The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film after the Revolution 9780755693078, 9781848857414

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To my Parents, Fahimeh and Ahmad-Reza and To the Memory of my Grandparents, Iran-Dokht and Mirza-Vali

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In conducting this research, I had the opportunity to benefit from the suggestions, encouragements, and insightful criticism of Drs. Nasrin Rahimieh (UC Irvine), Jerry White and William Beard (University of Alberta), M.R. Ghanoonparvar (The University of Texas at Atustin), George Lang (Prof. Emeritus, University of Ottawa), Paul Salmon and Mark Fortier (University of Guelph) and Asghar Seyyed Ghorab (Leiden University). My conversations with my friend and colleague Dr. Manijeh Mannani helped me better conceptualize my ideas on Iranian culture and visual arts. My gratitude is extended to Iradj Bagherzade, Philippa Brewster, Maria Marsh, and Jenna Steventon in I.B.Tauris for helping and facilitating the publishing of this book. The editor of this book Ms. Virginia Myers made a manuscript into the book you are about to read. I would also like to thank Ostad Bahram Bayzai and his brother Mr. Bijan Bayzai, Saman Khadem – Mohtaram, and Rene V. Steiner for their invaluable help to get images for the book. I had the intellectual and emotional support of my friends in completing this book. I wish to thank Dr. Nasser Tahbaz, who offered his collection of rare Iranian films and critical works and Dr. Lodan Fata who brought me a complete collection of Bahram Bayzai’s works from Iran. Farhad Sarioseiri, generously offered his assistance on the other side of the globe in acquiring the permission for images in this book. I must gratefully acknowledge the loving support of my friends Sheena Wilson, Jurate Motiejunaite, Fariba Sattari, Maryam

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Khademi, Mitra Salarvand and her daughter Shakiba Shayani. My childhood (lost and found) friend, Dr. Arash Rezazadeh, helped me overcome my fears and uncertainties, when I was sick, to face life and its struggles with a more positive attitude. My parents’ love and their confidence in me was a huge motivation in completing this project. Peimaneh and Saeed heard me outloud and helped further with mailing the material I needed for this project. I would like to express my deep appreciation to other members of my family: Payam, Sahar, Firouzeh, Ameh Nayereh, Sara, Amir, Yalda, Sharareh for their moral support; Pouneh, who watched many films with me in the languid afternoons in my hometown; my late grandmother, who was a model of a learned and strong Iranian woman; my late grandfather, a serene soul and the embodiment of pure love and kindness in my life; and the light of my eyes, my children, Mahan and Rodeen who helped me to work long hours on this book. My delighted thanks are extended to Komran, who has been a sincere supporter, a critic and a patient audience. He made my diasporic existence a meaningful and growing experience.

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A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

I have used a simplified version of the Library of Congress (LC) romanization system for Persian expressions and titles. However, terms such as ‘Tehran’ that are familiar to English speakers are not romanized according to the LC convention. In the transliteration of authors’ names already known in English, such as ‘Kiarostami’, I have used the most common romanization in scholarly texts. Because the hamzih and ayn are pronounced in the same way in Persian, both are represented by /’/.

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INTRODUCTION ISLAMIC REVOLUTION AND AESTHETIC EVOLUTION

In 1978–79 a revolution shook Iranian society to its foundations. During and after it, Iran not only experienced profound political and social changes, but also underwent a dramatic metamorphosis in its cultural and aesthetic discourses. Persian poetry, fiction, painting and other artistic forms have all, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, but this remarkable cultural evolution is best represented in Iranian films. In this book, I argue that the main artistic metamorphosis in post-revolutionary culture was that the exalted poetic language of Persian poetry, the leading artistic mode for centuries, was replaced by the image as the central cultural form of expression. Unlike the forces behind the Islamic revolution this transformation has been secular in nature, although not anti-religious. The poetic cinema that emerged in the pre-revolutionary period became the main artistic form of expression after the revolution. Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, as represented in Bahram Bayzai’s and Abbas Kiarostami’s films, has drawn on long-established themes in Persian literature and the performing arts. Both historical and theoretical issues influenced post-revolutionary films, and I have sought to clarify how intellectual and historical circumstances gave rise to the emergence and influence of cinema. In shifting from poetry to film as the dominant national art form,

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post-revolutionary Iranian poetics became the successor and at the same time a reaction to the poetics of pre-revolutionary culture. The methodological perspective that helps to explain this process is the Russian formalist concept of ‘the dominant’. This term was originally used by Juri Tynjanov,1 but the concept is best known to us through Roman Jakobson, a linguist, literary scholar and semiotician who founded the two theoretically seminal groups of the Moscow Circle and the Prague Linguistic Circle. In a 1935 lecture entitled ‘The Dominant’, he proposed that: The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure. The dominant specifies the work ... [T]he definition of an artistic work as compared to other sets of cultural values substantially changes, as soon as the concept of the dominant becomes our point of departure.2 The formalist notion of the dominant moves the emphasis from the poetic or artistic work per se to its relation to other poetic forms and its function within a network of interrelated artistic elements. Such a shift links each ‘autonomous’ poetic structure to other signifying structures, both on synchronic and diachronic levels. The idea of the Jakobsonian dominant is not static and unchanging. On the contrary, each cultural, literary, or aesthetic dominant may change through time, leading in turn to a poetic evolution. As Jakobson concludes: In the evolution of poetic form it is not so much a question of the disappearance of certain elements and the emergence of others as it is the question of shifts in the mutual relationship among the diverse components of the system, in other words, a question of the shifting dominants. Within a given complex of poetic norms ... elements which were originally secondary become essential and primary. On the other hand, the elements

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which were originally the dominant ones become subsidiary and optional.3 The Jakobsonian dominant has thus provided a new method for evaluating artistic phenomena. In any historical period, the shifting of the dominant can lead to literary evolutions through which canons change and ‘subsidiary’ cultural forms become ‘essential’ artistic works. This recalls Tynjanov’s concept of ‘literary evolution’ or ‘changeability’.4 He postulated that certain prominent artistic elements could ‘automatize’ over time to give rise to other poetic forms.5 In this process, the originally dominant element transforms into a secondary one. ‘It does not disappear,’ Tynjanov says; ‘[i]ts function simply changes, and it becomes auxiliary’.6 Against this framework, I argue that Iranian culture has changed over time, both by looking back to its past, examining other cultures and philosophies and bringing to the fore elements once considered secondary or peripheral. In this shifting of the dominants, poetry did not disappear, but lost its key role within Persian culture. Instead, post-revolutionary poetics evolved from a literary and written-based poetry into a visually oriented form of moving images. In his article, ‘After a Hundred Years’, Bahram Bayzai argues that the unparalleled success of Iranian cinema in just 100 years – compared to other artistic forms such as poetry, at least 2,000 years old – demonstrates that ‘the language of the image replaces the literary language. The image is the language of the people while the word is the language of the privileged’.7 Considering this, we can assume that the popularity of the image among the masses was a major thrust in mobilizing the shift of dominant in the cultural sphere. Iranian cinema is embedded in national culture; it thus reflects Iranian history, culture and identity, as well as its relations with other cultures, in a relatively uncomplicated language that directly reaches average film-goers. Moreover, Iranian culture itself has very strong ties with Persian poetry, and Iranian readers and viewers are aware of its aesthetics. Poetry was not only the most popular aesthetic form, it was the language of philosophical ideas and sociopolitical commentaries throughout the ages. Iranian art films employ this deeply rooted poetic-ness.

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Beyond the cultural motives that encouraged the popularity of films, there is an economic reason for the shift of the dominant: cinema is the least expensive and most accessible form of mass entertainment, especially of the performing arts, compared to other types such as theatre. It is noteworthy, however, that the other national mass medium that is easily available to Iranians is television. But this is state-funded and fully controlled by the Islamic regime. In the post-revolutionary era, the number of films and TV serials dramatically decreased. Besides, most of the TV programmes were heavily ideological and religiously oriented, with anti-royal, anti-Western and pro-revolutionary sensibilities addressing and glorifying either the revolution or the Iran–Iraq war. As a result, national television in this period did not achieve high ratings. The central literary form before the Islamic revolution was poetry, especially in its modern form of shi’r-i naw or new poetry. In the 1960s, modern poetry refashioned poetic themes and formal stylistics and offered a new poetic form that was socially and aesthetically concerned. In the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s, a new art cinema started taking shape in Iran, partly through employing themes from Persian literature. This later became known as Iranian new wave cinema. The artistic form and thematics of new wave directors created an original body of art-house movies that were internationally acclaimed. This temporarily bright period of Iranian cinema did not last long, however. It was to be interrupted by the cultural and social upheavals of the revolution and, to a lesser degree, by the devastating war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988. Nevertheless, in the pre-revolutionary period the limited number of national art films could not compete with the popular mainstream films and imported Western movies, especially Hollywood productions.8 According to fundamentalist revolutionaries, the Islamic revolution was a massive rejection of the economical and cultural interventions of Western countries, especially the imperialist intrusion of the United States of America in regional affairs. Cinema as a Western import and influence was regarded by the clerics as a corrupt medium whose aim was to undermine Iranian ethics and Islamic principles.

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In fact, cinema had never received clerical approval since the first theatre was established in Iran in the early 1900s. As Hamid Naficy notes, ‘there is a report that in 1904 a major clerical figure, Shiykh Fazlullah Nuri, attended Iran’s first public cinema in Tehran and proscribed it, causing it to shut down after only one month of operation.’9 During the revolution, the destruction of theatres became a symbolic act of protest against the Pahlavi regime and its Western supporters. Sadly, up to 180 cinemas nationwide10 were destroyed. One of the most dramatic incidents was the explosion of Cinema Rex on 10 August 1978 in the city of Abadan, only a few months before the fall of the Shah. More than 300 people trapped behind its locked doors were burned to death. Ironically, the film being shown in Cinema Rex was Masud Kimiyai’s Gavazn-ha (The Deer, 1975), which had clear anti-government sensibilities and had just received screening permission after a three-year ban. Although public consensus at the time blamed government-affiliated forces for the incident, the Shah denied the allegations and Naficy has confirmed that ‘testimonies and documents compiled after the fall of the Shah ... established a clear link between the arsonists and antiShah clerical leaders.’11 Under those circumstances, Iranian cinema, both art-house and commercial films, was inactive. The number of productions, which had steadily increased up to, for instance, 90 films in 1973,12 was disrupted by the social turmoil caused by the revolution. In 1977, only 38 films were produced.13 In 1978, the year of the revolution, this fell to 18.14 When the Islamic government took over, the clerics publicly denounced cinema along with other forms of ‘Western’ entertainment like gambling, drinking and dancing. Because of its enormous influence, cinema was a particular target of revolutionary condemnation. As Naficy points out, in the pre-revolutionary works of Ayatollah Khomeini (Kashf ul-Asrar and Vilayat-i Faghih) that were widely read and quoted before and during the revolution, cinema was regarded as ‘the direct cause of prostitution, corruption and political dependence’.15 Khomeini detested cinema as an undignified form of mass media. Paradoxically, social realist and revolutionary films such as Safar-i Sang (The Journey of Stone, 1978), Dayirih-i Mina (1978),

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Guzarish (Report, 1977) and Marsiyih (Lamentation, 1978) had aroused considerable public feeling in the last year of the Shah’s reign.16 Other forms of mass media had a similar impact on anti-Shah groups. For instance, both Iranian National Television and BBC Persian Radio17 sympathized with the revolutionaries and stirred up opinion against the Shah and his local and international allies. Although Khomeini widely criticized the ‘ill effects’ of cinema, he did not shrink from admitting that cinema and media in general could be exploited to promote Islamic values. In his historic speech immediately after his return to Iran in January 1978, a few days before the victory of the Islamic republic, he softened his views towards cinema and other forms of mass media: We are not opposed to cinema, to radio or to television ... The cinema is a modern invention that ought to be used for the sake of educating the people, but as you know, it was used instead to corrupt our youth. It is the misuse of cinema that we are opposed to, a misuse caused by the treacherous policies of our rulers.18 Thus the Islamic government led by Ayatollah Khomeini employed cinema as an ideological and propagandist tool. It was exploited to advocate their particular form of Islamic culture. After the revolution, in the transitional period between 1978 and 1982, the uncertain political and economic situation and the government’s lack of interest in cinema discouraged local productions. But the rescreening of old movies, with their ‘un-Islamic and anti-Islamic’ parts censored, and the importing of foreign movies, once again drew Iranian audiences to the cinema. Many of the foreign films that filled the market in those years had socialist and revolutionary themes in tune with the revolutionary atmosphere. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) became one of the most beloved films in Iran’s post-revolutionary years. It was simultaneously screened in twelve theatres in Tehran and ten in the provinces.19 After a period of revolutionary turmoil that resulted in the literal destruction of movie houses, followed by a transitional time of uncertainty, Islamist film-makers such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf began to emerge. Moreover, in the early 1980s the Islamic government created

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institutions that reorganized the film industry in accordance with the state’s anti-Western and pro-Islamic policies. These included the Farabi Cinema Foundation (FCF), the Foundation for the Oppressed (Bunyad-i Mustaz’afan) and the Arts Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organization (Huzih Hunari Tablighat-i Islami), and they created a cinema based on morality and religion. Between 1982 and 1989, committed film directors made films like Tubih Nasuh (Nasuh’s Repentance, 1983) and Baykut (Boycott, 1985), which observed Islamic codes of behaviour and advocated the new government’s moral and religious values. During the Iran–Iraq war, a number of government-funded films were made about the war and its social and cultural consequences. The Arts Centre of the Islamic Propaganda Organization and the War Affairs Department of the National Television (IRIB) were two of the main producers. In these films,20 the ‘holy cause for the war’ with Saddam Hussein was promoted with the intention of instilling ‘the culture of sacred defence’ among Iranian youth. These films emphasized action on the front line, but the portrayal of the war and its heroes was often one-dimensional and simplistic, as in Du Chashm-i Bi-Su (Two Blind Eyes, 1983). To encourage local filmmakers, the government established a special film festival, the Holy Defence Festival or Jashnvarih-yi Difa-yi Muqadas, for films about the Iran–Iraq war. Through sponsoring productions and organizing some TV programmes, the Islamic state sought to manipulate the image of revolution and war. Increasingly, the government began to monopolize power and to destroy opposition groups such as the Tudih party, Mujahidin-i Khalq and Fada’iyan which had participated in overthrowing the Shah. It exerted control over social and cultural life, imposing restrictions on behaviour and enforcing a coherent Islamic culture intended to obliterate social, cultural and ethnic differences. By this time the number of supporters of the Islamic state was decreasing markedly. By the end of 1980s the regime had lost its charismatic legitimacy. In response, the government sought to strengthen its control over cultural products in order to ‘produce’ a desirable image of the Islamic state and its ideal committed young hero. Almost no foreign films were screened at this time and local productions were heavily censored.21

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The war with Iraq lasted eight years. Many Islamist young people, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who had contributed to the revolution and the war were disappointed by their social consequences.22 A number of directors who had been involved in creating the image of an Islamic Iran as the embodiment of an Islamic utopia started to criticize both the revolution and the war. Films such as Makhmalbaf’s Arusi-yi Khuban (Marriage of the Blessed, 1988) and Ibrahim Hatami-kia’s Az Karkhih ta Rhein (From Karkhih to Rhein, 1993) deal with committed young soldiers who feel betrayed and disillusioned by the outcome of the war. The ideals of martyrdom and the sacredness of the war were no longer accentuated. Furthermore, the main emphasis shifted from action on the front lines to the impact of the war on urban and rural areas. Films made during this time presented a more sophisticated image of the cultural and psychological effects of the war on Iranians. By the late 1980s, Iranian cinema had regained its position as a form of cultural expression. Many new wave directors, like Darush Mehrjui and Abbas Kiarostami, started making films again. Filmmakers such as Bayzai and Kiarostami drew on the formal and thematic elements of Persian literature and the conventions of performing arts to create an Iranian art cinema. The increasing number of production companies and institutions supporting artistic productions had a positive effect on this. For instance, a special production company, Sima Film, in IRIB, started producing both popular and art films. Several film-makers like Abulfazl Jalili began making films under Sima’s auspices.23 Another institution, Cinema-yi Tajrubi (Experimental Cinema) was founded in 1983, the same year that FCF was established, to encourage and support young film-makers in their first films. In the private sector, the number of production companies grew to 60 in the 1990s.24 In this period, the more experienced institutions such as the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun-i Parvarish-i Fikri-yi Kudakan va Nujavanan), as well as new foundations like FCF and the Arts Centre for Islamic Propaganda, sponsored and produced art films. Many of the directors who started their careers before the revolution in Kanun, such as Bayzai and Kiarostami, became leading auteurs in the post-revolutionary era.

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The films of these two new wave directors contributed most to the change of the cultural dominant. Abbas Kiarostami is probably the best-known Iranian director on the international scene, and has been praised by directors as distinguished as Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa. He was born in 1940 in Tehran and studied painting at the University of Tehran. During the 1960s he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. He made the innovative credit title of Masud Kimiyai’s Qaysar (1969), which caught the attention of critics at the time. In the same year he helped to set up the film-making division of Kanun, where he made his first film, Nan va Kuchih (Bread and Alley) in 1970. This neorealist narrative brought Kiarostami to national and international attention. Since then he has made more than 20 films, including feature films, documentaries and educational shorts. Kiarostami’s work is deceptively simple in plot and philosophically thought-provoking on the level of thematics. He has also written screenplays for other directors, such as Jafar Panahi and Bahman Qubadi. In the late 1980s, Western festivals started showing his films. The first one that was widely acclaimed was Khanih-yi Dust Kujast? (Where Is the Friend’s House?, 1987). In 1997 he was the first Iranian director to win the Palme d’Or, for his Ta’im-i Gilas (Taste of Cherry, 1997). Bahram Bayzai’s films are among the most popular art films in Iran, despite a highly metaphorical language that makes them difficult to understand. Bayzai was born in 1938 in Tehran. He was a professor at the University of Tehran until the Islamic revolution interrupted his career, and is a scholar of the performing arts and a playwright as well as a film-maker. He has undoubtedly refashioned Iranian visual arts and re-mythologized the culture. Bayzai’s interpretation of myth is a ‘modern’ response to the question of self and identity. He has founded a cinematic tradition that clearly expresses his cultural and historical concerns by using the conventions of visual arts. He also rediscovered ta’zyih (Iranian passion plays) as the most important form of traditional Iranian visual arts and used them to convey contemporary issues in Iranian society. His films are dramatic and theatrical, and he uses a highly polished language.

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This book is an attempt to represent the poetics of the dominant cultural form of expression in post-revolutionary Iranian culture. This visual culture put an end to ‘a time-honoured aesthetics of permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty’, in Darush Ashuri’s words; the main artistic form of expression has shifted to embrace ‘an aesthetics of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty’.25

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CHAPTER 1 CINEMA AS ART: A POETIC INTERPRETATION

The Iranian film industry went through a transformation after the 1978–79 Islamic revolution. In the late 1980s, emerging from a period of dormancy, Iranian cinema re-established itself as an art form and revisited Persian literature, especially poetry, for inspiration. As a form of artistic cultural expression representing a nation’s voice, Iranian cinema chose a separate path from that of the government. The role of investors in the film industry – production companies and various institutions – was significant, paving the way for a liberal and rather independent art-house cinema in Iran. In addition, we should not underestimate the impact of the international (mainly European) market, which was ready to invest in the production and distribution of certain genres of Iranian film. Even though the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) did not relax its censorship rules in the 1990s,1 art cinema became a substitute for the ideological cinema that the state failed to maintain, and its emergence in the late 1980s refashioned Iran’s film industry. The originality of art-film aesthetics was widely perceived both in Iran and internationally,2 partly through the production and distributing strategies of companies such as the Farabi Cinema Foundation (FCF). The new art films took an essentially humanistic approach and sidestepped the (political) religiosity promoted by the government. In addition, art cinema portrayed a cultural and ethnic diversity that was at odds with the fixed, homogeneous and ideologically

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driven culture of state-sponsored films. In Bashu: Gharibih-yi Kuchak (Bashu: The Little Stranger, 1986), for instance, Bayzai’s characters come from diverse areas such as northern and southern Iran. The war-damaged southern child (Bashu) who seeks refuge in a northern farm speaks Arabic, while the female farmer and her children speak in Gilaki. In this juxtaposition of linguistic and ethnic differences, Bayzai problematizes ‘the myth of a linguistically, racially, and culturally unified Iran’, as Nasrin Rahimieh observes.3 Rahimieh concludes that the ‘Iran posited in Bashu: The Little Stranger is anything but uniform. It is a country incapable of facing its fear of the other within.’4 This depiction of cultural and social heterogeneity, as well as the renegotiation of gender and power, are not exclusive to Bayzai. The same issues are highlighted in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbih (1997)

Figure 1 Gilaki farmer, Na’i, overcomes ethnic and linguistic barriers in adopting the homeless Arab boy, Bashu.

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and Tahmineh Milani’s Du Zan (Two Women, 1998). Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry enhances ethnic and social heterogeneity by on-location shooting and the use of non-professional actors, reflecting everyday life with its multifaceted questions. The representation of social and cultural diversity distinguishes post-revolutionary art cinema both from the early productions of committed young revolutionaries and from most of the pre-revolutionary cinematic productions. This crucial aspect – which has been both nationally and internationally acclaimed – demonstrated that the art-house films were not prepared to sustain the state’s projected monologues. What happened in these films recalls Susan Hayward’s definition of ‘cinema’: Cinema is not a pure product. It is inherently a hybrid of many cultures, be they economic, discursive, ethnic, sexed and more. It exists as a cultural miscegenation, a deeply uncertain product, therefore, as to its heritage – patrimoine, as the French put it, makes the point more clearly. Who and where is the father? While it may matter to hegemony, it does not to cinema in and of itself. For it is a production whose reproducers are wide and scattered and not one – not a single maternal body, nor a lone paternal one. Nor is it solely the offspring of maternal and paternal discourses. Its moreness, its hybridity challenges the deadliness of paternal ... binary thought.5 If we accept Hayward’s creative cultural hybrid as a universal definition of cinema, we can understand why the Iranian government failed to produce a state-directed cinema and culture, since its vision was the hegemonic and homogeneous one of a totalitarian power. Yet the Iranian film industry has still produced more statesponsored films than many other national cinemas. The partial nationalization of production and exhibition and government censorship encouraged directors to make films in line with the state’s Islamic sensibilities. The question that arises is why the state film industry failed? Why did Iranian cinema not become totalitarian in style, like the Soviet cinema that produced mostly mediocre semipropagandist films?6 It seems that although the particular context in

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which Iranian film-making expanded led to the production of many state-compliant films, at the same time directors ultimately managed to produce more apolitical art films than propagandist ones. Before the revolution, Iran was developing a tradition of art film production. Although many artists and writers chose exile after the Islamists took over, most of the new wave directors remained in Iran. It was almost impossible for the government to destroy or ignore this artistic force that was determined to stay and to continue creative activities. However, many of the films made by these directors in the first few years after the revolution were banned, such as Bayzai’s Chirikih-yi Tara (The Ballad of Tara, 1978) and Marg-i Yazd-gird (The Death of Yazd-Gird, 1983). Nevertheless, these directors, who were now joined by a younger generation of film-makers, did not give up. Instead, they tried to infuse their films with enigmatic and allegorical sensibilities that would evade censorship. In addition, national exhibiting institutes such as FCF realized that these art films could be a profitable source of revenue internationally. Their attempts to find a global market for them were in tune with the government policy of trying to soften the image of the Islamic state. The government regarded many of the art productions, which were targeted at international festivals and commercial arenas, as politically neutral. This assumption was partly because most of the post-revolutionary art films do not directly criticize social problems. Many of them chose romantic, rural landscape settings. Therefore, urban problems such as the government’s struggle with the hijab (female head-covering) and with the influence of Western culture were not represented. Hence, art cinema managed to survive and develop as a major artistic form. Through the emergence of art-house style, Iranian cinema resumed its natural growth towards a heterogeneous body of work. Thus, the advent of a refashioned art cinema was not only a crucial artistic innovation, but also marked a culturally significant movement. It diverged from the state-oriented, Islamist culture to create a national, heterogeneous art cinema that in many instances dealt with both national and transnational issues. After the revolution, cinema became the most popular form of entertainment and a major site of social and artistic commentary. As a result, it changed the main cultural form of expression to a

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visual-oriented medium where the viewer could imagine an alternative national domain. The major subject matter of these films was humanist issues and representing the essence of life, which had nothing in common with an ‘art’ form that propagated politics. At this point, the state and the cinema, as a form of national art, began to go their separate ways. Iranian poetic cinema created an autonomous artistic domain that was disconnected from the monologic political agenda. If we consider the political domain as the actual or material or an outer sphere of influence, this alternative artistic domain functions as the imaginative and imagistic inner sphere. Interestingly, the dominant artistic form as the inner dominion and its relation to an outer reality is similar to traditional Persian residential architecture, with its two separate quarters of biruni (the external) and andaruni (the internal). The inside, or andaruni, is the most private, intimate area of any architectural space; the domestic space reserved for insiders. It is where family members are most relaxed and able to behave most unguardedly. The external, or biruni, is by contrast a public space. The biruni quarter was designed for social activities – mostly of the man of the house. Formal visitors and those individuals who were not welcomed into the family quarter were entertained in this external area. The biruni normally had a reception hall, which was designed specifically for guests and visitors. A courtyard usually separated these two quarters. These central motifs of biruni and andaruni in Iranian architecture are also socially and culturally relevant themes in a mixed society whose very existence is based on the notion of otherness. The biruni life is the social life of individuals, where people should observe accepted social codes of behaviour. By contrast, the andaruni life is the spiritual life, which can be imaginative, liberating and entertaining. While the social and political realities of Iranian society after the revolutionary upheavals and a bloody war left little for its citizens to dream about and yearn for, audiences found a refuge in images on the screen. It was not the image per se that brought spiritual liberation, but the power of image in activating imagination and dreaming that created an intimate andaruni inner zone, liberating the viewer to visualize and imagine in a different way.

