (mellat-e Iran) … from Islam and creator’.28 Farhi further asserts that ‘this attempt at re-fashioning Iranian national identity was of course turned upside down with the 1979 revolution’.29 Indeed, the term ‘vatan’ was mobilized by Ayatollah Khomeini to refer not only to Iran but also more broadly to the concept of a great Muslim nation vatan-e Islam (homeland of Islam), thus reinvesting the term with religious significance.30 At this time, the deeply emotional patriotism expressed as a love of one’s vatan becomes inextricably fused with Islamic identity. The widespread and all-encompassing nature of this fusion may be evidenced, for example, in the revision of school textbooks designed to provide children and youths with spiritual training in this particularly Iranian-Islamic identity. One often cited example may be found in a third-grade textbook from 1985. The verse from the book Iran: My Homeland (Ey Iran, ey Vatan-e Man) clearly expresses the inseparability of religion, homeland and citizenship, espoused by revolutionary discourse.31 The following lines also clearly draw upon both the wound imagery of the Karbala paradigm and the concept of pure soil: ‘Your clean earth (khak-e pak-e to) which is red with the blood of the martyrs is sacred to me. I kiss the red tulips which have grown from the graves of the martyrs.’32 While the personification of Iran is not gendered, the suggestion of a familial (maternal or paternal) connection to the geo-body of the homeland

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is present in the line ‘I look at your mountains to remind me of the courage and honour of your children’.33 The verse finishes with a clear call to action that cannot be read without evoking the war with Iraq, which was raging at the time this passage was introduced into the curriculum: ‘With anger and hate I will destroy your enemies.’34 Within the terrain of some recent Iranian war cinema, we find a range of variations on the concepts of vatan and khak-e pak-e Iran. The diversity of approaches between the three films I discuss in this chapter not only is suggestive of the heterogeneity of approaches to the war in recent films but also marks a significant shift of perspective consistent with political developments in the country.

Vatan as woman in need of protection: The Third Day (2007) In The Third Day, director Latifi draws upon the concept of vatan and posits a female figure in allegorical terms as an emblem of the nation under threat of ‘rape’ by an enemy force. She is in urgent need of protection by the sons and, more importantly, brothers of vatan, who ultimately offer their own bodies as martyrs of the Islamic nation. The film is set in 1980 during the last three days of the battle for the western section of Khorramshahr, one of the most significant battles of the Iran–Iraq war. As such, the film tends to mythologize this particularly successful moment of the war, providing an ending that at once suggests a ‘victory’ of sorts, as well as producing the martyrdom of its hero. The film’s central protagonist, Reza (Pouria Pursorkh), is a young Iranian volunteer fighting to reclaim the city from Iraqi forces. At the beginning of the film, we see him attempting to help his injured sister Samireh (Baran Kosari) flee the family home as it is about to be ransacked by the Iraqi army. Samireh’s broken leg, however, prevents her from climbing the high wall behind the house. Reza decides the safest option is to bury her in the courtyard and return later to retrieve her under the cover of darkness. As Reza hastily digs a shallow ‘grave’, Samireh gathers a few sparse provisions – water, potatoes, a flashlight – to see her through her temporary entombment. Allegorically, we may read this scene as Reza entrusting Samireh’s safety to the pure soil of the home/homeland (khak-e pak-e vatan) (Figure 5.2). Furthermore, the grave metaphor is suggestive of the Sufi understanding of the earth as the

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Figure 5.2  Reza entrusts his sister Samireh’s body to the pure soil of homeland, hiding her in a shallow grave. The Third Day (Ali Reza Jalali, Mohammad Hossein Latifi, 2007).

beginning of one’s return to the mother and the divine.35 A series of pointof-view shots from Samireh’s perspective allow the viewer to identify with her, as Reza covers the hole with a slatted wooden blind, a loose covering of soil and leaves to camouflage her earthy hiding place. These point-of-view shots are important, as they position the viewer as similarly vulnerable and in need of rescuing by the hero. This is heightened when Iraqi soldiers arrive to ransack and ultimately occupy the house. Several times, Samireh comes close to discovery, with tension building every minute Reza is delayed, failing to return that evening as promised. The ransacking of the family home clearly functions allegorically, emblematizing the invasion of Iran by Iraqi forces. The camera surveys the interior of the home, to show overturned furniture and broken photograph frames, clearly signifying the impact of the war on the intimate sphere of the home and family. However, this is further complicated by the arrival on the scene of an uncharacteristically sympathetic Iraqi officer, Foad (Hamed Behdad). Inexplicably, Foad insists that the soldiers who had ransacked the home restore it to its original, tidy state. We soon learn, via a few brief flashbacks, the meaning behind these strange orders. Prior to the war this officer had been raised in Khorramshahr; he had even taught alongside Samireh in the local school and had hoped one day to ask for her hand in marriage. The threat (and fact) of territorial invasion that began the war is now transposed to a highly personal and affective level now bearing

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the threat to Samireh’s body and her chastity and by implication the family’s honour.36 Ironically, it is initially Foad who protects Samireh from rape by one of the other Iraqi soldiers, who has discovered her in her shallow grave. As Samireh emerges from her hiding place, a shot over Samireh’s shoulder shows the approach of the Iraqi soldier unbuttoning his shirt. Suddenly, a shot rings out and a brief cut to Samireh’s face shows her horror (has she been shot?), before the reverse shot shows the soldier falling to the ground and reveals Foad as her saviour. Of course, Foad only protects her so that he may continue his own advances towards her; however, in an Iranian film of this genre, such an alliance is intolerable and as such presents the next narrative problem that must be suitably resolved in an ideologically correct way by the end of the film. Samireh’s emergence from beneath the earth (khak) further adds to the allegorical meaning of such a union, for the condensation of the signifiers ‘woman’ and ‘earth’ suggests the parallel defilement of the khak-e pak-e vatan/ Iran and the purity of a woman’s body and the threat of her defilement by the ‘other’, in this case the treacherous Arab-Iranian, who has joined the enemy forces invading Khorramshahr. The rather conventional cinematic approach of The Third Day is dominated by a hero-centred narrative, that unfolds in the present tense, placing the viewer in the midst of the fighting and aligns them with the Iranian family, while exploring the duplicitous nature of the ‘enemy’, who, it is suggested, emerged from within. Furthermore, despite the film’s many graphic scenes of war, death and horrific injury, there is a general idealization of war, rather than a concern with tending the nation’s ongoing wounds. Instead, the bodies of the hero and the woman-victim function as overt, didactic national allegories that reproduce well-worn clichés that effectively inhibit, rather than encourage critical reflection. In this sense, these films continue the nation-building work undertaken by some of the child-centred films such as Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, Majid Majidi, 1997), which was discussed in Chapter 2. In The Third Day Samireh, who remains incapacitated throughout the film, is constructed as a victim to be saved. Although in some small concession to the empowerment of Iranian women, it is she who finally shoots Foad, while being floated to safety by one of Reza’s fellow combatants. However, this production of clichés is most evident in the cinematic construction of the hero’s scene of martyrdom. After a long, climactic battle scene, Reza finally falls to the ground,

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fatally wounded. Just before he dies, we see him draw from his breast pocket a small, tattered photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini, which clearly signifies his entry into the ranks of the war martyrs. Interestingly, this scene is constructed primarily for the benefit of an ideologically aligned viewer, as the photograph is turned outwards towards the camera (and the viewer), rather than towards Reza himself. Through this act of interpolation, it is suggested that Reza’s body, Khomeini and the viewer are thus united in the symbolic wholeness of the Islamic nation, a wholeness embodied in the act of martyrdom. Here, allegory serves to reaffirm the symbolic order. Like films of the first phase of Iranian war cinema (those made during the war), The Third Day functions primarily as a celebration of the virtues and justification of heroic martyrdom wholly consistent with the government’s renewed interest, under President Ahmadinejad, in promoting revolutionary ideology. This serves to promote an uncomplicated, mythic view of the past.

Returning to the sacred Earth: He Who Sails (2007) Another example of this renewed turn to the Sacred Defence genre that emerged during the Ahmadinejad era is Arash Moayerian’s He Who Sails. Unlike The Third Day, which presents itself as a ‘historical’ war drama and lacks a sense of the war’s aftermath, He Who Sails is, for the most part, a lyrically structured film set partly in the present day, but lapsing with increasing frequency into flashbacks set during the war. Like The Third Day, He Who Sails is also set in the crucial south-western border region, this time in the vicinity of Abadan Island. The premise of the film is quite simple, an Iranian expatriate – a former soldier and now a scientist (Afshin Hashemi) – has returned to Iran to work on a project to bring ‘sweet water’ to Abadan and the surrounding countryside. As the protagonist wanders through the devastated landscape, he is flooded with memories of the time he spent as a soldier in the area. This premise, that of a returning expatriate, has in itself rather complex allegorical possibilities in terms of tending the wounds of the nation. Not only does it engage in imagining the repatriation of the diaspora – the literally absent bodies – but it also strongly folds together the logic of the wound and the concept of khak-e pak-e vatan, which has literally been ‘soiled’ or ‘scarred’ and is in need of cleansing and repair. Indeed, there is a very concrete impetus

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behind this premise, for Abadan and the surrounding region was subjected to severe chemical weapons attacks by Iraqi forces during the war and the water table around Abadan has also been polluted by the leakage of petroleum from the region’s many oil refineries. This premise, however, serves as something of a red herring, as it does not provide for the film’s major narrative trajectory. Just as the film’s central protagonist becomes swamped with memories of the war, the narrative too comes to be dominated by a spiritual journey that the solider undertook during the war. Similar to the framing premise of the film, this spiritual journey is about purification and revives a sub-genre of the Sacred Defence cinema that was popular in the 1980s, the ‘special-mission’ film. According to Sadr, the heroes of these films embody apparently contradictory characteristics: ‘physical toughness’ and a philosophical ‘religious sensibility’ that ‘aims to demonstrate the inseparability of war and religion’.37 Set during Ramadan, the protagonist, as a young soldier, is asked by his commander to take a journey from Abadan (a distance of about 25 kilometres, indicated by shots of a road sign riddled with bullet holes) so that he may break his fast early and therefore be strong enough to take part in a special operation. He takes with him a bottle of water, not to quench his thirst on his long and arduous journey but to perform his ritual ablutions before prayer. Along the way, he meets a range of characters who cause minor delays to his journey and significant depletion to his water supply. The diversions do little, however, to distract the soldier from his sacred task. By the end of his journey, signalled by the extra-diegetic call to prayer on the soundtrack, he almost collapses, dehydrated and disoriented amid a thick dust storm. After performing his purifying ablutions, he finally drops to the earth to pray, barely visible in the thick dust. In the process of becoming one with God, the film also suggests that he attains a sacred oneness with the land, thus affirming the concept of the Sacred Defence. As in The Third Day, where Samireh is temporarily entombed within the earth, the pure and sacred earth from which the soldier emerges as spiritually cleansed and ready for battle performs a similar function in He Who Sails.38 Unlike The Third Day, however, the land is not allegorically gendered as the ‘helpless woman in need of saving and keeping pure’. Rather, with the assistance of the framing premise, the task of maintaining (or defending) the purity of the earth, khak-e pak-e Iran and by association the broader concept of the

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Islamic homeland (vatan-e Islam), becomes paramount. This purity is clearly less material than spiritual, despite the opening premise, which brings the expatriate back to his homeland. For it is the past, in the form of the soldier’s memories, which are privileged by the narrative, rather than the project of bringing sweet water to the region, that seems to fade from view. In fact, at one point, the returned expatriate says to a police officer (in the present), ‘I have come for my memories.’ Indeed, throughout the film, his memories frequently intervene in the present. This is evident in the way the film has been edited. On the soundtrack, director Moayerian frequently uses a sound bridge to introduce the flashbacks. At times these sound bridges (voices, radio broadcasts of poetry of martyrdom, sounds of helicopters and gunfire) seem to be internally diegetic in nature, audible at least in the mind of the central protagonist in the present. At other times, features in the landscape (signs, buildings, flags) serve to provoke an image from the protagonist’s past (Figure 5.3). At other points, a shot-reverseshot/point-of-view sequence is used to produce the effect that the central protagonist is looking directly at himself in the past from the vantage of the present. This use of point-of-view places the viewer within the protagonist’s deep visualizations of the past, having the effect of interpolating spectators into these memories, hailing us to accompany him on his spiritual journey. The film is skilfully shot and poetically edited and is reminiscent of the tendency ‘to beautify and spiritualize a war-torn environment’ in earlier Sacred Defence cinema.39 The requisite theme of martyrdom is also linked closely to this poetic vision, expressed towards the end of the film as the central protagonist washes the dust from the grave of his commanding officer who, we learn, was martyred during the special operation. Thus we see that the opening premise

Figure 5.3  Evoking the past in the present. He Who Sails (Sima Film, Arash Moayerian, 2007).

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of bringing sweet water to the region takes on one final emblematic purpose, closely tied to the conventions of the Sacred Defence genre: that of cleansing and purifying memories of the martyrs and revivifying their importance in the current revival of post-revolutionary discourse. Like The Third Day, the memory of war is elevated to the realm of myth, with the effect of effacing the wounds still felt in contemporary, social reality. The structural and narrative neglect of the framing premise is significant, for this enables the spiritual journey in the past to take precedence over the process of physical and material renewal in the present. This sidelining of the contemporary social significance of healing the material wounds of the nation, suggested at the outset, functions as a promise that is never ultimately fulfilled for the viewer. Instead, the spectator becomes fully immersed in the past and, like The Third Day, reflects a revolutionary discourse where love of homeland is inseparable from devotion to Islam and takes precedence over the material and social conditions generated by the legacy of war. While both films aim to recollect the past, the past’s ongoing legacy in the present is not explored.

The scattered wounds of war: Gilaneh (2005) In contrast to the two films already discussed, Gilaneh consciously reflects upon these contemporary social conditions and the painful legacy of war. The first half of the film is set during the last days of the Iran–Iraq war when, as we are told in a title card ‘Iranian cities were subjected to severe Iraqi missile attacks on the eve of the Iranian New Year. Many people who did not feel safe in the cities fled to the country.’ The second part of the film, which takes place on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, establishes parallels and comparisons between the two events. In doing so, Gilaneh is not only at once intensely concerned with provoking a meditation on and constructing an allegorical treatment of the national wounds but also interested in turning the viewer’s attention to more contemporary global concerns. The film’s title character, Gilaneh, is an old woman, a war widow, whose life has already been profoundly touched by the eight-year war. Not only is she the widow of a war martyr, her pregnant daughter, Maygol (Baran Kosari), has fled her home in Tehran to the relative safety of Gilan, a fertile region in the north of Iran bordering the Caspian Sea. Maygol suffers from disturbing dreams

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of being bombed and frets for the safety of her husband, Rahman, who has remained in Tehran presumably in order to defend his home. Furthermore, within the first few minutes of the film, Gilaneh’s newly engaged son, Ismael, leaves to join the war effort, much to Gilaneh’s dismay and despair. Following a few brief introductory scenes, the main drama of the first part of the film involves Gilaneh and Maygol taking the long and dangerous journey to wartorn Tehran in search of Maygol’s husband. In doing so, they go against the grain of Tehran’s middle-class residents, who have the means to flee the bombing, seeking safety in the provinces. Many of the sequences in this first half of the film serve a dual purpose. First, they lament the many losses and bring into focus the enormous human suffering inflicted by the war, and, second, they serve to foreshadow the events that are to take place in the second half of the film. The primary conceptual thrust of this earlier section of the film is to set up Gilaneh as a kind of ‘ideal’ mother figure.40 Her name, after the rich and fertile region of Gilan, allows her to function allegorically as the maternal, lifegiving vatan and the khak-e pak-e vatan, that at once protects and is in need of protection. By the second half of the film, however, Gilaneh becomes the allegorical embodiment of a different kind of maternal vatan, one that evokes the 6,000-year-old dying mother of a century ago, suffering for her people, but neglected and in dire need of love and care. Prior to this, however, the film brings our attention to the effects of war on the homefront, placing emphasis on the fragmentation and dispersal of the family. In contradistinction to the two films previously discussed, very little emphasis is placed on the heroic martyrology of the Sacred Defence. Although the film contains a few fleeting references to Gilaneh’s husband as a war martyr, the film instead emphasizes the very material and visceral effects of war and its tragic aftermath. The opening title sequence is crucial in setting up the conceptual antinomies that run throughout the film and provoke ‘allegorical ways of seeing’.41 For Walter Benjamin, these allegorical ways of seeing or ‘allegorical intentions’ refer to the multidimensional perspectives contained by and employed in reading any allegorical work. As discussed in previous chapters, in the cinema, this may refer to moments of rupture in narrative structure or cinematic language that opens up the possibility of conventional signs and symbols being used for emblematic purposes. The viewer is asked to adopt an allegorical way of seeing: cued to read beyond the obvious meaning of such symbolism and,

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in some cases a range of sometimes contradictory meanings may emerge. The division of the film into two episodes, taking place in different eras (1988 and 2003) is perhaps the most obvious signal that the film might be functioning on numerous levels. Between these two episodes, the use of foreshadowing and backshadowing produce echoes that resonate, provoking correspondences across time. In the later period, the past is ever-present and viscerally felt through the very material suffering of bodies. The film opens with a black screen, over which the sound of an air-raid siren may be heard. The sound continues for several seconds before the title of the film – Gilaneh – appears on screen. The title fades to black and the sounds of bombing and screeching may be heard, finally blending into the sound of a woman screaming. The first image appears on screen. It is night, Gilaneh and her daughter, Maygol, have been sleeping. Gilaneh emerges from the darkness to comfort Maygol, who has been calling out in her sleep: ‘Rahman! I’m scared. Fire! Smell of burning! Rahman! I’m scared.’ Gilaneh responds, ‘Don’t be afraid dear. It was only a dream.’ Maygol replies, ‘I have to go. I can’t take it anymore.’ The camera then follows Gilaneh, panning slightly to the left as she reaches for a jug of water and pauses momentarily on a pomegranate, which has been torn apart, its small, juicy seeds glistening in the half-light. In Persian culture, the pomegranate – a fruit, which is native to Iran and Afghanistan – commonly symbolizes fertility. In Zoroastrian mythology King Esfandiyar is said to have become invincible after eating a pomegranate. Indeed, as we soon learn, Maygol is pregnant, and she is characterized by an invincible determination to return to war-torn Tehran to find her husband. But, I would ask, is this apparently clear and straightforward symbolic meaning really so ‘readable’ or obvious? Is this conventional sign of hope, possibility and prosperity perhaps being used for other purposes? In times of war, when lives are turned upside down, the stable signifiers that structure our lives and provide meaning may also become destabilized. Here, therefore, amid the trauma of the opening title sequence, the pomegranate could be read as an allegorical emblem that foreshadows the loss and destruction that pervades the film. I am reminded that the pomegranate has also, ironically, become a signifier of modern warfare, bequeathing its name (Old French pommegrenate) to the hand grenade, with its shape, size and seeds bearing a

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resemblance to shrapnel-filled hand grenades of the early twentieth century. A grenade is not a precision weapon; rather it is designed to ‘scatter’ destruction in many directions at once. Through its main characters and their encounters with incidental minor characters, Gilaneh attempts to show in a very complex way just how the effects of the Iran–Iraq war have left their deep physical and emotional wounds scattered throughout the nation. These scattered wounds are evidenced during the first half of the film via the various people Gilaneh and Maygol encounter during their journey to Tehran. After walking for many hours through the lush, fertile fields of Gilan, the two women board a bus. The further they travel towards Tehran, the more the verdant landscape gives way to dry, barren earth. Throughout their journey, they pass a steady stream of traffic travelling in the opposite direction, families fleeing the bombing of Tehran, their cars heavily laden with the few possessions they have managed to rescue from their homes. All around her, Gilaneh witnesses lives in disarray. To some extent, Gilaneh’s journey serves a purpose far greater than the telling of her individual story, for her presence enables a diverse array of experiences to be vividly depicted for the viewer. These draw our attention, not to the grand, heroic events of war but rather to the quotidian, but no less profound moments experienced by the general population. Gilaneh’s trajectory, against the flow of traffic, lends her an allegorical quality of standing slightly apart from the people she encounters. She becomes something of an observer, a witness to events, rather than a full participant in them. Within these small fragments of the lives of others, however, are contained the seeds of her own past and future, backshadowing what has been and foreshadowing what is to come. One such event occurs at a busy roadside inn where a wedding party is attempting to continue their celebrations after having fled their bombed village. The young bride laments the fact that she will not spend her wedding night in her hometown, her vatan. Through Gilaneh’s longing looks at the young bride we are reminded of the hopefulness contained in one of the early scenes of the film. In the skeletal framework of the family’s new home (which is also to become a restaurant), Gilaneh’s son, Ismael, tenderly adorns his fiancé, Setareh (Nayereh Farahani), with a beautiful new scarf, a farewell gift before he goes off to war (Figure 5.4). Somehow, the fragmented and chaotic nature of this roadside wedding at once backshadows the literal and metaphorical

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Figure 5.4  Ismael, newly engaged, is called off to war. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005).

incompleteness of the family home in the earlier scene and foreshadows the fact that Ismael’s own wedding shall never take place, due to the horrific injuries he is to sustain as a result of the war. We may also be reminded of the absence of Gilaneh’s own husband, also a war martyr, a fact reinforced later when Gilaneh reminisces over old family photographs. Signs of suffering continue to accumulate around Gilaneh – television images of victims of war, overheard conversations about the use of chemical weapons and reports of the bombing of a children’s hospital. Although she does not take an active part in these conversations, Gilaneh’s presence at the crowded inn allows the viewer to hear snippets of these conversations, which provide not only information and opinion about the destructive effects of war but also ominous premonitions of her own future, which is to be dominated by her attempts to alleviate Ismael’s suffering. During one crucial sequence, Gilaneh is positioned in the foreground of the image, while two women converse in the background. They talk of the tragic injuries caused by chemical weapons: ‘The ones alive look as if they have been boiled in oil. … Their skins come off in one piece.’ Ever so slowly, the camera zooms in on Gilaneh, tightening the shot on her face and with it the sense of foreboding. This is further consolidated by a shot of a television screen showing images of the wounded, accompanied by the sounds of a wailing baby.

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Here, we are presented with a series of sounds and images that continue to resonate throughout the film, pointing both to the fate of the central character and also to the broader consequences of the 2003 US-led war on Iraq. On the one hand, the wailing baby reminds us of Gilaneh’s role as a mother and on the other it foreshadows the tumultuous world into which Maygol’s baby (Gilaneh’s grandchild) will be born. Furthermore, these cries also serve to lament the fact that Ismael’s injuries will prevent him from fathering children and the television images of maimed children provide Gilaneh with a premonition of Ismael’s own devastating injuries.42 Significantly, these mediatized images of war return during the second half of the film, with television broadcasts of images from the US-led invasion of Iraq closely echoing the suffering of the earlier war. These images, which remain largely in the background and are barely acknowledged by the characters, tend to produce what Varzi called a ‘space of haunting’ where the past returns to provoke mourning in the present.43 This is not mourning in a beautified and spiritualized mythic-heroic register, but a mourning of a far more material kind and expressed primarily through the fragmentation and loss of the family unit. Together with the obvious care-giving role Gilaneh adopts for her own children, further events during the first half of the film help to reinforce Gilaneh’s allegorical role as a caregiver to the nation that is carried into the second half. On the bus to Tehran, Gilaneh and Maygol encounter two young soldiers returning to the battlefront. One of them is suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, indicated by his violent and irrational behaviour towards the other passengers, at one point screaming, ‘They’re taking us to the killing fields.’ To emphasize the source of his trauma for the viewer, nondiegetic sounds of bombing, similar to those used in the opening scene may be heard on the soundtrack. These link the soldier’s trauma with that of Maygol’s in the opening sequence and remind us of the wider ramifications of the war among both the military and civilian population alike. Just as she did with Maygol, Gilaneh responds with her maternal instincts, calming the distressed soldier by gently stroking his head, as one would a baby.44 Later, in a more lucid moment he apologizes for his outburst, addressing Gilaneh as madar (mother), thus reinforcing her broader allegorical role as a national mother figure or madar-e vatan. Here we see a distinct reversal of the gender dynamics presented in a film, such as The Third Day, in which the woman was vulnerable

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and dependent upon the heroic soldier/brother figure to protect her and, by implication, the nation. Here, Gilaneh becomes the temporary caregiver to the vulnerable soldier and he in turn comes to foreshadow the more permanent fate of Ismael and the nation more broadly.

A crippled nation If during the first half of the film Gilaneh is constructed allegorically as a mother figure to the nation, during the second part of the film her emblematic value becomes fully embodied and viscerally laden with meaning. This is evident right from the crucial transitional scene between the two halves of the film. At the end of the first part, Gilaneh and Maygol have finally arrived in Tehran, only to find Maygol’s husband missing and the furniture removed from her home. Shortly after their arrival, an air-raid siren sounds. As the residents run for cover, an intense bombing campaign begins, accompanied by the staccato sounds of machine gun fire. As a bomb hits Maygol’s building, the two women duck for cover and as the screen fades to black Gilaneh’s tender voice calls out, ‘Ismael, where are you sweetheart?’ This is immediately followed by the scene described at the beginning of this chapter, that takes place on the eve of nowruz, Persian New Year, 2003, just as the United States are about to embark on the campaign in Iraq. Not only does the black screen function as a conventional temporal ellipsis, the ambiguity of whether Gilaneh’s words are located in the past or the present also functions to directly connect these moments in time, cueing viewers to read each allegorically through the other. I would argue, however, that these words function as more than a cinematic sound bridge used in conventional film editing to connect two consecutive scenes. Here Gilaneh’s words and the sound of bombing are effectively situated both in the past and the present, thus serving to produce an ‘allegorical-image’, a virtual point of confluence between past and present. This is a dialectical image in the Benjaminian sense and a time-image as theorized by Gilles Deleuze. In the allegorical image, the past and the present coalesce, folded one into the other. The past is never simply past but returns to lay claim to the present. In the second part of Gilaneh what we see when the image returns are bodies weighed down by time and the traumatic past they have experienced: Ismael is

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literally paralysed, and Gilaneh hobbles with a stooped posture, as though she bears the weight of the last fifteen years on her shoulders. If the first half of the film was dominated by a journey, by movement and mobility – albeit against the grain – then the second half of the film is characterized by stasis and waiting. Gilaneh waits for the doctor (Shahrokh Foroutanian), who eventually arrives to administer medicine that will temporarily alleviate Ismael’s pain. She waits for Atefeh (Jaleh Sameti), a young war widow, whose husband was buried in Gilan and whom Gilaneh hopes will one day marry Ismael, but her crippled son will never marry. She has been waiting fifteen years for the highway to be built to bring customers to her restaurant, which she has never managed to open. Instead, her days are punctuated by the odd passer-by stopping to buy lollies or cigarettes from her little roadside stall. Signs of urban progress pass her by, lying just out of geographic and personal reach. When a couple stop in their car, blasting loud music, Gilaneh asks to borrow the man’s mobile phone to call the doctor but she is interrupted by Ismael, who calls her away by ringing a bell. Mirroring the role of the minor characters, as the bearers of speculation and opinion in the first part of the film, here too, minor characters serve to comment on wider contemporary events and to speculate on the implications for Iran. Once again, Gilaneh witnesses these conversations, rather than participating directly in them. We overhear the man with the mobile phone talking about contracts: ‘If a missile drops on this side, things will change. … Prices will go through the roof.’ Such economic speculation returns later during a rather flippant yet poignant discussion between a group of middleclass young men, reminding the viewer of Ismael before he went to war. They pull up in a jeep, again playing loud contemporary music. One buys a packet of Winston cigarettes from Gilaneh’s stall, calling back to the others, ‘Guys, they aren’t cheaper yet, the US has to come first.’ Another replies, ‘They’ll be done with Iraq in a week, then we’re rescued.’ The conversation continues, ‘When they come, you could go fight and get killed or something.’ This last remark attracts Gilaneh’s attention, turning her head to look at them as another adds: ‘But in your will, leave us all your veteran’s benefits.’ They depart laughing among themselves. The juxtaposition of the flippant attitudes of these young men with Gilaneh and Ismael’s story serves a variety of purposes. First, it suggests that, although these men belong to a generation born during the

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Iran–Iraq war, they seem to lack a social or political consciousness about the tragic consequences of war. Although they do not mention martyrdom, it is suggested that some economic (rather than spiritual) benefit could be gained. Second, although spoken with a clear degree of irony, the idea of being ‘rescued’ speculates openly about a possible desire for social, economic and political reform. However, they also represent a class and generation of materialistic, urban Iranian youth, who have little interest in politics or with the past. In this sense, they have much in common with the collective protagonist of Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (Darbare-ye Elly, 2009), which will be discussed in the next chapter. They drive off carelessly, their music blaring into the future. What the viewer comes to understand through this scene is that the present and indeed the future are inseparable from the past, for it is the past’s contours that shape the present and the future. These contours, however, are commonly shaped by the dominant discourses through which the past is narrated and remembered. If the wounds suffered by a nation are narrated into heroic mythologies, with tulips springing from the earth where the martyrs have fallen, then who is left to tend to the actual wounds of the fallen, the maimed and those left behind to mourn absent family members? This is Gilaneh’s role as primary caregiver to her wounded son (Figure 5.5). Of course, there are social services for veterans, but Gilaneh will not have her son taken from her. At one point, when a friend remarks that Ismael may be willing to go to a disabled veteran’s centre, Gilaneh retorts, ‘You think I found this child?’ indicating at once her acute sense of dedication to the needs of her son and suggesting the inadequacy of available social services.45 However, in a private conversation with the doctor – himself a wounded veteran – Ismael does express his desire

Figure 5.5  Gilaneh’s stooped and frail body encourages us to see her as the manifestation of vatan, figured as a 6,000-year-old dying mother trying in vain to care for her children. Gilaneh (Fadak Film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005).

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to go into State care for the sake of his mother. He barely manages to aspirate the words, ‘It’s killing her!’ At this point, Ismael is confronted with images reminiscent of his own past, through the mediatized images of the new war now taking place in Iraq. On the television, we see images of bombing, children, helicopters and women devastated by this new war. The film cuts to an extreme close-up of Ismael’s face, beads of sweat collecting on his brow. This is followed by a series of shot-reverse-shots of Ismael and the television screen. We are made aware of his laboured breathing, which is mixed with a low rumbling sound. This might just be thunder, but we cannot help being reminded of the ominous sounds of war.

Gilaneh as 6,000-year-old dying mother One of the most striking features of Gilaneh is the way it resists being drawn into the mythic-heroic register of much Iranian war cinema. This resistance is largely due to the highly embodied nature of the performances and the emphasis placed on the physical and material effects of war, rather than on spiritual justification and sanctification. In addition to functioning on this very grounded, material level, the film also works on an allegorical level to produce a meditation on the urgent necessity of attending to the nation’s wounds, rather than effacing them through the discourse of martyrology. This is expressed most emphatically through the body of Gilaneh herself, who may be seen as an allegorical manifestation of vatan. Through her old, stooped and frail body we may see a manifestation of vatan as a 6,000-yearold dying mother trying in vain to care for her children – the people of Iran who have themselves been ravaged by war and its aftermath. But clearly, she too is in desperate need of loving care and attention. In contrast to earlier nationalist and revolutionary conceptions of vatan and the discourse of martyrology that is perpetuated by films such as The Third Day and He Who Sails, Gilaneh does not figure a threat from the outside as the cause of her ailments. Rather it suggests that her symptoms have been generated by the general neglect of her people, who, like Ismael, may feel powerless to act, or like the middle-class urbanites, who simply want to forget. At the end of the film, Gilaneh sits quietly, clearly exhausted, looking out over the countryside,

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which is blanketed in mist. This scene and the film as a whole, I believe, asks the viewer to contemplate her fate and the future of the nation whose wounds cry out to be tended.

Conclusion When compared with some other contemporary Iranian films that deal with war, or the Sacred Defence more specifically, Gilaneh trenchantly resists the tendency of dominant Iranian cinema to beautify, spiritualize and idolize the concept of martyrdom. Instead, the film is filled with melancholy and mourning for a nation that is figured emblematically as a dying 6,000-yearold mother and whose wounds, from which she has long suffered, have not adequately been tended. In the next and final chapter, I will turn more directly to this concept of mourning through my close analysis of Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly. In this film, we witness a generation not dissimilar from the loud young middle-class characters encountered by Gilaneh. They have no memory of the war and strive for a more modern and more Westernized way of life. However, in their attempt to emerge from under the shadow of tradition, they are inevitably swept into what seems an eternal return to a state of sorrow and mourning.

6

Between Laughter and Mourning: About Elly as Trauerspiel of a Generation

Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (Darbare-ye Elly, 2009) opens with a black screen, pierced by a thin strip of light that is modulated by shadowy figures moving past it. A slip of paper is passed through the small aperture, and we realize that the camera is positioned inside some kind of box. As the shot continues, ambient street sounds can be heard as more paper and some metallic objects – coins perhaps – are pushed through the narrow opening. Gradually, from the edges of the darkness, the sound of people screaming joyfully fades in and the slit of light begins to grow larger. As it does so, a car enters from frame right and speeds past the camera. A young woman, her hair casually veiled, hangs out of the window, yelling ecstatically. With this new vantage point, we can see that now we are, unexpectedly, in a tunnel tracking a car, the slit of light opening up to reveal the light at the end of a tunnel. Visually and aurally, this opening credit sequence provides an optimistic glimpse of young Iranians striving to express joy and freedom, their enthusiastic screams resounding in the tunnel (Figure 6.1). Looked at more closely, however, the sequence also provides an indirect or, we might say, reverse view of the ways in which life in contemporary Iran is deeply infused with, and underpinned by, traditional practices. Iranian viewers might immediately recognize the reverse view presented to us in the film’s opening image as a sadaqeh (charity or alms) box. These blue and yellow boxes stand on many street corners of Iran’s major cities. They are provided by a state-run charity to help Iranians fulfil the tradition of sadaqeh (voluntary charity), which is considered a virtuous deed and one of the five pillars of Islam. In addition to encouraging philanthropy in the faithful, many Iranians believe that almsgiving may protect them from harm or even catastrophe when embarking on a journey. How then are we to

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Figure 6.1  Elly’s smile provides an optimistic figure of young Iranians striving to express joy and freedom. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

read this image against Farhadi’s narrative, which, as we will see, propels his characters from happiness and joy towards tragedy and sadness? As I have already argued throughout this book, allegorical films tend to teach us how to read them. Opening sequences often provide a key that can help us to decode the uniquely encoded allegorical film language. As we saw in Chapter 1, like the beginning of Ebrahim Golestan’s The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni, 1972) and Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina, 1978), opening sequences often cue us to look beyond the narrative surface of a film. We might be reminded not to take what we see merely at face value but to look for deeper meaning. In this seemingly simple opening sequence, Farhadi not only provides us with a template for understanding the film’s topical and thematic schema – the antinomies of sadness and laughter, tradition and modernity – in contemporary Iran, but also introduces us to his key allegorical strategy. I call this the ‘dissimulating camera’. Central to this is his use of the ‘trick’ edit that alerts us to the inherent flexibility of the film medium, its ability to shift our perspective while apparently maintaining continuity. The image simultaneously suggests one thing and points to something else: the image is rendered equivocal, meaning becomes unstable. Farhadi’s use of the dissimilating camera in this opening sequence should serve as a warning that we should not fully trust what we see and hear.

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In arguing that Farhadi’s key cinematic procedure in About Elly is one of dissimulation, I propose that this allegorical modality corresponds closely with practices of dissimulation and other modes of indirect communication that are an integral part of Iranian society. These practices constitute both the form and content of About Elly. Dissimulation and other forms of indirect or ‘veiled’ communication serve a variety of purposes in everyday life in Iran and are intimately tied up with the complexly layered conception of the ‘self ’. Commentators of Iranian interpersonal communication such as Farzaneh Milani and Mary Bateson explain how Iranian society is divided into separate private and public spheres where individuals construct different aspects of the self along similarly public and private lines: a hidden or veiled inner, private core and a public face, the construction of which, as Hamid Naficy explains, motivates people ‘to search for inner meaning in all they see, hear and receive in daily interaction with others’. This dynamic of ‘distrusting manifest meaning and concealing core values’ is at the heart of Iranian hermeneutics and effectively encourages allegorical ways of seeing.1 Farzaneh Milani outlines further aspects of this complex practice of social ‘veiling’: ‘Religious Taqiyeh [deliberate dissimulation] protects faith. Ta’arof [a ritualistic mode of discourse] disguises some thoughts and emotions and plunges both parties, the addressee and the addresser, into a kind of factual suspense.’ ‘Abstractions supplant concreteness. … Generalities replace the specific. Indirection becomes a common practice.’2 More specifically, taqiyeh (religious dissimulation) in the Shi’ite tradition allows the believer to conceal one’s belief for the purposes of self-protection, but dissimulation is no longer limited to the realm of religious practice. In contemporary Iran, argues Bateson, various modes of non-religious dissimulation have become part of the fabric of Iranian life. Stephen Poulson calls this ‘popular taqiyeh’.3 Bateson argues that such practice, extended into secular culture, ‘explicitly accepts certain types of deception and dissimulation’, particularly where this will uphold ‘values of kindness, courtesy and hospitality’. This is not to say that honesty is not valued but, as Bateson writes, ‘given a certain type of dilemma in which honesty will cause pain, a kind of deception is preferred – which would not be regarded as a lie’.4 Contemporary youth in Iran have learned to make use of popular taqiyeh as a way of negotiating the strict rules that impinge on their everyday lives, with

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many living one life in public, or in front of their strictly conservative parents, and another with their friends. This is particularly true of secular youth, who find ways of doing almost everything that is forbidden by Iran’s Islamic authorities, from attending mixed gender parties, drinking alcohol, listening to Western music and watching Hollywood films. Like Iranian film-makers, who find clever ways of getting around the strict censorship guidelines, Iran’s youth is highly adept at transgressing those red lines. Farhadi depicts various processes of dissimulation and ta’arof in About Elly through the words and actions of his characters. In the first part of the film, these are framed positively, with small acts of deception upholding values of kindness and promoting harmony. However, as the narrative turns, such acts become a means of self-protection, causing all harmony to break down. Through his narrative, Farhadi presents what we might call a tangle of issues related to uses of indirect communication in contemporary Iranian society.5 He does so, I argue, at least as far as the emergence of these practices of indirect discourse from the realm of tradition are shown to present tensions for the young, modern, educated, upwardly mobile and Westernized thirtysomethings that feature at the centre of the narrative, and whom we meet crying out with joyful abandon in the opening credit sequence. Farhadi uses scripting, performance and his own dissimulating camera to highlight tensions between tradition and modernity and the difficulties faced by Iran’s youth as they must continually modulate between varying constructions of selfhood depending on the social situation, thereby living in a perpetual state of factual suspense. This sense of factual suspense pervades About Elly, and it is this that enables Farhadi to produce a complexly allegorical film that laments the failure of his own generation to effect cultural change. While the opening sequence, and the first thirty minutes of the film lead us to imagine that a group of middle-class thirty-somethings can laugh and play freely, the narrative trajectory plunges them into a state of abject sorrow. In doing so, I will argue, Farhadi reminds us of the pervasive role that traditional conceptions of sadness and mourning play in post-revolutionary Iranian society. Ultimately, About Elly posits two failures: first, the failure of a generation to transcend tradition and alter their habitus, and, second, the failure of the cultural work promised by the institutionalization of grief and sadness in post-revolutionary Iran. The film

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plunges its characters into mourning but does not deliver to them a martyr, one that might offer transcendence. At its heart, I argue, the film is a Trauerspiel, a mourning play, and melancholia is its dominant emotion, but more on that later. We should dwell a little longer on the opening sequence. The opening image positions us inside the sadaqeh box, and it is from this darkened space – emblematically from inside tradition – that the narrative is launched. This view is somewhat alienating, an abstraction that disorients and limits our visual perspective as we are plunged into almost complete darkness. We are barely able to render an image from the small aperture of light at the centre of the screen. Visually and conceptually, tradition is figured as alienating, yet immersive and ostensibly inescapable. Compositionally, the image is reminiscent of Plato’s cave. However, rather than positioning us with a view of the inside wall of the cave onto which images are projected from a light source behind us, we are oriented towards the light source, which streams in from outside. As the image gradually morphs into the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and the youthful characters cry out with joy, we may be led to believe that the characters are emerging from Plato’s allegorical cave, freed from ideological chains. The characters emerge from the dark cave of tradition into the bright light of a hopeful future. In combination with their joyful demeanour, this seems loaded with the promise of a new, more modern kind of habitus, one that can move beyond the confines of tradition. As we will see, however, as the film unfolds such an optimistic reading becomes untenable. In retrospect, Farhadi forces us to reverse our reading, something he does numerous times throughout the film. These reversals, which are facilitated by holding the spectator – and sometimes also the characters – in a state of factual suspense, lie at the heart of Farhadi’s deployment of the dissimulating camera. This is a formal, allegorical strategy that is set in reflexive interplay with the themes and content of the film. My use of the term ‘camera’ in this formulation refers broadly to a variety of cinematic processes and elements of film style, including camera placement, framing, mise en scène and editing, such as those used in the opening sequence. More broadly, the term also encompasses character development and performance, as well as plotting and narrational strategies that determine how and when narrative information is concealed or revealed. On one level, the dissimulating camera does not always represent events truthfully and as

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such closely mirrors the various modes of dissemblance performed by the characters. Even the title of the film could be said to misdirect us. In the end, the film isn’t really about Elly at all. Rather, Elly is rendered an absent protagonist, becoming emblematic of the melancholia that descends upon the other characters and seems to emanate from the environment they inhabit and over which they have no control. On another level, the dissimulating camera also encourages us to look beyond the frame, beyond what is shown: representation is up for question, open to interpretation. Frequently, Farhadi’s camera dissimulates by not presenting key events on screen, or by withholding key pieces of information from us. Almost imperceptible temporal ellipses carve the film into fragments and exacerbate our disjointed grasp of events. Often, we are not even aware that there is something missing, and it is not until a gap in knowledge is deliberately revealed later, that we become aware that information has even been withheld. This fragmenting process, which is typical of the allegorical mode generally, and the Trauerspiel more specifically, has the effect of throwing what we have seen or witnessed so far into a state of uncertainty. As I have already indicated, About Elly functions as a powerful topical allegory. The film indirectly examines the effect of post-revolutionary discourses on a generation that was born around the time of the revolution and grew up in its wake. In particular, the film draws our attention to discourses derived from the Karbala paradigm that place a high value on mourning and sadness. In addition to the dissimulating camera, Farhadi invests the film with this allegorical dimension by encouraging a slippage from the particular to the general. Through his establishment of what I call a ‘collective protagonist’, he enables a tragic story about a group of characters to allegorize the experiences of a generation. Before moving on to my detailed analysis, I should pause to provide my reader with a brief synopsis of the film. About Elly is set during an unspecified public holiday period. A close-knit group of educated, upwardly mobile thirty-something couples and their small children travel from Tehran for a long-weekend getaway by the Caspian Sea. Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), who has arranged the trip, has also invited long-time friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who is the brother of her friend Naazi (Ra'na Azadivar). He has returned to Iran briefly after his recent divorce from his German wife and is now looking to remarry. Seeing an opportunity to

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matchmake, Sepideh also invites along Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), her daughter’s preschool teacher, in the hope that the pair might make a good match. Early into the film, as the group stop to picnic, we realize that while Ahmad and the others are aware of this plan, it must remain an open secret: accessible only to members of the close-knit friendship group. Sepideh is insistent that the group not discuss her plan to matchmake while Elly is around. Arriving to collect the keys from the caretaker, they discover that the house in the forest they had booked is available for only one night. Sepideh’s quick thinking – and an apparently harmless white lie – helps them secure use of a dilapidated beachside villa, where after a short debate and a vote they decide to stay. After this small setback, the group work together harmoniously as they set about cleaning up. By evening, they have settled in, prepared a meal and play a game of charades. The following day, the relaxed holiday atmosphere continues as the couples play volleyball and the children frolic on the beach. Indeed, Farhadi builds this joyous atmosphere to a crescendo as Elly is left to attend the children on the beach where she plays with them running, laughing and flying a kite. Moments later, however, the relaxed atmosphere turns to tension and anguish as Peyman and Shohreh’s little daughter Anita alerts the adults, who are playing volleyball, that her brother Arash has gone missing. They quickly establish that Arash had been playing in the water before he disappeared, prompting a search of the sea and surrounding coastline. Eventually the boy is recovered, barely breathing but thankfully alive. It is only at this point that Elly’s absence is noticed. Police, the coast guard and locals join the search, which ends in vain as the sea swells violently and evening descends. From this devastating point onwards the characters are ostensibly thrust into a state of mourning, with Elly now rendered an absent protagonist. Although she has disappeared, and is most likely dead, Elly becomes an enigmatic presence that hovers ominously over the scene as the group try to comprehend what has happened. With Elly’s fate uncertain, the group haggle over how to interpret and deal with the situation, and begin attributing blame. Not surprisingly, Sepideh is forced to bear the greatest burden, but even in absence – and likely death – Elly does not escape the blame game. After all, one of the most devastating revelations is that Elly was already engaged to another man, a fact that brings her virtue into question. As the plot unravels, various mistruths are revealed,

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new ones formed and, importantly, fractures develop, disrupting the surface of the group’s seemingly happy and harmonious exterior, to reveal deeply held values and behaviours that appear to be informed more by traditional beliefs and gender roles than by the relaxed, modern and seemingly progressive mode of interaction that opened the film. What is revealed is not so much a rift between so-called modern and traditional values but rather a shift in the delicate balance between competing and often contradictory modes of thinking, being and doing that are a part of daily life in contemporary Iran. Foremost of these are acts of dissimulation. As Farhadi’s camera also takes part in acts of dissimulation, his film seems to ask what happens to this delicate balance when a crisis hits. Tensions are further exacerbated when Elly’s fiancé arrives on the scene, and the film reaches its final, devastating crescendo as he is asked to identify her body. The final image of the film shows the group trying to shift their car from the beach, where it has become deeply bogged in the wet sand. As we will see, Farhadi’s film posits in condensed form, a group, a generation and social class faced with a limit situation. What is revealed under such circumstances is not the social glue that binds individuals together as a community but rather the fissures that open up between them as contradictions and ambivalences are revealed by the sudden turn of a joyful situation into sadness and despair.