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Cinema provided an inner space of representation both for local and diaspora audiences. It is a free zone based on imagination and art, and implies a fragmented perception. The artistic and apolitical inner zone of culture, in its Iranian context, resists a shallow homogenization of the nation. The interplay of imagination and perception in art cinema revealed these andaruni and biruni cultural spaces that portrayed cultural fragmentation, difference and otherness. The concerns of the film directors who transfigured the inner zone of culture were essentially elitist, and their imaginings of national art were profoundly different from the religious fundamentalist aspirations that defined the outer zone of Iranian culture. This inner space was also heavily influenced by Persian literature. Persian Literature in Iranian Films The relationship between cinema and literature in Iran was established when narrative cinema began in the 1930s. The country’s first feature films were made by directors Abdul-Hussein Sipanta and Ardishir Irani, who adapted some familiar themes of classical poetry and literature to the new artistic medium.7 In Iran’s first sound film, Dukhtar-i Lur (The Lur Girl, 1933), Irani employed familiar codes of the love story as found in Persian poems like the narrative romances of Shahnamih. The following year Sipanta made Firdawsi, an aesthetic narrative about the life and times of the revered national poet. In terms of audience, bringing Persian literary themes into the Iranian cinematic space was a smart practice. Sipanta’s use of classical Persian poetic themes, for example, made his films appealing to Iranian audiences and even to Indian viewers, who were familiar with Persian literature.8 He continued to exploit ornate literary discourses in films like Shirin and Farhad (1934) and Layli and Majnun (1937), which were cinematic adaptations of the twelfth-century NizamiGanjavi’s famous manzumihs or verse stories of the same titles. The popularity of these stories promised lucrative returns. Furthermore, relating the old, exalted Persian literature to the new medium elevated cinema into a highbrow artistic mode of expression. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Iranian cinema strengthened its relationship with literature. The outcome was a new movement in

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the film industry that came to be known as new wave cinema. By the time national cinema became an established art form, the linkage of art films with literature had become a fundamental characteristic. Coincidently, both poetry – called modern poetry, in its new form – and cinema flourished in Iran during these years, so that at a time when Persian poetry was in its prime, the Iranian film industry began its journey toward maturity. In the 1920s, a young poet and writer, Ali Isfandyari, who chose Nima Yushij as his nom de plume and became popular in Iran, transformed the conventions of Persian poetry. His style was innovative in form and content, and attempted to dismantle the ‘time-honored but paralyzing rules of rhyme, rhythm and the other percepts of poesy.’9 In Nima’s poems, classical thematics, such as repeated images of a universal ‘beloved’ and strict adherence to the old metres and rhymes, are replaced by a novel language with realist and modern social themes. When he published his second volume of poetry, Afsanih (The Legend), Nima introduced new possibilities to Persian poetic discourse. His innovative language and romantic images reflected the aspirations of modern man – a socio-politically conscious poetic self who is thoroughly in tune with nature, but disgusted with the chaotic state of urban life and societal affairs. The publication of Afsanih was a revolutionary act in Persian poetry, but its impact went far beyond the literary sphere and opened up new horizons in other forms of artistic expression in Iran. For almost 500 years (from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries) Persian poetry had been defined by conventions, precepts and rules that gradually brought this prodigious poetic tradition to near stagnation. ‘Whereas Persian poets of Medieval Persia such as Firdawsi, Khayyam, Sa’di, Rumi, and Hafiz had penetrated new spheres with the thrust of their imagination, their descendants, during the general cultural decline that followed, sought merely to imitate them.’10 In linguistic form, the obsolete and artificial language of so-called classical poetry was an imitation of the Persian used in medieval times and had few affinities with the modern language. As a result, its poetic form was difficult for ordinary people to understand. It was against this background that Nima’s resilient and ground-breaking voice emerged to usher in a new era in Persian poetry.

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The poetic discourse that Nima crafted in the 1920s, which became known as shi’r-i naw or new poetry, was taken up by other poets such as Ahmad Shamlu, Nadir Nadirpur and Mihdi Akhavan-Salis in the early 1950s. ‘These pioneers of contemporary Persian poetry have succeeded in freeing themselves from the confines of predetermined rhyme and rhythm schemes and traditional “poetic” language,’ says Amin Banani.11 The new canon appeared to portray the realities of a feverish society through a powerful and innovative language. Persian poetry, always considered the country’s most exalted art form, thus began its golden period in the modern era, regaining its status as the ‘dominant’ form of artistic expression. In the 1960s, when new wave directors turned their gaze onto social issues and were drawing on the conventions of Persian literature and visual arts, the new poetry was already in full bloom. The ‘children’ of Nima were now major voices in all artistic venues, in tune with the cultural modernity that was gradually shaping modern Iranian subjectivity. Their poetic tradition affected Iranian cinema in the same decade and in years to come. Later, the literary and poetic sensibilities of the new wave directors resurfaced in postrevolutionary films. Crucial changes took place both in fiction and documentary films made by Iranian film-makers and cultural activists in the 1960s, inspired by literature and the dramatic arts. The impact of literature on cinema was mostly through a few poets and writers such as Forough Farrukhzad and Ibrahim Gulistan who were also film-makers. Their involvement stimulated a marriage of literature and film, the two major forms of cultural expression. Farrukhzad’s Khanih Siyah Ast (The House Is Black, 1962) marked a new departure in Iranian cinema in how she used her poetic vision to make a ‘poetic documentary’ about leprosy. Equally important was Farrukh Ghafari’s Shab-i Ghuzi (The Night of the Hunchback, 1964), a modern adaptation of a Thousand and One Nights. In this film, Ghafari, who had already made a few documentaries and a banned feature entitled Junub-i Shahr (Down Town, 1958), ‘freed the feature film from the dominance of machismo values of the melodramatic Kulah Makhmali genre’.12 According to many critics, however, including Hamid Dabashi, modern Iranian art cinema begins with Gav (The Cow, 1969), the

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product of a close collaboration between playwright Ghulam-Hussein Sa’idi and prominent director Darush Mehrjui. The emphasis on this film’s importance reflects The Cow’s greater impact on the national and international cultural scenes at the time. Dabashi asserts that ‘Mehrjui achieved for Iranian cinema what no one before him had been able to do: give it character and direction, articulate its potential, and bring it to global attention’.13 In the following years Iranian cinema, enriched by the cinematic works of directors like Mehrjui, Farrukhzad and Ghafari, established its position as the dominant artistic form of expression in Iran. The rise of directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, among others, further transformed film-making during this period. Modernity and change were partly experienced through the poetic transformations that took place during the constitutional revolution14 and through the rise of new poetry. The next phase was a marriage of poetry with cinema, through which the concepts of modernity and change were to become more localized and better integrated into popular culture. This newly incorporated poetic cinema borrowed the realism, symbolism and radical humanism embedded in Iranian culture and Persian literature. Although the influence of Italian neorealism and French poetic realist stylistics on Iranian directors was evident, their cinema was distinctively Iranian in its literary background. By the mid-1970s, through such films as The House is Black, The Cow, Ragbar (Thunder Shower, 1971), Shazdih Ihtijab (Prince Ihtijab, 1974) and The Deer, Iranian cinema was already demonstrating the invigoration of this literary influence. The Iranian film-makers who adapted Persian literature to national cinema were internationally acclaimed, and established a cinema that would be recognized in the years to come as a new art form alongside poetry, theatre and the novel. They failed to reach a mass audience, however. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, young, committed Islamist film-makers tried to establish an Islamicized cinema to promote revolutionary ideologies, while enjoying governmental support from institutions such as the Mustaz’afan Foundation and the Ministry of Jihad for Reconstruction. Art cinema was dormant between 1978 and the mid-1980s, but by the late 1980s, experienced film-makers such as Kiarostami, along with

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newcomers like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, integrated the conventions of pre-revolutionary new wave stylistics with new sensibilities. This revived cinema, inspired by Persian literature, transformed filmmaking into a global artistic mode. During the 1980s and 1990s the impact of Iranian cinema on the collective culture grew significantly, recalling the popularity of new poetry in the 1950s to 1970s. However, as Dabashi indicates, two factors made Iranian cinema ‘far more important in the range and endurance of its effects. First, its reception by millions of Iranians inside and outside the country (an audience that modernist poetry could never boast of), and, second, crucially, its celebration by a global audience, an achievement inherently barred to Persian poetry because of the language barrier.’15 The Role of Kanun While Mehrjui and a few other art film-makers were enjoying a global celebration of their movies in the 1960s, Kiarostami was initiating a new dialogue between the traditions of Persian poetry and the revived art of cinema. Unlike Mehrjui or Farmanara, who engaged with drama and the novel as their main frames of reference, Kiarostami turned to poetry for inspiration. ‘The essence of Persian culture,’ says Reza Baraheni, ‘could be found in its poetry.’16 Poetry was not merely the most important art form in Iran; it was and still is deeply rooted in the Iranian mind, to the point where Iranians – even many who are illiterate – know the poems of Hafiz, Omar Khayyam and Rumi by heart and use poetic expressions in everyday speech. Iranian culture and the Persian language are enriched by a literature that has existed for thousands of years and is alive with metaphors, allegories and symbols. Moreover, post-Islamic Iranian philosophy was closely associated with Sufism, which is infused with the abstract and metaphoric language of Persian poetry, as the works of classical poets like Attar, Rumi and Hafiz attest. Indeed, poetry was one of the most significant vehicles for Islamic mysticism in Iran. Kiarostami’s cinematic sensibilities set the aesthetics of classical Persian poetry into a cinematic language that ripened in his

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film-making. It is true that he was not the first auteur who drew on literature, but what distinguishes his work is the profound formal and philosophical connections that he forged with Persian poetry. This is not based on adapting a much-loved literary classic or paying homage to a great masterpiece. Kiarostami’s stylistics translates from one medium to another through a liberating act of thematic and formal recovery. His film-making is an aesthetic practice in its own right, but is influenced by Persian poetry. The national – and to some extent international – shift of attention towards Iranian cinema in the post-revolutionary period proved to be a paradigm shift from a culture based on poetry to a predominantly visual culture with poetic sensibilities. A significant formative factor in Kiarostami’s intellectual career was the film division in the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, known in Iran as Kanun-i Parvarish-i Fikri-yi Kudakan va Nujavanan. The film division was founded in 1969 under the supervision of Kiarostami and Firuz Shirvanlu. The Institute or Kanun was a government-sponsored organization set up by Layli Jahanara, a close friend of Farah Diba, former Queen of Iran. The founding of Kanun was part of the Pahlavis’ general policy to ‘inform Iranian children and youth with the current cultural and artistic phenomena of human civilizations’.17 From another perspective, Kanun was established to engage both intellectuals and youth in politically harmless activities.18 It was committed to high-quality artistic productions and recruited prominent writers, poets and filmmakers, taking into account that the most renowned artists of the time had leftist leanings. Kanun therefore became a hub for Iranian intellectuals ranging from Ahmad Shamlu and Samad Bihrangi, who wrote children’s stories and songs, to Bayzai and Kiarostami, who made films for children. Kanun’s film division had an enormous influence on shaping Iranian alternative cinema as a completely separate genre from the mainstream filmfarsi,19 or commercial low-quality films. It played a seminal role not only in Kiarostami’s career, but in the formation of national art cinema as a whole. In the three decades before the Iranian revolution in 1978–79, the production and public screening of high-quality but unprofitable films such as The Cow and Farrukh

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Gaffari’s Downtown were rare exceptions, primarily because of boxoffice pressures, compared to the large number of filmfarsi movies produced each year. Mainstream cinema in Iran at that time either followed Samuel Khachikiyan’s thriller movie sensibilities or the noble-poor-boy’ssuccess-story formula represented in Ganj-i Qarun (Qarun’s Treasure, 1965). This latter formula became astonishingly successful at the box office, until the Islamic revolution shook Iranian culture to its core. The thrillers were made by producers such as Mihdi Misaqyih in Misaqyih Studios and Joseph Va’izian in Azhir Film Studios, both of whom employed Khachikiyan as one of their main directors. Khachikiyan’s Faryad-i Nimih Shab (Midnight Scream, 1961) and Yik Qadam ta Marg (One Step to Death, 1961) provided a lucrative formula for commercial films.20 His innovative editing, camera movement and use of German Expressionist sensibilities in mise-en-scène with high-contrast lighting were the formal reasons for his success. The mingling of suspense with a melodramatic story and employing popular actors such as Muhammad-Ali Fardin (in Midnight Scream) increased popular appeal. After these two films were screened, making thrillers became common in Iran. Of 27 films made in 1962, half were suspense and thriller movies.21 Dilhurih (Anxiety, 1962) and Suda-garan-i Marg (The Traders of Death, 1962) are two examples that received rather favourable critical reviews.22 Although the genre was quite popular in the early 1960s, Khachikiyan’s sensibilities were channelled into B-movie productions with recurring zoom shots, exaggerated lighting and irritating music selections. The years 1964 and 1965 were decisive in the history of Iranian commercial cinema. With his Aqa-yi Qarn-i Bistum (Mr Twentieth Century, 1964) and Qarun’s Treasure, Siyamak Yasami made the most profitable films in Iranian cinema up till then. It is noteworthy that in the same years two artistic films were also made. Gaffari’s The Night of the Hunchback and Ibrahim Gulistan’s first fiction film, Khisht va Ayinih (Brick and Mirror, 1965), won national and global acclaim but did not flourish at the box office. By contrast, Yasami’s cinematic formula, later known as filmfarsi, proved to be a money-spinner. In fact, it was so successful that thriller movies were soon forgotten in

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the nation’s commercial film industry. In filmfarsi, the misery and poverty of the masses were set aside in favour of portraying Iran’s dream life. This narrative approach was combined with action scenes and Persian dance sequences, usually in a café or bar, to increase the appeal. To promote their films, filmfarsi directors used charismatic lead actors and actresses such as Fardin and Foruzan or Gugush and Sa’id Kangarani, who played romantic couples in many films in the 1960s and early 1970s. In this way filmfarsi satisfied the audience demand for escapist and light entertainment movies. The new genre attracted more film-goers, and the number of productions rose from around 40 movies per year to 80 in 1966.23 The making of escapist films in the pre-revolutionary years was not exclusive to popular directors like Yasami, who were known for their commercial Abgushti films.24 Box-office pressure led directors such as Masud Kimiyai – who proved his cinematic skills in Qaysar (1969) – to entertain viewers who preferred filmfarsi with films like Riza Muturi (Riza, the Cyclist, 1970) and Baluch (1972). At the same time, producers and film-makers who refused to bow to market imperatives suffered financial crises. For instance, after Bayzai’s Thunder Shower failed at the box office in 1971, its producer, Barbad Taheri, was jailed when he was unable to repay the debt.25 Other film-makers, including Gaffari and Ibrahim Gulistan who were involved in making art-house films, were supported by certain institutions. Gaffari was encouraged to make art films and was sponsored by the Ministry of Art and Culture under the direction of Mihrdad Pahlbud, the Shah’s brother-in-law. Gulistan, a former reporter and cinéma vérité film-maker for NBC and CBS in Iran, found support under the auspices of the Ministry of Petroleum in oil-rich Abadan to make documentary films in the 1950s. His expensive documentaries turned out to be prize-winning poetic interpretations of life and industry in southern Iran.26 Later on he founded his own studios in Darrous, Tehran. He employed experienced technical staff like Mahmud Hangval and Suliyman Minasiyan and renowned poets and writers such as Mihdi Akhavan-Salis, Forough Farrukhzad, Najaf Darya-Bandari and Karim Emami to make a number of outstanding films during the 1960s. Other art film-makers had to convince a producer to invest in their productions.

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Against this background, Kanun’s film division created new opportunities for art film-makers unable to find financial backers. Kanun productions had intellectual objectives and, paradoxically, many of them were not comprehensible to younger audiences or even to the average adult film-goer. Nevertheless, the films made here showed artistic representations of Iranian life through fiction movies, documentaries and animations. While a number of Kanun’s productions, such as the animated film Aqa-yi Hayula (Mr Monster, 1970) by Farshid Misqali, could be interpreted as politically charged, Kiarostami’s films expressed universal humanist concerns. His projects were financially secure and he was not forced to meet commercial demands. In the absence of box-office pressures, he focused his artistic gaze on representing a poetic approach to life through his re-reading of reality, which showed the world as a far more meaningful place. His inspiration was primarily the rich legacy of Persian classical and modern poetry. Discovering Bread and Alley As Peter Wollen states, ‘Cinema is not simply a new art; it is also an art which combines and incorporates others, which operates on different sensory bands, different channels, using different codes and modes of expression.’27 In the case of Iranian art cinema, the combination of poetry with cinema has been one of the most fruitful dynamics. Kiarostami’s pre-revolutionary Kanun short films created this unique union, which was to define the art-house cinema of the 1990s. It was also represented in the works of film-makers such as Bahman Qubadi and Ja’far Panahi, who followed Kiarostami’s stylistics. Kiarostami’s poetic approach was already evident in his first film, Bread and Alley. The plot is very simple. A boy who has just bought a fresh loaf of bread is heading home when a stray dog approaches him. He gets frightened and follows a grown-up who leads him in unfamiliar directions. Then he tries giving the dog a piece of bread and going home. When he gets home his sister does not let the dog in, and in the last sequence we see the dog in the street, probably waiting for another passer-by. In this film, ‘the uncredited musical

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accompaniment – a cheerful jazz version of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’ a tune on the Beatles White Album – sets the [happy] mood precisely.’28 In his first film-making experience, Kiarostami is faced with the challenge of working with children and animals, the most difficult type of actors, but the end result is a poetic short film with an ‘almost unnoticeable’ ‘moral’ lesson.29 The camera work, editing and impressive performances prove the director’s formal abilities. Bread and Alley was recognized as a significant film when it was first screened. Kanun showed three animations and four shorts, including Bread and Alley, in a number of international film festivals that year. Among all the films, Bread and Alley was the most celebrated.30 With its humanistic approach to life, the film projected the world of children, and marked the beginning of a new aesthetics that was to produce the best of Iranian cinema. Kiarostami continued to make shorts for Kanun, using children and youth in films like Musafir (The Traveller, 1972), Zang-i Tafrih (Recess, 1973) and Du Rah-i Hal Barayi Yik Mas’alih (Two Solutions for One Problem, 1975). In Guzarish (Report, 1977), however, he was more concerned with Iran’s current social and political issues. At the same time, Report is a film with autobiographical elements – more so than in any of Kiarostami’s later works. These are the issues he did not explore in the post-revolutionary films, which engaged instead with universal aspects of life. In his interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kiarostami talks about this change in his film-making aesthetics: If you’re interested in what happened between Report and my more recent films, for me it’s that I changed my mind about life. I am not inside my home as much as before; I don’t have the same problems; I worked with children, so I am much closer to children now, and I am much closer to nature and landscapes. I wasn’t a photographer then, but I am a photographer now.31 Depicting the world of children, alien to adults’ eyes, as well as representing nature and landscape, become hallmarks of Kiarostami’s later work. In films such as Bi Tartib ya Biduu Tartib (Orderly or Disorderly, 1981) and Avali-ha (First Graders, 1984), he visualizes a profound and poetic reading of life in a minimalist fashion.

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema

While the whole country was undergoing a revolution that would change the social and political equilibrium of the Middle East and to some extent of the world, Kiarostami transformed Iranian and world cinema through his global concerns. He abandoned his local and self-centred interests to seek broader perspectives that redefined the concept of film-making. What makes his style controversial is partly his specific concern for formal structure in his films, which resemble poetry. As Wollen stated: any criticism necessarily depends upon knowing what the text means, being able to read it. Unless we understand the code or the mode of expression which permits meaning to exist in the cinema, we are condemned to massive imprecision and nebulosity in film criticism, an unfolded reliance on intuition and momentary impressions.32 Seventy years ago Russian formalist critics insisted on studying not only literature, but also the ‘literariness’ of different cultural expressions. This is still valid. A close reading of Kiarostami’s films and their relation to Persian classical poetry confirms that the ‘literariness’ or ‘poeticity’ of his oeuvre resembles the classical poetic sub-genre of ghazal both in formal structure and context. This strong relation between film and poetry reflects distinctive features of Iranian culture that both unify and verify different cultural modes.

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CHAPTER 2 KIAROSTAMI AND THE AESTHETICS OF GHAZAL

Among forms of classical Persian poetry, Abbas Kiarostami’s filmmaking is closest to ghazal, a sub-genre of lyrical poetry found in the poems of Hafiz – Khajih Shams-i din Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi, the medieval poet and philosopher. Hafiz used the poetic form of ghazal to articulate his philosophy. The similarities are found both on the philosophical and poetic levels. Hafiz’s lyrical poetry is related to the particular kind of poetic cinema known as Cinema-yi Taghazzuli (roughly translated as ‘lyrical cinema’), which is reflected in Kiarostami’s aesthetics. At the same time, Kiarostami’s non-narrative cinema and especially the formal poetic structure of his films is influenced by the ‘spatial’ poetic discourse in Hafiz’s poems. The importance of form in understanding film content is emphasized by André Bazin: Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content. Art for art’s sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere, probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter demands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.1 Hafiz of Shiraz was and still is the most influential poet in the Persian-speaking world. He was born in 1325/26 or 727/28 After

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Hijrah (AH) in Shiraz, in south-central Iran. He memorized the Qur’an by listening to his father’s recitations – the name Hafiz means one who has memorized the Qur’an. He also memorized many of the works of his hero, the poet Sa’di (d. 1292), as well as those of Attar (d. 1220), Rumi (d. 1273) and Nizami (d. 1209). While still in his early 20s, Hafiz was patronized by Abu Ishaq Inju (1341–53), who held undisputed control of Fars. At this time the city was enjoying relative prosperity after a period of anarchy and economic hardship under Mongol rulers. When Hafiz was 33, the Muzafaris (Amir Mubariz-u-din Muhammad Muzafar, ruler of Persia from 1353–57/754–59) invaded his home town. Later, when he fell out of favour with Shah Shuja’ Muzafari, he had to flee to Isfihan. At the age of 52, at Shah Shuja’s invitation, Hafiz returned to Shiraz from exile. Between 1358 and 1368 he was reinstated to his post at the college, where he taught theology and wrote commentaries on religious classics. In the late 1380s, Shah Mansur-i Muzaffari became his patron. A lifelong resident of the city of wine, roses and nightingales, Hafiz gained much fame and influence in Shiraz. When he died at the age of 69, he had composed some 500 ghazals, 42 rubaiyees and a few qasidihs (lyrical poems) over a period of 50 years. He only wrote when he was divinely inspired, and averaged about ten ghazals per year. His focus was on writing poetry worthy of the Beloved.2 During his lifetime Hafiz was famous beyond Shiraz – eastward to India and westward to other areas of Islamic dominion. In the last three centuries of greater confluence between East and West he became recognized as a world-class poet and is read in many languages. Goethe, for instance, composed his West-östlicher Divan in emulation of the Divan of Hafiz. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hafiz ranks with Shakespeare. John Payne, who translated him into English, ranked him alongside Shakespeare and Dante.3 While not everyone may agree, Hafiz is nonetheless distinguished as the sultan of ghazal and Lisan al-Ghyib (Tongue of the Hidden), or the Sufi poet who reveals the hidden truth, among a nation famous for its poetic tradition. His poems and poetic mysticism have had an enormous impact on Persian culture

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and literature and still live in the Iranian mind. As Wheeler Thackston says: [i]f Sa’di’s Gulistan has been read by more people, and Mawlavi’s Mathnavi has been called the Koran in Persian, no book has been so reverenced, no poet so celebrated, and no verse so cherished as Hafiz’s ghazals ... Hafiz sang a rare blend of human and mystic love so balanced, proportioned and contrived with artful ease that it is impossible to separate the one from the other; and rhetorical artifice is so delicately woven into the fabric of wisdom and mysticism that it imparts the vivacity and freshness to ideas that, in and of themselves, may not have been new or original with Hafiz.4 The secret of Hafiz’s eternal appeal may be that among all other Iranian mystical poets of the classical epoch, few extended religious mysticism (Irfan-i Zahidanih) to embrace a more playful, courageous and questioning version called poetic mysticism (Irfan-i Rindanih), which originated in the school of Khurasani Sufism. In this school, poets and thinkers eschewed rational thought and logic in favour of a non-rational and poetic interpretation of the story of Genesis in particular, and of life in general.5 Other poets versified the same concepts that culminated in Hafiz’s poetry, but lacked the magic of his poetic style. Hafiz was not the founder of the ghazal genre or of the philosophical doctrine of Sufism that he followed. The themes he focused on already existed in Persian poetic and philosophical traditions and are found in the poetry of Sa’di, whose ghazals greatly influenced Hafiz. As Darush Ashuri has noted, Hafiz’s mystical interpretation of life and religion was borrowed from Mirsad ul-ibad and Kashf ul-Asrar, which were in turn mystical interpretations of the Qur’an.6 In creating his own particular ghazal, Hafiz conveys meaning through an exalted lyrical form that was innovative in its ambiguous and imaginary language. Hafiz’s poetry is mostly famous for his sublime use of lyrical language. It is the magic of his words, or what modern linguists would call ‘stylistic elements’, that make reading his poetry a unique

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experience for Iranians. Thus it is partly the formal aspect of Hafiz’s poetry that made his Divan the most celebrated literary text in Iran, and changed ghazal both on structural and contextual levels. An equal passion for form is found in Kiarostami’s film grammar. Despite other Persian poetic genres in lyrical mode (such as qasidih)7 and in narrative poetry (such as mathnavi,8 himasih9 and manzumih10), Hafiz’s ghazals are non-narrative and non-linear.11 However, this is not true for ghazal as a lyrical mode. Generally speaking, ghazal is a mono-rhyme poem whose subject is love. It has seven to fifteen lines, in which the first two hemistichs and the second hemistich in each following line rhyme. In terms of poetic form, ghazal resembles qasidih. The main difference between these two lyrical modes is that qasidih is considered ‘public’ poetry while ghazal is ‘private’ poetry,12 and towards the last line of a ghazal the poet mentions his or her name. Ghazal began to flourish in the twelfth century, representing both mystical and secular love thematics. These two different paths overlap frequently and the result is a deliberate ambiguity. Other factors enhance the sense of ambiguity. For instance, the gender of the beloved is mostly ambiguous since Persian language does not formally distinguish gender. The sexual ambiguity of the beloved, who is usually called Saqi, is a particular subject of discussion in the ghazals of Sa’di of Shiraz, which are sometimes read as homosexual lyrics. The secular ghazal reached its highest point in Sa’di’s poems. In the fourteenth century Hafiz transformed ghazal both in form and content. In his poetry, the two streams of secular and mystical ghazal merged to shape a new form of ghazal. The imagery of secular and spiritual poetry is now combined and extended to convey multiple levels of meaning. In contrast to other poetic modes, Hafiz’s ghazals have no thematic or formal harmony. Baha u-din KhuramShahi comments that in Hafiz’s poetry13 the verses look semantically fragmented.14 This semantic fragmentation of each ghazal couplet gives it a semantic autonomy. This formal characteristic was new in Persian poetics, although it existed in the structure of the Qur’an.15 Indeed, a lack of semantic unity is the most obvious common stylistic feature of the Qur’an and Hafiz’s Divan. Khuram-Shahi concludes that although Sa’di influenced Hafiz to a great extent, the seemingly fragmented semantic structure of Hafiz’s ghazals is inherited from

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the non-linear structure of the Qur’an. In Hafiz’s lyrical poems, the verse demonstrates an extraordinary autonomy, diversity and divergence.16 What maintains each ghazal as a poetic unit is its rhythm, ‘rhyme, and the overall poetic aura’.17 Hafiz’s disjointed structure is evident in the following poem:

Falsely pious, of our state unaware No offence if their words our hearts tear. On the path, whatever you meet is for your good On the straight and the narrow, can’t be lost there. Whatever the rook may play, we’ll knock it down On the chessboard of lovers, Kings won’t dare. What is this multi-patterned, tall, simple dome? Who is wise to this riddle? Show me where? Is this your grace, O Lord, powerful, wise? Too many hidden wounds; no time to catch a breath of air. It’s as if the Judge of our Court is not fair. This royal seal, sign of God does not bear Whoever wishes may come, and whatever, may declare. No guards, no grandeur, this hall is bare Those who enter the tavern, openly share. Those who sell themselves, meet the wine-seller’s glare

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema Whatever befalls us is the doing of our affair. Your grace is not rare, and there’s no one you’d spare I serve the Tavern-Master, with his endless love and care. Piety, sometimes is cold, sometimes will flare. Hafiz gracefully declines from taking the head chair Lovers are free fortune and fame’s snare.18

It is obvious in this ghazal that there is no semantic unity between the couplets. Each verse is an autonomous unit that could exist independently. Each line conveys a full meaning and at times the lines seem to be irrelevant to one another. However, this multi-meaning design of each of Hafiz’s ghazals enriches the ghazal and brings a dynamic harmony out of seeming disharmony. As Khuram-Shahi indicates, the non-linear structure of each ghazal demands our full attention and meditation (huzur’i qalbi) to comprehend its meaning.19 From Poetry into Film In the twentieth century, when cinematography was introduced to Iranian film-makers, they adopted and adapted this non-linear approach to the realm of film. From a global perspective, history shows how the literary traditions in each culture affect the national or regional cinema. For instance, cinema in the West is primarily based on the rich tradition of Western novels and fiction20 and is therefore mainly centred on narrative conventions. Japanese cinema relies more on the dramatic traditions of kabuki and noh theatre.21 In the Iranian film industry, making poetic films with a semilinear or non-linear structure is a well-established aesthetic practice. In these films, there is a special interest in creating images that could stand alongside the narrative part of a film and add a poetic impression. In Sara (1993), for instance, Mehrjui depicts a lonely woman in her daily struggle with life. As well as narrating Sara’s story, Mehrjui portrays the poetic moments of her isolated life when she secretly sews endless pearls and beads on wedding dresses. In a dimly lit setting, the poetic aura is reinforced by low-angle shots of Sara surrounded – ironically – by a wedding dress that fills the whole frame. The mise-en-scène, lighting, and choice of Niki Karimi as Sara, with

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her innocent but serious face and deep gaze, underpin a sense of isolation and desperation. In addition, Sara visually celebrates the colourful life of the Tehran bazaar when it focuses on Persian carpets in the old shops. In Layla (1996) the audience is invited to follow the story of an unfortunate woman who cannot have a child and is maliciously forced to find a new wife for her husband. The film is visually poetic with many symbolically significant colours. Tinted red shots signify extreme frustration and love, while tinted yellow frames represent spiritual serenity. Moreover, Layla emphasizes objects such as the traditional samovar and the ritual of tea drinking, and the carnelian beads that signify a good omen and spirituality in a scene that shows Layla praying. The sound montage, accompanied by scenes that show her uncle playing tar, registers mystical and spiritual moments in the film. The fascinating architecture of Layla’s house, a contemporary dwelling inspired by traditional Iranian domestic architecture, is an extra symbolic touch. All this imagery adds poetic meaning to the narrative. Drawing on symbolic cultural and religious implications in a nonlinear fashion is not exclusive to Mehrjui. There is a general interest in Iranian cinematic aesthetics in conveying meaning in a non-syntagmatic manner. Another example is Ali Hatami’s film-making, which illustrates his fascination with the Iranian lifestyle of the Qajar era. Hatami’s successful TV serial, Hizar Dastan (1979–89) is enhanced by the elaborate portrayal of Iranian culture and traditions in a transitional era towards the end of the nineteenth century. He masterfully represents how modernity, in the Qajar epoch, is customized and merged into the Iranian lifestyle through a sophisticated mise-en-scène. In fact, he built a cinematic town – Shahrak-i Ghazal – for Hizar Dastan that was inspired by Qajar architecture. The scenes, costumes, music and lighting create a poetic atmosphere and the general ‘poeticity’ is evident, for instance, in sequences shot in Tehran’s Grand Hotel. The rich colour and texture in these sequences and the traditional costumes and carpets create a lyrical and nostalgic space. Other mise-en-scène-related examples that bring poetry into Hizar Dastan are images of calligraphy and the representation of traditional Iranian beauty through close-ups of the veiled

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Jayran,22 the girl who has a love affair with a revolutionary character in the movie. Bahram Bayzai, another prominent new wave director, used the poetics of visual arts and Iranian theatrical traditions to examine the challenges of modernity in Iranian society. His cinematic vision is rooted in Iran’s literary and performing arts. In Rakhsan BaniEtamad’s Banu-yi Urdibihisht (The May Lady, 1998), this ‘visual poetics’ is complemented by a ‘verbal poetics’, as the contemporary poet Ahmadreza Ahmadi reads his poems throughout the film. Hence, even in Iranian narrative films, non-linear meanings become semantically and visually significant. In general, there is a tendency in art films to convey meaning in a leisurely manner. Apart from clear narrative concepts, figurative meanings are hidden between the lines. The Iranian viewer is familiar with this figurativeness and takes pleasure in being challenged by cinematographic symbols and metaphors. Kiarostami’s cinema is poetic and non-linear in essence. In his film style, however, this becomes more abstract. He was trained in the film-making grammar of Mehrjui, Sohrab Shahid Sales and Hatami, and reaches beyond the more visually oriented poetics in favour of what I call an ‘abstract poetics’ or ‘philosophical poetics, similar to ghazal.23 In contrast to directors such as Hatami, Kiarostami does not seek poetic moments in portraying, for instance, the lavish life of a Qajar prince in a hotel, accompanied by the rich soundtrack of Badi’-zadigan’s unforgettable Murgh-i Sahar song – which to Iranian audiences nostalgically signifies Iranians’ struggles for freedom during and after the constitutional revolution. Kiarostami’s abstract poetics resides in the way he discovers poetry in everyday life, like that of rural people in remote villages. He does not use a poetic language, nor does he create spectacular scenes to play on the audience’s emotions. His amateur actors usually speak in a local dialect or language such as Gilaki or Kurdish, and their performances, which lack any trace of theatricality, do not make the viewer cry or laugh. Kiarostami even avoids using music to heighten emotions. In most parts of his films, viewers are left to concentrate on the concepts in the absence of music. The philosophical poetry that marks Kiarostami’s film-making is about the very essence of everyday life.

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If you omit the visual poetry of Hatami’s Haji Washington (1982) or Mehrjui’s Hamun (1990), there is still an essential narrative meaning in these films. In other words, the visual poetics stays in the background to ‘add’ meaning to the body of the main narratives. In Kiarostami’s Khanih-yi Dust Kujast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987), on the other hand, the poeticism of the film cannot be separated from the storyline. It runs through every scene of the film, first and foremost because its twisting narrative evades a linear unfolding of the events. This non-linear form, borrowed from the structure of ghazal poetry, deconstructs the conventional syntagmatic storyline. It is enhanced by the director’s decision not to use music.24 Kiarostami’s philosophical poetics take root in his film-making sensibilities, which carry the audience from the seen to the ‘unseen’. In Where is the Friend’s House?, for instance, the director’s ideas are shaped by poetic signs and symbols. The film is a seemingly uncomplicated story about a child named Ahmad, who is starting an odyssey to find his friend’s house to give him a notebook he mistakenly picked up in school. To prevent his friend being punished by the teacher he must find his house and deliver the notebook. He is shown asking people for directions to Pushtih, the nearby village up the hill, where his friend lives. Beyond this simple story, however, lies a more complicated story about friendship and commitment. The poeticism of Ahmad’s story resembles the design of ghazal based on a specific interpretation of ‘reality’ in mystical poetics, which bears no resemblance to the common idea of realism in Western literature and cinema. Reality in mysticism is a tangible but superficial variation of the truth based on vahm, or illusion. From the Sufist perspective, narrative poetry or cinema can be viewed as a ‘reality’ that is illusionist. According to Alireza Ra’isiyan, ‘narrative storytelling is based on everyday life reality, which is illusionist because it is based on vahm ...’. The nature of illusion, he says, ‘is mediumoriented’.25 Therefore, it functions as a medium or intermediate element in narrating a well-structured story with a precise beginning and ending. In contrast, in ghazal poetry the poet goes beyond this realist/illusionist approach (bardasht-i tavahumi) to embrace khiyal or imagination. For a Sufi, the illusionist reality of life merely conceals the truth, while imagination exposes it.

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Nonetheless, the artist should work with the ‘represented’ reality of life, based on vahm, in order to portray the ‘un-represented’ truth hidden beneath the ‘seen’. In this journey from the seen to the unseen, the artist uses words – in ghazal – or images – in film – to depict khiyal, ‘which is essentially aesthetical and not medium-oriented’.26 This is where the poeticism of Where is the Friend’s House? lies. In this film, Kiarostami as a lyrical or taghazzuli director portrays everyday events but does not rely on the illusionist reality of everyday life. He reaches beyond illusion to embrace imagination in illustrating reality. This imaginary and poetic reality does not depend on a realist/ illusionist medium; thus, it is ‘liberated’ from a linear storyline with a clear-cut beginning and ending. The film, like a ghazal, encompasses a fragmented, unfinished and ambiguous pattern. Kiarostami’s aesthetics in this film is, as Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa says, enshrined in ‘a system of narrative based on ... a sense of metaphysical absences and presences. This system involves a relative freedom from the structure of cause and effect.’27 This is one of the underlying principles of mystical poetry and philosophy, in which the artist relies on his or her sense of imagination rather than on rational thought and direct observation. The meaning in Where is the Friend’s House? is not encoded in the outcome of Ahmad’s journey to Pushtih. On the contrary, the viewer should make sense of what he or she sees in the non-linear ‘stories’ that are put together in the story of Ahmad. Thus, Where is the Friend’s House? unfolds its meaning in a non-linear fashion, a characteristic of ghazal that brings harmony out of the seeming disharmony of a non-narrative film. Although the main story is about Ahmad, it is interrupted several times by alternative stories, along with a detailed portrayal of Ahmad’s mother, grandmother and infant sibling. In the absence of a traditional narrative, the fragmented images and scenes restore harmony to the film. By focusing on a seemingly simple problem, Kiarostami attempts to take the viewer away from the plain reality of a child’s journey to reveal the more complex inner journey of a human being who is discovering the essence of friendship, paradoxically at an early stage of his life. In this way this film turns out to be purely poetic. The poetry and imagery in it become interchangeable elements. Although the formal aspects of ghazal are thoroughly evident, the film’s poeticism

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is not limited to this form. Where is the Friend’s House? is a poetic film because of Ahmad’s sincere effort to achieve humanism and companionship, two essential facets of Sufism. Therefore, by employing an abstract poeticism, Kiarostami exercises poetry in cinema. In the next two films of his Rostam-Abad trilogy, he skilfully exchanges images for poetic words to further explore notions of love and friendship in the midst of death and grief. As a superb manipulator of narrative incidents, Kiarostami increasingly concentrates on slight, seemingly irrelevant details in a story, often obscuring or hiding major plot twists. This is another technique that has enriched his non-linear philosophical cinema. In Where is the Friend’s House?, while the audience is still engaged in the story of Ahmad they have to confront various other stories. Ahmad’s grandfather gives an account of a foreign engineer. Then the camera focuses on a man who wants to sell wooden doors. The story of Ahmad and his attempts to find the friend’s house is once again interrupted by an elderly tradesman who makes old-fashioned wooden windows. Ahmad asks him the directions to his friend’s house. He then talks to the boy in a detailed manner about his profession, his life, the villagers and life in general. The audience, waiting impatiently to see if Ahmad finally finds his friend’s house, has to watch a visually beautiful sequence of the windows in a twisted alley in the dark while the old man is sharing his philosophical ideas with Ahmad. Another example of inserting seemingly irrelevant details into the so-called main story is in the first scene of Nama-yi Nazdik (Close Up, 1990). A reporter from a weekly magazine is informed that a movie fan named Sabzian has been arrested. The first sequence portrays the reporter, accompanied by two soldiers and a driver, heading to collect information about this arrest. In reality, Sabzian is an impoverished bookbinder. But he falsely introduced himself to a Tehrani family, the Ahankhahs, as the prominent director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Once the viewers get to see the Ahankhahs’ house, though, they are not privileged to see its interior and the arrest. Instead, the camera remains outside, watching the driver who is picking some flowers from a pile of leaves and kicking a spray-can. In other words, the audience has to miss the ‘central’ part of the plot at this stage – the meeting with the deceived family and Sabzian. Although they finally

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get to see the restaged arrest later in the film, Kiarostami finds an opportunity to break the sequence that enriches and de-centres the narrative by embedding another story into the first one. Once again, this fragmented style is reminiscent of the structure of ghazal, with its semantically autonomous lines. Kiarostami’s disintegrated aesthetics is also achieved by his image-oriented approach. From time to time he abandons the narrative sequence in favour of static and photographic scenes. The most significant example in Where is the Friend’s House? is a long shot in which Ahmad climbs a winding road on the hill with a single tree. This photographic effect is reinforced, as the audience is to see the same image-like shot more than once. Elsewhere, we are shown the long shot of the village of Kukir with olive trees. By themselves, these images could be seen as mini-themes of Kiarostami’s films. Their fragmented structure allows him to capture more than a single theme. In Kiarostami’s later films, such as Zindigi va Digar Hich (Life and then Nothing, 1992) and Zir-i Dirakhtan-i Zeytun (Through the Olive Trees, 1994), he takes this technique further. Life and then Nothing is about a director and his son who go on a trip from Tehran to the earthquake-struck region of Manjil, in order to find out if the lead characters of Where is the Friend’s House?, Babak and Ahmad, are alive. Instead of focusing solely on the director’s search for the boys, Kiarostami chooses ‘distracting’ long takes of landscape through the front, rear and side windows of a car. These images of the natural environment encode his engagement with a non-narrative poetic style. What makes this non-linear film even less narrative-based is its ending, when the viewer – who by now has seen many minor actors from Where is the Friend’s House? – is disappointed by not learning whether Babak and Ahmad are still alive. A Unique Spatial Aesthetics Kiarostami’s non-narrative aesthetics originates in a ‘spatial’ approach, deeply rooted in the Iranian psyche,28 that is inherited from the structure of Hafiz’s ghazals. The concept of spatiality in Hafiz’s poetry is crucial, and is a subject of debate and speculation

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among Hafizologists. In his seminal work, Hafiz’s Mind and Language, Khuram-Shahi meticulously explores the fragmented stylistics of the poet’s ghazals. Other scholars examined their formal characteristics. For instance, Alimuhammad Haqshenas, using the Chomskyan linguistic model, has made a distinction between the surface structure and deep structure of ghazal to come up with an explanation for the fragmentary composition. He speculates that it is merely ‘the surface structure of ghazal in the Divan of Hafiz [that] is fragmented, while its deep structure is non-linear [but] “circular”, or “spherical” ’.29 Therefore, the meaning in a ghazal of Hafiz is only superficially fragmented. Hence, the unity of meaning should be sought beyond its immediate literal meaning, because as Khuram-Shahi explains, the ghazals of Hafiz ‘evade a linear or one-dimensional structure to take up a polygonal shape.’30 Khuram-Shahi indicates that this ‘spherical’ structure of ghazal makes it possible to read it from wherever you wish and to end it wherever you wish. Neither Haqshenas nor Khuram-Shahi clarifies whether the ghazal form should be considered as polygonal, spherical or circular. Other scholars followed on. It is noteworthy, however, that Hafiz’s deviation from the original structure of ghazal was a matter of critical debate more than 90 years ago, when the Iranian historian and linguist Ahmad Kasravi concluded that the ‘haphazard’ structure of ghazal resulted from the poet’s fancy for a new form with no sustaining logic at all.31 Modern critics tried to come up with a more logical reason for the non-linearity of ghazal. In Haqshenas’s opinion, behind this circular or spherical approach are two seminal notions of ‘origin’ and ‘centre’ in Islamic-Iranian culture, which values roots and origin and is highly centrist.32 ‘In a centre-oriented culture,’ he says, ‘the seemingly fragmented units are all related to one another through their connection to the centre. It does not matter whether these bits and pieces are well-matched with one another.’33 Haqshenas goes further, declaring that the circular facet of Hafiz’s ghazal – resulting from a fragmented surface structure – is not exclusive to the Qur’an. He interprets it as an important element of Eastern and Iranian philosophies and cultures. Baraheni believes that although the influence of the Qur’an on Hafiz’s poetry is inevitable, the structure of his ghazal is symptomatic of a historical incident during the poet’s life: the invasion by

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the Mongols and their successors. According to Baraheni, the Mongol domination of Shiraz and the subsequent anarchy had made the poet’s existence irrelevant. He was imprisoned in his home town, and his poetry was imprisoned in verse. Hafiz saw the world ‘as fragmented and instantaneous, [and] as a result, his poetry was directed to a mystical condensation,’ with verse as its formal and semantic frame of reference.34 Whether the structure of Hafiz’s ghazal was inspired by the Qur’an or Mongol tyranny, or both, the result is a sense of imprisonment in a non-linear structure. Khuram-Shahi’s and Haqshenas’s discussions of the formal structure of ghazal seem contradictory and imprecise. At one point, Khuram-Shahi regards each ghazal as a whole semantic unit. He goes on to say that ‘Hafiz’s ghazal forms a polygonal volume in the reader’s mind. His style resembles a rosebud, which is growing in a “circular” fashion. Its formation is circular or “spherical”.’35 However, as Baraheni observes, in identifying ghazal with different shapes such as circular, spherical or polygonal, Khuram-Shahi shows a certain inconsistency36 – and he then states that the harmony in Hafiz’s poetry is to be sought in the verse, not in the poem as a whole.37 In each ghazal, Khuram-Shahi says, a number of autonomous images or themes are introduced. Therefore, in order to grasp meaning, the reader is free to read verses arbitrarily and not in the order in which they were originally written. While Khuram-Shahi’s comments on the autonomy of verse are accurate,38 the reader can still observe a harmony, at least in the formal and rhythmic aspects of ghazal. Thus, contrary to Haqshenas’s interpretation, this harmony does not rely only on the deep structure of a ghazal. Even if we make a distinction between surface and deep structures, this harmony would partly reside in its surface or formal structure. In fact, because of the ghazal’s rhythmic unity, Hafiz’s poems lend themselves perfectly to musical performance. It is more appropriate to describe ghazal as a non-linear and ‘spatial’ structure that cannot be associated with any particular shape or volume. This was a deviation from the original ghazal in the twelfth century. As we have seen, Hafiz transformed the concept of ghazal to create a non-linear poetic composition. The spatiality manifested in their structure is now represented in other aspects of Iranian culture.

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In particular, it influenced non-narrative cinema to focus on images and icons rather than on a narrative centre, and this is powerfully embodied in Kiarostami’s film-making, which is the best example of Cinema-yi Taghazzuli. The spatial universe of Kiarostami’s films can be seen in selfcontained and self-referring schemes. Whether or not viewers are consciously aware of this culture-specific spatial discourse, they understand that Kiarostami’s films cannot be read transparently. On the contrary, they are ambiguous texts that should be meticulously examined and reassessed. In the absence of narrative aesthetics, the viewer becomes sensitive to images and their symbolic meanings, in the same way that Persians read Hafiz’s poetry. For instance, the scene in which the driver shoots a canister in Close Up becomes symbolically significant when, in a graphic counter-image, a similar shot shows the reporter rolling the same can in the same street. Moreover, in Bad ma ra ba Khud Khahad Burd (Wind Will Carry Us, 1999), the zigzagging rolling apple recalls the canister images in Close Up. ‘Considering the recurrence of such paths and patterns in Kiarostami’s work, from the zigzagging path in Where is the Friend’s House? to the kicked spray can in Close Up, they virtually amount to a directorial signature.’39 In Hafiz’s poetry, each verse or couplet can stand as an independent semantic unit.40 Baraheni says that ‘in each verse a complete image is offered. In some cases, however, the image exceeds the first verse to the second.’41 The first two verses of ghazal no.1 of Divan illustrate this:

Oh! Beautiful wine bearer, bring forth the cup and put it to my lips Path of love seemed easy at first, what came was many hardships.

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema With its perfume, the morning breeze unlocks those beautiful locks The curl of those dark ringlets, many hearts to shreds strips.