Establishing a group dynamic: The collective protagonist Throughout his film-making career, Farhadi has proven himself to be an astute chronicler of contemporary Iranian society. One way he achieves this is to spread points of identification across multiple characters. Rather than providing a single, central protagonist with whom viewers can fully identify, during the course of his tightly plotted narratives, he will invariably shift our perspective between different characters, who come to stand for contrasting ethical positions and social classes. Like his other films, About Elly can be described as a multi-protagonist film or, more specifically, an ensemble film, one that is concerned with ‘the depiction of relationships among a multiplicity of characters’.6 Indeed, numerous critics have described About Elly as an Iranian

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Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983).7 In ensemble films, the conventional herocentred narrative is displaced by alternative storytelling devices that make use of restricted narration, but one that is de-centred, fragmented across various characters, allowing for a variety of perspectives to be presented. Farhadi frequently works with ensemble casts, carefully manipulating perspective via narrative processes and cinematic techniques to provide his viewers with a mosaic of perspectives, rather than a single, unified vision. From his third film, Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbeh-Suri, 2002) onwards, Farhadi’s films play out in realistic but rarefied urban milieu, his dramas unfolding among a small but tightly interrelated cast of characters and also often examining the interface across class divides. Characteristically, he plays with perspective and viewer identification to prevent his viewers from aligning fully with any single character. Typical of this is his Academy Award winning film A Separation (Jodai-ye Nader az Simin, 2011) which at different moments allows viewers access to the perspectives of each of his four main adult characters (Nader, Simin, Razieh and Hojjat) and to some extent also their daughters (Termeh and Somayeh respectively). In turn, we see each character’s differential moral and ethical response to moments of crisis, and how these responses often clash. Farhadi’s films present a tangle of issues and relationships that may give rise to multiple interpretations. He leaves it up to his viewers to decide where they will place their allegiance or how they will judge the actions of his characters. Farhadi’s skill lies in carefully unfolding plot points that destabilize meaning and cause us to reassess what we have witnessed at each turn. With the revelation of even the smallest new detail, we may come to realize that there is much more to a situation than meets the eye, or we may be forced to interpret what we have seen in a new way. What makes About Elly unique is that he treats his ensemble cast as a collective protagonist. By structuring the film around a collective protagonist, Farhadi encourages a particular kind of allegorical reading by allowing for a slippage from the particular to the general in which the group become emblematic personifications of a generation. According to Ismail Xavier, personification is a common allegorical device where one or more characters stand in for the nation or other larger entity. He writes, ‘Many national allegories are based on personifications, as when a single character is taken as standing for the nation, such as Maria Braun or Alexander Nevsky, or when the very idea of the nation

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is condensed in familial tropes such as Mother Russia or Mother India.’8 In this instance, the collective protagonist stands not for the nation as a whole but for a sector of the nation through which we see some of the ramifications of the post-revolutionary national project. It is in this sense that About Elly functions as a topical allegory, for Farhadi is interested in tracing the impact of the sociopolitical context on the interpersonal dynamics of a generation. We are encouraged by various cues in the film to see the collective protagonist not only as a specific group of friends but also as emblematic of a generation that was raised in a specific time and place. In turn, their representation becomes a commentary on that time and place. It is clear that the group of friends have strong interpersonal ties. It is suggested that some or possibly all of them have attended law school together. At one point, it is explicitly mentioned that Shohreh and Peyman studied together, and this is also alluded to during the game of charades they play on their first evening at the villa. Peyman mimes the clues that lead the group to harmoniously chant a phrase that loosely translates as ‘long live the law school gang!’ (dam-e bacheha-ye daneshkadeh-ye hoquq garm). Allusions are also made to the fact that this long-weekend vacation is possibly an annual event, a detail that reinforces the familiarity and sense of intimacy among the group. The closeness of the group in About Elly is even more strongly intimated through the casual and familiar way they interact with each other, often using contemporary slang and a familiar form of address with each other while they maintain a more formal mode of address with Elly. Only Sepideh addresses Elly in a familiar way. Farhadi also uses a range of cinematic devices together with performance and script to establish the intimacy of this friendship circle. This is most evident during the early parts of the film. Importantly, however, Elly is positioned as the group’s emblematic other, a device that further delineates the contours and closeness of the friendship group. Even after she disappears, her status as other profoundly haunts the group as the seeming intimacy that had bound the group together begins to degrade. Farhadi uses framing and composition at key moments to reinforce the closeness of the group and to emphasize Elly’s exclusion. For the first third of the film, the friends are presented mainly in group shots. By contrast, Elly is more often depicted alone, or she is relegated to the very margins of the frame. In addition, when she does find herself within the group, each time

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she actively leaves the scene, holding herself at some remove from them. The picnic scene, just a few minutes into the film, establishes this visual dynamic very clearly. As they arrive at the picnic ground, Elly immediately offers to take the children to the toilet. Not only does this help to establish her character as the teacher of Sepideh’s daughter but it also marks her as slightly lower in status than the members of the group by continuing to perform a service role. In one of the few shots where she appears among the group as they gather around the parked cars, Elly is framed for the most part at the extreme left of the frame, her back to the camera, barely visible in her dark brown costume. She hardly interacts with the group, except to exchange a few pleasantries with Naazi before collecting Shohreh’s two children. In subsequent scenes, this visual and spatial marginalization is reinforced by verbal cues where the group talk about but not with Elly while she is absent tending to the children. The group dynamic is also forged through access to knowledge. As the scene continues, we begin to learn that secret knowledge contributes to whether one is included in or excluded from the group. The attempt to match Elly with Ahmad is apparently known to all members of the group, except Sepideh’s husband Amir, who remains a reasonably marginal group member. During the picnic scene, Sepideh stresses that they should not talk to Elly about the plan to match her with Ahmad. We hear her saying in voiceover, ‘You must promise you won’t say anything when we are together,’ just as Elly can be seen in the distance returning with the children. This suggests that either Elly is not aware of the plan, or that discussing it with strangers might cause her embarrassment. Later, we realize that Elly probably did know of the plan, allowing us to retrospectively read this open secret as a form of collective dissimulation. It also further highlights Elly’s status as an outsider not on familiar terms with the group and continually engaging in self-lowering behaviour, which according to Khosravi ‘is the core of ta’arof’.9 During this sequence, we learn that the weekend is as much Elly’s audition for acceptance into the group as it is a matchmaking exercise. Sepideh assures them that by tomorrow, none of them will dislike Elly. Just as the group continues to banter playfully about Elly, Farhadi also continues to play with the visual and aural dynamics of image and sound. At one point late in the sequence, Peyman threatens to betray Sepideh’s request for secrecy by using his voice to breach the group’s proxemics. A relay of shots

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allows us to understand the spatial dynamics. At one point, Peyman playfully calls out to Elly, who remains off-screen, with the apparent intention of telling her that Ahmad has previously been married. Sepideh adopts a more serious tone, appealing for him to stop. Peyman responds in playful defiance, remarking ‘that’s why your German wife left you’, his voice raised just enough so that Elly will certainly hear, and glancing defiantly at Sepideh, indicating that he is aware that Elly is now within earshot. A cut reveals that Elly is indeed nearby, framed alone in a mid-shot, her back to the camera, but turning her head slightly as though registering Peyman’s voice. Peyman continues, now rather loudly, saying ‘she [Ahmad’s German wife] told the judge: “Achtung, Pachtung, this guy is mad!”’ Elly’s proximity to Peyman is confirmed in the next shot where she is visible, but out of focus in the background. After a brief reaction shot back to the group, Farhadi cuts back to a mid-shot of Elly in profile, before returning to the previous shot of Peyman, now showing Elly to be slightly closer, but still out of focus. In this shot, Peyman has turned his head towards Elly, who now turns abruptly, saying in a mildly stern tone, ‘I’ll go’, implying that she is going to fetch something and exits frame right. This is the first of several moments when Elly will leave abruptly, actively distancing herself from the group. In response to Elly’s sudden departure, the film cuts back to the group, who look around at each other in uncomfortable collective silence. As my description of the framing, blocking and focus used in this sequence suggests, Farhadi’s marginalization of Elly closely mirrors her marginalization by the characters. Another cut produces a temporal ellipsis, the next shot showing Elly and Sepideh together as they pack the car. Elly is visibly uncomfortable, prompting Sepideh to explain that the harmless joking helps to bring the group together and she encourages Elly to try to enjoy the next three days. This sequence not only very strongly establishes the group dynamic as one based on easy familiarity, casual banter and an attitude towards love and relationships that attempts to transcend traditional mores but also ambivalently references them, especially in terms of gender. For example, while Ahmad’s failed marriage to a German wife does not appear to affect his status as an eligible bachelor, especially in the eyes of his peers, as a woman, Elly’s virtue still seems to matter. At one point Shohreh remarks that Elly ‘is a good girl’, playfully admonishing Ahmad in case he might have thought otherwise. True to

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Farhadi’s dissimulating camera, at this point in the film, the comment about Elly’s virtue seems merely playful; however, later, after the crisis hits and after it is revealed that she was already engaged, the question of her virtue becomes a crucial way of placing blame on her. At this early point in the film, Shohreh’s comment seems inconsequential, but later after her disappearance, when Elly’s virtue is called into question, we might reflect back even on this jovial moment and read it as a residual trace of more conservative values, a lingering bias left behind by tradition. It is just one of numerous examples where Farhadi highlights the persistence of tradition underlying what appear on the surface to be modern behaviours and attitudes. The group scrutinizes Elly carefully as an outsider to determine not only her compatibility for Ahmad but also her suitability to be welcomed into the group. Within the first five minutes, Farhadi invites us to recognize the group as an intimate friendship group. At the same time, he draws our attention to the fact that groups are defined not just by what they include but also by their exclusivity, by what or who can be defined as other. Elly functions very clearly as this other and is marked as such both in terms of the cinematic techniques that marginalize her and through the modes of interpersonal communication employed by the group that also mark the boundaries between the familiar, intimate, informal interactions that take place inside the group and the more careful, formal or guarded mode of communication used with non-intimates, and also where there is a discrepancy in social status. As the film develops, Elly is to some extent able to interact with increasing intimacy with individual members of the group; however, this is always on a one-on-one basis, rather than as a member of the group. Indeed, to some extent it is she who continues to keep her distance, guarding her inner, private core. On a broader level, this group dynamic becomes emblematic of a particular social formation or generational class in contemporary Iranian society. This helps to cue the viewer to the film’s unfolding of a topical allegory through the emblematic personification of a broader social dynamic. The group presented here are quite clearly middle-class, urban Tehranis. They are all aged in their thirties and were therefore born around, or were small children, at the time of the revolution. Their concept of nation, therefore, has been formed entirely by post-revolutionary discourse, but as members of the middle class, they have also had some access to Western consumer culture through the many informal

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networks that thrive, despite state prohibitions. At the outset of the film, they seem to be secular and upwardly mobile. They are well educated: several, perhaps all, have law degrees, and Ahmad has been living abroad in Germany. In addition, the cars they drive suggest that they belong to a reasonably successful stratum of the middle class with global aspirations. Each couple drives an imported car, rather than an Iranian-made car such as a Samand, a Saipa or a Paykan, which, by the 2000s, had become a typically lower-class car. Amir and Sepideh drive an older model Nissan Patrol, Naazi and Manouchehr drive a BMW E30 from the late 1980s or early 1990s, and Peyman and Shohreh drive a later model Peugeot 206. While these cars are in no way signs of extreme wealth, they do nevertheless serve as status symbols of sorts in as far as they suggest a connection to and aspiration for global culture and brands, albeit on a fairly modest scale. Elly too exhibits signs of a similar kind of engagement with global consumer culture by her – most likely fake – Louis Vuitton overnight bag. The designer bag serves as a sign of Elly’s own aspirations for upward mobility and may be seen as a token of her desire to be seen as an equal, worthy of inclusion in the group. Indeed, Zuzanna Olszewska has highlighted the important function played by fashion brands, accessories and other forms of conspicuous consumption in signifying class in contemporary Iran.10 Some scholars have read the embrace of international brands, Western culture and fashion as acts of resistance, a rejection of ideological subject positioning, and an attempt to counter the government’s discourses around gharbzadegi (weststruckness or westoxification).11 However, Olszewska argues that conspicuous consumption of global brands does not necessarily have the same signifying function for all classes. For working-class youth such as Elly, the consumption of global brands more likely expresses her aspirations for social mobility rather than resistance. The bag, therefore, functions as a sign that she wishes to be admitted into such a group.

Akhar-e khandeh geryast: A dialectics of laughter and mourning12 Along with the material signs that signify belonging to a particular class of society, it is through their expression of a collective attitude that we may

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further identify the film’s collective protagonist with a particular generation. In February 2009, the year About Elly was released, Iran celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution. While the film makes no direct mention of the revolution, we are nonetheless presented with a view of post-revolutionary Iranian society refracted through the lens of a generation that grew up in the wake of the revolution and whose early years would have been deeply impacted by the eight-year Iran–Iraq war, known in Iran as the Sacred Defence (defa-e moqaddas). Their upbringing would have also seen them immersed in a culture dominated by public expressions of ritualized religious mourning. While these rituals have long been a part of Iranian culture, their place in public life and political discourse greatly intensified and became institutionalized after the revolution. As such, they represent the first generation to be born into and to come of age in the post-revolutionary era, an era in which sadness and grief have become the nation’s preferred emotions. In his book Young and Defiant in Tehran, Shahram Khosravi refers to this generation as the nasl-e sevvom or the third generation. By the mid-2000s they made up more than half the country’s population and although they have no memory of the revolution, they have ‘been totally formed under the rule of the Islamic regime’ and the revolutionary values upon which the Islamic Republic was founded.13 As Khosravi’s study highlights, however, this is by no means a homogeneous generation: class, education, religiosity, ethnicity and gender are among some of the many factors that delineate the different facets of experience and perspective that has shaped the individuals that make up this generation. As a representational medium, fiction films can rarely claim to capture all the nuances of human life and experience, and, even for its wealth of apparent verisimilitude, About Elly represents generational concerns in a necessarily generalized, even stereotypical fashion. Indeed, more than anything, the collective protagonist serves as a structural device that enables the allegorical leap from the particular to the general to be made. As such, the film’s close friendship group emblematizes not an entire generation but a slice of classed generational experience through which Farhadi refracts his social commentary. As mentioned earlier, one of the most striking features of About Elly is the way the group are catapulted from an attitude of relaxed joy to one of overwhelming sadness. My identification of the film’s ensemble cast as a

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collective protagonist that prompts this generational reading may be further ratified by a close analysis of how the film engages with a dialectics of laughter and sadness that also resonates with generational experience as described by Khosravi. Widening the frame further, such a dialectics of laughter and sadness becomes emblematic of broader sets of competing values that, on the one hand, underpin dominant ideology and, on the other, mount a resistance to these values in contemporary Iran. In his study of the third generation, Khosravi observes a considerable tension between the aspirations of the educated, predominantly secular and upwardly mobile sector of the generation, and the official state discourses and practices aimed at propagating revolutionary values. One identifiable aspect of this tension is between happiness and sadness and the social values ascribed to public displays of these emotions. About Elly stages this tension as an inescapable dialectic via its narrative trajectory that shows its initially happygo-lucky characters being plunged into a state of sadness and mourning. In the narrative universe of the film, we might say that the characters are punished for their initial display of happiness. They are punished for their happiness because it transgresses state-imposed Islamic and cultural behavioural norms. This is a common trope in the thriller and horror genres where characters that display transgressive behaviours are often the first to be attacked or killed off. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that Farhadi is condoning the punishment that his screenplay exacts on his characters. Rather, I argue that his allegorical presentation of this uncomfortable dialectic is meant to prompt viewers to reflect on the sociocultural conditions that give rise to the valuing of some emotions over others, rendering Elly an allegorical emblem whose role, on one level, is to evoke sadness and grief – the state-preferred emotion – but, on another, only produces melancholy that diverts mourning from its usual purpose. Ultimately, I think Farhadi’s film poses the question, ‘Why can’t we be happy?’ Before moving on to show how this dynamic functions in the film, I will provide a brief discussion of some of the ways that happiness and sadness have been valued disparately in Iranian society before turning to look at how the centrality of the Karbala paradigm in post-revolutionary public and political discourse provides a frame of reference to further understand how the film explores the failure of grief to provide meaning or transcendence for the characters. Khosravi writes,

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Iranians frequently complain that the Iranian culture is ‘a culture of sadness’ (farhang-e gham), ‘a culture of mourning’ (farhang-e azadari). Contrary to Western conceptualizations of it, in the Iranian culture sadness and its various shapes of grief and despair is not an indication of anomaly or a destructive feeling, but rather is normal and even valued.14

Furthermore, ‘sadness and grief (qam o qosseh) are marks of social sophistication and personal “depth” (‘oumgh) and decency’.15 In contrast, explains Khosravi, people ‘who express their joy frankly, laugh loudly, and joke with others risk being stamped as “happy-go-lucky” (alaki khosh), “unconcerned” (bi-khiyal), or bidard’.16 Literally meaning ‘without pain’, bidard is considered negatively within the Iranian spectrum of values. According to Khosravi, the cultural value of sadness and ‘centrality of tragedy to collective consciousness’ may be traced back through both Shi’a religious traditions and also to pre-Islamic Persian cultural expression. Khosravi cites as examples the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), which is filled with tragedies. Other important examples include tragic love stories such as ‘Khosrow and Shirin’ and ‘Leyla and Majnun’, the last of which has been described as a Persian ‘Romeo and Juliet’. These pre-Islamic stories were later immortalized by some of Iran’s most renowned poets, including Nizami Ganjavi in the twelfth century. Even the typically Persian form of love poetry, the ghazal, tends to focus at least as much on the pain and suffering of love as it does on the pleasures derived from loving: lost or unattainable love is a persistent theme. On one level, About Elly taps into the tradition of unrequited or unfulfilled love, for Elly disappears just as she and Ahmad appear to be making a connection. The revelation of the existence of another suitor in the guise of Elly’s fiancé further adds to this resonance, as it is structurally reminiscent of the love triangles familiar from tales such as ‘Khosrow and Shirin’. However, any resemblance to a prototypical Persian love story is merely superficial. In the post-revolutionary period, the culture of sadness described by Khosravi can also be traced to the high value placed on mourning in the Shi’a Islamic context. This culture of sadness has very deep roots in Iranian culture and has, in the post-revolutionary era, become institutionalized, particularly through the prominence of the Karbala paradigm that is evoked through mourning ceremonies and in the ta’ziyeh, a form of participatory religious theatre. As discussed in Chapter 5, the Karbala paradigm refers to

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the narratives, practices and rituals that commemorate the battle of Karbala (680 CE) in which Imam Hussain, his family and followers were killed on the plains of Karbala by the Umayyad Caliph Yazid and his forces. Hussain’s sacrifice is remembered by Shi’a Muslims annually during the month of Muharram and most particularly on Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram. Vast numbers spill onto the streets to participate in public mourning rituals that involve chest thumping, self-flagellation and weeping. Ta’ziyeh is a religious drama, sometimes compared to medieval passion plays, in which the events of Karbala and other stories of Shi’i Islam are re-enacted in dramatic form. Importantly, ta’ziyeh does not aim for verisimilitude; rather it is performed in the round and is characterized primarily by its minimalist and symbolically charged staging, props and costumes, which are colour coded to assist in the clear codification of meaning. For example, good characters wear green and white, while bad or evil characters wear black and red. The entire performance is managed by the director, ta’ziyeh gardan, who appears on stage and performs multiple functions, including producer, stage manager, narrator, prompter and master of ceremonies. He is also responsible for eliciting the participation of spectators at important moments, for example, to cheer on the good characters, denounce the villains and, most importantly, orchestrate weeping. For this reason, the director is also known as the mo’in-al-boka, ‘the one who brings tears’. This participatory element collapses the distinction between on- and offstage space, actor and audience. At times a performer will even step outside his character to make a comment or provide judgement on events or the actions of their character. In this way, audience’s attitudes to the events depicted can be actively shaped, interpretation can be managed and new meanings can be added to the old stories. It is also these elements that help to make ta’ziyeh allegorical. The emblematic and allegorical dimensions of ta’ziyeh have enabled it to be evoked in the service of various nationalistic, patriotic and revolutionary agendas. For this reason Hamid Dabashi has referred to ta’ziyeh as a ‘theatre of protest’.17 He argues that one of the most powerful aspects that has ensured its relevance to different moments of Iranian history lies in the fact that its characters are ‘not just metaphorical, they are metamorphic – they easily mutate into contemporary historical figures’.18 Ta’ziyeh had been discouraged and banned intermittently throughout the reign of the Pahlavi Shahs (1925–78) not only

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because, like many traditional practices, it did not accord with the image of a modern Iran propagated by the state but also because its metamorphic qualities could lend themselves to oppositional sentiment. According to Negar Mottahedeh, attempts to have the ban lifted in 1977, just as revolutionary fervour was beginning to swell, ended in failure.19 Beeman writes that SAVAK, the State’s secret police, ‘recoiled in horror at the thought of hundreds of ta‘ziyah performances involving millions of persons being brought to an emotional pitch in a highly moving religious spectacle’.20 Despite this, the Karbala paradigm would play an important role in forging an emotionally charged collective consciousness around a traumatic foundational event during and after the revolution. Thus, within Iran’s revolutionary discourse, the allegorical possibilities of the ta’ziyeh ‘transformed the battle between Khomeini and the Shah into a simulacrum of the battle of Karbala, in which a new generation of Muslims could actually participate’.21 In the wake of the revolution, Iran’s leaders promoted sadness and grief (gham o ghosseh) as ‘the appropriate demeanor of its citizens and the paradigmatic emotional tone for contemporary public life’.22 This was propagated via radio and state television which broadcast daily mourning rituals and rawzeh (mourning recitations). In addition, the martyrdom of Hussain was regularly invoked to facilitate mourning for the martyrs of the Iran–Iraq war. In this way, the state has played a key ‘role in defining the meaning and legitimacy of emotions’ and in the institutionalization of sadness and grief as the ‘paramount ethos for the society’.23 The participatory and metamorphic aspects of ta’ziyeh make it a very powerful way of engaging or training the collective national sensorium in the ritual performance of mourning. Ta‘ziyeh, therefore, may be considered a form of ‘didactic allegory’. As we shall see, in its evocation of Trauerspiel, rather than ta’ziyeh, About Elly mounts a resistance to this didacticism and mourns the ineffectiveness of this culture of sadness. However, the culture of sadness was not limited to the realm of religion. According to Good and Good, ‘Similar themes are present in secular genres – in modern plays, novels and popular films.’24 Even children’s television programming in the 1980s was afflicted by sadness. This is referenced in About Elly during the game of charades. Elly mimes the clues to the title of a 1970s’ Japanese animated children’s television series that was broadcast in

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Iran throughout the 1980s: Hutch the Honeybee (1970–1; 1974).25 The central character is a young honeybee named ‘Hutch’ who is orphaned in the first episode when his colony is destroyed in a violent attack by a swarm of wasps. Mark West writes, ‘Despite its cute art style, it is a bleak tear-jerker reminiscent of Victorian children’s novels about pure-hearted homeless waifs who suffer endlessly and usually die tragically at the climax.’26 No doubt, there were elements of the show that were closely aligned with the dominant ideology of the times, as Hutch was continually thrown into situations where he had to outwit some nasty predatory insect. Although the group depicted in the film appear to be quite secular, the sheer dominance of sadness and mourning in public culture in the first decade after the revolution would have made this an inescapable part of their upbringing, even if their lifestyle choices might directly or indirectly reject this subject positioning. What does the privileging of sadness over happiness mean for the third generation and, by implication, for Farhadi’s collective protagonist? Like Farhadi’s protagonists, many of this generation strive for a more modernized, Westernized mode of being. This applies particularly to the modernized, Westernized youth of Tehran’s more affluent neighbourhoods such as those who were the focus of Khosravi’s fieldwork. Yet, with the cultural valuation of emotions that, according to Khosravi, associates ‘dard’ (pain or suffering) with ‘inner purity’ (safa-ye baten), ‘conscience and responsibility’ and ‘bidard’ (without pain) with ‘ignorance and frivolity’, construction of a modern, Westernized identity and public displays of happiness can be understood not only as transgressive of institutionalized norms but also as a subtle form of resistance enacted through everyday practices.27 One way of doing this is through the adoption of a kind of commodity fetishism. According to Khosravi, ‘Young people defy the dominant order by, for example, engaging in global youth culture, but defiance is not solely restricted to this “new” arena of modernity. Youth’s defiance has also grown out of tradition’.28 This is an important point, because even for Iran’s aspirational youth such as the collective protagonist of About Elly, tradition and modernity are not diametrically opposed but intricately interwoven and interconnected in everyday life. As already mentioned, practices of dissimulation continue to linger in the habitus of the film’s collective protagonist, and this plays a crucial role as their more modern façade begins to break down.

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From the dissimulating camera to the dissimulating character In preparation for this breakdown, Farhadi embeds within the collective protagonist a character that functions as a dissimulator in the text, one that embodies his own dissimulating camera. Of all the characters, Sepideh stands out, not only because she has arranged the weekend getaway but also because she shows the most skilful ability to deploy strategies of indirect communication. Throughout the first third of the film, Sepideh shows herself to be a sharp and clever operator, capable of manipulating a situation to get the outcome she wants. In Persian, we might describe her as zerang, a term that is used to refer to someone who is clever or intelligent, and also cunning or shrewd. Although in English these latter connotations might seem overly negative, in Persian to be cunning or shrewd is not necessarily seen as a negative trait, depending on context and intention. Zerangi is often achieved through modes of indirect communication such as ta’arof (ritual politeness) and dissimulation, by withholding one’s true emotions, or by the manufacture of small mistruths and misdirections. As Maria D. Wagenknecht explains, in social situations, ‘Zerangi is not only “used” …. It is constantly anticipated.’ In Iran, it is part of the fabric of interpersonal communication. It is, writes Wagenknecht, ‘part of the game’.29 Sepideh’s particular skills for zerangi are best illustrated in the scene where she first concocts a story – a little white lie – about Elly and Ahmad being newly-weds. Following the picnic scene, the group arrive at the home of an old lady to collect the keys to a villa in the forest that Sepideh has booked. An uncomfortable moment ensues, however, when the woman reminds Sepideh that they can only have the villa for one night, as the owner is expected the following evening. It becomes clear that Sepideh had led her friends and even her husband to believe that they would be staying at the forest villa for three nights, despite having been notified earlier by phone that the owners would be returning the next day. Added to this, we must remember too that Elly seemed surprised when, back at the picnic site, Sepideh told her she should just try to ‘enjoy these three days’, suggesting that Elly was not expecting to be away for so long. This revelation gives us some insight into Sepideh’s personality. Read generously, we might say that it is a sign of her confidence and optimism. Despite knowing they could stay for only one night, Sepideh seemed sure that alternate accommodation could be found, even though this is one of the

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busiest times for holiday rentals in the region. She therefore saw no need to tell her friends about the truncated booking. Read less generously, however, we might be critical of Sepideh for wilfully withholding this information from her husband and friends, and thereby potentially inconveniencing them. In order to save the situation and perhaps redeem herself, Sepideh spins a little white lie. Farhadi’s camera seems to conspire with Sepideh as it follows her into the house where she quietly tells the old woman that among their travel companions is a couple of newly-weds. Importantly, she does not directly point out any particular couple, leaving the old lady to fill in the gaps; she simply mentions that the groom has come from Germany and that this is something like a honeymoon for them. The ploy works, because the woman offers to let them stay in a dilapidated beachside villa. Despite Sepideh’s deception of her friends and the old lady, Farhadi carefully refrains from directing us to judge Sepideh, especially when we read her actions as zerangi designed to gain favour and also enabling her to save face. Indeed, given her desire to get Ahmad and Elly together, at this early stage of the narrative, her lie also takes on the character of an imaginary wish-fulfilment, casting her as a hopeless romantic. It is also a convenient and seemingly harmless way to solve their present housing dilemma. Only later, after tragedy strikes, will Sepideh’s actions and intentions be scrutinized and interrogated and further attempts to deploy her talent for zerangi will fail. At this point in the film, Farhadi places little emphasis on the weight of this scene for the narrative as a whole: it serves merely as a minor plot complication temporarily delaying the holidaymakers from their merriment, and in a sense rerouting them from their original destination. However, this rerouting will have several serious consequences for the plot, the characters and also for our reading of the film as a whole. Additionally, the scene serves to provide a glimpse not only of Sepideh’s capacity for zerangi through misdirection and dissimulation, but that of the film itself. It is only in retrospect that we will, along with her friends, look back over her actions to re-read them in the negative.

Elly as emblematic other The first thirty minutes of the film is filled with joyous laughter and happiness. The collective protagonist is characterized by a sense of hopeful optimism that

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seems to discard institutionalized sadness, yet on closer inspection, Farhadi’s cinematic discourse is inflected with subtle hints that serve to unsettle this optimism and begin to foreshadow the tragic events to come. This is achieved not only by further emphasizing Elly’s outsider status but also by introducing the judgemental gaze of another outsider. As mentioned above, public displays of laughter and happiness can, in Iranian culture, lead to being labelled negatively as alaki khosh (happygo-lucky), bikhiyal (unconcerned) or bidard (without pain). Such labels are commonly contrasted with sadness and grief, which is associated with sincerity and depth. Farhadi establishes a contrast between the group’s loud, joking and easy-going manner and more guarded modes of behaviour in the sequence where the group first arrive at the dilapidated house by the seaside. Once again, Farhadi uses framing and character positioning to further highlight Elly’s marginal status in relation to the group. In fact, he shows Elly actively separating herself and carefully withholding her emotions on two occasions during the sequence. On the first occasion, the group gather in the lounge room to take a vote about whether they should stay at the seaside villa. Initially, Elly is made to feel included by asking her to cast the first vote. She responds indirectly by saying, ‘I’ll take care of the cleaning.’ Then, before her own husband Amir can cast his vote, Sepideh proclaims, ‘Five votes to two. We stay!’ The rest of the group then tease Amir for the way Sepideh seems to rule him by clapping, singing and dancing. As they do so, we see a shot of the group, with Elly standing a little off to one side. She smiles, but does not join in the merriment. Within several moments, Elly crosses the room and exits towards the kitchen saying that she is going to get the broom. Throughout this scene, Elly’s demeanour is calm and composed and contrasts starkly with the raucous behaviour, loud voices and broad gesticulations of the rest of the group. We might just put this down to Elly’s status as a non-intimate; however, Farhadi introduces yet another outsider into the scene that cues us to pay further attention to the contrasting behavioural modes. As the group are carrying on with their playful merriment, the local boy, Omid, who has come to show them the way to the villa, is watching on from the margins of the scene. Twice we see him in the background standing impassively by the door, hand on his hip and gazing intently at the group. The third time he appears, Farhadi cuts to a medium close-up of him looking towards the group with an expression on his face that might be taken as vaguely judgemental.

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During this shot, which lasts for about two seconds, he turns to gaze out the door, towards the beach. This is followed by one of only a few point-of-view shots in the entire film. In it, we see two of the group’s small children playing on the beach near the water’s edge. On one level, Farhadi uses these shots to foreshadow the tragedy that is soon to occur and on another to highlight the fact that the parents, who are so caught up in their merriment, are somewhat negligent, failing to properly supervise their children. Indeed, several minutes of screen time will elapse before Shohreh and Peyman attend to their children, with little Arash defiantly refusing to come away from the water’s edge. On another level, the apparently judgemental gaze of this outsider also provides a subtle clue that the group’s highly animated behaviour might be perceived negatively by others: as alaki khosh (happy-go-lucky), bikhiyal (unconcerned) or bidard (without pain). Farhadi further reinforces the perspective of the judgemental gaze of the outsider by inserting yet another medium-close-up of Omid staring intently at the group, clearly unimpressed (Figure 6.2). The insertion of two medium close-ups of an otherwise inconsequential character is clearly used as a signalling device to prompt viewers to consider how the group might look from the outside. Read allegorically, the gaze of this child hints at the ubiquitous gaze of society more broadly. We might even remember from my

Figure 6.2  The local boy Omid adopts a judgemental gaze. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

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discussion in Chapter 2 just how privileged the gaze of the child has been in post-revolutionary Iranian film in modelling appropriate values. In addition, the second shot of the boy directly precedes the shot in which Elly makes her departure from the room. This particular succession of shots clearly links the boy’s attitude with Elly’s poised and contained demeanour and further serves to reinforce the contrast between her and the group. Her departure also closely echoes her abrupt departure from the picnic site described earlier. During the first part of the film, Elly’s difference from the group is signalled again and again via similar echoes. In fact, only a few minutes later, Elly slips out while the group engage in yet another round of merriment. This is triggered by Shohreh asking about the sleeping arrangements. Initially, Sepideh responds by saying, ‘Shohreh dear, it’s chaotic (khar tu khar). Anyone can sleep anywhere, and that’s fine.’30 However, this is quickly countered by her more conservative husband Amir, who suggests that the women take the bedrooms and the men sleep in the living room.31 But Manoocher objects, saying, ‘I’m not separating from my wife.’ This is followed by Peyman complaining that the night will be cold, and Shohreh responding, ‘We’ll dance to stay warm.’ At the mention of dancing, the men start singing and clapping and Manoocher jumps onto the sofa and begins to dance, waving around a handkerchief. The others join in, the women clapping, the men dancing. Once again, Elly, who is positioned in almost exactly the same place as in the earlier scene, carefully conceals a modest laugh behind her hand, lowers her head and quickly turns to leave. A brief close-up of her shows her smiling and looking back at the group, and in a subsequent shot, she quietly slips out the door. A third example occurs later that evening as the group are about to eat dinner. Everyone is seated except for Elly. Sepideh stands to join her, saying, ‘Why are you standing? Go and sit down.’ There are several reasons that Elly might have remained standing. She may simply be shy, or more likely, being an outsider, she is showing polite deference to the group, performing ta’rof through a subtle gesture of self-lowering. This is an extension of Elly’s consistently subdued demeanour and a further sign that she does not really feel equal to the group. At the urging of the group, Elly gingerly accepts a place next to Ahmad, but seconds later, when someone asks for the salt, Elly suddenly begins to look distant, before getting up to fetch it from the kitchen. While she is gone, questioning glances are directed to Ahmad, seeking confirmation as

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to whether he likes Elly. When he signals yes, they begin to clap quietly (in subdued echoes of the earlier dancing scene) and, in whispers so Elly cannot hear them, sing to rejoice the newly-weds. In a cutaway to the kitchen, Elly stands alone, pensively holding the saltshaker, only returning when Sepideh calls after her (Figure 6.3).

Pensive moments and equivocal images This pensive moment is a good example of what I want to refer to as a sign of equivocity, one of many, and an important element of Farhadi’s dissimulating camera. As I have already suggested, Farhadi gives us certain scenes that might appear to be read in a simple and straightforward way, but later, after tragedy strikes, might call on us to reassess our initial reading, prompted by a new frame of reference. I argue that in prompting us to re-read an earlier scene in light of subsequent events, Farhadi does not extinguish the earlier interpretation but rather adds a layer of meaning that renders definitive meaning impossible. All meaning becomes ambiguous or equivocal. Arguably, however, these are equivocal from the start: it is merely our capacity to register this equivocity that is inhibited. This tendency towards equivocation occurs at numerous levels of

Figure 6.3  Elly’s pensive moment, a sign of equivocity. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

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the cinematic discourse including narrative, character, theme and also at the level of cinematic style. It is an important element of the film’s allegorical style as it introduces the element of semantic slippage, a process by which meaning is destabilized, shifted by context. This is key element of Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory derived from the Trauerspiel. In allegory, Benjamin writes, ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’.32 But I shall return to this later. For the moment, let us briefly return to Elly’s private pensive moment in the kitchen to see how Farhadi provokes equivocation. At this stage in the film we are likely to read this as a moment of reflection about her possible feelings for Ahmad; however, later, or on repeated viewing, it will be backfilled with the revelation that she was already engaged to another man. Perhaps she is trying to figure out how to break off the engagement. Perhaps she is having second thoughts about Ahmad. Crucially, this private moment is witnessed only by us and not by the other characters, for it provides us with an additional, albeit ambiguous, perspective once the crisis hits. The sequence follows closely from a scene in which Ahmad, urged by the group, accompanies Elly into town to make a phone call, as there is no mobile reception at the villa. We witness a brief conversation between them in the privacy of the car in which they both seem relaxed and apparently at ease in each other’s company: they talk about their mothers and even joke about Ahmad’s failed marriage. Unusually, Elly even laughs quite unreservedly; gone is the self-lowering behaviour that we have seen her display in the group. However, Farhadi is careful not to show us everything that goes on between the two, as he inserts an ellipsis of unspecified duration between this conversation and the pair’s arrival back at the villa. It is likely that the ellipsis is quite substantial in duration, for by the time they arrive, night has fallen, and Sepideh remarks that they are very late. This is one of several ellipses that might pass almost unobserved by the viewer, but they serve to produce a sense of ambiguity. Together, this ellipsis and Elly’s pensive moment serve as indices of equivocity and are a crucial structural element of Farhadi’s allegorical discourse. Throughout the film, Farhadi prompts us to think about what is not being shown, or what might be occurring off-screen. The judgemental glance of the boy at the children playing by the water’s edge discussed earlier is a good example, as are temporal ellipses that nevertheless seem to maintain

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the impression of continuity. These highlight the importance of the gap, the in-between. Sometimes gaps that do not at first appear to be meaningful are later piled with meaning; others are left unfilled or unexplained, producing uncomfortable lacunae in the story. By doing this, Farhadi is effectively teaching us to pay attention to the small details, to invest ourselves in the process of interpretation and to adopt an allegorical way of seeing. Let’s pause for a moment to develop a more theoretical understanding of the equivocal image. For Gilles Deleuze, ‘equivocity’ is a key aspect of what he calls the ‘small form’ of the action-image, a concept developed in his book Cinema I: The Movement Image. Deleuze’s concept of ‘equivocity’ not only helps to explain how Farhadi maintains an impression of tight plotting but also how he invests his film with a sense of openness and ambiguity that points towards an entirely equivocal view of the situation for the spectator. As we will see, the small form not only allows for tight plotting and suspense, but, in its privileging of the equivocal image and ellipsis, we may come to understand how, on a formal level, Farhadi produces crucial gaps in the presentation of situations that prompt the viewer to read beyond the partial images presented on screen. Ultimately this allows the film to be read allegorically against the sociocultural context. Deleuze identifies two distinct forms of the action-image: the ‘large form’ and the ‘small form’. He uses these to theorize the relationship between situation and action in the organizational logic of a range of films. His examples are drawn primarily from fictional Hollywood genre films. As my interest here is in the small form, I shall merely give a synoptic account of the large form for the purposes of differentiation. Deleuze asserts that in the large form, action arises from a situation or milieu and serves to either overcome or change the situation or restore the situational equilibrium. This form is most common among hero-centred narratives including certain types of Westerns, the film noir and the historical epic. Deleuze writes, The milieu and its forces incurve on themselves, they act on the character, throw him a challenge, and constitute a situation in which he is caught. The character reacts in his turn (action properly speaking) so as to respond to the situation, to modify the milieu, or his relation with the milieu, with the situation, with other characters. He must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation.33

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In contrast, in the small form, the situation emerges from or is partially disclosed by the action. Deleuze writes, This time it is the action which discloses the situation, a fragment or an aspect of the situation, which triggers off a new action. The action advances blindly and the situation is disclosed in darkness and ambiguity. From action to action, the situation gradually emerges, varies and either becomes clear or retains its mystery.34

There are a number of key aspects of the small form of the action-image that may help us to understand the relationship between action and situation operating in About Elly. The small form frequently allows situations to be only partially disclosed. This is due to the fact that the situation is deduced from the action, rather than being presented directly or overtly. This is the case throughout About Elly as very little contextual information is provided and at no point are any of the characters empowered to take action or adopt a habitus capable of transforming the situation. Indeed, even more importantly, Farhadi reveals that while the characters appear initially to have transformed their habitus and thrown off certain aspects of tradition, the film seems to reinforce the idea that such transformation is not entirely viable. This is a generation seeking change but unable to bring about such change. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the small form action-image that helps us understand how Farhadi works with gaps and forges indirection is through the use of the equivocal image at key moments of the film. For Deleuze equivocation is a key aspect of the small form due to the process by which situations are only revealed by actions, leading often to partial and ambiguous understandings of situations. Equivocation finds its apotheosis for Deleuze in what he calls the Burlesque, a style of comedy exemplified by the films of Charlie Chaplin. In crucial moments in his films, Chaplin introduces what Deleuze calls an ‘index of equivocity’, that is, an image or action that serves as an index of two entirely different situations or modalities: pathos and humour, for example, to name but two. Deleuze explains how Chaplin utilizes the minute difference between two actions to produce an image that may be read in vastly different ways. Deleuze writes, ‘It is as if an action, a mode of behaviour, concealed a slight difference, which was nevertheless sufficient to relate it simultaneously to two quite different situations, situations which are worlds apart.’35 In About Elly it

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is not necessarily human actions that reveal situations that are worlds apart. Rather, this power is frequently granted to the camera.

Elly disappears With this in mind, I wish to turn now to one of the film’s most powerful equivocal images. It is such an important sequence in terms of the film’s plot and Farhadi’s cinematic style that I shall attempt to describe it and the lead-up to it in some detail, for Farhadi provides us with some clues that we will later use in reading the ensuing crisis. Elly seems to have finally become more integrated into the group as she is now playing a vigorous game of volleyball with the men. Farhadi alternates long shots of the group with mobile close-ups that insert us into the midst of the action. In the middle of the game, however, Elly suddenly stops, looks at her watch and says that she has something to do. As with the previous scenes already described, Elly always seems to be leaving, removing herself from the group. We cut inside to find Elly, who has changed her white headscarf for a red one, packing her Louis Vuitton bag as though she is preparing to leave. Sepideh and Shohreh are getting ready to go into town, and Elly says she wants to go with them to buy her train ticket. She reminds Sepideh that she only wanted to stay one night and mentions several times that her mother will be worried. Shohreh chimes in, saying that if she doesn’t want to stay, why force her? Elly responds cryptically, saying that Sepideh knows why she can’t stay. This comment reveals that Sepideh knows something that the others don’t, and this knowledge will soon come back to haunt her. As Sepideh walks out the door, she says, ‘We came together, we will leave together.’ It is as though Farhadi, at this point, is piling detail upon detail that will later cast a dark shadow over Sepideh. Furthermore, at the end of this interchange, we see Elly once again carefully modulating her emotions. As Sepideh and Shohreh leave the shot, we are left with Elly in another pensive moment, similar to the one we witnessed the previous evening. A wave of deep contemplation, verging on worry or even sadness comes over her face. As she sits on the steps overlooking the sea, she forces a smile as Naazi passes by and another as Sepideh waves at her from the car. That she does not stand up for herself to Sepideh is another sign of her self-lowering behaviour. Once again, Sepideh’s

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capacity for zerangi shines through, overpowering Elly, who responds with subtle deference and passivity. But the unspoken, gestural dimensions of this communication might also suggest that Elly is equivocating, perhaps deciding to stay for Ahmad, even though there is apparently a pressing need for her to return to Tehran. Elly’s passive response to the situation in the face of Sepideh’s forcefulness also opens up the possibility that she may have indeed left without telling anyone, as several members of the group later speculate. Unable to face up to Sepideh directly, it is not unthinkable that she might try to slip quietly away to avoid another confrontation. In fact, she jokes with Sepideh that she will even walk, or hail a taxi if necessary. Only later will we discover that this pensiveness and apparent equivocation may be a result of her engagement to another man, but we still can’t read her thoughts. While Farhadi provides his viewers with several private moments with Elly, making us feel close to and aligned with her, we easily forget that we barely know anything about her, or her motivations, and we are therefore not entirely capable of knowing for sure what her actions, gestures or facial expressions might mean. Even when we look back at the film retrospectively via careful analysis, we are still left with a range of possible interpretations causing us to equivocate. This sequence provides an important prelude to Elly’s disappearance and serves to foreshadow its aftermath. Just like the earlier pensive moments that we have already shared with Elly, Farhadi provides us with one last private moment with her. During the course of the sequence, we see her move from a state of quiet contemplation verging on sadness to a fleeting moment of sheer joy and laughter. Within less than a minute of Sepideh and Shohreh’s departure, Naazi, who has been asked by Shohreh to watch the children, returns to the house. She seems to interrupt Elly in her state of quiet, inward contemplation, asking her to watch the children. This prompts Elly to turn her brooding, unfocussed gaze towards the children playing on the beach, which is reinforced by a rare point-of-view shot. During this interaction, Elly barely feigns a smile, even when Naazi complements her on her ring, which she has been playing with absent-mindedly. Importantly, we see Arash in the depth of the shot playing in the water un-supervised. This prompts us to remember the judgemental gaze of Omid, the caretaker’s son, and foreshadows the chaos that will soon be unleashed. This is our last glimpse of Arash before he is finally pulled from the water barely breathing.

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Arash’s near drowning and the adult’s negligence in not properly supervising the children proves to be a diversion, for it is Elly’s disappearance that Farhadi uses to unleash a cascade of consequences. These consequences reveal a tangible shift in the habitus of the characters as a rift is torn in their seemingly harmonious and happy collective attitude. Importantly, this shift is signalled by Farhadi through a highly equivocal image that on one level functions as an expression of unbridled joy, but on another infuses the cinematic image with a degree of violence that will help prepare Elly for emblematic purposes. When Naazi leaves, Elly goes down onto the beach to help the girls fly a kite. Importantly, Farhadi films Elly getting up from where she is seated on the steps of the villa in a shot from the porch, looking down across the beach to the water where Arash is playing. As Elly exits screen right, the shot lingers, so as to reinforce the potential danger. This is yet another example of Farhadi’s dissimulating camera that leads us to focus on Arash, rather than on Elly. What follows is a series of shaky hand-held mobile medium close-ups of Elly that track her as she runs back and forth along the beach attempting to get the kite to catch the wind. These shots are remarkable not only in terms of how Elly is represented, but also for the sheer energy that is generated through the combination of camera movement, framing, sound and jumpcut editing (Figure 6.4). Until this point, Farhadi’s camera and the editing patterns of the film have been relatively unremarkable: largely unobtrusive and observational. While we are aware of the presence of the two little girls offscreen through the sound of their laughter, Farhadi limits our view exclusively to Elly’s head and shoulders, thus granting us a final, private moment with her. Unlike the private, pensive moments we have previously witnessed, here Elly is uncharacteristically animated: not only is she filmed running energetically

Figure 6.4  Mobile tracking shots capture Elly’s last moments of unbridled joy. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

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back and forth along the beach, she smiles broadly, laughs loudly and squeals playfully. This physical energy is reinforced through the soundtrack via the emphatic crunch of Elly’s shoes on the sand accompanied by the sound of waves crashing on the beach. These sounds, however, breach the bounds of realism as they function as sonic close-ups that collapse spatial depth. The sound pushes against the very surface of the image, intensifying its affective dimensions, producing a haptic effect. In fact, a close listening to this sequence reveals that the waves sound much larger than the small waves we had seen gently rolling onto the sand in the preceding shots. This break from the bounds of sonic verisimilitude pushes the image into a different register, destabilizing its status in the narrative and also foreshadowing the surge of the sea that will later cause the search and rescue effort to end. Finally, Elly says to the little girls, ‘Here, take it,’ ‘I’m going.’ This is followed by a shot of the kite – the first time we have seen the kite in the sequence – hovering in the wind. The sound of the waves has died down, replaced by the sound of the kite fluttering in the breeze. Then, we cut to a brief shot of the sea framed by the doors of the villa as the kite momentarily flies into view. These two shots lend the sequence a sense of peace and calm; however, they are also wrought through with emptiness and loneliness, already evoking Elly’s absence. The human energy that engaged us haptically in the previous shots is noticeably absent. In its ambiguous signification, the image is decidedly equivocal and will therefore come to haunt our experience of the remainder of the film. The peace – or is it loneliness – of the kite is suddenly broken by a loud bang that triggers a reaction shot of Naazi in the kitchen, catching her in movement as she is startled by the sound. This combination of sound, image, edit and character action generates another important equivocal image. This is achieved by initially withholding the source of the sound. The abrupt sound and edit functions as a jump scare, more typical of the horror and thriller genres than the kind of light-hearted drama we have witnessed so far. It is intended to produce a sense of unease in the viewer, a feeling that is modelled on screen by the shot of Naazi looking fearful. Farhadi draws out this sense of unease by lingering momentarily on Naazi who looks around, trying to make sense of what she has just heard. The equivocal image places us momentarily in a state of factual suspense. Seconds later, however, our sense of shock is dispelled. A shot through the windows reveals Peyman running to retrieve

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the volleyball, allowing us to infer that the noise was caused by nothing more sinister than the ball hitting the side of the house. However, the unease we are made to feel through this equivocal image never quite dissipates, and the sound–image combination serves as a warning sign of the violence and rupture that will resonate through the remainder of the film.