The unity of each ghazal partly depends on each verse. Beyond that, the ghazal as a whole is a harmonious unit. Kiarostami’s film-making is similar in style. Each scene or image is a self-contained unit. At the same time, each film, as a collection of images, is a congruent whole, as we saw in Life and then Nothing. This is taken further in Dah (Ten, 2002), with its ten independent and at the same time interrelated parts. Kiarostami’s film-making thus resembles Hafiz’s poetry in its deliberate manipulation of form. In general, what makes a poem into poetry is the arrangement of words or formal structure,42 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-scène and cinematography. As in Hafiz, the meaning in Kiarostami’s films is mainly signified by form. This differs from a narrative film or novel, where the shots or words refer to the concrete reality in the outside world, to a specific culture and society and its historical background. Ghazal, as a form of mystical poetry, does not specify a time or space since it does not depict illusionist reality. Words, in their poetic and imaginative form, treat time as a timeless commodity. They may have immediate social and historical meanings, but beyond that, the verses of a ghazal have a universal meaning that could apply to the past, present or future. Therefore, even a reader who is not familiar with the history of Shiraz in the age of Hafiz can understand his poetry and apply it to his or her present condition. Similarly, in a poetic film such as Taste of Cherry, the language does not signify a specific time. This film does not explore concrete reality in the outside world, or set out to portray a ‘story’ about a man who wants to commit suicide. On the contrary, this man, Badi’i, represents a universal story of human beings and how they challenge and question concepts such as life and death. Through successive images of Badi’i, Kiarostami moves from a narrative about a specific man in a specific place to a timeless story problematizing the questions of life

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and death. Thus, it can be interpreted as relating to the present situation, or the past, or to future possibilities. It is about life with all its complexities, from the beginning to eternity. The structure in Hafiz’s ghazals and Kiarostami’s films is not segregated from the content, and both draw on artistic forms to articulate their philosophical points. In both, the ambiguity of form gives rise to several interpretations. Because of their timeless poetic approach, Kiarostami and Hafiz were, and still are, condemned for being indifferent to the social and political realities of their societies and for not deserving global acclaim.43 When Iran was suffering the aftermath of a revolution and facing war with Iraq, Kiarostami illustrated everyday issues in relatively peaceful environments. In the same way, Hafiz, living under Amir Mubariz-u-din Muzafar’s tyranny, was versifying about a hedonistic life, drinking wine and dreaming of an imaginary beloved, instead of writing about the social and political situation. The stylistic ambiguity and a universal humanist approach in Hafiz’s ghazals and Kiarostami’s films make them semantically multilayered or polysemous. Besides their literal or immediate meanings, mostly related to the historical realities of their time, they carry allegorical meanings. There are usually two different layers in poetic language: its literal and linguistic meaning and its connotational poetic meaning, which elevates it from a purely linguistic level to a spatial poetic ambience. This signification transcends historical and visual reality into an abstract form of reality. Like Hafiz’s poetry, Kiarostami’s film-making reaches beyond ‘current’ issues to philosophical questions about life. In addition to the formal influences of Hafiz’s poetry on Kiarostami, ghazal has had thematic effects. For instance, asking for directions, a common theme in Hafiz, is a recurring topic in Kiarostami’s films. This verse from Hafiz’s second ghazal depicts the poet’s concern:

My eye-liner is the dust of your door and fence Where shall I go, tell me, you command me whence

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Asking for directions symbolizes the Sufi’s quest to find the ‘friend’, a term repeatedly used to refer to God. In the journey to ishraq or illumination, a Sufi seeks his leader’s guide. The leader or guide in Sufism is personified as an archetypal wise old man. In Where is the Friend’s House? he is represented by the old door-maker who tries to help Ahmad find his friend’s place. The sequence shows the old man and Ahmad treading through the winding back alleys of the village in the dark. Occasional shafts of light shine through the traditional wooden windows, while the man philosophizes about life – perhaps mirroring the director’s own philosophical concerns. The old man is the only person who listens to Ahmad. He offers to help him find the friend’s house and tells him about his craft (making wooden windows and cribs) and how this is getting lost in the ugly world of metal and modernity. Seeing the old man, the viewer is made to feel nostalgic for an older world that is dying. Ahmad thus represents youth with humanistic concerns. The relationship between the doormaker and Ahmad is reminiscent of the relation of the leader (murad or pir in Sufism) to the pupil (murid) depicted in Hafiz’s poems, as in this passage:

With wine colour your robe, one of the old magi’s best tips Trust in this traveller’s tips, who knows of many paths and trips As the old man and young boy labour on, the old man, tired, asks Ahmad to leave him behind and continue his quest. Here Kiarostami deconstructs the conventional relationship of murid and murad so that the murid is the one who takes the lead. In the next film in the trilogy, the person playing the old man acts as his real character, a resident in Pushtih after the earthquake. He is shown carrying a toilet to install in the new house he is building. This time his philosophical concerns take an ironic twist. In Where is the Friend’s House? the old man represents the murad or ‘purveyor of truth’, as Rosenbaum puts it,44 while in Life and then Nothing he is criticizing art and cinema in general and Kiarostami’s authorial power in particular.45 He acknowledges his role in the former film

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and condemns Kiarostami for making him play an old hunchback. By showing the same man as a younger person, with less ambitious concerns about life, Kiarostami endorses the revisiting of entrenched concepts such as the spiritual leadership reserved for a murad. In Life and then Nothing, it is the director who is asking for directions in frequent stops along the way. This request is a philosophical concern illustrated by Persian poets like Khayyam, known for his discursive scepticism, or by Hafiz’s ontological questions about life and Rumi’s a priori mystical wandering.46 Both Ahmad and the director (Kiarostami’s alter ego) in Life and then Nothing represent the philosophical uncertainty inherited from Persian Sufism and especially from ghazal. Another theme in Kiarostami’s aesthetics is the image of ruins, a recurring key icon that is directly borrowed from Hafiz’s ghazal.47 For example, the rubble left after a devastating earthquake in Life and then Nothing, or the construction sites in Taste of Cherry. To an Iranian viewer, ruins signify a mystical notion mostly associated with Hafiz’s poetry. The image does not mostly signify devastation or despair, but an elitist isolation of the Sufi in his quest for absolute truth, as reflected in these verses of Hafiz:

In the ruins of the magis I see God What is this? How can I see it?48

Come bearer, that chaste drunk Who is forever in the tavern sunk Give me, ill repute bring to my name The cup and wine I shall only blame The words also suggest the state of a thinker who rejects the norms of society. In contrast to the mosque, church and monastery, where ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ are maintained and institutionalized, the ruins are a refuge for drunken rinds (hedonists) who reject the monotonous

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world of the ascetic Muslim. Rindi (hedonism), a ‘disregard of conventional morality in pursuit of pleasures of music, drink, sex, and drugs’, was a fact of life in Shiraz in Hafiz’s era.49 As Limbert points out, this ‘desire to ignore the dictates of both reason and religion is what Hafiz evokes so beautifully in his poetry.’50 A Sufi prefers the state of rindi and the freedom it brings, to zohd (asceticism), which is usually related to hypocrisy. It is in the ruins of a tavern that an unconventional rind is able to meditate and also to embrace the more colourful and joyful life of the sinner. The residents of ‘the house of ruins’ – what Hafiz called manzil-i viranih or kharabat – are those who rejoice in earthly life, not those who believe in the other world:

Last night the Master left the mosque for the tavern Is there any other choice left to us? The imagery of ruins in Kiarostami’s films evokes the depth of a thinker’s loneliness and isolation, and the challenge to societal conventions. Like a rind, a modern intellectual turns from the institutionalized order to embrace the natural disorder reminiscent of an isolated land. This approach to film-making as a poetic form inspired by Persian ghazal is what makes Kiarostami unique. His non-narrative aesthetics conveys a taghazzuli or lyrical aura that creates a cinematic world based on imagination rather than illusionist reality. He wrote: The problem with narrative films is that people from all walks of life come out of watching it with the same story. Nonnarrative film allows people to use their own mind, frames and experiences, and walk out with experiences they have created from watching the film ... I like films that have lasting power where you come out and immediately or much later begin to reconstruct what happened. I like to put you to sleep, let you have a nap, but afterwards make you stay up at night thinking.51

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As an offshoot of ghazal, Kiarostami’s films lend towards simultaneity over sequentiality. When his latest film, Ten, was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2002, he stated: Sometimes, I tell myself that Ten is a film that I could never make again. You cannot decide to make such a film ... It’s a little like Close-Up. It’s possible to continue along the same path but it requires a great deal of patience. Indeed, this is not something that can be repeated easily. It must occur of its own accord, like an incident or a happening ... At the same time, it requires a great deal of preparation. Originally, this was the story of a psychoanalyst, her patients and her car, but that was two years ago ...52 In other words, Kiarostami does not intend ‘to continue along the same path’. Each work ‘happens’ to him like an incident. As he declares, the meaning in Ten is constructed simultaneously. For him, making a film should ‘occur’ ‘like an incident or happening’ ‘on its own accord’. This echoes Muhammad Reza Shafi’i-Kadkani’s ‘Poetry is an accident which occurs in language’.53 Because Kiarostami’s films develop meaning simultaneously through space, and not through time in a conventional linear fashion, their ‘unity’ cannot be grasped unless the audience watches them in a spatial manner. In most cases, the unit of meaning is in the sequence or even in the shot and image, rather than in an extended narrative. In this way, Kiarostami joins directors such as Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson, who approached film-making by integrating the genres of poetry and film. Interactive Stylistics As we have seen, Kiarostami’s aesthetics is non-linear, fragmented and spatial. His stories avoid a conventional and cohesive narrative and create gaps to be filled in by the audience, who get to participate in the ‘game’ of completing the meaning, of semantically finishing the film. This idea is reinforced by the director’s view that ‘when you see a film, you should come away with your own interpretation,

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based on who you are. The film should allow that to happen, make room for that interaction.’54 In Kiarostami’s later films, such as Wind Will Carry Us or Ten, this ‘unfinished stylistics’ is taken to the point where the films seem incomplete without the audience’s contribution. Employing non-professional actors, the lack of resolution or ending in a film, long shots and extreme long shots that have a detaching effect, as well as narrative ellipsis and ambiguity, are the techniques Kiarostami uses to achieve an open-ended and interactive end product. Through these poetic conventions, he presents an innovative cinematic language to the world. It is not only the audience who participates. The actors have a vital role in shaping the films too, as most of this director’s films are not based on a fixed written scenario. The non-professional actors do not memorize their lines but extemporize, as he admitted in an interview with Rosenbaum.55 When Kiarostami premiered his digital film, Moonlight, in London in 2004, he acknowledged that he achieved the best results when he did not interfere in his actors’ performance. ‘That is when incidents happen automatically,’ he says. ‘I believe we directors both make and destroy, because we tend to make things artificial. We ask our actors to forget themselves and obey our commands.’56 However, since Kiarostami’s films are not based on fixed scenarios and the actors are amateurs, his films represent a natural flow. Because actors extemporize, their words are often ‘the unthinkable structure of the unconscious’, in Lacan’s words.57 The non-linear structure of Kiarostami’s films is partly the result of narrative ellipsis. This is evident, for instance, in Life and then Nothing. While the dominant theme is finding out about Babak and Ahmad, the movie does not take the audience to the ‘main point’. We get to see the other actors, but have to wait to find out if Babak and Ahmad are still alive. The film finishes without the audience’s expectations being fulfilled. This lack of resolution and deliberate narrative ellipsis themselves provide the missing parts in the narrative. In Homework, a film in which students in a poor neighborhood in Tehran are surveyed about their homework, the camera does not focus on a specific student. Kiarostami also shuts off the soundtrack when children are reciting religious war chants. This creates a comic

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situation that ultimately has a detaching effect. It stops the viewer from becoming absorbed in the narrative. Instead, the audience becomes conscious of its place as the ‘spectator’ who is observing a comic scene that is not part of the narrative. In Close Up, when Sabzian is released from jail he gets to meet Makhmalbaf, his hero, for the first time. The viewer expects to see how the two men will interact. However, the conversation between them is not heard. Instead, the audience hears a conversation between members of the film crew talking about a technical problem in recording the sound. It is not known if the soundtrack was meant to be turned off, or – as reported in the film – it is a failure of the sound equipment, but in any case it has a distancing effect on the audience, who are left to guess about the conversation between the two men. In a similar way, Kiarostami deliberately does not show the old woman whose death the film crew members are awaiting, or the man digging a hole in The Wind Will Carry Us. Generally speaking, there are always more things missing than represented in his narratives. These missing parts are either not provided or are delayed. In all of these films, Kiarostami’s camera does not affect his characters. It is invisible, external and detached. The use of amateur actors is successful in presenting down-to-earth performances that resemble the lives of people in real settings. In portraying the events, the director’s camera constantly switches from an objective perspective to a subjective one. It is objective when it acts in a detached and invisible way, an approach enhanced by the use of long shots. The camera only becomes subjective when it serves as the character’s eye. In Where is the Friend’s House?, for instance, we witness the adult world through Ahmad’s eyes, or in Taste of Cherry and Life and then Nothing we examine suburban Tehran and the roads through the eyes of the drivers. Also, when Kiarostami himself appears in his films – as he does in Homework and Taste of Cherry – the camera is consciously subjective, referring to Kiarostami as the authorial power. This switching from a subjective to an objective perspective and vice versa brings a realistic, non-dramatic perception that demands greater audience participation. The viewer is not drawn into the image. Instead, he or

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she stays outside the story and judges it with a critical eye, a detachment reinforced by Kiarostami’s use of irony. Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry is about having freedom of choice in a society that dictates morality to its citizens. In this film, Mr Badi’i, who wants to commit suicide, questions orthodox morality, which regards man as God’s creation who should surrender to God’s will. He rejects Islamic modes and decides to end his life. As a result, Taste of Cherry is an artistic interpretation of life that is outside the religious boundaries of Iranian society. Kiarostami’s humanism elevates man above culture. Badi’i is a daring and questioning man who is looking for someone to help him to commit suicide and to call him three times the day after he has done so. But this person whom he hired first has to toss a few stones at him. If Badi’i is still alive, he should help him get out of the grave, but if Badi’i is dead, he should bury him and collect the money left in the dashboard of Badi’i’s car. In his journey to the outskirts of Tehran, Badi’i meets three people. Each of them represents a different stage he is to accomplish in his search for the meaning of life and death. His journey resembles the stages a Sufi should pass through in his or her spiritual growth, called Maqamat va Ahval-i Sufi. The first person Badi’i meets is from Kurdistan. Ironically – since Kurds are well known as brave warriors, not only in Iran but in Syria, Turkey and Iraq – this is a young but timid soldier. As soon as Mr Badi’i proposes his plan, the soldier runs away. This creates an ironic scene that distances the viewer from the depressing story of a man who intends to end his life. Badi’i leaves this man behind, symbolically passing the immaturity related to youth and lack of experience. The second encounter is with an Afghani seminarian. He looks older and is more positive in outlook than the soldier; a man of God who believes that there is no choice but to live. The seminarian and Badi’i signify two conflicting ideologies of poetic and ascetic worldviews rooted respectively in Ishraqi and Khurasani mystical schools of thought. The neoplatonic ideas of Ishraqi mysticism, as Driush Ashuri explains,58 are well presented by Ebn’i Arabi and Nasafi and are founded in rational thought and the concept of causality. Khurasani Sufism, on the other hand, is based on emotional feelings, hope and worship and is expressed in a poetic and mysterious

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language. It is strongly represented in Kashf ul-Asrar by Maybudi and Mirsad ul-ibad by Najm-u-din Razi and is later developed in Hafiz’s ghazals. Khurasani-oriented poets and thinkers such as Hafiz rejected rational thought and logic in favour of a poetic and affectionate interpretation of the story of Genesis, in particular, and of life in general.59 The following conversation between the seminarian and Badi’i illustrates the conflict between the two philosophies: BADI’I. I have decided to free myself from this life. As for the reason, it doesn’t help you and I cannot tell it either. Even if I do, you wouldn’t understand. It’s not because you don’t understand. I mean you can’t ‘feel’60 what I feel. You may understand it, sympathize, and show your compassion, but you cannot feel it ... That’s why I ask you as a Muslim to help me. SEMINARIAN. Yes, I understand you. But suicide is wrong. Since the Hadiths, our twelve Imams and the Qur’an refer to suicide and say that man must not kill himself. The body is a token granted by God and man should not torment his body. I understand you. But suicide viewed from every angle is not the right thing to do ... BADI’I. I know that suicide is among the deadly sins but living unhappily is a sin, too ... I think God is so great and merciful he cannot see his creatures suffer. That he doesn’t want to force us to live. That’s why he grants him this solution. Have you ever thought about the logic behind this? From Badi’i’s perspective, God is a compassionate lover who cares for his creatures. Unlike the Afghani seminarian, whose relation to God is one of inferiority, Badi’i’s feeling toward God is that of a mutual relation between lover and beloved, both of whom impatiently search for each other. This conflict of ideas is highlighted in the film by the shot/reverse shot filming of the scene. In these scenes Badi’i and the seminarian are never seen together, emphasizing that they belong to the two world-views of poetic mysticism and asceticism. Badi’i’s poetic view of life reminds us of the passionate rind portrayed in Hafiz’s poetry. In the rind’s universe, the relationship with God is not a static one of God/creator to man/creature. On the contrary, it

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is a dynamic and mutual relation of two comrades or lovers. Like a rind, Badi’i is in search of meaning for his life; he is thoughtful and contemplative, a madman in his sanity. In fact, the story of Badi’i in Taste of Cherry takes one back to the story of Adam, the first man, and according to Sufis the first rind. The history of poetic Sufism itself goes back to a perceptive interpretation of the story of Genesis in the Qur’an. As Driush Ashuri shows,61 unlike previous Semitic religions such as Judaism and Christianity – especially the latter, which stresses mankind’s original sin – there is no such focus in the Qur’an. Humankind, according to the Qur’an, is God’s best friend, his deputy or caliph, and this is underlined in Surih Bagharih, 2:29–32: When your Lord said to the angels: ‘I am placing on the earth one that shall rule as My Deputy,’ they replied: ‘Will You put there one that will do evil and shed blood, when we have for so long sung Your praises and sanctified Your name? He said: ‘I know what you do not know.’ He taught Adam the names of all things and then set them before the angels, saying: ‘Tell Me the names of these, if what you say be true.’ ‘Glory to You,’ they replied, ‘we have no knowledge except that which You have given us. You alone are wise and allknowing.’ Then He said to Adam: ‘Tell them their names.’ And when Adam had named them, He said: ‘Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of heaven and earth ... ? ... Then Adam received commandments from his Lord, and his Lord relented towards him. He is the Forgiving One, the Merciful.62 In the Qur’anic version of the story of Adam and Eve, God forgave their sins immediately. What is stressed here is man’s knowledge, which is a token of God’s eternal knowledge, ironically obtained by eating from the forbidden tree. Man, as God’s caliph and the first rind, descends to the world of mortals to ‘discover’ the mystery of life and ‘the logic behind the existence of the universe and human

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kind’.63 This is described several times in Hafiz’s ghazals and especially in one infamous verse:

The angels couldn’t bear the burden Therefore, the man had to take the mission Hence, sin has made human beings knowledgeable and powerful, rather than sinful and corrupt. This sinful but knowledgeable man is the rind, who – according to the Sufi world-view and reflected in Hafiz’s poetry – is privileged over the rational fundamentalist, known in Persian as Insan-i Zahid or the ascetic. It is through the discovery of the meaning of life that the Sufi’s life is transformed, because as Ashuri indicates, the task of a Sufi is to ‘discover’ the logic behind the existence of the universe and humankind.64 Badi’i is a modern rind who abandons religious mysticism (Irfan-i Zahidanih) to embrace a more playful, courageous and questioning version called poetic mysticism (Irfan-i Rindanih). Being a rind, he dares to question and challenge his creator, too. In Kiarostami’s philosophy, rooted in Hafiz’s ontological thought, the concept of change is crucial. Being a rind is all about ‘becoming’ and not ‘being’. It is on this journey to become that man discovers the meaning of life. The third person whom Badi’i meets is a Turkish taxidermist, Mr Baqiri, who works in the Museum of Natural History. All of the three men who confront Badi’i are from Iran’s ethnic minorities. This evokes, as Michael Fischer points out, ‘the strong communal life of Iran’s ethnic minorities in contrast to the anomie of middleclass Tehrani [Badi’i].’65 The taxidermist resembles the old man in Where is the Friend’s House?, since he acts as a guide, known in Sufism as a pir. The pir gives both physical and spiritual directions to a lost person. While they are driving up a hilly road, the taxidermist asks Badi’i to turn left. Badi’i says: BADI’I. But am not familiar with this road. TAXIDERMIST. Well, I do. Turn left. It’s longer but more beautiful. I have been the prisoner of this desert for 35 years now.

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The taxidermist is aware of the power of making choices in life. During their conversation in the car, he is the one who talks most of the time and Badi’i is the listener. He tells Badi’i that when he himself was once contemplating suicide, he gave up the idea just for the taste of mulberries: TAXIDERMIST. Finally, I was so fed up that I decided to end it all. One morning before dawn, I put a rope in my car. My mind was made up ... I reached mulberry gardens. I stopped. Still dark. I threw the rope over a tree. But it didn’t catch hold ... So I climbed the tree and tied the rope tight. Then I felt something soft under my hand. It was mulberry, sweet ones. I ate the first and the second and the third. Suddenly I noticed it wasn’t dark any more. The taxidermist’s words reveal his poetic world-view. They also echo a sentence by the Romanian-French philosopher, E. M. Cioran: ‘Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ego.’66 This is the inspiring idea that motivated Kiarostami in the making of Taste of Cherry. From his perspective, the world is far from being perfect, but there is still a lot of promise to be discovered even in the simplest things, such as the taste of cherries: TAXIDERMIST. Have you lost all hope? Have you ever looked at the sky when you wake up in the morning? At dawn, don’t you want to see the Sun rise? ... The night at the full moon? ... Refusing them all, you want to give up the taste of cherry? Through the taxidermist, the audience enters the garden of Persian poetic philosophy, introduced by philosophers such as Khayyam and Hafiz whose choice was the immediate pleasures of this world over the best of the other world.67 In the taxidermist’s mind, the world is the representation of beauty, love and hope despite all its misfortunes and unhappiness. Like a Sufi, he is a lover, a madman in his sanity, thoughtful and in search of a reason to live. Both Badi’i and the taxidermist portray modern, liberated rinds. By granting himself the choice either of living or ending his life, Badi’i enters the

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realm of rindi where a man is an ‘individual’ who could abandon the norms of his society to embrace his own choices. In this way, Taste of Cherry reminds us of the story of Adam eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and his subsequent descent to Earth, as described in the Qur’an. In his previous films, Kiarostami was always focusing on ‘ideas’ rather than on questions that concern ‘humankind’. In Taste of Cherry, he highlights the plight of modern human beings. This may explain why this, of all his films, has the largest number of close-ups and wide shots. Once again, Kiarostami uses the road and his ‘windshield camera’, which symbolize the journey of a man in search of the meaning of life. Badi’i, in his expeditions, is more in search of life than death, its happy and unhappy moments, and is about people’s metamorphoses in finding new meanings for their lives. In embracing poetic mysticism and the state of rindi, Hafiz became Persia’s iconic everlasting poet. In modern times Kiarostami, influenced by the philosophy of rindi, crosses ethnic, geographical and political boundaries to touch the very essence of humanity.