The descent into melancholy The private moments of joy that we experience with Elly make the eventual discovery of her disappearance all the more devastating. From our last glimpse of Elly until the group notice that she is missing, approximately five minutes of screen time passes. While this might not seem like a long time, measured in story time, we experience it as a fairly significant gap. The group – and the camera – have been distracted by the panic of looking for Arash, who is eventually dragged out of the water, lucky to be alive. Arash’s disappearance causes panic both in and of the image as the characters rush to look for him in the water. Farhadi matches the panic of the diegetic characters with a fastmoving, shaky hand-held camera and with fast, disjunctive editing that is not entirely dissimilar to the sequence of Elly flying the kite: similar cinematic techniques used for opposing purposes. The effect is highly immersive and haptic, allowing the viewer to feel, rather than merely view the situation. Finally, when Arash is rescued, a kind of calm is restored to the image, mirroring the relative calm of the characters, particularly Arash’s father Peyman, but this calm does not last long. Moments later, Naazi registers Elly’s absence, and she runs to the water’s edge to alert the men. Over the next few minutes, image and camera are once again invested with the sense of panic that is unfolding on a narrative level. This time, we join Ahmad, Peyman and Sepideh in and even under the water as they search in vain. Tight framing restricts our view, ensuring that we are immersed in the chaos along with the characters. The chaos is only broken by another ellipsis of unspecified duration. Scuba divers have since arrived and taken over the search. The film cuts between individual shots of Ahmad, Shohreh and Peyman showing us the first glimpses of despair sinking in. It is perhaps significant that this mood is conveyed in a series of one-shots: the first sign of rupture in this previously unified collective

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that for the most part had been seen in group shots. For the remainder of the film, signs of rupture and fragmentation abound and the characters are plunged into deep despair and melancholy. It is at this point that the film begins to transform into a Trauerspiel, a play of sorrow that laments the inability of its characters to acquire a new habitus: the failure to sustain happiness in a state that values sadness above all other emotions.

About Elly as Trauerspiel Trauerspiel – literally ‘mourning play’ or ‘play of sorrow’ – is a form of allegorical drama that emerged in Europe in the seventeenth century during the Baroque age. Like the allegorical dramas of Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca or the tragedies of William Shakespeare, the lesser-known German Trauerspiel was typically an allegorical secular drama that played out within a royal court and frequently involved political intrigue, blood lust and sovereign violence, which would be embodied in the dialectical figure of a tyrantmartyr. However, as George Steiner has emphasized, it is also ‘emphatically “mundane”, earth-bound, corporeal’.36 Unlike tragedy, which has its origins in myth and exalts the efforts and sacrifices of a central heroic figure, the basis of the Trauerspiel is history, or, rather, a nature-history dialectic in which the figures of decay, destruction, and ruin take precedence. Nature was not seen ‘in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations’. History was recognized only in ‘eternal transience’.37 The Trauerspiel is also deeply rooted in the sociopolitical context from which it emerged, rendering it a form of topical allegory with a critical potential. For Benjamin, the Baroque age heralded the emergence of a new, modern form of allegory. Allegory no longer merely served the purposes of didactic moral instruction as it did during the medieval period. With its metamorphic qualities, the ta’ziyeh shares with the Trauerspiel some of these properties, particularly when used allegorically in the service of resistance. However, as discussed above, in the post-revolutionary context, the official allegorical function of ta’ziyeh is didactic and totalizing, serving the purpose of forging a collective consciousness. Its function is mythic in the sense that it locates the foundations of the nation in a singular, highly

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sacred traumatic event. In contrast, according to Benjamin’s formulation, Baroque Trauerspiel ‘vulgarizes ancient mythology in order to see everything in terms of figures (not souls)’,38 and elsewhere, he describes allegory as the ‘antidote to myth’.39 According to Samuel Webber, the Baroque mourning play does not ‘emphasize national tradition: it treats neither popular myths nor monumental events’.40 It is in this sense that About Elly has a greater affinity with the Trauerspiel than the ta’ziyeh, for while its main product is sadness and mourning, it refuses the mythic and transcendent function that sorrow plays within the Karbala paradigm. As mentioned earlier, like the ta’ziyeh’s director, the mo’in-al-boka Farhadi also orchestrates our weeping, but, as with the Trauerspiel, he takes this sorrow and uses it for other purposes. Here, sorrow emerges not from the sacred but from the profane world. It emanates from an ostensibly mundane situation and afflicts its characters – representative of a generation – just as they seem to be extracting themselves from a lifetime of institutionalized sorrow. I shall return to this shortly. For the moment, I want to look at some of the ways that About Elly shares some further, structural affinities with the Trauerspiel and, more broadly, with Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. Writing of the structural qualities of the Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin noted that ‘it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle’. Importantly, he links this structural device with the figure of the ruin, ‘the highly significant fragment’, which he describes as ‘the finest material in baroque creation’.41 The fragment, the ruin, the corpse and the death’s head are the key emblems of the Trauerspiel, and this is also reflected in the formal elements as well. From the moment that Elly’s disappearance is noticed, Farhadi piles fragment upon fragment. These fragments consist of the revelation of details, small and large, that begin to fill previously unperceived ellipses in our knowledge and also raise more questions about things that still remain in factual suspense. Rather than providing clarity, the narrative drives towards even greater ambiguity and fragmentation. These include things like the mystery of Elly’s full name and the fact that she has a fiancé. The narrative is also subjected to other processes of fragmentation, such as the dispersal of the collective protagonist and the deep fractures that open up among and between

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the couples. Increasingly, Sepideh is filmed isolated in one-shots, her clothes bedraggled, her face exhausted from crying. The intensity of her isolation increases as she is confronted by the other characters, demanding to know what she has been withholding from them. Even her husband Amir lashes out at her. He begins by muttering under his breath, calling on God to strike her down. Later, he chastises her for interfering and trying to matchmake outside of the confines of close family. He judges both Sepideh and Ahmad with highly conservative values. He yells at Sepideh, ‘Who are you to Ahmad?’ ‘His mother? His sister?’ Eventually, when he catches her out telling an obvious lie, he lashes out physically, pushing and hitting her. Later, he even says this to Manoochehr: ‘She forced me to raise my hands.’ Whereas Amir had previously seemed to be accepting of Sepideh’s wiliness and extroverted nature, following Elly’s disappearance his deeply held conservative nature rises to the surface. Other elements further add to this sense of fragmentation. The sea swells violently, bringing the search to an abrupt end; Shohreh pricks her finger on the door frame; Ahmad trips on a rock; rain sets in at nightfall, drenching the wretched characters who maintain a vigil on the beach in case a body washes up. Nature, the environment and even architectural structures seem to conspire in this descent into misery. Benjamin also identified this quality in the Trauerspiel. He wrote, the ‘natural setting intrudes increasingly into the dramatic action’.42 It now seems no mere coincidence that the villa is in ruins, a vestige of history, an allegorical sign of inevitable decay. Rather than illuminating the situation, this accumulation of details intensifies, bringing to the surface a tangle of issues that provide no clarity, instead creating further misdirection and ambiguity. With each new detail that is revealed, it seems that a new gap in knowledge is opened. Amid the chaos, anger and despair the group looks desperately among these fragments for some small sign of a miracle. This comes initially when Naazi cannot find Elly’s bag. This leads them towards hope, believing that Elly may have left to go home without saying goodbye. But this small sign of hope brings up a plethora of new questions – would she really have left without saying goodbye? – and accusations – What kind of dishonest person would do that? But this theory is soon dismissed when Sepideh reveals that she hid the bag to prevent Elly from leaving. Sepideh’s wiliness no longer seems to be clever zerangi, but blatant manipulation. But even with this detail revealed,

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some members of the group still seem to want to believe, perhaps out of denial, in the possibility of a miracle, at least until a body shows up. Details pile up in the expectation of a miracle that will never happen. The tendency towards fragmentation is also evident in the cinematic design. Throughout the latter part of the film, Farhadi’s framing shifts from the earlier use of harmonious group shots, to a proliferation of one-shots that are interspersed with occasional wide shots that emphasize the growing distance between characters. Initially, after Elly’s disappearance the friends barely communicate with each other; every shot and each countenance is wrought with melancholy, later, as they begin to express anger and start bargaining over where the blame should fall. Shots of two or more characters often suggest unequal power relations as they haggle over the interpretation of each other’s and Elly’s past actions. To take one example, the day after Elly disappears, they return to the question of whether Elly might be the kind of person that could just leave without saying anything or if one of them had perhaps offended her. They begin reviewing their interactions with Elly, trying to identify whether one of them might have caused offence. Rather than signifying hope at this point, however, the effect is to reveal just how much of a stranger, an outsider, Elly was to them. This outsider status also prompts them to judge Elly very harshly, particularly after the revelation that she was already engaged to another man. What kind of girl does that? We see numerous members of the group applying conservative gender norms that contradict the earlier assertion at the picnic ground that Elly is a ‘good girl’. This is significant, for it reinforces the idea that women’s behaviour is judged according to a simple good/bad, virgin/whore dichotomy. In narrative terms, her death might be seen as punishment for her transgressions in the same way that the loose girls are killed off first in the horror film. However, I think we need to look beyond this simple narrative reading. This deconstruction and destruction of Elly’s character even, and especially in the face of very little concrete knowledge of her, is ultimately what denies Elly the possibility of entering into the realm of martyrdom. This is made even more explicit at one point when the group argue over whether it is even worth worrying about someone who might have just left without saying goodbye. In response Sepideh exclaims, ‘And if she drowned because of Arash, isn’t

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she worth it?’ However, Shohreh retorts, ‘Who says she drowned for my Arash?’, adding, ‘I didn’t even ask her to watch my child.’ In doing so, Shohreh actively resists the prospect of granting Elly’s probable death any sacrificial or transcendental meaning. With no martyr then, how are they, and we, supposed to make sense of Elly’s death and the deep sadness it provokes? This marks a crucial and, I would argue, deliberate departure from the prototypical narrative of sadness and mourning encompassed by the Karbala paradigm: the metanarrative fails. While the narrative trajectory uses Elly’s disappearance and ultimate death to bring about an ideologically appropriate corrective to the joy and happiness that opened the film, it does so in such a way that prevents any kind of salvation from being found in her death. In the absence of salvation, there is only melancholy. This is not to say, however, that Elly’s death is entirely without meaning. Indeed, it is in Elly’s death that we find the most compelling resonance between About Elly and the allegorical form of the Trauerspiel. As Benjamin wrote, ‘The characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. It is not for the sake of immortality that they meet their end, but for the sake of the corpse.’43 He continues, ‘In the Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century the corpse becomes the pre-eminent emblematic property,’ adding that ‘it is the function of the tyrant to provide the Trauerspiel with them’.44 In About Elly, as in the Trauerspiel, the corpse does not carry with it any promise of transcendence as it does in the ta’ziyeh. It does, however, exceed its mere materiality and physicality to take on an emblematic function. Indeed, we are not presented with the physical evidence of Elly’s death until the penultimate scene of the film. Her fiancé is asked to identify the body. We are given a brief glimpse of her pale and lifeless face, but this glimpse is so short that viewers might not even register with certainty that this is indeed Elly’s face (Figure 6.5). Interestingly, we have already glimpsed such a face in Sepideh, as she awakens in the car where she slept the night of Elly’s disappearance (Figure 6.6). Emblematically, Elly’s death and her corpse hover over the film as possibilities that are not yet actualized. As such, she is both dead and alive at the same time, but in life and death, she is emblematic of melancholy. As already discussed, this is evidenced before her disappearance by the many private, pensive moments that we share with her. Benjamin writes, ‘Pensiveness is characteristic above all of the mournful.’45 Her downcast eyes

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Figure 6.5  Elly’s corpse does not carry with it any promise of transcendence. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

Figure 6.6  The morning after Elly’s disappearance, Sepideh awakens from a corpselike pose, prefiguring the eventual revelation of Elly’s corpse. About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

therefore become simultaneously a sign of modesty and melancholy. After her disappearance, she comes to personify, rather than embody melancholy, which, now freed from the bounds of a physical body returns to descend like a mist over the rest of the characters, the remainder of the narrative, and ostensibly also over the nation that is rendered allegorically within the film. For Benjamin, melancholy is the pre-eminent mood of allegory, a mood that is also adopted by the allegorist. Inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s engraving ‘Melancholia I’ (1514), Benjamin’s theory of allegory also offered a diagnosis of melancholy in the Baroque world. According to Steiner, Benjamin ‘points

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to the cultivation of private and public tristesse so symptomatic of political and philosophical postures in the seventeenth-century’.46 Is it not also this ‘cultivation of private and public tristesse’ that is also symptomatic of postrevolutionary Iran, at least as Farhadi seems to see it? We can now return to that equivocal image that opened About Elly. We begin with a view from the inside of tradition, only to exit into the light, the hopes and dreams of a generation that might bring about a shift in the habitus of a nation. They place some trust in tradition, giving alms to protect them on their journey, but ultimately this offers them no protection. Their joy and happiness turn to grief and sadness – a corrective that realigns them with a more appropriate national habitus – but in that sadness and grief, they find no salvation, no martyr that can give these emotions meaning. Instead, it is melancholy that has descended into the setting, which is emblematic of the world they inhabit: a dilapidated house, a desolate beach, an unforgiving grey sea. The final image of the film is a high-angle shot of the group attempting to dislodge a car that has become bogged in the sand. It is an open image that poses an open-ended question. Farhadi seems to be asking: Is this the fate of the third generation? Will they ever be able to transform their habitus and in doing so bring about change within their society? If only it were as easy as dislodging a car from the sand (Figure 6.7).

Figure 6.7  The final shot. If only transforming the habitus of a generation were as simple as dislodging a car from the sand! About Elly (Dreamlab, Asghar Farhadi, 2009).

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About Elly was released in Iran just days before the 2009 election that controversially returned incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power amid accusations of election rigging. The film continued to play in theatres across Tehran in the chaotic days that followed as masses of protestors – many of them middle-class youths such as those we see in About Elly – spilled onto the streets, protesting the election that they believed had been stolen from them. In my first chapter, I analysed a number of allegorical New Wave films from the pre-revolution era. I argued that in their desire to create films that would closely reflect and critique contemporary social reality, many New Wave film-makers used allegorical strategies to register the impending breakdown of the modernist project. Their films seemed to dream of the kind of uprising that would soon manifest in the revolution and lead to the downfall of the Shah. In much the same way About Elly appears to be deeply infused with a spirit of the times in which it was made. The chaotic limit situation presented by Elly’s disappearance, the emphasis placed on practices of dissimulation, notions of factual suspense and the narrative’s insistence on sadness and mourning as a corrective to light-hearted laughter seem to capture a sense of a society on the brink of some kind of rupture or crisis that would test Iran’s youth. As I argued, About Elly seemed to ask whether Iran’s youth – the third generation – would be able to summon the collective strength and unity needed to bring about a change in their habitus should such a limit situation arise. In retrospect, Farhadi’s film seems to have taken a pessimistic view, but, at the same time, we might consider it as a prophetic warning against the dangers of being guided only by traditional attitudes and practices. Indeed, I still palpably remember how I felt as I first watched the film at the Sydney Film Festival on the ninth of June 2009, just three days before the election. As the end credits rolled accompanied by melancholy piano music, I felt as though my entire viscera had spilled out onto the floor of the cinema and I had

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been left with nothing but a massive cavity, a great void – such is the power of really great cinema! I had viewed the film in the context of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s election campaign, a campaign that saw the political engagement of an unprecedented number of Iran’s youth. Many had invested their hopes for a brighter future in the figure of the reformist candidate, rallying behind him vociferously throughout the electoral race, proudly draping themselves in green, the colour of Mousavi’s campaign and the colour of Imam Hussain. As Negar Mottahedeh has written, ‘A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns in Iran in the spring of 2009. … Public space felt celebratory and alive and the air was spiked with a flavor of exhilaration.’1 Farhadi’s film begins with Elly’s euphoric screams and visualizes the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel; however, it ends with despair, disillusionment and disunity. Might Farhadi have been suggesting that Iran’s youth, embodied by his collective protagonist, were not yet ready for or capable of collective action? Or, might we think of the film as a provocation, an allegorical parable that shows what can happen when a community closes rank, fostering division rather than unity. In the wake of the election, Iran’s youth did rise up in great numbers, taking part in massive collective actions. These were, on the one hand, facilitated by the latest technology – mobile phones, YouTube videos and the recently hyperlinked Twitter hashtag – but many protestors also drew from the realm of tradition in equal amounts. We might say that during those days and weeks of protest, allegory spilled out into the streets. Negar Mottahedeh has argued that during the 2009 post-election protests, Iran’s youth showed just how effective the Islamic regime had been at infusing their sensoria with the values of the revolution. More importantly, however, those youths demonstrated their capacity to retool these values, and the imagery that had been propagated all their lives in films, on television and other media. They showed a great capacity to invest these with new meaning and use them for their own, critical purposes. With great alacrity, the protestors created digital and real-life memes out of revolutionary imagery and slogans. For example, at one demonstration, a protestor held an old tube television aloft, its screen scrawled with the words ‘lying media’.2 In allegorical fashion, they invested both everyday objects and traditional signs and symbols with new meanings. All of this was swiftly pushed out on social media: propagated

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and reproduced simultaneously online and in the streets. Among the traditions that were retooled and reinterpreted by the protestors were various elements of the Karbala paradigm. Mottahedeh gives the example of one young man who was photographed among the protestors wearing a ta’ziyeh costume of Imam Hussain. He holds a sign that reads ‘My martyred brother, I will reclaim your vote.’3 Similarly, Mottahedeh highlights how the Karbala narrative was rearticulated in response to the death of Neda Agha-Soltan and other ‘martyrs’ of the green wave at the hands of the basij (Iranian paramilitary). Mottahedeh gives the example of a video by Reza Deghati, ‘Neda of Ashura’, that went viral. In the video, Neda’s image, along with other images of the protests and its victims are inserted into a painting depicting scenes from Karbala while voices sing traditional chants.4 Similarly, the mourning ceremony held forty days after Neda’s death was mobilized by the protestors, who hailed her a ‘martyr’ of the ‘green revolution’, an action that ultimately reignited clashes between police and the crowds. Indeed, it was at this memorial service that Jafar Panahi was first arrested, accused of making a film against the regime. These examples show how Iran’s third generation are not only fluent in the signifying systems that have been imposed upon them by the state; they are also capable of appropriating these signifying systems – symbolism, slogans, iconography – and using them for their own purposes. They are, in effect, allegorists in as far as they seek to invest the myths that have structured their lives in post-revolutionary Iran with new meaning. Flash forward: In late December 2017, a young Iranian woman removed her headscarf, tied it to a stick, stood on top of a utility box and waved it aloft. The significance of her action – a protest against compulsory veiling – was heightened by the location she chose: Khiyaban-e Enqelab-e Eslami (Islamic Revolution Street), a major avenue in central Tehran. The street, which before the revolution had carried the name of Reza Shah, was renamed Enqelab-e Eslami after the revolution and is one of the many streets that were renamed after the revolution. Indeed, as I discussed in Chapter 2, this was part of a project to inscribe the geography of the city with reminders of the revolution. This one young woman’s brave act was followed by another, then another and still more. Many were arrested. Collectively they were dubbed ‘the girls of Enqelab street’, but, unlike 2009, this was not a mass protest. These were individual acts of defiance, isolated but nevertheless collective.

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As images of these defiant young women – and the men that joined them – began to appear on my Twitter feed, I couldn’t help but think of little Mina, the protagonist of Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror. Didn’t little Mina also remove her headscarf? Didn’t she declare that she didn’t want to act anymore? As I discussed in Chapter 2, in her quest to reach home, little Mina traversed the revolutionary geography of Tehran, passing through the streets and squares that had witnessed revolutionary actions, the very streets and squares that were renamed to celebrate the victory and commemorate the revolution’s fallen martyrs. At the time, she appeared oblivious to the significance of these spaces, but I can’t help but imagine little Mina – now all grown up – joining the girls of Enqelab street, holding her headscarf aloft and perhaps once more calling out ‘I don’t want to act anymore!’

Notes Chapter Introduction – Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance 1 Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, ‘The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema’, in Screening World Cinema, ed. Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): 163–81. 2 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970): 328. 3 Ismail Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell, 2004): 344. 4 Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 5 Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (New York: Penguin Books, 2016). 6 Hamid Reza Sadr, ‘Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema: When We Were Children’, in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002): 236. 7 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 39–47. 8 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, in Movies and Methods Volume 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 549. 9 Vivian Sobchack, ‘What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, Senses of Cinema 5 (2000). Available online: http://sensesofcinema. com/2000/conference-special-effects-special-affects/fingers/ (accessed 20 February 2018). 10 Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1985). 11 Anonymous, ‘Panahi’s Lawyer Concerned about Severe, Disproportionate Sentence’, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (21 December 2010). Available online: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2010/12/panahi_lawyer/ (accessed 16 December 2012).

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Chapter 1 1 Hereafter referred to as Treasure. 2 Prior to 1933, Persian language feature films were made in India. The Lor Girl (Dokhtar-e Lor, Ardeshir Irani, 1934) was the first Persian language sound film. See Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011): 208. 3 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing, 1990): 56–62. 4 Ohanian, who was a Russian Armenian born in Turkmenistan, may well have seen Vertov’s film as he had studied film-making in Moscow. See Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1, 209. It should also be noted that in terms of world cinema history, the film seems somewhat belated for 1933. Not only does Mr Haji the Movie Actor not use sound technology, which had been introduced in many parts of the world in 1928/9, but the film also displays an unsophisticated grasp of techniques of cinematic narration such as continuity editing. Instead, it employs the simple chase trope to structure its plot and a catalogue of what Tom Gunning has called ‘attractions’. Such attractions showcase the various ‘tricks’ of cinema, together with gags and vaudeville style entertainments typical of cinematic production prior to 1906/7. It also employs slapstick-style performances, reminiscent of – although less agile and clever than – early films of Buster Keaton. I also note that the version of the film I have seen appears to have several moments where the footage has been reassembled out of sequence, thus exacerbating the film’s already loose attention to matters of continuity. 5 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 335. 6 Ibid., 335. 7 Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006): 24. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1, 145. 10 Ibid., 23. 11 Ibid., 208. 12 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 353. 13 For discussions of the allegorical dimensions of Rancho Notorious see Florian Wild, ‘Rewriting Allegory with a Vengeance: Textual Strategies in Fritz Lang’s

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Rancho Notorious’, Mosaic 35, no. 3 (2002): 25–38. Walter Metz, ‘A Very Notorious Ranch, Indeed: Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust’, Journal of Contemporary Thought 13 (2001): 71–86. 14 Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011): 269. 15 Ibid., 285. 16 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 335. 17 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 294. 18 Hamid Naficy, ‘Neorealism Iranian Style’, in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, ed. Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012): 226–39. 19 A luti is a neighbourhood tough guy, usually exhibiting traits of honour and justice. The luti’s nemesis was the lat, a common thug. Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 295. 20 Ferdowsi, Shahnameh. 21 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 295. 22 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 337. 23 Philippe Rochard, ‘The Identities of the Iranian Zūrkhānah’, Iranian Studies 35, no. 4 (2002): 313; 321. 24 Ibid., 318. 25 Ibid., 323. 26 The film is also innovative for the way the story is told in flashback via the voiceover narration of the central female character. This is unique as both film farsi and New Wave films are dominated by a heavily patriarchal world view. 27 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana Press, 1992): 253. 28 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 342. 29 Walter Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (1983): 41. (Translation modified). 30 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 333. 31 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 297. 32 Ibid., 290. 33 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981): 14–28. 34 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 40. 35 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 343. 36 Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History, 133.

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37 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1992): 166. 38 Michelle Langford, Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol: Intellect, 2016). 39 Mohammad Rasoulof ’s recent film A Man of Integrity (Lerd, 2017) is highly reminiscent of Tangsir, in that it features a character similarly beholden to moneylenders who eventually finds the strength to take action, gaining the praise of his village. 40 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 224. 41 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 2. 42 Ibid., xi. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 Marvin d’Lugo, The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1991): 126–39. 46 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 23. 47 Ibid., 23. 48 Benjamin quoting Birken, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 195. 49 I will discuss the correspondences and divergences between ta’ziyeh and the Trauerspiel in Chapter 6. 50 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 356. 51 Ibid., 340. 52 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 380. 53 Talinn Grigor, Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (New York: Periscope, 2009). 54 Ibid., 67. 55 Ibid., 47–77. 56 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 380. 57 Fire documents efforts to extinguish a fire in the gas fields, while Wave, Coral and Rock chronicles processes involved in drilling for oil and laying an oil pipeline in the Persian Gulf. It should be noted that Golestan’s ‘perspective’ in these documentaries also aims to include recognition of rural farming communities. Such images tend to work against the grain of the main purpose of the films, thereby preventing them from functioning merely as propaganda. 58 Firuza Abdullaeva and Charles Melville, ‘Shahnama: The Millennium of an Epic Masterpiece’, Iranian Studies 43, no. 1 (2010): 4.

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59 Susan Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 89. 60 Abdullaeva and Melville, ‘Shahnama’, 4. 61 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 383. 62 Abbas Milani, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington DC: Mage Publishers, 2009): 260. 63 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 382. Parviz Sayyad is most famous for his creation and portrayal of the naive and bumbling country bumpkin character Samad in a series of films beginning in 1971, which he also wrote and directed. 64 Milani, The Persian Sphinx, 260. 65 Ebrahim Golestan, quoted in Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 382. 66 Ali M. Ansari, ‘The Myth of the White Revolution: Mohammad Reza Shah, “Modernization” and the Consolidation of Power’, Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 3 (2001): 3.

Chapter 2 1 Sadr, ‘Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema’, 236. 2 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 404. 3 Touraj Daryaee and Kourosh Beigpour, 50th Anniversary of Kanun (Irvine: Jordan Centre for Persian Studies, 2016): 5. 4 Sadr, ‘Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema’, 228. 5 The biographical information presented here has been gleaned from Shirdel’s comments at an event held at Stanford University on 27 February 2014. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX0BeMSMTJg (accessed 13 October 2015). 6 Indeed, it is interesting to watch Shirdel’s film now with the term ‘fake news’ dominating the media. It reminds us that nationalist discourses have long been founded upon the propagandistic embellishment and manufacture of ‘truths’. 7 The film was made in the same year as the Shah’s epically stage-managed coronation. 8 David Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992): 164–5. 9 For a detailed account of the different varieties of documentary film practices during this period see Hamid Naficy, ‘Chapter 2: The Statist Documentary

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Cinema and Its Alternatives’, in A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2, 49–146. 10 Kristin Thompson finds it reminiscent of the work of the great documentarian Errol Morris. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art, Archive (July 2015). Available online: http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/2015/07/ (accessed 13 August 2016). 11 Christian Metz, ‘Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts)’, trans. Cormac Deane, New Review of Film and Television 8, no. 4 (2010): 348–71. See particularly the section entitled, ‘Film(s) Within Films’, 355–69. 12 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October 12 (1980): 69. 13 Ibid., 69. 14 Ibid. 15 The schoolbook story was based on events that took place in 1961 when a thirty-two-year-old farmer Riz-Ali Khajavi saved a train from pending disaster. Tehran Times (3 December 2017). Available online: http://www.tehrantimes. com/news/419006/Iconic-school-book-character-Dehqan-e-Fadakar-dies-at-86 (accessed 21 December 2017). In 2002, Kanun produced a film about Riz-Ali, directed by Sirous Hassanpour. 16 Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 3: The Islamicate Period 1978–1984 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012): 184. 17 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 153. 18 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3, 8. 19 I have discussed the melodramatic properties, including the use of music, of Majidi’s style elsewhere. See Michelle Langford, ‘Majid Majidi’, in Directory of World Cinema: Iran, ed. Parviz Jahed (Bristol: Intellect, 2017): 70–9. 20 Edward Brannigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1992): 101. 21 Ibid., 103. 22 Ibid., 102–3. 23 The figure of Hussain was slain on the plains of Karbala in AD 680 together with his family and army. His martyrdom is remembered via various mourning rituals. The significance of Hussain in Iranian culture will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 5 and 6. 24 Sara Saljoughi, ‘Jafar Panahi’s “The Mirror”: On Political Film in PostRevolutionary Iranian Cinema’, Film International 69, no. 12 (2014). Available online: http://filmint.nu/?p=13673 (accessed 15 December 2017).

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25 Metz, ‘Impersonal Enunciation’, 355–6. 26 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories. 27 Metz, ‘Impersonal Enunciation’, 355–6. 28 Ibid., 358. 29 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (New York: Lot 17 Media, 2017). 30 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 47. 31 I note that in Panahi’s previous film The White Balloon, he also plays with a split between voice and image to highlight this disavowal of the male gaze. In that film, the father is in the shower for the entire movie, and he is present only through his voice calling out into the courtyard. 32 Interestingly, the name ‘Mina’ is a secular name, unlike the overtly Islamic names used in Children of Heaven. These naming conventions align closely with the contrasting ideological positions of the two directors. Majidi is closely aligned with post-revolutionary Islamicate cinema, while Panahi supports the separation of religion from society and culture. It is therefore ironic that it should be her gaze that performs this act of purification. 33 This is also a feature of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), another film that blurs the distinction between illusion and reality. Negar Mottahedeh has pointed out that the failure of the microphone in Close-Up ‘drives home the conditions under which the industry labours’. See ‘Crude Extractions: The Voice in Iranian Cinema’, in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, ed. Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 239–40. 34 Ali Daei scored four goals during the match at 66’, 76’, 83’ and 89’. The crewmember announces Daei’s third goal at 45’ 33’’ into the film. 35 To confirm this, two friends sent me photographs from Tehran taken around 5 pm on 15 and 17 December 2017. The angle of the sun was such that no sunlight could reach the pavement at 5 pm in mid-December. I am grateful to Amin Palangi and Laetitia Nanquette for sending the images. 36 Piruzi Street is mentioned several times in the film. The first time is approximately fifty-five minutes into the film when an old man describes the street to Mina, and she says, ‘Yes, that’s it!’. A little later, she asks a taxi driver to take her there, to the post office, where she has arranged to meet her brother, and finally, at around one hour and fifteen minutes, we see a street sign that says ‘Shohada Square’, which lies at the intersection of Piruzi Street and Mojahedin Eslami Street. 37 Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (London and New York: Routledge, 2010): 174.

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38 Interestingly, during the upheavals of August 1953 that caused Mohammad Reza Shah to flee the country, the Tudeh party drew up a chart ‘in which the monarchical names of the main avenues and squares of the capital were replaced with alternatives in tune with the proposed new state system’. This included renaming Shah Street Jomhuri-e Eslami. See Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, ‘“Down with the Monarchy”: Iran’s Republican Moment of August 1953’, Iranian Studies 50, no. 2 (2017): 293–313. 39 For an account of how soccer has been politicized in Iran, see Houchang E. Chehabi, ‘A Political History of Football in Iran’, Iranian Studies 35, no. 2 (2002): 371–402. 40 Ali Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998): 43. 41 Asma Mehan, ‘Manifestation of Modernity in Iranian Public Squares: Baharestan Square (1826–1978)’, International Journal of Heritage Architecture 1, no. 3 (2017): 417. 42 Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis, 37. 43 Ibid., 43. 44 Mehan, ‘Manifestation of Modernity’, 418. 45 Ibid. 46 Randjbar-Daemi, ‘Down with the Monarchy’, 299. 47 Ibid., 300. 48 The old parliament building still stands at the eastern end of the square. In 2004 a new pyramid-shaped building was opened next to the old parliament building. In the film, we catch a brief glimpse, through the bus window, of several Baharestan Square landmarks, including a multi-storey building that stands just around the corner on Mojahedin Eslam Street and is now the front entrance to the new parliament building. We can also catch a glimpse of the distinctive dome and minarets of the Sepahsalar Mosque. It is also worth noting that the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance, which has oversight of the film industry, also has its offices at Baharestan Square. 49 Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013): 112. 50 Ibid., 113. 51 Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis, 44. 52 Ibid., 44. 53 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Abington: Routledge, 2005): 187–228.

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54 Ibid., 226. 55 Ibid., 209. 56 Ibid., 225. 57 Ibid., 226. 58 Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, 39–47. 59 Ibid., 41. 60 Ibid. 61 Laura Mulvey, Death 24 × a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006): 10. 62 Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, 41–3. 63 There is, of course, much to say about the relationship between The Mirror and Panahi’s more recent films, especially those made after the twenty-year filmmaking ban was imposed on him, particularly This Is Not a Film (2011) and Tehran Taxi (2015). Unfortunately, I will have to defer this discussion to another time and place.

Chapter 3 1 Meshkini is the wife of prominent Iranian film-maker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who also wrote and produced the film. This has led some critics to question the level of actual female authorship or agency involved in the production of this film. This chapter does not aim to deal with this question but rather seeks to read the film as a complex allegorical text in its own right. For a good discussion of the role of women in the Makhmalbaf film-making family, which includes Makhmalbaf ’s wife and daughter, Samira, see Adrian Danks, ‘The House that Mohsen Built: The Films of Samira Makhmalbaf and Marziyeh Meshkini’, Senses of Cinema 22 (2002). Available online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/ filmmaker-profiles/makhmalbaf/ (accessed 14 November 2017). 2 Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (London: Macmillan, 1998): 120. See also Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (Florence: Routledge, 2001) and Fredric Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. 3 Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 108. For two useful discussions of woman as allegory of nation in post-colonial cinema see Gil Hochberg, ‘National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli’s Les silences du

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palais’, Third Text 50 (2001): 33–44; and Dorit Naaman, ‘Woman/Nation: A Postcolonial Look at Female Subjectivity’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17, no. 4 (2001): 333–42. 4 Negar Mottahedeh, ‘Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe…Some Other Time: The un-Presentable Iran’, Camera Obscura 43, 15, no. 1 (2000): 164. See also ‘“Life Is Colour!” Toward a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s Gabbeh’, Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1403–24. 5 Mottahedeh, ‘Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe … Some Other Time’, 178. For Walter Benjamin’s discussion of dialectics at a standstill, see The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999): 473. 6 Deren’s co-panelists were Parker Tyler, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Miller. The sessions were chaired by poet and scholar Willard Maas. Maya Deren, ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium’, in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000): 171–86. 7 Deren, ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium’, 178. 8 Ibid., 174. 9 Miller in ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium’, 184. I would like to thank Amelie Hastie who reminded me of this altercation between Deren and the male panellists. 10 Rosi Braidotti, ‘Becoming Woman: or Sexual Difference Revisited’, Theory, Culture, Society 20, no. 3 (2003): 47. 11 Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002): 99. 12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the notion of assemblages at length in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88–9. 14 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 52. 15 Hamid Naficy, ‘Women and the Semiotics of Veiling and Vision in Cinema’, The American Journal of Semiotics 8, no. 1 (1991): 54–5. 16 I include men here, because as Naficy argues, in the ‘Islamic system of looking … eyes are not passive organs [but] … active, even invasive organs, whose gaze is also construed to be inherently aggressive.’ Furthermore, the sexuality of women is seen as so excessive and powerful that it could ‘lead to the wholesale moral corruption of men and society’. Add to this the conception that ‘men are considered to be nothing but weaklings in the face of women’s powerful

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sexual force’, ibid., 54, and we have a reversal of the all-powerful male gaze conceived by Western feminism, which is masochistic in the sense that it contains the distinct potential of backfiring on its bearer. The rules of modesty are therefore designed to protect men as much as women. 17 Ibid., 50. 18 Ibid., 51. 19 Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992): 72. Milani also notes that the word ‘khanum’, meaning both ‘lady’ and ‘wife’, describes woman in terms of her relationship to a man as well. 20 Ibid., 72. 21 Naficy, ‘Women and the Semiotics of Veiling’, 50–1. 22 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): 14–26. 23 Milani, Veils and Words, 19–45. For more debates on veiling as a complex social and religious practice, see also Nilufer Gole, ‘The Voluntary Adoption of Islamic Stigma Symbols’, Social Research 70 (2003): 809–28 and Shahrzad Mojab, ‘“Muslim” Women and “Western” Feminists: The Debate on Particulars and Universals’, Monthly Review 50, no. 7 (1998): 19–30. 24 Mojab, ‘“Muslim” Women’, 23. 25 Milani, Veils and Words, 9. 26 It is also interesting to note that huri also appears in Bahá’ì literature and translates as ‘maid of heaven’. Etymologically, huri is said to derive from awira, meaning ‘black-eyed like a gazelle.’ She is, therefore, allegorically linked to Ahu by name. 27 Such a shrine appears in the film Baran (Majid Majidi, 2001) and is also associated with Afghan characters. I have found no reference to this practice in Iran. See Mark Saroyan, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Late Soviet Union (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 112. 28 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1960): 1–2. 29 Ibid., ix. 30 Ibid., x. 31 Ibid., ix. 32 Ibid., 323. 33 Ibid.

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34 Deren, ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium’, 183. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239. 36 Ibid., 242. 37 Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000): 12. 38 Jerry Aline Flieger, ‘Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, 42. 39 I am greatly indebted here to Teresa Rizzo’s theorization of the molecular qualities of film viewing, elaborated in her book Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction (London: Continuum, 2012). 40 Examples include Buchanan and Colebrook, Deleuze and Feminist Theory; some of the essays in Becoming: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and the work of Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) and Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 41 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 246. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 247. 44 Mojab, ‘“Muslim” Women’, 20. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Ibid., 29. Negar Mottahedeh advocates a similar transnational feminist approach for analysing Iranian cinema. See Mottahedeh, ‘Life Is Color!’. 47 Although I am using the length of shadows as evidence of the simultaneity of the three episodes, it should be noted that at times during the second and third episodes, the length of the shadows are actually quite inconsistent. I refer to them not because they offer conclusive evidence of simultaneity, but rather to highlight the perceived impression of their significance. Because our attention has been drawn to the shadow of the stick in the first episode, the viewer is predisposed to see the shadows as a measure of time in the two subsequent episodes. 48 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 40. 49 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 224. 50 Deleuze and Guattari would call this ‘contagion’ or ‘epidemic’. See A Thousand Plateaus, 241. 51 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 473.

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52 Langford, Allegorical Images. 53 Deleuze, Cinema 2. 54 Gharbzadegi (westoxification) is the term coined by Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the 1960s, used to describe the ‘toxic’ influence of the West on Islamic culture. 55 For a sustained discussion of the role of women and modernity in Iran see Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 56 Forugh Farrokhzad, Imam Biavarim be Aghaz-e Fasl-e Sard [Let Us Believe in the Dawning of a Cold Season] (Tehran: Morvarid, 1974), cited in Milani, Veils and Words, 10. Farrokhzad was one of Iran’s most celebrated female modernist poets, who died prematurely in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two.

Chapter 4 1 Fakhreddin Anvar, deputy director of the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance cited in Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012): 140. 2 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 2. 3 Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 4, 140. 4 Eric Egan, The Films of Makhmalbaf: Cinema, Politics & Culture in Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2005): 135. While Egan acknowledges the poetic dimensions of the film, his reading is based primarily on narrative details. 5 Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, 542–58. 6 See, for example, Stephen Heath, ‘Film/Cinetext/Text’, Screen, 14, no. 1–2 (1973): 102–28. 7 My understanding of Pasolini’s theory of the cinema of poetry is deeply indebted to Patrick Keating’s extremely eloquent and systematic account of it in ‘Pasolini, Croce, and the Cinema of Poetry’, Scope (June 2001). Available online: www. nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2001/june-2001/keating.pdf (accessed 14 February 2018). 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, 543. 10 Ibid., 545. 11 Ibid., 545–6.

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252 12 Ibid., 547.

13 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 2–3. 14 I note that Mottahedeh does not discuss Pasolini, or his notion of the cinema of poetry; however her overall argument lends itself beautifully to this extrapolation, despite the fact that her understanding of film language is developed largely from the work of Christian Metz, a theorist whose work diverged significantly from Pasolini’s. 15 Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, 549. 16 Ibid., 550. 17 Ibid., 553. 18 Ibid., 553–4. 19 For an excellent discussion of Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (Gav, 1969) through the lens of Pasolini’s cinema of poetry, see Richard Gabri, ‘Recognizing the Unrecognizable in Dariush Mehrjui’s Gav’, Cinema Journal 54, no. 2 (2015): 49–71. 20 Chaudhuri and Finn, ‘The Open Image’, 163–81. 21 Khatereh Sheibani, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film After the Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011): 42. 22 Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987): 240. 23 Angelika Neuwirth and Thomas Bauer, eds., Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre (Beiruit: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005). 24 Ehsan Yarshater, ‘Ḡazal ii. Characteristics and Conventions’, Encyclopedia Iranica (2016). Available online: www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gazal-2 (accessed 26 February 2018). 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Sheibani, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema, 30. 28 Yarshater, ‘Ḡazal ii. Characteristics and Conventions’. 29 J. T. P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems (London and New York: Routledge, 2013): 54. 30 Meisami, Persian Court Poetry, 245–6. 31 Julie Scott Meisami, ‘Allegorical Techniques in the Ghazals of Hafez’, Edebiyat 4, no. 1 (1979): 4. 32 Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, ‘Revivification of an Ossified Genre? Simin Behbahani and the Persian Ghazal’, Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 (2008): 80. 33 Ibid., 82.

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34 Blake Atwood, ‘Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, World Literature Today 86, no. 3 (2012): 38. Although Atwood is writing of increased censorship under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, such anxieties about love have been pervasive throughout the post-revolutionary era. 35 I am thinking in particular of tragic love stories such as ‘Khosrow and Shirin’ and ‘Leyla and Majnun’. 36 Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Hess, Judith Pfeiffer and Börte Sagaster eds., Ghazal as World Literature II: From a Literary Genre to a Great Tradition The Ottoman Gazel in Context (Istanbul: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2006): 151–232. 37 The text is also reminiscent of the phrase Be nam e Khoda (In the name of God), which is required at the beginning of all Iranian films. Its placement as the very first image of the film might also suggest that Makhmalbaf means it to serve this purpose as well. 38 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998): 377. 39 Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, 557. 40 I borrow the term ‘material ghost’ liberally from the title of Gilberto Perez’s book. 41 Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, ‘The Islamic Conception of Migration’, The International Migration Review 30, no. 1 (1996): 37–57. 42 Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi and Diana Glazebrook et al., ‘Return to Afghanistan? A Study of Afghans Living in Tehran’ (Afghanistan Research Evaluation Unit, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, 2005): 12–13. In 1993, Afghan refugees were no longer officially considered mohajerin; instead, they were categorized as panahandegan (refugees), a term with pejorative connotations. 43 Sobchack, ‘What My Fingers Knew’. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Richard Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003): 206. 48 Sobchack, ‘What My Fingers Knew’. 49 My thanks to Patrik Åberg for helping to identify the song of the Eurasian pygmy owl, which does not happen to occur in Iran. 50 Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi – Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi (London: Oneworld Publications, 2000): 178.

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Chapter 5 1 Although vatan (or watan) is an Arabic word, the term, along with its Persian equivalent mihan, is still used in everyday speech, as well as in poetic discourse in Iran. 2 Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993). 3 Chris Berry, ‘From National Cinema to Cinema and the National: Chinese Language Cinema and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Taiwan Trilogy”’, in Theorising National Cinema, ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemem (London: BFI, 2006): 151. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Haggay Ram, ‘Mythology of Rage: Representations of the “Self ” and “Other” in Revolutionary Iran’, History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 71–3. 7 Dabashi, Theology and Discontent, 5. 8 Ram, ‘Mythology of Rage’, 74. I will provide a more expansive discussion of ta’ziyeh and the Karbala paradigm in the next chapter. 9 Farideh Farhi, ‘The Antinomies of Iran’s War Generation’, in Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War, ed. G. Potter and G. G. Sick (New York: Palgrave, 2004): 104. 10 Richard Tapper, ‘Introduction’, in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002): 6. 11 Roxanne Varzi, ‘A Ghost in the Machine: The Cinema of the Iranian Sacred Defence’, in The New Iranian Cinema, 157. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 164–5. 14 Ibid., 165. 15 For a detailed discussion of the Islamicization of Iranian cinema, see Hamid Naficy’s seminal article ‘Veiled Vision/powerful presences: women in postrevolutionary Iranian cinema’, in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (London: National Film Theatre, 1999): 44–65. 16 See Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History, 217–23. According to Sadr during the 1990s war films began to depict the effects of war more candidly. He cites films such as Snake Fang (Dandan-e Mar, Masoud Kimiai, 1989) and The Glass Agency (Azhans-e Shisheh-i, Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1998). Another film that is concerned with the social and emotional consequences of the war is Bashu,

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The Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak, Bahram Beizai, 1987), although the war itself is not mentioned directly. Significantly, like Gilaneh, this film is also set in Gilan province and primarily uses the local dialect. 17 Evidence of literal wounds may be found in the wealth of medical literature on the ongoing physical and psychological traumas suffered by both the military and civilian populations, with much focus on the long-term effects of chemical weapons (primarily mustard gas), used by the Iraqi military against Iran. See, for example, Farnoosh Hashemian et al., ‘Anxiety, Depression, and Posttraumatic Stress in Survivors of Chemical Warfare’, Journal of the American Medical Association 296, no. 5 (2006): 560–6. The authors write, ‘According to Iranian government estimates, Iran sustained approximately 387 chemical attacks (via rocket, air, or artillery) during the 8-year war, which resulted in high rates of medical morbidity and psychological distress among an estimated 60,000 Iranian survivors’, 560. See also Shahriar Khateri et al., ‘Incidence of Lung, Eye, and Skin Lesions as Late Complications in 34,000 Iranians With Wartime Exposure to Mustard Agent’, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 45, no. 11 (2003): 1136–43. 18 Michelle Langford, ‘Iranian Cinema Looks Inward: The 25th Fajr International Film Festival’, Senses of Cinema 44 (2007). Available online: http:// sensesofcinema.com/2007/festival-reports/fajr-iff-2007/ (accessed 7 October 2018). 19 These last two films were produced during 2006 and premiered at the 2007 Fajr International Film Festival. The Third Day was in fact the first of a series of Sacred Defence films to be produced by the ‘Martyrs and Sacrificers Foundation’. It won Best Film at Fajr in 2007 and ranked eighth at the Iranian box office that year. See Mohsen Beig-agha, ‘Economic Report of Iranian Cinema in 2007: The Year of Comedies’, Film International: Iranian Film Quarterly 14, no. 2 (2008): 40–5. 20 Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 98. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 100–1. 23 Ibid., 101. 24 Ibid., 102. 25 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Going Public: Patriotic and Matriotic Homeland in Iranian Nationalist Discourses’, Strategies 13, no. 2 (2000): 175. 26 Ibid.