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CHAPTER 3 KIAROSTAMI AND MODERN PERSIAN POETRY

Abbas Kiarostami draws heavily on modern Persian poetry in his film-making, just as he did from its classical antecedents. Among contemporary poets the influence of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrukhzad is most evident in his film grammar. The flowering of Iranian art cinema in the 1960s, as we have seen, coincided with the most glorious moments of modern poetry inherited from Nima Yushij, the father of modern Persian poetry, and this dynamic was continued by poets such as Ahmad Shamlu, Manuchihr Atashi, Forough Farrukhzad and Sohrab Sepehri. The idea of adapting Persian poetry to accommodate new social and political phenomena, however, had begun in the late nineteenth century with the ‘revivalist’ ideas1 of poets such as Arif Qazvini (1882–1933), Mirzadih Ishqi (1893–1923) and Iraj Mirza (1874– 1925). It developed further during the critical formative years of the constitutional revolution. The contribution of these poets was significant, as their work stood against traditionalist concepts aimed at preserving the old Persian prosody together with relatively traditional concepts and beliefs. The revivalists’ poetry and their political and patriotic subjects created a fresh ambience in Persian poetry, but ultimately it was Nima who established a new era in Persian poetry both in poetic form and subject matter. He freed poetic structure and used innovative concepts to reconcile poetry with the realities of Iranian society. Gradually,

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poetry became a political weapon, whose primary objective was to convey social and political ideas instead of genuine personal emotions and universal human feelings. Expressing social and political concerns was the hallmark of poems written by Shamlu, Khusraw Gulsurkhi and Akhavan-Sales. Among the second generation of Nima’s followers, Farrukhzad and Sepehri reconstructed his legacy by turning Persian poetry into something more personal and peaceful. As Dabashi says, these two poets ‘cut through the thick politicization of [their] age to grasp a primal moment of wonder in the world.’ He adds: In the poetry of Forough Farrukhzad and Sohrab Sepehri, in particular, there was a transmutation of the historical person that Nima had made possible into an impatient realization of the self-transparency of one’s presence in the world. The whole metaphysics of representation, from classic poetry down to its vestiges in the Nimaic revolution, Sepehri and Farrukhzad took gracefully to task by radically rejecting the aesthetic objectification of being. Their poetry is an active insurgency against that objectification in reaching for the immediate experience of the world before its mediated modulations. Theirs was an instrumental intrusion into the immediacy and facticity of that form of being wherein the world is de-worlded, life is deexperienced, reality becomes no longer self-evident, and the self-transparency of life is no longer inaccessible.2 Sepehri’s ‘de-experienced’ reading of reality, as Sirus Shamisa speculates, comes from his new approach unencumbered by ‘pre-judgements and inherited knowledge of the past’.3 His poetry is energized with an emanicipatory power and invites the reader to become liberated from the conventional ‘known’:

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I wonder why they say that the horse is a noble beast, the pigeon is delightful and why nobody keeps a vulture in a cage. Is the clover flower not as pleasing as tulips? We should wash our eyes, we should see in a different way.4 In similar fashion, Farrukhzad’s poeticizes everyday life. In the introduction to a collection of her poetry, she points to the simplicity of her language: There are endless possibilities in Persian language. In Persian, I discovered5 the possibility of conveying a message in a simple language ... as simple as I am talking to you now ... If you ask me about what I have gained in terms of language and rhyme, I could say intimacy and simplicity.6 Her poetry talks intimately about her sewing machine, a window to the yard, her son, husband and lover, or the erotic moments of one’s life. Her honest, simple and intimate words visualized everyday life and de-familiarized Persian poetry that was invariably charged with ornamental vocabulary and complex concepts:

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema There is an alley where the boys who were once in love with me, with the same uncombed hair, thin necks, and long legs are still thinking of the innocent little girl who was carried by the wind.7

In the same poem Farrukhzad aestheticizes and visualizes the most ordinary moments of life, or in Hillmann’s words, ‘images of everyday happenings that may collectively define life’s essence ... [h]er artist’s eye and imagination capture vivid, everyday moments.’8

Life is perhaps a long street through which a woman holding a basket passes by every day ... Life is perhaps a child returning home from school. Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette in the languid interval between two love-makings or the absent gaze of a passerby who takes off his hat to another passerby with a meaningless smile and a good morning9 In Kiarostami’s films, the intimate language of Sepehri and Farrukhzad has been transformed into a unique visual display in which the viewer feels detached from the past and the future in order

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to grasp the wonderful immediate moment. The director’s camera represents a ‘fresh look like water flowing in each and every moment of the river’, to borrow Shamisa’s description of Sepehri’s poetry.10 What makes Kiarostami’s approach to reality different from that of other Iranian film-makers, yet similar to the poetry of Sepehri and Farrukhzad, is the way in which he deconstructs our perception of reality. The eye of his camera brings enlightenment, allowing us to grasp reality or what we failed to see before. It is significant that he relies on an ‘aesthetic reality’, a non-manipulative approach to filmmaking, as opposed to a ‘seamless reality’ that naturalizes what it represents as reality.11 Kiarostami’s aesthetically motivated realism offers a reading – in some cases several readings – of reality and does not intend to suggest an absolute, unchanging and unchangeable whole. Like Sepehri and Farrukhzad’s poetry, his realist discourse subdues certain truths in order to reveal the diversity of his concept. His realism produces a multiple reality. These multiple possibilities liberate his films from having a fixed meaning by giving the audience space in which to draw their own conclusions. Kiarostami achieves this aesthetic realism by using depth of composition and long takes, which ‘bestow [on] his films an Iranian aura in tune with Persian poetry and its lyrical nuance.’12 His cinema presents what André Bazin would call ‘a language the semantic and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality [through montage and the plastic composition of the image] but what it reveals of it.’13 In Through the Olive Trees, for instance, Kiarostami portrays the real story of a man and woman in a quake-struck area. He reveals an issue as simple as a love affair in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake in northern Iran. The simplicity of the real event is enhanced by his use of depth of field and long takes, in which he shows the whole scene in its physical entirety in a single take. The refusal to break up the action by using a classic cut ‘ensures the continuity of dramatic space and, of course, of its duration’.14 The idea of making the film develops when Kiarostami returns to the village of Kukir, now struck by a devastating earthquake, to shoot another film called Life and then Nothing. Among the high school girls assembled by the crew, Ms Shiva, the assistant director,

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chooses Tahirih to be cast as a young bride with the same name. As soon as the crew starts preparing to shoot the film, the director faces difficulties. Tahirih refuses to wear the traditional costume and wants to put on an inappropriate party dress. The man chosen to play the young husband stutters in front of women and is unable to deliver his lines. Ms Shiva has to bring in an unemployed mason called Hussein to play Tahirih’s husband, Hussein. Tahirih now refuses to talk to Hussein. The filming is suspended so the crew can assess the situation. Hussein reveals that he had previously proposed to Tahirih, but her family did not consent. He is looking for a sign that will indicate whether she is interested in him or not. The film continues to show both the actual events in Hussein and Tahirih’s relationship, which at times take ironical turns, and the main story. Through the Olive Trees redefines the function of cinema as a narrative of real life, because the two genres of documentary and fiction are fused. The most sincere moments are when it represents the daily life of the residents of Kukir and the actual moments in the interaction between Hussein and Tahirih. Kiarostami’s cinematic techniques enhance the revelation of reality. The length – or what looks like the actual length – of shooting time corresponds to real life. The film’s final sequence, the most significant moment in my view, is a good example of this technique. In a long, static take with deep focus, Hussein is shown following Tahirih, apparently proposing to her once again. The camera tilts down the hill through the olive trees and an open field, after the fictional crew has finished shooting the film. Now the couple are depicted in their real off-camera lives. They fade into white dots in the green landscape. As they move further away, the audience no longer hears Hussein’s pleading. After a fairly long silence the audience is given the privilege of hearing the soundtrack once again, but disappointingly it is not Tahirih and Hussein’s conversation. Instead, it is a peaceful piece of classical music, ‘Concerto for Oboe and Strings’ by Domenico Cimarosa. This extremely static long take with deep focus continues as we see Hussein running towards the camera once again. Does he have good news? The audience can only assume so. Here, the depth of focus gives a more realistic, less theatrical image of life with its complex messages. This last shot is a reflection of the actual passage

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of time and makes the whole movie seem to be one long episode in which the viewer is suspended between film fiction and reality. The deep focus that shows reality as a whole, especially in the absence of a soundtrack, proposes a unique cinematic language that is very close to the poetic language of Sepehri and Farrukhzad, offering ultimate liberation from the constructed meaning imposed through traditional montage images that break down the action into cuts. Kiarostami’s rejection of classic editing gives the audience of Through the Olive Trees maximum freedom to conclude the film either way. The fact that this episode is presented in its physical entirety makes it ambiguous, if not undecidable. In the last sequence, the audience does not see the actors in close-ups that would reveal their facial expressions accompanied by their voices. The choice of deep focus, which brings uncertainty, is especially important in suggesting that Hussein and Tahirih are shown in real, off-camera moments – although this is a deceptive twist, and in any case this is only a film or a fictive imitation of reality. It could suggest that people’s real personalities are much more complex and intriguing than the characters they play in front of a camera. With Kiarostami’s camera, the audience goes beyond the devastation caused by the earthquake to witness a celebration of life and love. In Life and then Nothing, Kiarostami’s lens is focused on children who are talking about World Cup soccer in the midst of their loss. Where Is the Friend’s House? visualizes the world through a child’s eyes to capture moments of life that adults fail to take in. The director’s camera is the artificial or artistic eye that observes more accurately than real eyes, as if to show the failure of the artificial/real binary. Focusing his camera on the object/nature of reality, Kiarostami problematizes the subject/ audience and established prejudgements. This is reminiscent of a part of Sohrab’s ‘The Sound of Water Steps’, which reads:

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema The eyes should get cleansed, we should see in a different way Words should be washed Words should be the same as wind, words should be the same as rain15

As Shamisa says, Sepehri proposes a ‘philosophy of novel outlook’16 in which the thinker frees herself from ‘the known’ to grasp the wonderful moment here and now. In films like Through the Olive Trees Kiarostami translates this into a poetic cinematic language.

The Art that is Universal Neither Farrukhzad nor Sepehri held back from creating an art form inspired by deep and sincere feelings. Farrukhzad especially made a point of confounding the expectations of a patriarchal society that female artists should conceal their sexual desires and confine their attention to social issues. A good example of a poet who fulfilled the expectations of the patriarchal society was Parvin Etesami (1907–41), the most famous Iranian poet before Farrukhzad and still considered by traditionalists as ‘the acceptable’ female poet among modern counterparts such as Sepideh Kashani. Etesami’s poetry is traditional in form and diction and didactic in nature. She neglects the poetic self for critique. In contrast, Farrukhzad’s poetry is bold and controversial with an unmistakably feminine perspective. As a rebellious woman in a Muslim country in the 1950s and ’60s, Farrukhzad expressed her true feelings about love and sexual desire, which as both Michael Hillmann and Farzaneh Milani point out, remain a central theme in her poems to the end.17 Of all her poems, ‘Gunah’ (Sin) is quoted most often:

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I sinned a sin full of pleasure, in an embrace which was warm and fiery. I sinned surrounded by arms that were hot and avenging and iron. In that dark and silent seclusion, I looked into his secret-full eyes. My heart shook impatiently in my breast in response to the request of his needful eyes In that dark and silent seclusion, I sat dishevelled at his side. His lips poured passion on my lips, I escaped from the sorrow of my crazed heart.18 In her life and poetry, Farrukhzad did not abide by the norms of her patriarchal society or by poetic conventions,19 and remained controversial until the end of her life. Milani analyses the feminine elements in her work: Describing her emotions and the experiences of both her body and her mind – avoiding semantic obliquity, obtrusive stylistic devices and traditional artifices of concealment – [Farrukhzad] explores patterns of heterosexual relationships in an unprecedented manner. No other Persian woman has offered more

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema detailed and candid description of such relationships, or a more individualized, less restrained portrayal of men. The substitution of abstractions for individuals or the subordination of characters to types – a literary tradition practiced too often – has no appeal for this poet. Even the criterion of objectivity and its techniques are repeatedly abrogated.20

Milani asserts elsewhere21 that Farrukhzad’s personal and sincere feminine voice ‘seldom leaves the Iranian reader impartial. It evokes either strong attraction or keen aversion.’22 Especially in the mid1950s, when the poet gained national and to some extent international fame, the reaction to her poetry in Iranian journals and newspapers was frequently unsympathetic. Hillmann recalls one example written by Sirus Parham, under the pseudonym ‘Doktor Mitra’: Ms. Farrukhzad has implicitly considered the right of ‘sexual freedom’ the most vital and essential right that a woman should seek from society. Consequently, she has endeavoured to incite women against men, assuming that the ‘massacre’ of men will do away with all of women’s social deprivations and thus women will be completely free!23 Farrukhzad’s internal poetic gaze and frank feminine descriptions were controversial and offensive to her society, but they made her into a poet with universal human concerns. Ignoring the thick political atmosphere of the Tehran literati, she found sophistication in everyday life and transformed it into a simple poetic language, precise and clear. In doing so, she crossed cultural and political thresholds into ontological human concerns. Similarly, Kiarostami’s rejection of immediate political issues and social problems made him a groundbreaking film-maker inside and outside his country. His concerns are set out on the screen and broaden the audience’s mind by asking questions about existence as a universal issue. Hence, his seemingly naive and depoliticized approach to reality has been criticized or at least closely watched by Iranian and international critical circles. At a time when Iran was experiencing violence and brutality under an Islamic regime that took more political prisoners and

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carried out more executions than any other in the country’s history, and was struggling with a war in which millions of lives were lost, Kiarostami trained his camera on simple issues such as Iranian schools in Homework, or a young boy determined to find his friend’s house in Where Is the Friend’s House?. He has been seriously criticized for this by some Iranian film critics. Muhammad Saeed Muhassisi gives an example, but the author and source are not mentioned: In the midst of a devastating outbreak, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, Kiarostami is more interested in the results of World Cup Soccer, or finding two young kids among thousands of missing children [in Life and then Nothing]. Another such example is [found in Through the Olive Trees which is] the persistent and, to some extent, annoying proposal of a young man to a young girl who ironically lost her family [in the earthquake].24 As Muhassisi says, Kiarostami’s approach is similar to Sepehri’s, who was thinking of ‘getting a whiff of a flower in another planet’,25 while according to his critics, others had already found their way to outer space. Kiarostami’s tendency to look at the world in a simple manner could explain why in many instances he has chosen a child’s viewpoint, innocent of adult concerns.26 In Where Is the Friend’s House? it is through the eyes of Babak that the audience sees the unsympathetic reactions of grown-ups to his problem. More significantly, in Wind Will Carry Us, it is through Farzad, the young country boy who becomes the guide to the film crew that the engineer learns to appreciate both life and death. Through Farzad’s novel viewpoint, the engineer understands he is not to wait for death, but to celebrate life, because as Farrukhzad says, ‘the wind will carry us away’ at any moment. Like Sepehri, Kiarostami is an artist who is seeking the truth beyond the tumult of war and revolution. His approach is reminiscent of Sepehri’s ‘The Sound of Water’s Footsteps’:

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema Our job may be to follow the song of truth between the lotus and the century27

Because as he says in ‘To the Garden of Fellow-Travellers’:

I’m afraid of the cement layer of the century ... open me like a door to the descent of the pear in this time of ascending the steel Put me to sleep under a tree branch far from the night of the metals’ friction.28 Because Kiarostami’s films were banned in Iran after he made Wind Will Carry Us and are mainly shown to Western audiences, he is now accused of being under Western influence. According to his critics, this is how he finds his way into Western cinemas. There are people who believe that his journalistic method of film-making does not deserve international attention and that he is lauded at international festivals because he portrays Iran as a povertystricken country, portraying the rural poor rather than the majority urban population. Kiarostami himself brought up this issue in an interview.29 From an international perspective, the paradox of Kiarostami’s film style is related to political changes in Iran that inflamed antiWestern attitudes. As Rosenbaum comments: ‘While Iranians continue to be among the most demonized people on the planet (along with their neighbors to the west, the Iraqis), Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized by critics as among the most ethical and humanist.’30 Needless to say, Kiarostami’s vision and approach have contributed greatly to this.

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The Legacy of Black As we have seen, Kiarostami’s poetic realist approach has been inherited from Iranian new wave film-makers such as Darush Mehrjui and Sohrab Shahid Sales, and Kiarostami himself cited Sales’s Yik Ittifaq-i Sadih (A Simple Event, 1973) as a major influence.31 As Dabashi says, what was at stake in this film was its ‘deceptive simplicity’, which ‘began patiently to probe the nature of reality beyond its metaphysically mediated signification’32 in portraying the life of a boy in northern Iran. A lesser known film, but the ‘greatest of all Iranian films’ according to Rosenbaum,33 The House Is Black, made by Farrukhzad in 1962, shows profound affinities with Kiarostami’s movies made almost 30 years later. It is hard to say to what extent Farrukhzad’s film had a direct impact on Kiarostami’s film grammar or at what point in his career he became acquainted with The House Is Black. What is clearer, as the film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf has pointed out, is that this documentary made by a poet is ‘the best Iranian film [to have] affected the contemporary Iranian cinema’,34 to which Kiarostami’s body of work belongs. Thus, not only did Farrukhzad inspire Kiarostami through her poetry, but she also became a source of inspiration to Iranian cinema, and consequently to Kiarostami, through her film-making. The House Is Black35 is a poetic documentary about a leper colony near Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan province in Iran. It won a prize for best documentary at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1964. Four years later this award was named the Forough Farrukhzad Memorial Prize.36 The film was also screened at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1966.37 The House Is Black was one of the first examples of adapting literature and poetry to cinema, with Farrukhzad’s voice reciting poems in the background. This fusion of art forms, which had existed since the earliest days of Iranian cinema, became the hallmark of Iranian new wave films. Mehrjui’s Cow and Bahman Farmanara’s Prince Ehtejab are other fine examples. Kiarostami’s deep reliance on Persian poetry is therefore no surprise, to the point where the titles of two of his most acclaimed movies, Where Is the Friend’s House? and Wind Will Carry Us, are taken from poems by Sepehri and Farrukhzad respectively.

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As a classic Iranian film, The House is Black, a ‘versified story/ film’ to quote Houshang Golmakani,38 is crucial in two ways. First of all, it is a specific secular and realist focus on a social issue, translated into a symbolical film grammar. As Ibrahim Gulistan, the film’s producer, indicated, ‘The House Is Black depicts a leprous society in which the people trust in God and seek a cure for their condition through prayer, whereas only science and surgery can effect a cure.’39 This secular poetic gaze would later be transferred into Kiarostami’s film grammar, which is widely seen as symbolically charged. Second, and more significantly, Farrukhzad’s profound humanist approach is similar to Kiarostami’s perspective. Rosenbaum points out that ‘Farrukhzad’s uncanny capacity to regard lepers without morbidity as both beautiful and ordinary, objects of love as well as intense identification, offers very different challenges, pointing to very different spiritual and philosophical assumption.’40 In this documentary masterpiece, Farrukhzad uses non-professionals in their real life situation, which is reminiscent of Kiarostami’s stylistics. The contemporary film-maker Nasser Saffarian observed that The House Is Black was not made according to a prepared scenario. Most of it became a meaningful whole only when Farrukhzad had finished the editing.41 To some extent, however, The House Is Black is staged and in very rare cases might be scripted. An example of a scripted segment could be the final scene, in which the lepers come towards the camera and close the door that has a sign reading ‘The Lepers’ House’. The blend of fact and fiction in Farrukhzad’s film established the cinéma vérité approach in Iranian cinema, but Kiarostami was to master it. Farrukhzad’s spiritual yet secular approach to a community of lepers shows their pleasures more than their sufferings. In similar manner, the subject of most of Kiarostami’s movies is the condition of poor people viewed through the eyes of a middle-class director. As Rosenbaum observes: The most obvious parallel to The House Is Black in Kiarostami’s career is his documentary A.B.C. Africa (2001) about orphans of AIDS victims in Uganda. This film goes beyond even

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Farrukhzad’s works in emphasizing the everyday joy of children at play in the midst of their apparent devastation.42 In Through the Olive Trees and And Life Goes On there is a comparable emphasis on the simple pleasures of everyday life rather than on the sufferings caused by a natural disaster. Throughout The House Is Black, the audience is exposed to the two different voices of Gulistan and Farrukhzad. The former gives a dispassionate medical account of the disease, while the patients are seen being treated in a clinic. It offers an external look at the lepers’ condition by presenting statistical and scientific data.43 This might explain why the film was premiered to a professional audience in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Tehran University, with former Queen Farah Pahlavi and the Shah’s sister, Ashraf Pahlavi, as guests of honour. Immediately after this factual account, Farrukhzad’s mesmerising voice recites from the Bible44 in a gentle tone, to ‘soften the effect of the harsh images’45 of deformed bodies and the unsympathetic scientific information. Now the lepers are shown in their daily activities, going to school, walking in the compound yard, dancing and having a party. The rest of the film shows images of the lepers’ lives. In the first sequence, the audience sees a close-up of a man’s feet dancing to a humming voice. The camera slowly pans up to show two deformed dancing hands and a ravaged face full of joy, singing. Among other scenes we witness the children’s school, two residents playing checkers, a wedding ceremony with lepers dancing and playing instruments and a few shots of the lepers at prayer in their mosque. One of the most moving scenes is a close-up of a woman’s face, deformed by leprosy, as she applies make-up to her eyes. Farrukhzad successfully avoids a journalistic style of documentary by viewing the material through a poetic gaze. She deconstructs our pre-judgements about normal/abnormal and beautiful/ugly by showing the leper community as just like any other group of people engaged in everyday life. The masterly fusion of fact and fiction is represented by ‘the dual narrative mode’ described by Kaveh Gulistan in The House Is Black Commentary. It reinforces a detachment value comparable

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to the distance effects in Kiarostami’s films. Rosenbaum confirms this: This poetic mixture [of actuality and fiction in Farrukhzad’s The House Is Black] is also found throughout Kiarostami’s work over a span of more than three decades, and it raises comparable issues about the director’s manipulation of and control over his cast members. Yet the films of both Farrukhzad and Kiarostami propose inquiries into the ethics of middle-class artists filming poor people: they are not simply or exclusively demonstrations of this practice. In Kiarostami’s case, the films are often critiques of the film-maker’s distance and detachment from his subjects as well as his special entitlements, as seen in his work since early 1980s (both Orderly and Disorderly [1981] and Fellow Citizen [1983], for instance, feature his off-screen voice). In Farrukhzad’s case, in which the sense of personal commitment runs even deeper, the implications of an artist being unworthy of her subject are never entirely absent.46 The ironical approach of both directors towards their subject matter creates a similar detachment effect. In the lepers’ elementary school, the teacher asks one of his students to name a few beautiful objects, to which he answers: ‘The Moon, the Sun, flowers, and playing.’ He then asks another student to name a few ugly objects. The student replies: ‘Hands, feet, head.’ The class bursts into laughter. As a viewer, I found this response bitterly humorous, too. Humorous because these human body parts are not usually seen as ugly, but it also suggests the sad reality that a leper’s hands, feet and head can become ugly when the disease spreads. In any case, this ironical gaze directed at a serious disease such as leprosy is a refreshing attitude that prevents the audience from being overwhelmed by sorrow. Farrukhzad’s quizzical look at her subjects is reminiscent of Kiarostami’s witty approach in almost all his films, including Homework. In this film, when the audience is wearied by the rather similar responses of children all pointing to the priority of their homework over TV (although all of them are asked to come to the principal’s office because they have failed to do their homework), one

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boy’s response offers the same refreshing energy. Basically, he blames his playful young sister for his failure to complete his homework and narrates amusing stories about the two of them. When Kiarostami asks him how his mother punishes him when he does not do his assignments, he replies: BOY. My mother only tells me to do my homework as soon as I can. She never beats me with a belt. KIAROSTAMI. Then how do you know about punishing with a belt? BOY. Well, my father has got a few belts, but since he has a big belly, he can’t use them. People call him Mr Chubby [giggling]. He is not able to use them so my mother uses them for beating me. But each time she wants to beat me, she can’t find them. This conversation is made even more humorous by the reverse shots of the boy’s face, showing his big smile and naughty expression. Through Kiarostami’s ironical look at a child’s suffering, the boy ‘moves beyond everyday pains to attain the beauty bestowed in the human spirit.’47 In this way, it is not the issue of homework or even of the Iranian school system that matters; what is at stake, in Ramin Jahanbegloo’s words, ‘is not the society but existence as a whole.’48 This ironic perspective is mastered in Kiarostami’s Wind Will Carry Us, which takes its title from one of Farrukhzad’s poems. Like The House Is Black, Wind Will Carry Us depicts the bright side of life in spite of its title, and Kiarostami’s choice of location in a remote village in Iranian Kurdestan called Siyah Darrih (Black Valley), connoting misery and unhappiness, associates the colour black with a state of grieving or melancholy. In Wind Will Carry Us, the audience follows a film crew that has travelled to Black Valley to record the funeral of a dying old woman named Malik Khanum. Overturning a Fixed Reality In this film the concept of binaries, which suggests a fixed reality schema through which we perceive the world, is problematized. Ironically, it is through the philosophical answers of Farzad – the

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village boy who acts as guide to the film crew – that Kiarostami deliberately thwarts the audience’s expectation of a clear-cut answer. In Farzad’s world there is always more than one answer or possibility to a single question. When the film-maker, ironically called the engineer,49 asks Farzad the way to the village, he answers: ‘you can take this way, or that way or the other to get to the village.’ In another instance the film-maker inquires about the grandmother’s age. Farzad replies: ‘She is 100 to 150.’ Similarly, when asked about the old woman’s health – they are waiting for her death to shoot the funeral ceremony – Farzad says it is ‘both good and bad.’ Farzad’s ‘young’ uncle is 80 years old, and he calls him young because he has two older uncles as well. In problematizing a ‘black and white’ world-view, Kiarostami challenges the audience’s concepts such as truth and reality. He suggests the ‘art of thinking differently’, inherited from the modern poetry tradition with its questioning and novel world-view. The paradoxical answers of a child in Wind Will Carry Us cast doubt on the concept of binaries intrinsic to the adult body of precepts. In this way, the viewer moves beyond the diegetic structure of the film to a dynamic interpretation of truth, existence, thought, power and culture. Thus, truth is not treated as an absolute and well-structured entity but as a textual and contextual commodity. Generally speaking, we make sense of linguistic patterns by relating them to binaries. Farzad’s responses strip familiarity from the engineer’s conventional shaping of meaning, and through him our own. While the boy’s responses may make us laugh, they suggest that it is impossible to make a clear distinction between concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. To borrow Nail Lucy’s illuminating terms, the ‘fascist’ and ‘foundationalist’ approach to reality that legitimizes the ‘all or nothingness of the opposition’ fades away, creating the feasibility of an ‘assemblage of the oppositions’.50 In this film, the concepts of reality and truth are not treated as the ‘essence’ but as an assemblage of contextual prospects. More than in any other of his movies, in Wind Will Carry Us Kiarostami uses irony to entertain contradictory possibilities. His ironization of style, as a different aesthetic mode, recalls Allan Wilde’s comment that irony is ‘a mode of consciousness, a perceptual

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response to a world without unity or cohesion.’51 This is deliberately reinforced by Kiarostami’s choice of location, which he found only after two years of searching: I was looking for a village with a strange architectural design – something that would seem strange to the viewer as well as to us, suggesting a strangeness that would be brought out by the local funeral ceremony. When I found this village, it was so remote that when we went back to the place to begin shooting, we had some trouble finding it.52 Siyah Darrih (Black Valley), with its white exteriors and labyrinthine architecture that opens multiple routes to any particular destination, is an allegorical suggestion to the audience and Behzad that they live in a world that lacks any order or coherence, or any final well-established meaning. It is a reminder that so-called objectivity comes only from our subjective perception of reality. Yet Kiarostami’s outlook is not a pessimistic view of the world. During his time in the village, Behzad learns not only how to recognize, but also how to appreciate and accept variety and confusion, among other things. Thus we find a kind of ‘order’, but not ‘orderliness’ in the incoherent world presented to us.53 Venturi asks a remarkable question, similar to what Kiarostami encourages us to see: ‘[s]hould we not resist bemoaning confusion? Should we not look for meaning in the complexities and contradictions of our times and acknowledge the limitations of system? ... When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.’54 From the anomalies and uncertainties in the village architecture, Kiarostami steps forward to portray the indeterminacy that Behzad confronts in awaiting death when he is surrounded by wonderful manifestations of life, represented through such images as a long take of a turtle, ironically stepping on a gravestone. When it is turned upside down by ‘the engineer’ it manages to flip itself back and continue its way. Another image of life and livelihood in the village is the birth of a new baby in the house where the film crew is staying. Other instances show virtual manifestations of life, including a vibrant, extremely long shot of a field with three playful dogs.

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Kiarostami does not direct his ironical gaze merely by controlled and witty verbal strategies in Farzad’s speeches or by the architecturally complex location. His paradoxical perspective is intensified by a familiar mise-en-scène-oriented metaphor that he has exploited in many other films: a car driving down a twisting road. Once again, the visual and spatial nature of mise-en-scène at the beginning of the film implies a Sufi (to the Iranian audience) or a transcendental journey in search of the truth (to the international audience). This is reinforced when we hear the film crew, who are looking for the village, recite part of Sepehri’s poem ‘Address’: ‘a few steps to the tree, there is a garden greener than God’s dreams’.55 It also echoes Kiarostami’s previous movies, such as Where Is the Friend’s House? Conversely, this mystical journey turns out to be that of a Tehrani film crew, with obvious colonial attitude, travelling to shoot an exotic funeral in a remote village. In order to not hurt the villagers’ feelings they pretend to be in search of a lost treasure, and in one scene Behzad claims to be in charge of a telecommunications project, thus legitimizing the title given to him. Hence, the presence of these Tehrani people is not legitimized. On the other hand, the audience starts to question Behzad’s exercise of power over the villagers – including Farzad, the well-digger and his fiancée. The unequal relationship between (ironically) the guide/Farzad and the follower/engineer is harshly pointed up when Farzad brings some bread for the film crew before going to school. Behzad, annoyed and frustrated by his colleagues’ intolerance, yells at Farzad, shown in a low angle shot to emphasize his inferiority and helplessness. Behzad, who came to know the well-digger in the cemetery that he frequently visits to get a cellphone signal, introduces himself to his fiancée as Yousef’s boss. The audience is also repelled by Behzad’s voyeuristic treatment of the well-digger’s fiancée, when he asks her to bring the lamp near her face in the dark cavern so that he can see Yousef’s taste. All these examples show how Kiarostami’s reflexive and regressive approach casts irony on the established symbolic figures of road and traveller. Wind Will Carry Us turns out to be not an innocent mystical journey but a self-critical account, because, after all, these middle-class people are involved in making a film in a poor village, just like

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Kiarostami himself who travels to remote places to make films. It is a self-mirroring movie that questions the moral validity of the film crew’s presence in Siyah Darrih. Kiarostami’s transcendental use of irony and reflexivity recalls F. W. Schlegel’s identification of elegy as the median form of transcendental poetry: It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute identity of the two ... This sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw material and preliminaries of a theory of poetic creativity – often met with in modern poets – with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring that is present in Pindar, in the lyric fragments of the Greeks, in the classic elegy, and among the moderns, in Goethe. In all its descriptions, this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.56 Kiarostami’s reflexive mode is aptly described by Schlegel as ‘simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.’ While Kiarostami’s poetic film engages with a number of issues, including questions of life and death, it maintains a ‘cinema of cinema’, to adapt Schlegel’s term, with a self-criticizing awareness of its own cinematic nature and the power to construct meaning through cinematic techniques. In Wind Will Carry Us, Behzad travels from epistemological assurance to indecisiveness when he is troubled by the philosophical dilemmas that Farzad confronts him with. In regard to the welldigger’s fiancée, despite what a few critics assume, the movie does not accommodate a harassing or voyeuristic approach. On the contrary, it represents a reflexive irony in a sustained critique of voyeurism. Thus, it functions as an initial act of criticizing the film-maker that will lead to an attempt to eliminate him in later films. While Kiarostami’s physical and figurative presence is evident in many of his films, including Close Up, Homework, and Life and then Nothing, the presence of the film-maker character (Behzad) in Wind Will Carry Us interrogates the legitimacy of Kiarostami as director. In any event, the presence and the deliberate elimination of the director in Kiarostami’s films announce an auteur who wishes to

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criticize or eliminate himself. This is another striking resemblance to the poetry of Sepehri and Farrukhzad. Unlike others in the modern poetry tradition, they do not disembody the poet. Sepehri talks about his love and passion for a woman, his parents and town, while Farrukhzad’s poetic persona aestheticizes the ordinary incidents of her life, including her husband, her son Kamyar and her lover, her sewing machine and garden. The following two examples are taken first from the beginning of Sepehri’s ‘The Sound of Water Footsteps’, dedicated to his mother’s silent nights, and then from Farrukhzad’s ‘Return’:

I’m from Kashan Life treats me well enough I have enough to eat, a bit of intelligence, and a puny amount of talent I have a mother, better than a tree’s leaf And some friends more refreshing than running water.57 The rest of this long poem deals with Sepehri’s own principles, his father and a poetic account of his death, and his memories of his sister’s birth. As Shamisa indicates, Sepehri’s intention in versifying this autobiographical poem after his father’s passing was to offer a poetic consolation to his mother.58 The next poem, ‘Return’, is taken from a letter written in a reconciling mood59 by Farrukhzad to her husband:

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Because of that letter you sent and those bitter complaints I couldn’t close my eyes last night Oh essence of hope and my distant refuge never suffer for what is hidden in my verse What has this poetry given to me but my beloved’s suffering ... These verses that have tormented your soul are the cries of a tortured heart ... Once again, bind my legs to the chains so that deceit and treachery do not defeat me so that the stealthy hand of colorful passions does not bind me again with another band60 While Kiarostami’s self-critical approach questions the power of media and of the director himself, it also brings the director, like the poet above, to the centre of the film. It is an ironical presence that recalls the postmodern sublime identified by Andrew M. Roberts as a ‘playful, self conscious, double coding and strategic anachronism’.61 Farrukhzad’s ironical, and at times apologetic presence in her poems creates a modern sublime that shows a ‘nostalgia for the missing contents’,62 such as a lost son (in ‘A Poem for Kami’) or an unattainable lover (in ‘Another Birth’). Hence, in Kiarostami’s case this nostalgia for a loss becomes a postmodern sublime that ‘creates new forms in order to impart a stronger sense of unpresentable’,63 through his critique of his own ideological position in the process of film-making.

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Consequently, Wind Will Carry Us dismantles the illusion of ‘absolute objectivity’ through its ironical aestheticization, which deconstructs the audience’s presumption of an ‘absolute good’ or the ‘right path’ constructed by the ‘historically conditioned frames of meaning and perception’, as Terry Eagleton indicates.64 I am convinced that Kiarostami, along with other contemporary directors like Makhmalbaf in Nubat-i Ashighi (Time of Love 1991), has opened the door to the philosophy of relativism in Iranian cinema. In Wind Will Carry Us, he successfully manages to diminish binary concepts such as old and young, good and bad, black and white, in favour of a more realistic world with relativist values. After watching this film, the viewer feels freed from the absolute structured meanings imposed by culture or language. She or he is given a chance to rethink established norms and values and to recontextualize and re-signify meaning. The last ironical instance proposed through Kiarostami’s poetic and philosophical humour is his deconstruction of the notion of leader in Iranian culture. A leader or pir is supposed to be an older person, as the Persian word literally suggests. In this film, however, it is a child who is guiding the film crew. In fact, Farzad is the one who makes us, and perhaps the film-maker, review our/his prejudices. His actions and speech underline the prejudices that govern our day-today evaluations. Is there any way to get rid of them as Behzad did, by symbolically throwing a human bone – representing the old values of a dead world – into running water, which is alive, active and ready to embrace the future? His intention was to film a funeral. Ironically, after the old woman’s death he does not record the ceremony. Instead, he succeeds in demolishing the old ‘epistemological’ paradigms rooted in his old habits and beliefs. Behzad is a manipulative and not very likeable person65 who is trying to legitimize and justify his presence in the village. Through a child’s leading and an encounter with the village doctor, who makes him re-examine life, he ultimately moves to shift his beliefs and to celebrate life instead of waiting for a death. One of the most beautiful moments in Wind Will Carry Us is a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops, through which the doctor, accompanied by the film-maker, is riding his scooter along a winding road. In response to his comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this robayee of Khayyam:

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They promise the houries (beautiful women) in heaven But I would say wine is better Take the present to the promises A drum sounds melodious from apart Once more, Kiarostami deconstructs our perception of a leader by portraying Farzad as the leader of the crew. In this way, Wind Will Carry Us is a dialogical response both to Where Is the Friend’s House? and to Sepehri’s poem ‘Nishani’ (Address). In the earlier film, it is the old man with his profound philosophical view who takes the lead to show the way to the child. Nevertheless, he is not successful, gets tired in the middle of it and lets Ahmad continue in the dark. In the latter film, it is the child who acts as leader and surprisingly accomplishes the job. He not only gives directions to the film-maker, but also acts as a spiritual leader. Farzad is the boy in Sepehri’s Nishani who guides a confused man in a strange land:

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‘Where is the friend’s house?’ in the morning twilight the rider asked. The sky halted. The passer-by gave away the branch of light to the darkness of sand and pointed with his finger to an aspen and said: ‘before you see the tree there is a garden-lane greener than God’s dream where love is as blue as candour’s wings. Keep on going to the lane to pass the adolescence then, turn towards the flower of solitude, two steps to the flower, stop by the eternal fountain of earth myths a translucent fear envelops you in the intimacy of flowing space you see a child climbed up a pine tree, to pick a chick from the light’s nest and you ask the child, ‘Where is the Friend’s house?’66

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The Poetic Treatment of mise-en-scène The symbolic and in some cases allegorical construction of modern Persian poetry is achieved in Kiarostami’s films by minimal plots and non-narrative stories, based on lyrical moments in rural settings that become an occasion for poetic realism. By choosing rural areas for most of his films and genuine urban or suburban locations for the others, Kiarostami – along with many Iranian film-makers, Mehrjui, Abolfazl Jalili, Bahman Qubadi and Samira Makhmalbaf and others who made their films in real locations before and after the Islamic revolution – strives to achieve a new aesthetics that emancipates possibilities. Because the plot is minimal, the focus shifts to the location and to film-making techniques, such as lighting, colour, composition, music, sound, camera angle and camera movement. Rural areas in northern Iran with their natural greenery, olive groves and rice paddies are the location for Kiarostami’s three films known as the Rostam Abad trilogy. Later, in Wind Will Carry Us, he chose a remote Kurdestan village. From a formal perspective, it is distinguished by its unusual composition, and as Ben Zipper observes, ‘Kiarostami’s work as a landscape artist is evident in his strong compositional distant shots of the dry hills around Siyah Darih.’67 Kiarostami’s rural and remote settings are reminiscent of Sepehri’s attention to landscape. In poems like ‘Gulistanih’, Sepehri treats the rural environment realistically and imbues it with a poetic aura:68

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Vast prairies! Lofty mountains! Sweet scent of grass in Gulistanih, I was looking for something in this land: perhaps a dream, some light, sand, a smile Behind the poplar trees pure negligence was calling me I stopped at a reed-bed, the wind was blowing; I listened: Who is talking to me? A lizard slipped, I started walking a hayfield on the way, a cucumber bed, flower bushes, and the oblivion of the Earth

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I put off my shoes and set down my feet dangling in the stream, How green am I today and how observant is my body! God forbid if grief comes from behind the mountain. Who is behind the tree? Nobody, a cow is grazing in the field. Noontime in summer, only shadows know the summer, spotless shadows, in a bright and pure corner, Children of Emotion, here is a playground. Life is not empty: There is kindness, apples, and belief. Life goes on as long as poppy flowers are alive! Something is lurking in my heart, like light, like A dream before daybreak And so restless I am that I feel like running to the end of the plain, or climbing to the top of the mountain. A voice in the distance is calling me.69 For both Sepehri and Kiarostami, landscape is the source of inspiration, purity and knowledge. Kiarostami’s camera is sensitive to colours, light and lack of light and its reflection on objects. The fact that he has a degree in painting and is a professional photographer may help to explain this. In his films, green forests and fields suggest the peacefulness and inviolability of life in its most simple form. Sacredness is especially reflected in the single trees in many scenes, an image that in Iranian culture represents calmness, holiness, melancholy and maturity. Both forests and single trees (green or leafless) are subjects that Kiarostami dwells on in films and photographs. The lack of light where the young woman is milking the cow in Wind Will Carry Us underpins the theme of death. When asked about this scene, Kiarostami stated that: ‘[d]eath is a constant theme of [this] movie, that’s why I placed that scene in the darkness and deep inside the earth, not merely inside a house.’70 The ‘absence’ of light in Taste of Cherry when Badi’i enters the grave for almost a minute, to the sound of thunder, may signify death and non-existence for some viewers, but the ‘presence’ of abundant light and its reflection on

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trees on full bloom, accompanied by the hopeful tune of Summertime while the soldiers are marching and when Kiarostami announces the end of shooting to the film crew immediately after the scene in the grave, implies the continuity of life (either Badi’i’s or life in general) and its beauty. Thus, the assemblage of well-lit versus dark scenes in Kiarostami’s film grammar suggests the mutual existence of life with all its possibilities and of death as a factual moment in anyone’s life. When the leading actor in Wind Will Carry Us enters the dark, he recites a Farrukhzad poem that implicitly represents his nostalgic yearning for light and life in a dark, dead moment:

‘Present’ If you happen to come to my house, oh dear, bring a lamp for me; and a window so I can watch the crowd in the Happy Street The image of the ‘window’ both for the poet and the film-maker signifies hope, light, future and spiritual insight, or what is called ishraq in Persian. The window is also the medium of communication. There is an obstacle between the leading actor/poetic self and the window that must be overcome. Shooting films through a windshield in many of Kiarostami’s movies, such as Close-Up, Life and then Nothing and Taste of Cherry, underpins the same concept. It invites the audience to perceive the world in a different way. Contrary to what is assumed by many critics, including Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa71 and Stephen Bransford,72 Kiarostami’s choice of rural areas as locations is not an explicit cultural or political statement. The restrictions imposed by the Ministry of Guidance and Islamic Culture in the post-revolutionary era may have encouraged Iranian directors to choose rural and suburban areas for their more realistic

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representations of life. They were not pressured into showing an altered reality when they portrayed rural men and women who had not been exposed to Westernized values and had no desire to give up their relatively traditional appearances. This choice of rural space has been interpreted by many audiences, including those at international film festivals, as a political act and has drawn a range of reactions inside and outside Iran.73 But Kiarostami’s camera is a means to reveal philosophical and poetic interpretations of reality. The rural space in most of his films is a source of purity and knowledge, a knowledge untarnished by cultural or political constraints. As a result, a rural space or at least a natural location is a better place for showing reality in its essence. Kiarostami’s film-making is not aimed at culturally specific questions. The questions he proposes are to be pondered globally. His films just happen to be shot in the land of Iran, but the questions in them are far more universal. Kiarostami’s treatment of mise-en-scène is in tune with his poetry. As Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Beard comment, Kiarostami, ‘[l]ike Rumi, the poet of the largest questions in all of Persian poetry ... reaches out to the world rather than focusing on any local topic. His thinking is cosmopolitan, humane, and global.’74 Karimi-Hakkak’s comments on Kiarostami’s poetry could be equally applied to his films: [Kiarostami’s poetry] ought to be experienced phenomenologically as direct manifestations of states of being. The sustained pursuit may, in the end rest in surprising revelations of the ultimate insufficiency of a culturally determined sense of aesthetic pleasure, bound by ideology, by history, or by aesthetic convention. To make this understandable to those accustomed to such poetry, we need to expound a theory of the poetic image as independent of ideology or history, poetry without a past, immediately referable to ontology. A poetry in which it is the immediate manifestation of our hearts and souls, in their existential being, apprehended in their actuality. Human behavior reveals the human-ness of human beings caught in the act of being themselves, rather than creatures of history, culture or circumstance.75

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Since he made Homework in 1990, Kiarostami has preferred to shoot his films exclusively in exteriors and usually in rural areas or en route to them.76 In my view, his choice of exteriors implies the confrontation of man with nature, with God, and with life in general. Being away from a cosy domestic space could also suggest lack of privacy and the isolation of his leading characters in their lives. Badi’i in Taste of Cherry is so isolated that he drives on roads to find someone with whom to share his thoughts. The leading actor in Wind Will Carry Us has set out on a journey to an exotic land to find out about life and death. He is an isolated man who fails to communicate with his wife – and ironically, he is shown at a telecommunications construction site when talking to his complaining wife and to a dissatisfied boss unconvinced by his explanation. Cut off from them and from the film crew, he faces the meaning of life in a profound form in his confrontation with nature. In a different setting, in the world of children, we are invited to see the friendless Ahmad in Where Is the Friend’s House?, watching the world from his viewpoint and seeing the indifference and hypocrisy of the grown-ups who abandon him in his search for his friend’s house. These isolated characters are in a constant state of searching. The journey is a recurring motif in Kiarostami’s films and enhances the frequently seen image of a road. This motif is an important theme both in classical and contemporary Persian literature. In his poem ‘Nida’yi Aghaz’ (The Call of Debut), Sohrab Sepehri highlights the same subject. The last part of the poem reads:

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Tonight I should take the suitcase, which suits my loneliness dress and head in the direction where the mythical trees appear, head to that vast wordless realm which is calling me Somebody is calling again: Sohrab Where are my shoes? Where are my shoes?77 Like Sepehri’s poetic persona here, the isolated characters in Kiarostami’s movies begin their journey in response to an inner voice. This journey starts at a physical point, but the outcome is spiritual. Kiarostami’s characters are shown on the road, displaced and wandering from one place to another, which also suggests that life is transitory. This is particularly represented in Wind Will Carry Us. In Forough’s poem of the same name, the poetic self is desperately watching how life is passing away. When Behzad goes to the dark cavern to ask the young lady to milk the cow, he recites this poem to her, referring to life’s speedy passing:

In my little night, alas the wind has a date with the trees in my little night there is the fear of devastating

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The Poetics of Iranian Cinema Listen Can you hear the darkness blowing? I am nostalgically looking to this joy I am addicted to my hopelessness Listen You can hear the darkness blowing ... Wind Will Carry Us.

That is why the film-maker/engineer (Kiarostami’s alter ego) comes to realize that we should celebrate the here and now. He feels that ‘“moment” is his share written on the sheets of history’, as Farrukhzad once said.78 To Kiarostami, ‘life is [like] swimming in the “present”, little pond’,79 to borrow Sepehri’s term. This little pond called ‘present’ is disconnected from the past or the future. Kiarostami, like his poetic inspirers Sepehri and Farrukhzad, defamiliarizes familiar reality to represent the beauty of life hidden in one’s inner being. His films avoid current political issues to embrace simple but poetic moments and lyricism in the lives of individuals who live and survive in a harsh environment. His use of rural landscapes, amateur actors, poetic shots (such as a turtle) problematize the aesthetic values and conventions of film-making, leading the audience to draw meaning from the absence of linear narration. By taking a poetical and philosophical approach to film-making, Kiarostami confirmed Alexandre Astruc’s prophecy about the concept of caméra stylo (camera pen). Astruc predicted that ‘the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language ... It can tackle any subject, any genre.80 He continued: I will go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them ... [A] Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16 mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film81... From today onwards, it will

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be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their profundity and meaning to the novels of Faulkner and Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and Camus.82 Kiarostami is that philosopher of today, already using his digital camera. He borrowed Persian poetic concepts to convey his philosophy of life through a cinematic language that is equivalent to poetic language. In the change of the literary dominant in Iran from poetry in the 1960s to cinema in the 1980s and beyond, poetic language gave way to a rich cinematic language that was infused with poetic and philosophical concepts. In Kiarostami’s cinema, words and music belonging to other forms of art, as well as visual and special movements belonging exclusively to the art of cinema, coalesce in a harmonic existence in which the distinction between director and author evaporates, since he writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen. In the midst of the dramatic social transformations of revolution and war, Kiarostami trains his camera on simple issues, such as a toothache in Dandan Dard (Toothache, 1980) or on the notion of duty and assignment in Homework. In my view, his aesthetic engagement with the nature of reality and life on a deeper level de-abstracts our construction of reality to embrace the concrete and palpable moments of life that are experienced by all people. His cinematic work is deeply involved in everyday life while appearing detached from it. Unlike many other Iranian film-makers, his focus is genuine human feelings translated into the language of images, issues of universal human concern and not external matters such as politics. It is this that makes his films a form of art, free of location or time. Although Farrukhzad and Sepehri’s poetry dealt with the same internal feelings, because of the linguistic barrier their poems never managed to appeal to a transnational audience on a broad scale. Kiarostami’s images, on the other hand, provide a global camera-pen whose message reaches out internationally. Through a masterful intermingling of poetic discourse with his own film grammar, Kiarostami has achieved a profoundly humanist approach to cinema. His camera makes the audience look again at reality, fiction and media as an offshoot of the fusion of fact and

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fiction, by revealing the relations between the signifier, or the produced meaning, and the signified, which is the mode of production. At times, Kiarostami deliberately fuses fact and fiction to remind the audience of the artificiality of constructing a factual point. To achieve this, he sometimes uses an ironical and witty cinematic language that is harshly self-critical and self-reflexive. In representing life both factually and fictionally, his simple approach is far from cultural and ideological judgements, but similar to the poetics of Farrukhzad and Sepehri’s. Like his predecessor, Shahid Sales, he sets aside political concerns to investigate things ‘before they are perceived, understood, analysed, [and] judged’, as Dabashi asserts.83 The poetic language that Kiarostami inherited from Farrukhzad and Sepehri turned into a caméra stylo as flexible and as subtle as the poems that inspired his vision.

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CHAPTER 4 MODERNITY AND IDENTITY IN A CINEMATIC PERSPECTIVE

The subject of modernity is one of the most controversial for the Iranian intelligentsia. As a scholar, translator, playwright and filmmaker, Bahram Bayzai grappled with questions of modernity and the associated changes in self and identity both before and after the Islamic revolution, and these are central issues in his films. His approach is philosophically modern in the sense that it is an effort to shed light on the problems that challenge contemporary humankind. First of all, it is important to define the terms modernity, modernization and modernism, as they are sometimes used interchangeably in scholarly and non-scholarly texts. As used here, each term has a different connotation. Modernity is the philosophy behind all modernist exercises, including, for instance, modern artistic forms as well as modernized industry and architecture. Thus, modernity here signifies ‘an ethos rather than a well-demarcated historical period’.1 In contrast to modernism, modernity cannot be exported to a community or society. On the other hand, modern equipment and technology are imported from one geographical region to another. Modernism is the concrete and pragmatic application of modernity. While modernity exists on the ontological level of culture, modernism is represented on its external level. Like modernism, modernization resides in the economic and sociopolitical perspectives of a society, while modernity, as an ethos, is potentially capable of displacing the religious beliefs or philosophical background of a culture.