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27 Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 110. 28 Farideh Farhi, ‘Crafting a National Identity Amidst Contentious Politics in Contemporary Iran’, Iranian Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 16. 29 Ibid. 30 Barbara Allen Roberson, Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation (London: Frank Cass, 2003): 33. 31 Jomhuri Islami Iran, Wazarat Amuzish wa Parwarish (Islamic Republic of Iran, Ministry of Education and Training). Farsi, Sal-e Sevvom Dabistan (Tehran: 1364/1985): 101–2. Cited in translation in M. Mobin Shorish, ‘The Islamic Revolution and Education in Iran,’ Comparative Education Review 32, no. 1 (1988): 62–3. I am grateful to Professor Shorish for providing me with the original Persian version of this verse. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 63. 34 Ibid. 35 Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches, 100–1. 36 Through the character of Foad, a sense of the betrayal of some Arab-Iranians, who joined the Iraqi forces, is plainly felt. 37 Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History, 196. 38 It is relevant to note that in Iranian Shi’i Islam, in the absence of adequate water, it is permissible to perform one’s ablutions with earth, as earth is considered to be naturally pure. 39 Varzi, ‘A Ghost in the Machine’, 164–5. 40 Roxanne Varzi, ‘Iran’s Pieta: Motherhood, Sacrifice and Film in the Aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War’, Feminist Review 88 (2008): 88. 41 See Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166, and ‘Central Park’, 32–58. 42 Ismael appears to bear some of the physical and emotional scars commonly caused by chemical weapons such as mustard gas, which have been recorded in the medical literature, the most pronounced being the extreme difficulty he has breathing. He also appears to have suffered some discolouration and scarring of the skin and displays some signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, commonly experienced by combatants and civilians alike. 43 Varzi, ‘A Ghost in the Machine’, 164–5. 44 It is perhaps worth noting that due to Iranian censorship regulations, Gilaneh would be prevented from actually touching the soldier, so she strokes the soldier with his woollen hat in her hand. In apparent contradiction of censorship regulations regarding physical contact between men and women, we do see Gilaneh clean Ismael’s bare feet, and at one point Ismael rubs moisturiser into

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Gilaneh’s hands. Following a screening of the film in Brisbane 2006, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya told me that this did not cause any issues with censorship. 45 This inadequacy will be revisited briefly in Bani-Etemad’s Tales (Ghesse-ha, 2014) in a phone conversation between the doctor and Gilaneh.

Chapter 6 1 Hamid Naficy, ‘Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films’, Social Research 67, no. 2 (2000): 561. 2 Milani, Veils and Words, 5. 3 Stephen C. Poulson, ‘Confronting the West: Social Movement Frames in 20th Century Iran’ (PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2002): 75. 4 Mary C. Bateson, ‘“This Figure of Tinsel”: A Study of Themes of Hypocrisy and Pessimism in Iranian Culture’, Daedalus 108, no. 3 (1979): 126. 5 Ibid. 6 María del Mar Azcona, The Multi-Protagonist Film (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 19. 7 See, for example, Thomas Sotinel, ‘“A propos d’Elly”: un week-end à la mer, trente ans après la révolution islamique’, Le Monde (8 September 2009). Available online: www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2009/09/08/a-propos-d-elly-unweek-end-a-la-mer-trente-ans-apres-la-revolution-islamique_1237514_3476. html#ens_id=1088095 (accessed 7 February 2018); Craig Mathieson, ‘About Elly Review’ (22 March 2013). Available online: www.sbs.com.au/films/movie/15260/ about-elly (accessed 7 February 2018). Scott Foundas, ‘AFI Fest, A to W’, LA Weekly (28 October 2009). Available at: www.laweekly.com/2009-10-29/film-tv/ afi-fest-a-to-w/ (accessed 7 February 2018). 8 Xavier, ‘Historical Allegory’, 340. 9 Shahram Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 33. 10 Zuzanna Olszewska, ‘Classy Kids and Down-at-Heel Intellectuals: Status Aspiration and Blind Spots in the Contemporary Ethnography of Iran’, Iranian Studies 46, no. 6 (2013): 841–62. 11 For example, Pardis Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) and Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran.

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12 Akhar-e khandeh geryast is a Persian saying meaning ‘at the end of happiness is crying’. My thanks to Elham Naeej for bringing this to my attention. 13 Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran, 5. 14 Ibid., 48. 15 Ibid., 48–9. 16 Ibid., 49. 17 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Ta’ziyeh as Theatre of Protest’, The Drama Review 49, no. 4 (2005): 91–9. 18 Ibid., 95. 19 Negar Mottahedeh, ‘Ta’ziyeh: A Twist of History in Everyday Life’, in Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi’i Islam, ed. Kamran Scot Aghaie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005): 38. 20 William O. Beeman, quoted in Mottahedeh, ‘Ta’ziyeh: A Twist of History in Everyday Life’, 38. 21 Dabashi, ‘Ta’ziyeh as Theatre of Protest’, 96. 22 Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and Byron J. Good, ‘Ritual, the State, and the Transformation of Emotional Discourse in Iranian Society’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12 (1988): 43. 23 Ibid., 45–6. 24 Ibid., 52. 25 In the film, Elly mimes the words ‘mother of the honeybee’. 26 Fred Patten, ‘The Allure of Anthropomorphism in Manga and Animé’, in The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki, ed. Mark I. West (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2006): 45. 27 This very dynamic played out in 2017 when a group of seven young Iranians posted a video on YouTube showing themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’s song ‘Happy’. The youths were later arrested and sentenced to a year in prison and ninety-one lashes. 28 Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran, 3. See also, Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, Sherry B. Ortner, Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994): 483. 29 Maria D. Wagenknecht, Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 133. 30 Khar tu khar is a colloquial idiomatic expression that literally means ‘donkey in donkey’. 31 Amir’s deeply held conservatism is very gradually revealed throughout the film, climaxing when he physically hits Sepideh. We eventually come to realize why he never seems to be fully integrated into the group.

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32 George Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, Origin, 175. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 141–2. 34 Ibid., 160. Emphasis added. 35 Ibid., 161. 36 Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, Origin, 16. 37 Benjamin, Origin, 179. 38 Ibid., 187. 39 Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique, 34 (1985): 46. 40 Samuel Webber, ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play’, MLN 106, no. 3 (1991): 475. 41 Benjamin, Origin, 178. 42 Ibid., 93. 43 Ibid., 217–8. 44 Ibid., 218–9. 45 Ibid., 139–40. 46 Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, Origin, 19.

Chapter Coda: Allegory Spills into the Streets 1 Negar Mottahedeh, #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015): 1. 2 Ibid., 15. 3 Ibid., 53. 4 Ibid., 49. The video is available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Mv9ehsW6PN8 (accessed 5 February 2018).

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Index Abadan  179–80 Abdolvahab, Mohsen  8, 169. See also individual works Abedini, Hossein  155 About Elly (Darbare-ye Elly, Farhadi, 2009)  9, 11, 190, 192, 193–233, 235 abstraction  33, 128, 137, 139, 142, 195, 197 action-image  220–1 aesthetic resistance  2, 3, 37, 73, 143 Agha-Soltan, Neda  237 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud  8, 173, 179, 235, 253 n.34 Alidoosti, Taraneh  199 allegoresis (allegorical interpretation)  25, 35 allegorical aesthetics  1, 3, 11 allegorical decay  5, 34, 37, 53, 227, 229 allegorical degradation  4, 25 allegorical dimension  9, 16, 21, 24, 32, 33, 36, 38, 52, 54, 59, 140, 198, 210, 240 n.13 allegorical discourse  67, 99, 219 allegorical-image  129, 131, 188 allegorical intention  8, 25, 21, 37, 52, 55, 66, 110, 136, 183. See also allegorical ways of seeing allegorical master code  25, 28 allegorical palimpsest  5, 63, 67–8, 73, 84 allegorical personification  6, 33, 61, 63, 145, 175, 201, 205 allegorical poetics  7, 106–10 allegorical resistance  58, 63, 64, 69, 102, 208, 211, 227 allegorical trope  17, 49, 144, 202 allegorical ways of seeing  1, 39, 51–2, 83, 87, 110, 124, 139, 183, 195, 220. See also allegorical intention Ansari, Ali  58 Antonioni, Michelangelo  139, 148 Anvar, Fakhreddin  251 n.1

any-space-whatever  38–9 The Apple (Sib, Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)  65 art films  10, 17, 59, 63, 140 Ashcroft, Bill  107 Ashura (tenth day of Muharram)  171, 210 assemblage  109–10, 124–6, 128, 131–3, 248 n.12 Atwood, Blake  143, 253 n.34 Axworthy, Michael  99 Azadivar, Ra'na  198 backshadowing  184–5 Baharestan Square  97–8, 99, 102, 246 n.48 Bahrami, Sadegh  47 Bahrami, Zahra  155 Bakhshi, Gholam Ali  156 Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan  8, 169, 257 n.45. See also individual works Baran (Majidi, 1999)  7–8, 135–6, 142, 143, 154–68, 249 n.27 Baroque age  227–8, 232 Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, Gharibeh-ye Kuchak, Bayzai, 1987)  62, 254–5 n.16 Basij (Iranian paramilitary)  237 Bateson, Mary  195 Battle of Karbala  40, 171, 172, 210, 211, 237, 244 n.23. See also Karbala paradigm Battle of Khorramshahr  176–8 Baudelaire, Charles  30 Baudry, Jean-Louis  6, 101–2 Bayzai, Bahram  62, 107, 138. See also individual works becoming as process  7, 108, 110, 122–7, 171 becoming-woman  7, 106, 108, 110, 123, 125–7, 130–4 Beeman, William O.  211

Index Behbahani, Simin  140, 142–3 Behdad, Hamed  177 Benjamin, Walter  9, 24–5, 30, 34, 37, 43, 107, 110, 128–30, 183, 188, 219, 227–9, 231–2 Bergson, Henri  123–4 Berry, Chris  171 beyt  140–1, 145, 151, 157, 164–5 bidard (without pain)  209, 212, 215, 216 Big Chill (Kasdan, 1983)  201 bikhiyal (unconcerned)  209, 215, 216 Braidotti, Rosi  109, 126 Brannigan, Edward  76 Bread and Alley (Nan va Kucheh, Kiarostami, 1970)  62 Brookshaw, Dominic  142 burka  162, 166 Burlesque  221 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  227 camera consciousness  41–2, 45 camera movement  42, 80, 137–8, 148, 224 camera narration  139, 150 censorship  2–3, 7, 23, 34, 57–8, 62, 74, 90, 92, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114, 116, 118, 133, 135, 143, 155, 157–8, 161, 196, 253 n.34, 256 n.44 Centre for the Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun-e Parvaresh-e Fekri-e Kudakan va Nojavanan)  62, 75, 244 n.15 chador  89, 99, 111–12, 114, 115, 118–19, 123, 132 Chaplin, Charlie  221 Chaudhuri, Shohini  139 child-centred films  5, 62–3, 74, 81, 84, 88, 90, 101–3, 156, 178 child protagonists  61, 75, 84, 88, 112 children as emblems of new society  73–84 reality effect of  6, 61 Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye Aseman, Majidi, 1997)  1, 6, 63, 73–84, 88, 90–1, 96, 102, 103, 112, 136–7, 156, 178, 245 n.32 chivalry  19, 21, 22 Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un été, Rouch, 1961)  65

269

Chubak, Sadeq  35 cinema of poetry  7–8, 135–40, 145, 149, 154–5, 159, 162, 167, 168, 251 n.7, 252 n.14, 252 n.19. See also poetic cinema cinema of prose  149, 154 cinematic apparatus  15, 65, 85–6, 101–3, 147 cinematic codes and techniques  1, 3, 114, 122, 135, 138, 158, 161, 201, 205, 116, 226 cinematic discourse  66, 81, 87, 149, 215, 219 cinematic ghazal  7–8, 136–43, 145, 146, 154–68 cinematic grammar  138, 148 cinematic narration  66, 76, 115, 150, 153, 197, 240 n.4. See also narrative cinema cinematic representation  6, 61, 84, 106, 107, 117, 122–3, 124, 125, 160, 198, 207 cinematic styleme  136, 138, 139, 146, 149–50, 155, 157, 158 cinéma-vérité  42 cinephilia  4, 14, 15, 20 cine-poetics  2, 7, 146, 164 cinesthesia  160, 167 cinesthethic ghazal  167, 154 cinethestic mode  8, 136, 159 The Circle (Dayereh, Panahi, 2000)  119 citizenry (mellat)  174, 175 classical folklore  21. See also Shahnameh Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, Kiarostami, 1990)  65, 245 n.33 close-up shot  21, 22, 26, 27, 39, 41, 42, 50, 71, 77, 80, 82, 90, 115, 138, 145, 147–8, 150–3, 162–3, 165–6, 191, 215, 216, 217, 222, 224–5 coenaesthesia  160–1 Colebrook, Claire  125 collective protagonist  9, 190, 198, 200–8, 212–14, 228, 236 commodity  29–30, 32, 37, 212 conservative values  9, 17, 196, 205, 217, 229–30 Constitutional Revolution (1905–9)  98, 174 consumer culture  130, 205, 206

270

Index

contemporary Iranian society  5, 10, 11, 34, 36, 74, 122, 193–6, 200, 205–6, 208 continuity editing  20, 95, 103, 110, 113, 114, 122, 150, 153, 240 n.4 illusion of  86, 93, 101, 102, 184, 220 lapse in  113–4 corruption  5, 13, 36–7, 43–4, 47, 58, 142 The Cow (Gav, Mehrjui, 1969)  32–3, 34, 36, 49, 252 n.19 Creative Evolution (Bergson)  123 culture of mourning (farhang-e azadari)  209. See also mourning culture of sadness (farhang-e gham)  209, 211. See also sadness The Cycle (Dayereh Mina, Mehrjui, 1978)  5, 13, 31, 34, 36–47, 49–50, 54, 139, 194 Cytowic, Richard  160 Dabashi, Hamid  171, 210 Daei, Ali  93, 245 n.34 Daftari, Iran  21 dard (pain)  212 dash mashti (tough-guy genre)  19 The Day I Became a Woman (Ruzi Keh Zan Shodam, Meshkini, 2000)  6–7, 105–34 de Bruijn, J. T. P.  141 Deghati, Reza  237 Deleuze, Gilles  7, 38, 39, 41, 108, 109, 110, 124–6, 128, 129, 140, 188, 220–1, 248 n.12 De Man, Paul  100–1 Deren, Maya  108–9, 125, 131, 248 n.6 dialectical image  24, 27, 37, 128–9, 188 dialectical montage  28, 39, 65, 71 dialectic at a standstill  107, 128 didactic allegory  6, 16, 48, 211 disembodied voice  91–6 displaced allegory  2, 86, 89 dissimulating camera  9, 194, 196, 197–8, 205, 213–18, 224 dissimulating character  213–18 dissimulation  9, 195–6, 200, 203, 212–14, 235. See also indirect communication D’Lugo, Marvin  39

documentary film  5, 51, 52, 63, 65, 66, 68–70, 84, 243 n.9 dominant ideology  61, 63, 66, 73, 74, 83, 101, 208, 212 double discourse  84, 86 dubbing  91–2 duration  109, 124, 128–33 Dürer, Albrecht  232 Durix, Jean-Pierre  107 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal  251 n.54 editing  20, 77, 113, 122, 137, 140, 150, 152, 153, 161, 188, 197, 224, 226, 240 n.4. See also continuity education  65, 69, 73, 79, 81, 83, 109, 156, 172, 207 Egan, Eric  136 emblem/emblematic figuration  4, 6, 9, 11, 16–17, 21, 26–30, 32–3, 36–7, 40, 43, 54–5, 57, 64, 73–84, 92, 99, 103, 112, 121–3, 128, 145, 156–7, 164, 176–7, 182–4, 188, 192, 197–8, 201–2, 205, 207–8, 210, 214–18, 224, 228, 231, 233 embodiment  33, 53, 100, 145, 183 encroachment of the West  4, 30, 172 Entezami, Ezzatollah  32, 36 epic film  64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 74, 85 episodic structure  26–7, 149–50, 106, 129 equivocal image  194, 218–22, 224–6, 233 equivocation  218, 221, 223 equivocity  218, 219, 220, 221 eroticism  152, 161, 165 ethnographic film  59, 65, 70 Eurasian pygmy owl  163 external focalization  76–8, 80, 82. See also focalization Fajr International Film Festival  143, 173, 255 n.19 Farahani, Golshifteh  198 Farahani, Nayereh  185 Farhadi, Asghar  9–10, 190, 192, 193–205, 207–8, 212–16, 218–26, 228, 230, 233, 235–6 Farhi, Farideh  172, 175 Farmanara, Bahman  47. See also individual works Farrokhzad, Forugh  134, 251 n.56 feminism  7, 106–9, 116, 126–7, 249 n.16

Index Ferdowsi (poet)  4, 21, 49, 53, 67–8 fetishism  116, 212 fetishistic scopophilia  116 film aesthetics  2, 11, 14, 27 film-e abgushti (stewpot films)  18 film farsi  18, 28, 29, 92, 241 n.26 film genre  4, 10, 13, 16, 18–31, 92, 170, 178, 179, 180, 182, 208, 220, 225 film history  2, 14, 19, 59, 92 film-making  3, 14, 18, 31, 32, 52, 65, 70, 73, 84, 86, 92, 135 films within films  66, 86 Finn, Howard  139 Fireworks Wednesday (ChaharshanbehSuri, Farhadi, 2002)  201 A Fire (Yek Atash, Golestan, 1958–61)  52, 242 n.57 First World War  147 Fish and Cat (Mahi va Gorbeh, Mokri, 2013)  11 Fletcher, Angus  2 Flieger, Jerry Aline  126 focalization  6, 63, 76–83, 88, 91, 137, 156, 167. See also external focalization; internal focalization Ford, John  19. See also individual works foreshadowing  4, 183–8, 215, 216, 223, 225 Forouzan (aka Parvin Kheyrbakhsh)  44 Forsi, Bahman  44 fragmentation  24–5, 42, 53, 67, 72, 130, 140–1, 146–7, 149–50, 152–4, 183, 185, 187, 198, 201, 221, 227–30 framing  42, 77, 79, 80, 82, 87, 113, 132, 137–9, 147, 150–1, 159, 162, 164–5, 197, 202, 203, 204, 215, 224, 225, 226, 230 freedom  2, 9, 117–18, 136, 142, 193, 236 Freedom (Rahaei, Taghvai, 1971)  62 free indirect subjective/point-of-view  8, 136, 139–41, 148–9, 153–4, 159, 163, 167 French New Wave  20 Freud, Sigmund  116 Frye, Northrop  67 Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)  1, 107, 138, 143 Ghaffary, Farrokh  22, 32. See also individual works Ganjavi, Nizami (poet)  209

271

‘Garbage Dump’ (‘Ashghalduni,’ Sa’edi, 1968)  36 gaze  39–42, 74–5, 79–80, 82–3, 86, 88–91, 113, 115, 131, 133, 156, 158–9, 166, 215–17, 223, 245 n.32. See also male gaze; voyeuristic gaze gender  8, 29, 30, 62, 125, 142, 169, 174–6, 180, 187, 200, 204, 207, 230 generational conflict  9, 11, 45–6, 99 geo-body  8, 174, 175 Gered, Shiva  143 ghazal  7, 8, 43, 136, 140–8, 143–8, 150–1, 154, 157–8, 160–1, 164, 168, 209. See also cinematic ghazal Ghobadi, Bahman  10. See also individual works Gilaneh (Bani-Etemad and Abdolvahab, 2005)  8, 9, 169–70, 173–4, 182–92, 255 n.16 The Glass Agency (Azhans-e Shisheh-i, Hatamikia, 1998)  254 n.16 Godard, Jean-Luc  38 Golestan, Ebrahim  5, 13, 31–2, 47–57, 194, 242 n.57. See also individual works green wave/green revolution  237 grief  31, 196, 207–8, 211, 215, 233. See also culture of sadness; mourning Grigor, Talinn  48–9 Guattari, Félix  7, 108, 109–10, 124–5, 128, 248 n.12 Gunning, Tom  240 n.4 habitus  196–7, 212, 220–1, 224, 227, 233, 235 Hafez (poet)  140–2 happiness  163, 194, 208, 212–15, 227, 231, 233, 258 n.12 happy-go-lucky (alaki khosh)  215–6 Hashemi, Afshin  179 Hashemian, Amir Farrokh  75 The Hawks and the Sparrows (Uccellacci e uccellini, Pasolini, 1966)  137 Hayward, Susan  53 hermeneutics  195 heroism  13, 64, 67 He Who Sails (Anke Darya Miravad, Moayerian, 2007)  8, 174, 179–82, 191 Hitchcock, Alfred  20. See also individual works

272

Index

Hollywood  18, 19, 20, 73, 92, 196, 220 homeland. See vatan homeland of Islam (vatan-e Islam)  181 honour  19, 21, 23–4, 31, 35, 55, 174, 176, 178, 241 n.19 Hosseini, Shahab  198 Hoveyda, Amir-Abbas  47, 49, 57 huri (maid of heaven)  120, 249 n.26 Hutch the Honeybee (1970–1; 1974)  212 iconography  18–19, 237 ideology  2, 8, 53, 63–6, 101–3, 106, 169, 170, 171, 179 Imam Hussain  40, 83, 171–2, 210, 211, 236–7, 244 n.23 index/sign of equivocity  218–9,  221 indirect communication  9, 195–6, 213 inner purity (safa-ye baten)  212 internal focalization  76, 80. See also external focalization; focalization intertextuality  24 intimacy  26, 28, 62, 113, 127, 135, 156, 165, 202, 205 invented tradition/heritage  5, 49, 53 Iranian culture  2, 9, 22, 34, 47, 53, 54, 63, 100, 184, 207, 209, 215, 244 n.23 Iranian Medical Association  46 Iranian national soccer team  93, 96, 97, 100 Iranian revolution (1978–9)  3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 34, 47, 58, 62, 73, 74, 92, 97–101, 129, 172, 175, 205, 207, 211, 235 Iran-Iraq war (1980–8)  8, 97, 101, 143, 170, 171, 172, 176, 182, 185, 190, 207, 211. See also Sacred Defence (defa-e moqaddas) Iran Oil Company  52 Iran Oil Consortium  52 Iran vs. South Korea soccer match  93, 95, 96 Islam  74, 83, 126, 171, 172, 182, 193, 210. See also religion Islamicate cinema  74, 135, 245 n.32 Islamicate era  63 Islamicate values  7, 4–5, 107 Islamic cinema  74 Islamic feminism  116 Islamic identity  9, 97, 175 Islamicization  173, 253 n.15