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Sometimes modernization refers to state-funded developments on the infrastructural and external levels in non-Western societies. It usually denotes a political act backed by certain ideological principles. Abbas Mirza’s modernization of the Iranian army or Reza Shah’s efforts to reform the economy and bureaucracy are examples in Iran.2 Artistic responses to the issue of modernity in Iran have been deeply impacted by social and historical factors, and Bayzai’s filmmaking should be placed in its historical context. The following discussion challenges the view that modernity is a Western phenomenon to which the East is a late arrival. A significant body of postmodern and postcolonial scholarship has unsettled the ‘natural’ assumption that the West is the original home of modernity and rationality. Rather, modernity is ‘a product of a globalizing network of power and knowledge that informed the heterotopic experiences of crisscrossing peoples and cultures and thus provided multiple scenarios of self-refashioning’.3 The history of modern Persian projects and Persian texts of modernity, as Tavakoli-Targhi says, dates back to the seventeenth century.4 Danishmand Khan Shafi’a Yazdi (b. 1620) and Raja Jai Singh (1688–1743) are two examples of Persian scholars who tackled modern projects ‘at a time when Europe was still plagued with religious wars’.5 Under colonial influences, these self-refashioning projects in Iran and other parts of the Persian-speaking world were forgotten and dehistoricized. Later Persian historiographical accounts adopted Western narratives that resulted in cultural amnesia and self-Orientalizing.6 Because these texts have vanished from history, the modern projects of the seventeenth century had no significant effect on subsequent modernizing movements in Iran. Intellectual movements in Iran and confronting the ‘question’ of modernity in the last two centuries can be divided into two phases: those leading up to the constitutional revolution7 (1905–11) and those preceding the Islamic revolution (1978–79). The growing awareness of Western hegemony in the mid-nineteenth century was shown in the modernist ideas expressed both by government-oriented and independent groups of people. Among those affiliated to the government, Abbas Mirza (1789–1833), the crown prince of the Qajar dynasty, introduced new concepts to the Iranian government and army.8 Amir

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 95 Kabir (1804–52), the chief minister of Nasir u-din Shah, also helped to shape Iranian modernity. His reforms included the establishment of the first modern college in Iran (Dar ul-Funun) and he contributed to intellectual life by publishing a journal, Vaqayi’ Itifaqiyh (Current Events).9 Modernist ideas were not only brought in by the royal family and high-ranking officials. For instance, Jamal u-din Asadabadi’s (1839–97) writings on modernity and the reasons for what he called ‘the Muslims’ cultural decline’ and the ‘backwardness’ of Iranians had a decisive influence on debates in Iran. Asadabadi’s global concerns were published in a Parisian-based Arabic journal, Urwa-al Wuthqa (Indissoluble Link).10 Eventually, these responses to the issue of modernity culminated in the constitutional revolution and later the Islamic revolution. Contrary to many critics, including Vanessa Martin and Mangol Bayat, I do not accept that the birth of modernity was wholly initiated by the modernizing attempts of a group of elites in the Qajar or Pahlavi eras. The response of the masses profoundly affected the form that modernity took in Iran from the very beginning.11 As Janet Afary indicates, Iran’s constitutional revolution was not merely a political revolution. It had ‘multiclass, multicultural, and multiideological dimensions’, informed by Western-style parliamentary democracy, Russian intellectual movements and the anjumans or grass-roots popular associations.12 The constitutional revolution popularized modern ideas and philosophy that had gained hold among the Iranian masses. Influenced by similar movements in Russia and Europe, the masses forced the government to restrict the Shah’s power and to grant freedom of the press, of speech and of association. The constitutional revolution created a relatively democratic atmosphere for writers and journalists and reinforced debates in intellectual circles about modernity and its relation to the West. During this period, thinkers and scholars such as Mohammad Khiyabani, Talibzadeh and Mirza Agha Khan Kirmani critically discussed the concept of modernity and subsequent changes at the societal level.13 In many instances these debates were affected by ‘self-Orientalizing rhetorical argument[s]’ that influenced later investigations of modernity in Iran.14

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The constitutional revolution ultimately failed in 1911, due both to external pressures and internal conflicts. As Afary points out, the problems it faced included ‘penetration by Western imperialism, pressure from within and without to modernize along with Western models, demands from below for democracy, conflict with religious institutions, [and] women’s emancipation’.15 For many constitutionalists, the revolution was a means to the modernization of society following the Western model. In the Pahlavi era, modernization was accelerated through government projects that were mostly industrial and technological, as well as being reflected in the lifestyle of the upper-middle classes. The underlying philosophy of modernity was not consistently examined except in intellectual circles. The Iranian revolution of 1978–79 was a profound political event that initiated a series of changes in national cultural patterns and helped to craft a new identity for Iranians. However, the groundwork for these changes had been laid a decade earlier in the 1960s, when Iranian society was on the brink of an upheaval. The sociopolitical and religious changes were partly caused by a shift in Shi’a clerical authority that began in 1961.16 In that year, Ayatollah Khomeini, who introduced a politically charged version of Islam, took over religious leadership from the relatively moderate Ayatollah Burujirdi. This marked the onset of a new era in which Islam and politics were to be more closely intermingled than at any other time in contemporary history.17 Two years later, in 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini led a major uprising against the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ that was brutally suppressed. At the same time, widespread rejection of the uncritical adoption of foreign values led to a shift in intellectual discourse, best represented by Jalal Al-i Ahmad’s popular treatise, Gharb-Zadigi (Westoxication), published in 1962. Around this time, cultural life including cinema responded to the agitated atmosphere. Although the cultural changes in the 1950s and 1960s were heavily influenced by sociopolitical changes, many literary activists and artists shared in the trend to modernity – Sadiq Hedayat in fiction, Nima Yushij in poetry and Al-i Ahmad in social criticism – and became leading national icons. Later on, film-makers such as Bayzai and Darush Mehrjui joined these cultural heroes.

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 97 The political changes of the 1960s produced ideologues such as Al-i Ahmad and Ali Shari’ati, who had strong Marxist/socialist and anti-colonial sensibilities. Yet their ‘embrace of Islam forced them to create a radically alternative form of revolutionary socialism’.18 But as Ali Mirsepassi states in Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization, the ‘Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic [and, by extension, Iranian] identity.’19 He describes movements like the Iranian Islamic revolution as: Movements [that] promote social and cultural institutions which are modern but ‘authentically local’. These ‘local’ forms of resistance confront a global problem – the universalizing and homogenizing tendencies of ‘Western’ modernity – and thus they have a distinctly universal character. The politics of modernity is therefore neither local nor authentic. What matters is that it is grounded in some construction of ‘local’.20 This embracing of ‘locality’ or at least of a ‘constructed locality’ and of modernity or universality in post-revolutionary Iran necessarily and logically led to a new definition of culture and identity. It was influenced by the two Iranian revolutions – especially the Islamic one – and is strongly represented in Iranian cinema, where it has transformed perception in a new and vigorous phase of Iranian culture. Years before Al-i Ahmad’s popularization of Westoxication, Ahmad Fardid’s writings on the negative impact of the West on the East had failed to engage people, and his philosophy was doomed to be buried in intellectual circles. On the other hand, the ideas of Al-i Ahmad and Shari’ati, the two leading theoreticians of the Islamic revolution a decade before it took place, were quickly popularized. In short, the movements that fuelled the Islamic revolution were the result of a ‘massive’ response to and an analytical rethinking of the Western values that had been adopted in the previous century. The indigenous movements had produced a modernity based on local values and traditions.

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This reaction was crucial if we consider that in the modern era, the West was ‘discovering’ the East by ‘constructing’ a self-congratulatory history of European civilization as the driving force behind rationalization and enlightenment.21 In this analysis the West considered the East as the significant, but still inferior ‘other’, leading to the concepts of the Orient and Orientalism. As Mehrzad Boroujerdi asserts, apart from China and India, which became subjects of the West’s ‘otherness’, ‘the Islamic Orient became Europe’s collective nightmare, a world prone to exotic and erotic fantasies’.22 Boroujerdi adds that for ‘Western thinkers, the “Orientals” who included Muslims, Arabs, Turks, and Persians, were only occupying a “discursive space”. They served as Rousseau’s ideal type of “noble savage” and as Montesquieu’s fictitious travelers to Paris in Lettres persanes.’23 Furthermore, it was through the invention of this idea of the Orient as the other that ‘Europe was able to create and maintain its own identity.’24 Europe reinforced its identity through subjecting Orientalism to ‘imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism’.25 Post-Saidian scholars such as Tavakoli-Targhi concluded that attributing modernity to the West was merely a result of a ‘genesis amnesia in European [and Eastern] historiograph[ies]’.26 For example, the modern texts that were produced by Persianate scholars in India and Iran as early as the mid-seventeenth century were neglected in contemporary histories written in Iran and the West.27 This cultural amnesia, TavakoliTarghi says, caused Eastern countries, including Iran, to redefine themselves ‘in relation to Europe’, while Europeans established their status as the architects of universal modernity and rationality.28 Tavakoli-Targhi adds that ‘[t]his amnesiac or forgetful assertion gained hegemonic currency and thus constituted “non-Western” modernity as “Westernization”.’29 New Identity and an Ideology of Combat The intellectual and philosophical frameworks that eventually led to the Islamic revolution were responses to this dehistoricizing perception. It was the beginning of a new era in which Iran strove to revisit the West, modernity and the philosophy behind it, and the

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 99 Iranian self became rearticulated in a new identity. It was an attempt to recover the Iranian self that had been the subject of Orientalism and self-Orientalism. Iranians were now conscious of the economic and – more importantly – the cultural impact of Western thought. Scholars such as Jamshid Bihnam, Masha’allah Ajudani and Darush Ashuri continued the legacy of Fardid and Al-i Ahmad to explore the impact of modernity and globalization on Iran. Even more significant was the active participation of artists and grass roots in this identity-constructing effort. In this sense, the Islamic revolution was a ‘modern’ political response to the West and to Western hegemony. Many social and intellectual strata participated in the revolution and most of these groups tried to consolidate local values within a local definition of modernity. Collectively, they fought against the Shah’s regime that had unquestioningly adopted Western values, but the ‘big idea’ in the 1978–79 revolution was an ideology of combat, based on Ayatollah Khomeini’s new interpretation of Shi’a Islam, with its ultimate goal of leading the Islamic world (Umm ul-Qura’) and globally ‘exporting’ the revolution and its values. Once again, Iranians faced with the executions and terrors of a religious government did not benefit, either intellectually or economically, from their struggle to overthrow the Shah. In the cultural scene, the post-revolutionary era witnessed a ‘change of the dominant’ from poetry to cinema in artistic forms of expression. In Kiarostami’s film-making we saw how poetry influenced Iranian cinema and made this shifting of the dominant possible. When examining Bahram Bayzai’s films, I argue that in the ‘real’ political scene the ideology of combat became the dominant political monologue, whereas in cinema, now the dominant artistic mode of expression, questions of modernity, the global world and the crisis of identity were imagined and explored by using the ‘image’ in a dialogical fashion. This shift of focus in film-making from a theological and monological perspective to a dialogical one is very significant, as it reflects how the nation and the state have been going their separate ways. What Iranian cinema was imagining did not sustain the Islamic state’s conception of modernity and identity. Cinema, as a modernist implement, was a European or American invention, according to different accounts.30 In Iran, it was an offshoot

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of a modernization that was introduced first to the royal family and then to the Iranian masses by Muzaffar u-din Shah’s cameraman, Mirza Ibrahim-Khan Akkas-Bashi, in 1900.31 Although imported from the West, in its later productions in Iran the cinema was not used just to further Western values. In a centrifugal change, the more that modernization and its outgrowths – among them cinema – are globalized, the less they conform to their Western origins. In the last two centuries, modernism flourished in Europe and then in North America. Nevertheless, it should be taken into account that Western progress in inventing modernist equipment was a result of borrowing from non-Western modern ideas32 and from modernist science and technology, as well as drawing on the vast resources of the colonized non-Western countries. From this non-Eurocentric perspective, the modernist achievements of the West were the result of ‘a collective heritage [and] an omnivorous mélange of cultures’.33 Therefore, the accomplishments may be considered as the fruit of a global collaboration (either voluntarily or non-voluntarily) of ‘the interdependence ... [and] diverse worlds’.34 During the colonial and post-colonial periods these ‘Western’ modernist achievements were embraced globally. Modernism was negotiated as a colonial network of power and knowledge and a new dominating force. In the new contexts, modernism and modernity began mutual dialogical relationships with indigenous cultures, which subsequently started to transform themselves in order to accommodate both their traditional customs and the new ideas and technology.35 Modernity as a philosophy and ethos is a diverse and global phenomenon with many possible ontological representations. Although influenced by modernism and modernization practices, it is not entirely dependent on them. In a non-Western country such as Iran, modernity is deeply rooted in national and local traditions and history. Besides, the impact of global modernism reinforced the creation of new cultural and philosophical discourses – still modern, but quintessentially local and non-Western. This reconciliation of nonWestern traditions with modernity established new settings that can disturb notions of self and identity. In Bayzai’s films, the subject, whether in a rural or urban setting, negotiates with an unsettled

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 101 identity that is an outcome of these new cultural and philosophical paradigms. Although it is crucial to consider that after the Islamic revolution individual Iranians, who had been betrayed by both of Iran’s revolutions, were more than ever confronted by the quintessential question of their role in the modern world. As Nayereh Tohidi says, the constitutional movement ‘never managed to overthrow feudalism and neocolonial dimensions, and did not succeed in implementing its bourgeois-democratic goals ...’.36 The Islamic revolution was similarly unsuccessful in bringing a democratic dimension to the society. The Iranian self was still grappling with unanswered questions of identity in the national and global milieus. Neither the modernizing attempts of the Pahlavis nor the repressive policies of the theocrats provided satisfying answers. Bayzai was among those intellectuals who engaged with this question philosophically. He sought to investigate the concept of modernity that stands beyond Iranian modernization or the modernist dimensions of Iranian culture and society. In reaching into the core of problem, his films are enriched by his unique knowledge of Eastern and Iranian performing and visual arts. The crucial issue in Bayzai’s films is how the ‘subject’ conceives the world. Since the 1970s, his meticulous examination of the self as subject has initiated a new trend in Iranian cinema in which the individual and his or her internal universe takes precedence over the external world. This innovation in Iranian film-making explored – and to some extent is still exploring – the social environment as a defining element in human behaviour. In films such as Avanes Oganians’s Haji Aqa, The Movie Star (1932), Farrukh Ghaffari’s Downtown or Mehrjui’s The Cow, society is signified as the decisive element in predetermining behaviour. This cultural legacy also resonated in more recent films such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Nargiss (1992), where Saeed-Vafa declares that: the main character’s evil habits of stealing and living with an older female accomplice are presented as a result of social ills and unemployment. The evil is in society, not in the characters. It seems that as martyrs, heroes or even victims, the characters

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cannot even afford to own their shadows. Their dark sides are blamed on their enemies and others, or in general on society.37 It was against this background that Bayzai concentrated on ‘the subject’ instead of the social signifiers. The shift from a subjugated personality overwhelmed by the metaphysical supremacy and hegemonic forces of society becomes highly significant in the cultural context. In a value system that privileges the community over the individual, the Iranian self had been treated as merely ‘a part of the whole’ throughout history. The self had to be dissolved in society in order to function as a meaningful element. Farzaneh Milani examines this idea and why Iranians shy away from writing about themselves: [The absence of autobiography] is perhaps the logical extension of a culture that creates, expects, and even values a sharply defined separation between the inner and the outer, the private and the public. Perhaps it bespeaks a mode of being and behavior that is shaped or misshaped, by varying degrees and types of censorship, both external and internal. In short, it could be one more manifestation of strong forces of deindividualization, protection, and restraint.38 This cultural ‘deindividualization’ not only led to an absence of autobiography as a sub-genre in Persian literature.39 It also disallowed the subject from becoming the focus of attention in other artistic modes of expression,40 including cinema. Bayzai’s characters, however, represent uprooted selves who challenge divine destiny and the influence of cosmic, metaphysical or social forces in human affairs. From Mr Hikmati in Thunder Shower to Gulrukh in Sag-Kushi (Dog-Eat-Dog, 2000) the subject in Bayzai’s films confronts external problems as well as the force of destiny – a burden laid on Iranian shoulders both by Zoroastrian and Islamic theologies. Even so, the subject is not looking for social security, but striving to find meaning on the inside, to become a key element in deciding and dominating his or her world. While Kiarostami was mastering a cinema verité style in which the exterior world was showcased and highlighted in a seemingly realist manner, Bayzai fashioned a highly polished

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 103 and understated drama of individuals’ interior worlds. Whether he chooses an urban or rural setting, and regardless of historical or contemporary context, his films have modern sensibilities in their focus on the subject’s perceptions, emotions and sense of alienation. The exterior world depicted in Bayzai’s films suggests a state of ambiguity and uncertainty. The magic realist settings of the foggy seashore in Chirikih-yi Tara (The Ballad of Tara, 1978) and the poorly lit forest location in Gharibih va Mih (The Stranger and the Fog, 1974) imply the philosophical uncertainty that the characters are dealing with. This imagery of uncertainty does not always need a magic realist setting. In the more realist setting of Dog-Eat-Dog, for instance, Bayzai shows crowded Tehran streets where soldiers march and martyrs’ portraits adorn the walls. While every Tehrani resident is accustomed to similar scenes, Bayzai’s portrayal is an overstated and dramatized version of reality that evokes cultural instability and an uncertainty associated with war and chaos.

Figure 2 Tara (played by Susan Taslimi) meets the surreal Historical Man who travelled from the past, in The Ballad of Tara.

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Figure 3 The past time meets present in The Ballad of Tara through the representation of the Historical Man.

Whatever dramatic exterior world Bayzai chooses in order to reflect a psychological imagery, it is always the subject who decides and dominates her destiny as she finds her way back to her roots and historical identity. This is a significant move in Iranian film aesthetics. In Bayzai’s films, the self arises to become the centre and agent of all changes. While his aesthetics is heavily codified by Iranian and Eastern mythologies, the characters do not live in the light of existing myths, but refashion and sometimes demythologize them. Although they have roots in tradition, women such as Kiyan (in Shayad Vaqti Digar (Perhaps Some Other Time, 1988)), Asyih (in Kalagh (The Crow, 1977)), and Na’i (in Bashu: The Little Stranger, 1986) are ‘free spirits’41 who challenge their collective social norms. These new mythical figures represent the modern Iranian individual who is seeking roots in the past and simultaneously signifying the emergence of new ideas in the society. Bayzai examines his characters’ confrontation with modernity. They are searching for a new identity,

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 105 inspired by their background, which will fit into modern definitions of the modern era. Asyih in The Crow is an example of a woman in a modern urban space, negotiating with her cultural past and with the modern lifestyle that informed Tehrani upper-class society in the time of the Shah. The story begins when Aman Isalat, a television anchorman, is conducting research for his programme. In the process, he notices an advertisement about a missing girl. Isalat and his wife Asyih, a teacher in a school for the deaf, become deeply involved in an investigation to find the girl. At the same time, Asyih is helping her mother-in-law Alam to write her memoir. Asyih is portrayed as a woman in search of a new definition of her identity in a society on the brink of massive change, as this film was made during the upheavals of the Islamic revolution. She represents the dynamic status of an Iranian culture that strove to cope both with modernity and with its past. Asyih’s uncertainty about her identity does not stem only from being uprooted from her own social class. Among her husband’s upper-class family she encounters a similar uncertainty and confusion. Asyih is engaged in a dialogue with history through her real and imaginary visits to the old neighborhoods of Tehran. She is also involved with exploring the young girl’s story, which is being recovered. In the afternoons she writes Alam’s memoir as the old lady narrates it. As the story unfolds, the viewer realizes that these events are all interrelated. Asyih is a vigilant observer of the representations of modernism and, at times, of the superficiality and absurdity of the modernized lifestyle in Tehran. Her disgust at the showy upper class is specifically emphasized at the party of her husband’s friend, where she decides to speak her mind and leave unexpectedly. Here Bayzai signifies the ostentation brought about by modernizing forces that is soon to be shattered by the seething power of the predominantly lower-class revolutionaries. These (religious) groups had a decisive role in the final outcome of the revolution, as they had been angered and humiliated by the modernization imported by the Shah in his White Revolution.42 In the search of her identity, Asyih is one side of a triangle of Alam → Asyih → Isalat. They are all lost and/or isolated in

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modernized Tehran. Asyih’s husband, Aman Isalat (ironically, ‘Isalat’ means ‘noble birth’), is an adopted son of a wealthy lady who found him in a hospital crying and ‘seeking refuge’ (‘Aman’ in Persian). As an anchorman and reporter, Isalat is infatuated with his new modernized lifestyle and has a shallow understanding of the current social situation. He is making a documentary about some missing people. Yet he represents a lost, rootless self in a society with a state-imposed modernization. Isalat is an extrovert character who exploits language as a propagandist device and shares values with the corrupt society. At the same time, his frequent lapses in presenting the news, as well as his failure to find a way to communicate with his wife and mother, convey a paradoxical absurdity reminiscent of characters in Samuel Becket or Eugene Ionesco’s plays.43 He shows no interest in Alam and Asyih’s physical and psychological search in old Tehran and in past memories. Hence, Isalat is the legitimate son of this so-called modern society that lacks dignity and human decency. He makes fake documentaries that are ‘performed’, is asked to ‘change the news if he doesn’t like it’ and allows the host of the party to search his pockets for a valuable jewel that went missing. Another paradoxical point is that while Isalat uses language as a profession and to communicate, in many instances he fails to express what he means. In contrast, Asyih, who works with deaf-mute students, easily understands them and successfully communicates with them. This is particularly stressed when she narrates the story of the woodpecker and crow to the students by using sign language. Like the woodpecker in her story, Asyih is inquisitive for knowledge and aware of the world around her. She resembles the bird in its search in the tree trunk; she is hurt and distressed, but never ceases her exploration. The third side of the triangle, Asyih’s mother-in-law Alam, is a dying old woman in search of her lost youth. Her existence is split between a real place that she seems to be living in and an imaginary city lost in memories. She does ‘not belong to Tehran but to Tehran-i Qadim [the old Tehran],’ she says, ‘a neighborhood lost for years.’ By the end of the film, the viewer realizes that she was the one who gave her picture to the paper as the missing person and who makes the whole family go on a search. With the help of her daughter-in-law,

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 107 she searches forgotten memories. The cold winter, the cry of the crow and her health situation are a metaphor for ‘the philosophical dying of a society’, as Bahar Irani suggests,44 and of an era in Iranian history that, ironically, coincided with the Islamic revolution. Nevertheless, it is through Alam that Asyih develops nostalgia for a past she never experienced. Like Ra’na in The Stranger and the Fog, Asyih lives in ‘an isolated, unstable, and unbalanced environment’, ‘but she is to achieve the balance only when she revaluates and unites with her past.’45 Asyih is the only one of the three who waits for a new era to come. In her case, the crisis of identity brings about a new cultural and philosophical discourse, or what Hoodashtian calls ‘new cultural compositions’ that are the result of ‘a dynamic reconciliation between local traditions and the global modernity’.46 As the viewer learns, Asyih is ‘probably’ pregnant. This, figuratively, suggests her status as being informed by a change that gives rise to her awareness as well as to the crisis in her life. Georges Lukacs aptly describes Asyih as resembling ‘the mythical person whose metaphysical security and freedom is unsettled once she is introduced to the new era’.47 Her name is reminiscent of the historical Asyih, wife of the tyrant Pharaoh and the adoptive mother of Moses, who rebelled against her husband in support of Moses when he challenged his father’s and brother’s authority in order to save the people of Israel. Like her historical namesake, Asyih in a modern Tehran setting becomes an outsider to her society. Although Bayzai does not often use deep focus, by depicting Asyih in depth-of-field shots, her situation as a lonely stranger is highlighted. In her struggles to understand the social transformations, Asyih is not accompanied by her upper-class family. The ‘Canned Theatre’ Approach In contrast to Kiarostami or masters such as Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941), who preferred deep focus and wide-angle lenses, Bayzai chooses a more dramatic editing style and a shot/reverse-shot technique for dialogues. In most cases, as in The Crow, the viewer does not have the ‘advantage’ of a realist view of the whole scene through depth of focus. On the contrary, Bayzai presents a ‘canned theatre’ approach, to use Bazin’s terminology,48 in which the events are

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shown from the eye of the viewer on the stage. The camera, in this role, therefore remains subjective throughout the film. Through this point of view, Bayzai presents the story of the Isalat family and their journey in search of their identities. As mentioned, Asyih and Isalat get involved in the search for the young woman, but only Alam knows her real identity. Asyih and the camera remain outsiders and do not learn the facts about the missing young woman, the youthful Alam, until the last sequence of the film. In The Crow, Bayzai remains faithful to the subjective viewpoint of Asyih throughout the movie. The audience does not learn the reality – objectively, in a classic cinematic fashion – until Asyih does. This theatrical approach is enhanced by cinematic techniques of classic montage, presenting dialogues in shot/reverse-shot formula, and by filming most events in medium and medium-close-up shots

Figure 4 Asyih (played by Parvanih Ma’sumi) should deal with her doubts and questions about the past and present on her own.