Islamic Republic of Iran  4, 58, 73–4, 92, 143, 171–2, 207 Islamic Republic Street (Khiyaban-e Jomhuri-e Eslami)  97, 246 n.38 Islamic Revolution Street (Khiyaban-e Enqelab-e Eslami)  237–8 Italian neo-realism  20, 38, 64 jaheli (tough-guy genre)  19, 23 Jaleh Square  99 Jalilvand, Vahid  10. See also individual works Jetztzeit (‘now-time’)  24 Jom’e-ye Siyah (Black Friday)  99–100 juxtaposition  39, 65, 189 Kafka, Franz  110 Kalari, Mahmoud  11 Kamali, Amir  71 Kangarani, Saeed  36 Karbala paradigm  8, 171, 172, 175, 198, 208, 209, 211, 228, 231, 237, 254 n.8. See also Battle of Karbala Kasdan, Lawrence  201 Kayhan (newspaper)  68, 70–1 Keating, Patrick  137, 251 n.7 Keaton, Buster  240 n.4 Kennedy, Barbara  109 khak-e pak-e Iran (pure soil of Iran)  8, 173–4, 176, 178–80, 183 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali  79 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah  73, 172, 175, 179, 211 Khosravi, Shahram  9, 203, 207–9, 212 Kiarostami, Abbas  1–2, 10, 11, 17, 21–3, 62, 65, 84, 138, 140, 245 n.33. See also individual works Kimiai, Masoud  4, 13, 18–32, 35, 62. See also individual works Kimiavi, Parviz  47. See also individual works Kluge, Alexander  65–6 knowledge effect  6, 101–3 Kosari, Baran  176, 182 Kuleshov effect  82 land reform  58 landscape  37–41, 46, 49–51, 58, 92, 105, 115, 117, 131–2, 134, 163, 179, 181, 185

Index Lang, Fritz  19. See also individual works lat (villain)  19, 22, 23 Latifi, Mohammad Hossein  8, 176. See also individual works laughter  46, 161, 194, 206–12, 214, 215, 223, 224, 235 Leone, Sergio  26 Loreta (aka Loreta Hairapedian Tabrizi)  47 The Lor Girl (Dokhtar-e Lor, Irani, 1934)  240 n.2 love  7, 8, 15, 18, 112, 135–6, 140–2, 143–6, 148–50, 152–4, 155–8, 163–8, 174–5, 182, 183, 204, 209, 253 n.34 love of cinema. See cinephilia love poem. See ghazal luti (tough guy)  19, 21–3, 26, 41, 241 n.19 Maas, Willard  248 n.6 Madanipour, Ali  98–100 madar-e vatan (national mother figure)  187 Majidi, Majid  1, 6–8, 63, 73–84, 90, 96, 112, 135–6, 137, 142–3, 154–67, 178, 245 n.32. See also individual works Makhmalbaf, Hana  10 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen  1, 2, 7, 10, 17, 65, 84, 107, 135–6, 138, 140, 142–54, 167, 247 n.1, 253 n.37. See also individual works Makhmalbaf, Samira  10, 65, 84. See also individual works male body  22, 24, 169 male-female gaze  88, 90, 249 n.16 male gaze  20, 29, 111–12, 114–19, 121, 245 n.31, 249 n.16 Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, Vertov, 1929)  15, 65–6, 102 Márquez, Gabriel García  107 martyrdom  8–9, 83, 171–2, 176, 178, 179, 181, 190, 192, 211, 230, 244 n.23 martyrology  172, 183, 191 martyr  97, 120, 175, 176, 179, 182, 183, 186, 190, 197, 211, 227, 231, 233, 237, 238

273

Martyrs and Sacrificers Foundation  255 n.19 Mashayekhi, Jamshid  20 matriotic vatan  9, 170, 175 Maybe … Some Other Time (Shayad … Vaqti Digar, Bayzai, 1988)  107 Mehan, Asma  98 Mehrjui, Dariush  5, 13, 31–4, 36–47, 194, 252 n.19. See also individual works Meisami, Julie  142 ‘Melancholia I’ (1514, Dürer)  232 melancholy/melancholia  9, 162–3, 192, 197–8, 208, 226–7, 230, 231–3, 235 melodrama  18, 20, 24, 76, 83, 244 n.19 memory  120, 138, 171, 179–82 Menashri, David  65 Meshkini, Marziyeh  6–7, 10, 105, 107, 108, 113–14, 117, 118, 121–2, 247 n.1. See also individual works meta-filmic  86, 149 metatextuality  67 metonym  22, 25, 32, 36–7, 49–51, 66 Metz, Christian  66, 85–6, 137, 252 n.14 Milani, Abbas  57, 249 n.19 Milani, Farzaneh  115, 119, 195, 249 n.23 Miller, Arthur  109, 248 n.6 Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG)  143, 172–3, 246 n.48, 251 n.1 Ministry of Arts and Culture  54, 63–4, 65, 66 The Mirror (Ayneh, Panahi, 1997)  6, 63, 65, 81, 84–103, 112–14, 238, 247 n.63 mise en abyme  84, 86–7 mise en scène  27, 30, 49, 52, 75, 80, 112, 120–2 Moayerian, Arash  8, 174, 179, 181. See also individual works modern allegory  25, 30 modernist film style  4, 14, 17, 19, 20, 27, 29, 28, 136 modernist project  17, 34, 235 modernity  4–5, 14–18, 25–8, 30, 32, 37, 47, 64, 98, 129, 131–2, 194, 196, 212, 251 n.55 modernization  4–5, 15–16, 27, 28, 34, 47, 49, 51–2, 57, 58, 97, 98, 129, 212

274

Index

modesty  29, 73–4, 76, 81–3, 106–7, 111–12, 114–16, 120, 130, 132, 135, 155, 159, 161, 165, 166, 167, 217, 232 Mofidi, Rooholah  35 mohajerin (religious migrants) 156, 253 n.42 Mohammadi, Esmail  36 Mohammadkhani, Aida  100 Mohammadkhani, Mina  100 mo’in-al-boka (one who brings tears)  210, 228. See also ta’ziyeh Mojab, Shahrzad  126–7 Mokri, Shahram  11. See also individual works A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldun, Makhmalbaf, 1996)  65, 143 Monfaredzadeh, Esfandiar  26 montage  21, 27, 28, 39, 65, 66, 71, 72, 82 moral code  29, 74, 78, 109, 118, 142, 143, 201, 248 n. 16 Morricone, Ennio  26 Morris, Errol  244 n.10 Motamed-Arya, Fatemeh  169, 257 n.44 Motiei, Naser Malek  20 Mottahedeh, Negar  2, 73, 86, 89, 107, 138, 211, 236, 237, 245 n.33, 250 n.46, 252 n.14 mourning  9, 25, 26, 46, 83, 100, 170–3, 187, 190, 192, 196–9, 206–12, 228, 231, 235, 237, 244 n.23. See also culture of mourning and rawzeh (mourning recitations); Trauerspiel Mousavi, Mir-Hossein  236 movement-image  220–1 Mr Haji the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa Aktor-e Sinema, Ohanian, 1933)  4, 13, 14–18, 19, 57, 240 n.4 Mudbrick and Mirror (Khesht va Ayneh, Golestan, 1965)  32 Muharram  171, 210 Mulvey, Laura  29, 103, 116 mystical lyricism  8, 136 myth  4–5, 21, 24, 53, 54, 58, 63–4, 131–2, 171, 176, 179, 182, 184, 187, 190, 191, 227, 228, 237

Naficy, Hamid  17, 18, 19, 21, 27, 29, 32, 46–7, 49, 54, 57, 62, 65, 74, 111, 112, 116, 195, 248 n.16, 254 n.15 Najmabadi, Afsaneh  174–5 narrative agency  38, 114–19, 122 narrative cinema  19, 103, 106, 124, 135, 154, 167, 172. nasl-e sevvom (third generation)  9, 207–8, 212, 233, 235, 237 Nassirian, Ali  44 national allegory  5, 17, 21, 83, 96–101, 156, 178, 201 national consciousness  33, 65, 68, 73 national identity  97, 171, 175 national ideology  5, 54, 55, 58, 171. See also ideology nationalism  53, 55, 174, 175, 191, 210 national sensorium  6, 73, 83, 101, 211 nation and family  17–19, 83, 109, 175–7 nation-building  4–6, 19, 54, 61, 65–7, 69, 84, 88, 90, 96, 101, 103, 106, 178 New Film Group  20 New Wave cinema  3–5, 9, 13, 17, 19–20, 31–59, 62–3, 84, 102, 139, 235, 241 n.26 The Night It Rained … or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy (Un Shab Keh Barun Umad … ya Hamaseh-ye Rustazadeh-ye Gorgani, Shirdel, 1967)  5, 6, 59, 63–73, 84, 96, 101–2 1996 Asian Cup  93 No Date, No Signature (Bedune Tarikh, Bedune Emza, Jalilvand, 2017)  10 non-professional child actors  75

Nabili, Marva  49 Naderi, Amir  1, 35, 62. See also individual works

Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza (Shah)  4, 5, 34, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48–9, 54, 57–8, 62, 63–5, 74, 211, 235, 246 n.38

Ohanian, Ovanes  4, 13–18, 240 n.4. See also individual works oil  32–3, 37, 58, 180, 186, 242 n.57 Olszewska, Zuzanna  206 opening credit sequence  21–2, 24–6, 28, 193, 196 The Oriental Boy (Pesar-e Sharghi, Kimiai, 1974)  62 overt allegory  17, 19, 48, 54, 102, 178 Owens, Craig  67

Index Pahlavi, Reza (Shah)  4, 15, 48–9, 57–8, 68, 98, 129, 237 Pahlavi era  4–5, 40, 48, 53, 63, 65, 67–8, 73, 97–8, 210 Palay, Abdurrahman  144 Panahi, Jafar  1–2, 6, 10, 17, 63, 65, 81, 84–103, 112, 119, 237–8, 245 n.31, n.32, 247 n.63. See also individual works Parto, Maziar  20 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  7–8, 136, 137–40, 145, 148, 149, 162, 251 n.7, 252 n. 14, n.19. See also individual works patriarchy  16, 18, 32, 46, 105–6, 132, 241 n.26 patriotism  9, 65, 73, 170, 175, 210 Perez, Gilberto  148 Persian miniature painting  131 Persian poetry  7, 135, 136, 140–3, 164, 209. See also ghazal personification  6, 22, 24, 33, 43, 49, 61, 63, 74, 76, 83–4, 137, 141, 145, 156, 175, 201, 205, 232 Perspective (Cheshm Andaz, Golestan, 1957–62)  52 petrified unrest  37, 128–30, 132 phallocentrism  109, 126 Piruzi Street (Khiyaban-e Piruzi)  96, 100, 245 n.36 Pishvaian, Jalal  20 Plato’s cave  197 poetic allegory  2, 10 poetic cinema  108–9, 131, 136–7. See also cinema of poetry poetic realism  140 point-of-view shot  38, 41, 42, 77, 78, 80, 82, 88, 90, 139, 147–8, 159, 177, 181, 216, 223 political allegory  6, 14, 43, 98 popular entertainment cinema  4, 16, 18, 32, 92 post-colonialism  106–7 post-revolutionary discourse  9, 182, 198, 205 post-revolutionary era  2, 3, 5, 14, 17, 97, 100, 196, 202, 207–9, 227, 233, 237, 253 n.34 post-revolutionary Iranian cinema  2–3, 59, 61–3, 73–4, 83–4, 90, 92, 96, 101, 106, 107, 117, 120, 135,

275

138–40, 142, 143, 167–8, 169, 173, 196, 202, 217, 245 n.32 Poulson, Stephen  195 poverty  37, 42, 43, 64, 75, 82, 142, 156 pre-Islamic period  48, 53, 68, 209 pre-revolutionary cinema  4, 13–59, 92, 139, 153, 235 Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)  20, 27 purification of cinema  6, 63, 74, 75, 76, 92, 97, 101, 114, 135, 167, 180, 245 n.32 of the gaze  76, 82 of the sensorium  90, 101 Pursorkh, Pouria  176 Qeysar (Kimiai, 1969)  4–5, 13, 18–31, 32, 35, 38, 53 Radan, Bahram  169 Rahimi, Abbas  156 railways  26, 27, 30, 31, 64, 68, 71, 72, 144 Ram, Haggay  171 Rancho Notorious (Lang, 1952)  19 Randjbar-Daemi, Siavush  98 rape  20, 176, 178 Rasoulof, Mohammad  10, 242 n.39 rawzeh (mourning recitations)  211 realism  23, 34, 47, 61, 78, 95, 101, 102, 225 rebus  40, 51 Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, Antonioni, 1964)  139 redemption  5, 24, 31 redoubling  66, 85–7 religion  15, 24–5, 34, 74, 83, 131, 175, 180, 211, 245 n.32 Religious Warriors of Islam Street (Khiyaban-e Mojahedin-e Eslam)  99–100, 245 n.36, 246 n.48 Republic Square (Meydan-e Jomhuri)  97 revenge  20–1, 23, 28, 30, 35, 153 revolutionary ideology  175, 179 revolutionary values  6, 102, 173, 207–8 Rizzo, Teresa  250 n.39 Rochard, Philippe  22 Rostam’s seven labours (Haft-Khan-e Rostam)  26 Rouch, Jean  42, 65. See also individual works

276

Index

Rumi (poet)  140, 164 The Runner (Davandeh, Naderi, 1985)  1, 62 Sacred Defence (defa-e moqaddas)  8, 172, 192, 207. See also Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) Sacred Defence cinema (sinema-ye defa-e moqaddas)  8–9, 170–6, 179–83, 192, 207, 255 n.19 sadaqeh (voluntary charity)  193, 197 Sa’di (poet)  140 sadness  9, 194, 196, 198, 200, 207–9, 211–12, 215, 222–3, 227, 228, 231, 233, 235 Sadr, Hamid Reza 6, 17, 32, 61–2, 78, 180, 254 n.16 Sa’edi, Gholam Hossain  36 Saeedi, Kobra  28 Saffar-Harandi, Mohammad Hossein  173 The Salesman (Forushandeh, Farhadi, 2016)  10 Saless, Sohrab Shahid  34–5. See also individual works Saljoughi, Sara  85, 87 salvation  25, 231 Samancilar, Menderes  144 Sameti, Jaleh  189 Sarkoob, Gholam-Reza  28 Saura, Carlos  39 SAVAK (secret police) 57, 211 Sayyad, Parviz  47, 57, 243 n.63 Schrader, Paul  140 Schroeter, Werner  1 scopophilia  116, 157 The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar be Mohr, Nabili, 1977)  49 The Searchers (Ford, 1956)  19 Second World War  18, 38 Secret Ballot (Ra’ye Makhfi, Payami, 2001)  119 The Secrets of the Treasure of the Jenni Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darreh-ye Jenni, Golestan, 1972)  5, 13, 31, 47–57, 194 Seddiqi, Bahare  75 seer  38–9, 41, 44 self-reflexive cinema  2, 4–6, 13–17, 23, 51, 54, 61, 63–5, 69–70, 84, 87, 89, 92, 101

semantic slippage  26, 33, 112, 137, 145, 219 sensuality  8, 136, 141, 155, 157, 160, 161 Sepahsalar Mosque  98, 246 n.48 A Separation (Jodai-ye Nader az Simin, Farhadi, 2011)  10, 201 17 Shahrivar Street (Khiyaban-e 17 Shahrivar)  99 shadow economy  5, 13, 36–7, 41, 43–5 Shahin, Hassan  27 Shahnameh (Book of Kings, Ferdowsi)  4–5, 21–6, 31, 49, 53, 55, 67–8, 209 Shahrzad. See Saeedi, Kobra Shakespeare, William  227 Sheibani, Khatereh  140–1 Shi’a 40, 83, 171–2, 195, 209, 210, 256 n.38 Shirdel, Kamran  5, 59, 63–73, 74, 84–5, 96, 102, 243 n.5, n.6. See also individual works Shohada Square (Meydan-e Shohada)  99–100, 245 n.36 Shomal-e Iran (newspaper)  70–1 shot-reverse-shot  29, 46, 77, 80, 88–9, 138, 148, 157, 165, 181, 191 A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, Shahid Saless, 1973)  34, 35 Snake Fang (Dandan-e Mar, Kimiai, 1989)  254 n.16 Sobchack, Vivian  8, 136, 159–61 social media  236 social-realist film  23, 32, 36, 47 Sorud-e Shahanshahi-e Iran (Imperial Anthem)  68 sound/soundtrack  22, 26, 42, 72, 75, 79–81, 86–8, 91–6, 103, 114, 132–3, 145–50, 152, 154–64, 166, 169, 180–1, 184, 186–7, 188, 191, 193, 203, 224–6 South of the City (Jonub-e Shahr, Ghaffary, 1958)  23, 24, 32 Spaghetti Westerns  20, 26 spectator  27, 29, 57, 73, 91, 97, 115, 135, 153, 158, 181–2, 197, 210, 220 spectatorship  8, 16, 136, 159 spectator-within-the-text  139 stasis  128, 132, 140, 189 state ideology  2, 37, 65 statist documentary  65

Index Steiner, George  227, 232 stereotype  18, 29, 49, 57 Still Life (Tabi’at-e Bijan, Saless, 1974)  34 The Stone Garden (Bagh-e Sangi, Kimiavi, 1976)  47, 49 storytelling  19, 24, 153, 201 Sufism  174, 176 Sydney Film Festival  235 synaesthesia  160 ta’arof (ritual courtesy)  195–6, 203, 213 Taghizadeh, Mostafa  10 Taghvai, Nasser  62. See also individual entries takhallos (pen name)  141, 145 Tall Shadows of the Wind (Sayeha-ye Boland-e Bad, Farmanara, 1978)  47, 49 Tambling, Jeremy  96 Tangsir (Naderi, 1974)  35, 242 n.39 taqiyeh (religious dissimulation)  195–6 Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e Gilas, Kiarostami, 1997)  1 tattoos  21–2 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad  175 ta’ziyeh  43, 138, 171, 209–11, 227–8, 231, 237, 242 n.49 Tehran  6, 30, 57, 85–8, 94, 96–101, 103, 155, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 198, 212, 223, 235, 237–8, 245 n.35 Tehrani, Shahnaz  48 Tehran is the Capital of Iran (Tehran, Payetakht-e Iran Ast, Shirdel, 1966)  64 Tehran Taxi (Panahi, 2015)  247 n.63 temporality  125, 128–9 theory of allegory  128, 219, 228, 232 The Third Day (Ruz-e Sevvom, Latifi, 2007)  8, 174, 176–9, 180, 182, 187, 191, 255 n.19 This is Not a Film (Panahi, 2011)  247 n.63 Thomas, Dylan  109, 248 n.6 Thompson, Kristin  244 n.10 A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani Bara-ye Masti-ye Asbha, Ghobadi, 2000)  10 A Time for Love (Nobat-e Asheghi, Makhmalbaf, 1990)  7, 8, 135–6, 143–54, 159, 167–8

277

time-image  38, 41, 129, 140, 188 tough-guy genre film  4, 13, 18–19, 22, 23, 25, 28–30, 35, 153. See also dash mashti; jaheli tradition  9, 13, 16, 19, 22, 27, 34, 46, 47, 54, 99, 115, 118, 119, 130, 131, 132, 138, 192, 193, 196, 197, 200, 204, 205, 209, 211, 212, 221, 228, 233, 235–7 and modernity  4, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 27, 131, 194, 196, 212 Trauerspiel (mourning play)  9, 43, 197–8, 211, 219, 227–33 trauma  169, 184, 187–8, 211, 228, 255 n.17 tropological system  49–51, 58 Truffaut, François  38 Tudeh party  246 n.38 Tunj, Aken  143 Türkan, Ömer Fahreddin  147 Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha Ham Parvaz Mikonand, Ghobadi, 2004) 10 2009 post-election protests  9, 235–7 Tyler, Parker  248 n.6 Umayyad Caliph Yazid  40, 171, 210 Uncle Moustache (Amu Sibilou, Bayzai, 1969)  62 US invasion of Iraq (2003)  170, 182, 187 Varzi, Roxanne  172–3, 187 vatan (homeland)  8–9, 170, 171, 173–9, 182, 183, 185, 191, 254 n.1. See also madar-e vatan vatan-e Islam (homeland of Islam)  175, 181 veiling  110–12, 116, 119, 121, 124, 129, 133, 195, 237, 249 n.23 Verfremdungseffekt (distanciation effect)  43 Vertov, Dziga  15, 65–6, 102, 240 n.4. See also individual works voice-over narration  50–2, 65–6, 71–2, 95, 151, 241 n.26 von Birken, Sigmund  43 Vossoughi, Behrouz  20, 23, 35 voyeurism  29, 73, 76, 82, 116, 135, 138 Vuitton, Louis  206, 222

278 Wagenknecht, Maria D.  213 war films  8, 170, 173, 176, 179, 191, 254 n.16. See also Sacred Defence cinema War Films Bureau (1983)  172 Wave, Coral and Rock (Moj o Marjan o Khara, Golestan, 1958–61)  52, 242 n.57 Wayne, John  91–3, 95, 103 Webber, Samuel  228 Wednesday 9 May (Chaharshanbeh, 19 Ordibehesht, Jalilvand, 2015)  10 West, Mark  212 Western consumer culture  205–6 Western feminism  126, 249 n.16 Western genre  19–20, 26, 30–1, 220 Westernization  17, 34, 47, 58, 73, 192, 196, 212 Westoxification (gharbzadegi)  129, 206, 251 n.54 Where is the Friend’s House (Khaneh-ye Dust Kojast?, Kiarostami, 1986)  62 The White Balloon (Badkonak-e Sefid, Panahi, 1995)  1, 100, 245 n.31 White Revolution  58, 63–5 Williams, Pharrell  258 n.27

Index womanhood  105, 106, 112, 114, 122, 123, 130–1 women  132 bodies  29–30, 107, 111, 116, 124, 169, 178 censorship of  7, 62, 111, 112, 135, 142, 158, 173 in cinema  6–7, 115, 117, 119, 122, 133 representation of  7, 28–30, 105–7, 111–2, 116, 122, 123 social mobility  117–18, 132 wound  9, 76, 99, 169, 170–3, 175, 178–9, 182–8, 190–2, 255 n.17 Xavier, Ismail  2, 16–17, 19, 21, 25, 102, 201 Yarshater, Ehsan  141 Yellow (Zard, Taghizadeh, 2017)  10 zan (woman/wife)  115, 123 Zarrinpour, Bahman  48 zerangi (clever/cunning)  213–14, 223, 229 Zoroastrian mythology  184 zurkhaneh (house of strength)  22–4, 26, 27