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 109 that give the impression of seeing the story as on the stage. A good example is a close-up of Asyih’s hands mimicking the flight of a bird, where the director follows an ‘elementary syntax of interest’ that is ‘the equivalent of concentration of attention’ in a theatre.49 By and large, Bayzai incorporates his stage aesthetics into film stylistics in The Crow, most notably through a subjective gaze in the case of the missing woman. Asyih’s concentration discovers the key to a locked room in the house in the mysterious closed locket on Alam’s necklace. When she enters the room with the key, she finds old family albums, and among them the picture of Alam that was identified as the young missing woman. It is only through this subjective gaze that Isalat is enlightened about his mother’s real identity and Alam redefines her ‘self’. According to Bazin, adopting stage techniques enhances a theatrical approach in film-making. Bayzai uses ‘the resources of the camera to point up, to underline, to confirm the structure of the scenes and their psychological corollaries’.50

Figure 5 Bayzai’s formalist camera work in The Crow calls attention to style and technique in order to make a thematic point.

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Because revolutionary turmoil coincided with the screening of The Crow, the film was not critically appraised in 1978. Nevertheless, it represents Bayzai’s meticulous observation of societal changes at that time. The Crow envisioned the history of a lost nation that was suspended between an adopted modernization and a cultural past that tended to be forgotten. Asyih stands as an example of a deterritorialized subject who tries to reshape cultural discourses by imagining a new cultural space. Her alternative cultural space allows for a recreating of the self and of identity. Asyih as an individual is not trapped within the limited space of modernized projects and the past is not eliminated from her identity. Metaphorically, she migrates from the modern/ized real to the desired imaginary past, to craft a new identity that does not dehistoricize the self. Her real and imaginary travels to old Tehran create a productive and positive instability that engages the self in a dialogue with history and the cultural past. It is both through Asyih’s imagination and Bayzai’s film, or through

Figure 6 Asyih’s and Alam’s surreal travel to the old Tehran, that does not exist any longer, in The Crow.

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 111 cinema in a general sense, that the audience is drawn into a dialogue with a dynamic past that is able to refashion the reality of the present. The ‘canned theatre’ approach is used to replace a national memory abandoned to old neighborhoods that are already destroyed, and to resurrect the forgotten family albums. Bayzai’s cinematic memory in The Crow re-members and reconceptualizes Iranian identity. More than anything, it is the ambivalence of modern Iranian society that Bayzai shows in The Crow as well as in his other films, including Bashu: The Little Stranger and Perhaps Some Other Time. In The Crow the private interests of Asyih assume public significance, especially by Bayzai’s highlighting of old as well as modern public spaces. As we have seen, the political authorities both before and after the constitutional revolution had a strong influence on mobilizing modernity in the country. But the cultural systems that stem from popular forms of expression, including newspapers, literature and the visual arts, were also important in the shaping and reshaping of modernity. The Crow suggests that imagining the nation and national identity in Iran should not be read only through the ideological representation of state power. The cultural systems should be considered as essential, as Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities: The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness ... [Few] things were [are] suited to this end better than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and ... glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.51 While Bayzai points to the significance of cultural systems, he does not let us forget that over time, cultural amnesia plays a role in what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the cultural temporality of the nation’, which ‘inscribes a much more transitional social reality’ because, as Bhabha asserts: ‘[n]ations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths

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of time.’52 By setting aside the comfort of social belonging, Asyih initiates a travel into modern times, as well as into history, to jolt cultural amnesia and bring a more profound discourse into Iranian cultural life and historical change. The way in which Bayzai drew on national identity, however, could not be interpreted as ‘nationalist’. The outsider in The Crow is celebrated as much as the insider. The ‘in-between spaces’53 of modernity and the past, through which the Iranian self constructs his or her identity, are portrayed as equally important. Therefore, the seemingly national concerns in this film turn out to be the universal concerns of modern communities. This recalls Homi Bhabha’s comment that ‘National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.’54 In The Crow, the modern self is uprooted and de-territorialized by the redefining of cultural boundaries and limitations. In Bayzai’s perspective, the modern Iranian subject is left with serious ontological questions and is at times confused and mystified. This uncertainty arises from Iran’s encounter with local and global modernity especially after the Islamic revolution. According to scholars, including Tavakoli-Targhi, cultural amnesia had an impact on the self-imposed Orientalist approach to historiography, modernity and modernism. Thus, Iranians were voluntary subjects of the ‘disenchantment’ intended by modernizing forces, in Darush Shaygan’s terms. The projects of this disenchantment were set to ‘erase all representations of the magic and the mytho-poetic universe’55 in favour of a ‘modern’ technological world. Hence, this erasure of the ‘familiar’ world resulted in a crisis of identity. But this engagement with modernity for more than two centuries was not unproductive. The powerful mass movements during the Islamic revolution – cultivated by the national/Islamic/socialist theories of scholars such as Shari’ati – caused Iranians to revisit and reimagine notions of ‘Western’ modernity and the tasteless modernization attempts of the Pahlavi regime that discounted national and religious perspectives. Through the rethinking of selves and identities, Iranians constructed a new global modernity that is also localized. In this local modernity, modern ideas and global facts are reconciled with national history and identity. This reconciliation has given rise to multiple forms of

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 113 modernity on governmental and religious, secular and artistic levels of Iranian culture and society. The confluence of modernity with national history and traditions is explicit in Bayzai’s aesthetics. In The Crow, it gave rise to new cultural and philosophical discourses, or what Hoodashtian calls ‘new compositions’.56 These new cultural compositions are the inevitable offshoots of the convergence of modernity and tradition. In this process of composing new cultural systems, the modern self shows resistance to Western-style modernization in order to become engaged in a more creative process of ‘re-enchantment’, as Shaygan postulates,57 in which the solid classical ontology is destroyed. Instead, a mosaic form of identity, informed by the cultural past as well as by modern values, replaces this classic ethos. The Iranian self is now dealing with a plural identity resembling a bricolage. Refashioned, it shows an uprooted, multilayered identity that recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomes, of a mosaic or rhizomatic culture that embraces a multilayered identity. No ‘arborescent’ culture or philosophy is able to meet the endless questions of the modern self, which is why Iranian culture responds to modernity in a ‘rhizomatic’ manner.58 In Musafiran (Travellers, 1990), Bayzai showcases a multifaceted identity that resembles a rhizomatic formation. The figures in Travellers move towards creating new concepts to deal with contemporary issues. The crisis of identity in this film can be allegorically connected to the concept of rhizomes. This is partly inspired by Bayzai’s extensive portrayal of trees, especially dying trees, both on the Caspian road and in Ma’arifis’ house. Also relevant are the cinematic techniques and, more specifically, their integration of the Western medium with the rhythm of ta’zyih. This indicates a new cultural composition that embodies an ever-changing modernity in Iranian society. In Travellers, Bayzai illustrates a number of individuals who are struggling with notions of life, death, happiness and success. They are chosen from different social classes – a driver, middle-class newly-weds, a rural woman, a professor, and so forth, to represent a people. Thus, he symbolically examines the crisis of identity at the national level. The clash of the old order with the construction of a new bricolage is central to this movie with its symbolical and highly dramatized dialogues, such as the episode between Mahrukh, the bride, and

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her bridegroom, Rahi. In this sequence the viewer sees the distorted image of Rahi in a broken mirror – the mirror that Mahrukh shattered when she learnt about her sister’s death. The next shot shows Rahi asking Mahrukh about rescheduling of their wedding: MAHRUKH: Impossible. We were supposed to be married in front of a mirror that is broken now. RAHI: Why should we break, then, Mahrukh? Why? In the first sequence of Travellers there is a close-up of a mirror that reflects the sky – referring metaphorically to destiny and providence. The camera pans to show the mirror being moved to the car; in its reflection we see the grey, barren forest and a rather big black car resembling a coffin, which is to carry the dead bodies of Mahtab and her family. Mahtab Ma’arifi, along with her children Kayvan and Kayhan and her husband Hishmat Davaran, are leaving for Tehran

Figure 7 Travellers highlights a choral character rather than a main character. Instead of showing main characters in close up shots or medium shots, they are captured in a long shot in this composition, allegorically representing a people collectively in search of new identities.

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 115 to attend Mahrukh’s wedding. The camera shows the cheerful boys playing outside, as Mahtab finishes last-minute arrangements in her house by the seashore. Recreating a Passion Play59 Later, Mahtab is shown in a medium shot looking straight into the camera – a reminder of her awareness of her ‘performance’. Ironically, her conscious ‘performance’ implies a realist approach. She announces: ‘We are going to Tehran to attend my sister’s wedding. But we are not going to reach there, we are all going to die.’ Nevertheless, with a smile on her face, she joins the others in the car. Although this gesture may look rather Brechtian, it is a direct borrowing from traditional Iranian plays. Here, as in many other instances in the film, Bayzai draws on the conventions of ta’zyih. Similar to the exposition sequence in Travellers, in ta’zyih the narrator (usually the same person as the director or ta’zyihgardan) gives a brief summary of the tragic story before it is enacted. Although this self-reflexive technique has a long history both in ta’zyih and naqali, the two major forms of traditional Iranian theatre, its use in a film has a unique and powerful effect. The viewer, who is – rather shockingly – being addressed, becomes unusually engaged in the film and its events. Thus, Mahtab starts a passion play. It is the beginning of a ta’zyih story that will play out. This passion play, as Jahanbakhsh Nura’i observes, is performed in four stages: ‘death, awaiting, mourning, and resurrection’.60 The family leaves the house by the Caspian Sea on their last journey. The car travels along a foggy twisting road on a winter morning that resonates, once again, of the dull setting in a ta’zyih. The Ma’arifi/Davaran family, against a gloomy and leafless forest, is shown in a set of dramatic travelling shots. This sequence aestheticizes a concept of life that, ironically, could embrace death. A life that is short and tragic. Bayzai’s paradoxical composition shows a happy family looking forward to attending a sister’s wedding. They have hired a chauffeur who is about to change his profession and settle in the city. Against this joyful ambiance, the camera shifts onto the misty, gloomy road that will bring death to its travellers. Since neither the car accident nor the bodies are shown in the film, and the viewer sees only a happy, hopeful

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family, this sequence has a cheerful atmosphere. In this way, Bayzai artistically grafts death onto life. Mahtab ‘was’ going to Tehran to attend her sister’s wedding. She was also supposed to bring the family mirror for the wedding ceremony. A mirror in a Persian wedding represents a good omen, fertility, enlightenment and continuity.61 It was and still is widely believed that if the mirror breaks during the ceremony, bad luck will dog the marriage. In Travellers, the mirror also symbolically represents a family’s history and identity and is given to a new bride in the family to be kept until she hands it on to the next bride, perpetuating a matriarchal tradition. But as Khanum Buzurg says: ‘In the last wedding [the mirror] was lost. Mahtab found it among the items in the rental shop. She searched everywhere until she found it. We decided then that she should keep it herself.’ Thus, Mahtab becomes the guardian of the mirror, along with the good omen and enlightenment that it brings. When Khanum Buzurg is told of her death she cannot believe it, and says: ‘This is impossible, she is supposed to bring the mirror for the wedding.’ Mahtab, her sister Mahrukh and their brother Mahu each have a tree in the garden of their house in Tehran. In a scene in the garden, the camera tilts up to a second-floor window where Mahrukh is standing. She says: ‘Mahtab’s tree has died recently.’ The camera pans down to show the dead tree in a garden filled with dead leaves on a winter’s day. In a set of parallel cuts, we see the black car and a trailer both smashed after the accident. The second cut shows the officer who reports the death of Mahtab’s family, the driver and a rural woman who accompanied them in the car to receive fertility treatment in Tehran. The next parallel cut captures two different shots in Khanum Buzurg’s house, first of Hikmat Davaran and then of Mahu, who are told about the accident and the deaths. While the family in Tehran learn of Mahtab’s death, we see the gardener examining the tree carefully, and when he makes sure it is dead he ritualistically waters it – recalling the ritual before sacrificing an animal – and sorrowfully cuts it down. In showing the dead tree before Mahtab’s death is announced, Bayzai draws on a metaphorical language that predicts a death. At the same time, the gardener’s careful examination of the garden and his pruning promise a greener and more vigorous growth in the following spring.

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 117 Mahtab (‘moonlight’ in Persian) coincidentally dies alongside her tree. But her death, as Khanum Buzurg indicates, is not the end, as ‘she died but didn’t finish’. This event will shed light on and rejuvenate other people’s lives. The tree dies, but we witness how hope blooms in people’s hearts. It is through a death in Travellers that life is reshaped. Mahtab’s death is a reminder to each and every member of this family to revisit their life and to redefine his or her identity. This is symbolically shown in the last sequence, when Mahtab – who is dead – appears to bring the mirror. The reflection in it lights up people’s faces. In this final sequence, a group of people is gathered in Ma’arifi’s guest room on the first floor for the mourning ceremony. All of them except Khanum Buzurg are wearing black. The setting is dramatically dark and depressing. A travelling shot portrays the visitors, members of the family and six empty chairs in the middle of the room, left vacant in honour of the six people who died in the accident. A second travelling shot tilts up to Mahrukh in a wedding dress. The crowd

Figure 8 Mahtab and other travellers resurrect from death to accomplish the mission and bring the mirror for the wedding.

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stops crying, as they are shocked by the paradox of seeing a bride in a mourning ceremony. But they soon cheer up for the bride. In the opposite direction, the camera shows Mahtab, her family, the chauffeur and the rural woman who died in the car. Mahtab is holding the mirror, which is shining spectacularly. Here a high-key lighting, normally reserved for comedy, is used. The reflection of the mirror’s light illuminates each person’s face in the room. This is shown in a high-angle travelling shot that ultimately zooms in on Mahrukh’s face, magically illuminated, as she comes downstairs. Khanum Buzurg now smiles with satisfaction. Although Mahtab (moonlight) is dead, she has succeeded in transferring the mirror, light, productivity and good omen to the next generation of Ma’arifi daughters. This magic realist sequence not only brings an innovative energy to this film – and to Bayzai’s aesthetics in general – but also re-establishes contact with Iranian traditions temporarily eclipsed by the realist body of film and literature. In Zoroastrian mythology, the last five days of the Iranian year (26–30 Isfand) are called gathanik, when the dead (farurs) come to visit their living family members. They descend to this world to participate in the joyful preparations for the New Year. If their family members call on them, they offer help as well. According to Zoroastrianism, during the gathanik days the house should be kept clean and peaceful. As Hussein Qana’at suggests, Bayzai may have had this ceremony in mind when he decided to incorporate the magic realist scene into the film.62 In Islamic mythology, Iranians celebrate a similar event on the birthday of the twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who according to Shi’a Muslims has been hidden or ‘occulted’ for 500 years. On this particular day, which is called baraat, people visit cemeteries, pray for their dead and donate to charity. It is based on the belief that the dead are waiting to be paid a visit on this particular day. The infusion of Zoroastrian and Islamic mythology into the film creates a magic realist situation, which is defined by Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris as: [a] supernatural [account that] is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 119 of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort.63 The arrival of Mahtab and the turning of mourning into a wedding ceremony are similarly portrayed as an ordinary event if not an obvious one. This is fully accepted by the other characters and is well-integrated into the narrative. At the same time, it disrupts the narrative to make it aesthetically more dynamic. It also suggests a cultural disruption, leading the viewers to ‘scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, [and] motivation’.64 Mahtab’s death and the dying of her tree metaphorically suggest the end of what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘arborescent’ form. In a family entangled by convention, the concept of the self seems to be firm and unchanging. No one has dared to examine the question of identity. Metaphorically, all the characters resemble trees rooted in the same spot. Mahrukh deeply believes in what destiny has to offer her. Her puppet-like gestures are reminiscent of traditional puppetry or arusak bazi – she represents a puppet in the hands of predestination. Her comment on the power of fate and destiny reinforces this interpretation. When Munis complains that in her day, wedding arrangements were more proper, Mahrukh replies: ‘It was not my decision to be born now.’ Mahu and Mastan are doomed to have a disabled child, whom they visit only once a month. Hikmat and Hamdam suffer an unhappy marriage. They have never experienced love in their relationship and now, after the death of his brother and his two sons, Hikmat sees himself as the last Davaran, because, as he says, his two daughters ‘are going to bear somebody else’s name once married’. But they do not have power to change the course of their lives. A Nomadic, Rhizomatic Identity In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari say: ‘We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and [plant] radicals. They’ve made us suffer too much.’65 In similar fashion, Bayzai, fed up with watching the giant trees of carefully constructed cultural

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conventions, proposes a mosaic form of identity that resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic imagery. Metaphorically, Mahtab’s tree dies to give life to an open, rhizome-like existence. Afterwards, Mahrukh and other members of the family reconsider the assumptions that led them to be bound to fixed points of origin. Their new identities depict a multilayered structure, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a ‘nomadic’ assemblage that challenges established conceptions. The travellers are gone, despite Khanum Buzurg’s disbelief, but the rest of the family inaugurate a journey from ‘being’ to ‘becoming’. They grow into rhizomes in order to embrace the most liberated moments of their lives: The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and ... and ... and’. This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’. Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation – all imply a false conception of voyage and movement.66 However, when the family first learn about Mahtab’s death, their initial reaction is the ‘appropriate’ response for the loss of a loved one. As a professor trained in a systematic school of thought and relying heavily on his observations and empirical skills, Mahu is the first in the family who ‘believes’ the bad news, although painfully. He is in the rental shop to borrow wedding items when he learns about the accident from Hikmat, who is making phone calls to confirm it. Mahu, on the other hand, does not wait for verification. He decides, immediately, that the wedding items – including a curtain displaying Khusruw and Shirin’s love story – should to be replaced with items of mourning, among them a curtain portraying a resurrection scene, another reference to a ta’zyih. Faced with Khanum Buzurg’s denial, he brings first-hand evidence of the accident – a police officer. Mahu and the police officer represent pure rational wisdom, believing what they see with their physical eyes. The policeman affirms that

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 121 Mahtab and her family are dead. He adds: ‘We carefully examined the accident just 30 seconds after it happened; nothing escapes our meticulous observation.’ Ironically, however, when the grandmother asks him about the mirror he has to admit that he did not see it. It is only the grandmother who reacts ‘irrationally’ following Mahtab’s death. The people who come to pay their tribute see her as a schizophrenic. She strongly believes that even though Mahtab is now dead, she is not finished. Khanum Buzurg waits for them to come back with the mirror for Mahrukh’s wedding. She acts schizophrenically, as she denies the binary logic of life/death, or what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the logic of the either-or’.67 In her mind, the binary logic fades away to bring forth a multiplicity of ‘schizoanalysis’, ‘where the emphasis is on ... the egoless production of what is irreducible to a structure of a resemblance or an identity, for which Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘becoming’.68 ‘Becoming’ for the two philosophers is anti-fascist, because it refuses the opposition of being and non-being. By the same token, Bayzai employs the creative force of ‘becoming’ in Khanum Buzurg’s characterization, as he scrambles all the conventional codes of identity. In this way, Mahtab’s non-organic life emerges in the family’s imagination and uproots the longstanding linear trees of conventions; it is an abstract life based on the affirmation of ‘coming and going rather than starting and finishing’.69 Khanum Buzurg takes the lead in introducing her family to the new possibilities of a circular approach to identity. Individually, but also collectively, the people in Travellers develop new meanings for voyage, movement and identity. They move from the logic of ‘to be’ to the logic of ‘AND’, to add new horizons to their lives. The fact that this film does not centre on the actions of one leading character enriches Bayzai’s multilayered and de-centred approach. It is the story of people who collectively, and thus ritualistically,70 grow new identities rooted in multiple origins. Choral acting makes this multiple point of view possible in Travellers. Although we are dealing with one omniscient camera, the story is told from several perspectives in order to reveal the psychological struggles of each person in the process of rediscovering their selves. Quite frequently the camera tilts up and down, or pans, to focus on

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one actor and then another to change the point of view. For instance, in a series of travelling shots, the viewer sees the wedding preparations in Ma’arifi’s house. First, Rahi is shown with a bouquet of flowers in the street by his car. He throws it up to Mahrukh, and the camera follows the bouquet as she grabs it from the upstairs window. They talk about wedding preparations and Mahtab’s arrival. Then, another camera on Hikmat’s dashboard shows Rahi. He is almost hit by Hikmat’s car. Next, Hakmat and his wife Hamdam are shown greeting Rahi. A shot from Mahrukh’s point of view illustrates, at a low-angle, Rahi’s car starting and then disappearing down the street. A crane shot portrays a symmetrical view of two rows of golden trees alongside the street. This cuts to the next shot, of Mahrukh as she closes the windows while humming a song. A second camera from the opposite side of the room illustrates her point of view as she turns towards the door: the open door of her room and a framed image of a handrail then moves to a low-angle shot downstairs. In the next shot, the viewer sees Hamdam, her husband Hikmat and Khonoum Buzurg in the hall. When Hamdam leaves, Hikmat is seen walking in a half circle, talking about the advantages of tearing down this large house to make it into an apartment complex. He adds that ‘his company could handle the reconstruction.’ A swish pan leaves Hikmat in the corner of the shot. A long-focal-length lens that pushes the characters onto the same plane takes in both this scene and the former one. Mastan is in the centre of the focus, responding to Hikmat: ‘Now that we have a wedding, I think you can come up with a better idea than tearing down (the house).’ Afterwards, Mastan leaves the camera frame. Since the long lens flattens depth, Hikmat and Mastan’s movements in half circles in this sequence take more time to cover what should be small distances. The use of a telephoto shot makes the figures seem closer to one another. The dramatic effect of using this lens enhances the idea of collectivity and the director’s ritualistic approach.71 The camera pans once again to show Khanum Buzurg, who says: ‘Don’t talk about destruction. Have a shirini (sweet pastry) instead.’ A fast cut abruptly takes the scene to a shot of Mahrukh with the bouquet, seated on one of the chairs beside Khanum Buzurg. She

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 123 says: ‘I hope Mahtab likes these flowers [that I ordered for her room].’ The camera tilts up once again, to capture Munis and her husband coming down the stairs while Munis is cheering for the bride. This is a typical example of Bayzai’s use of a theatrical approach throughout the film. The use of tight editing, rapid camera movements and travelling shots fragments a single, centralized perspective. The travelling shots create a harmonious balance between the ‘communal’ versus ‘individual’ identity that is an ongoing tension in modern societies. The collective evolution of the film’s characters carries a sense of ritual performance. Like any other ritual, the family’s problematization of their identities signifies, as Bayzai indicates in ritual terms, ‘a collective act of creation’.72 Collectively and ritualistically, these characters create new concepts on the way to understanding self and identity. Like other rituals that convey universal meanings, this communal struggle can bypass national borders. Hence, Travellers, empowered by the cultural conventions of a particular nationality and sociopolitical border, can also be seen as a universal concern. At the same time, the monologues performed by each character – also recalling the conventional monologues in ta’zyih – reveal each person’s unique struggles. De-centred as they are, the monologues are a means to discovering these people’s hidden sides. Bayzai deconstructs the usual visual focus of cinema in order to represent an intermingling of verbal and visual modes through the metaphorical, elaborate and sophisticated language used by the characters in the film. The wedding ceremony, which turns into a mourning that turns once more into Mahrukh’s wedding, becomes the cause of family members’ rethinking and re-defining of their lives. Mastan is now considering adopting a girl, to be named after Mahtab. Hikmat, after sharing his thoughts with his wife about the sorrow of not having a boy to bear his name, is now re-examining his life. Watching the two girls playing, he seeks forgiveness from Hamdam: ‘Please ignore what I said. I felt blue, I just felt blue all of a sudden.’ They will no longer be imprisoned by their old beliefs. Their identities can fly in different domains or territories to re- and de-territorialize their selves. The excessive camera movements in a set of seemingly

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unending travelling and panning shots are philosophical rather than cinematic achievements when Bayzai ventures into new aestheticophilosophical territory. In Travellers, the characters/textual elements, the narrator/omniscient camera and the viewers are masterfully interrelated and interwoven. Concepts of life and death are similarly de-territorialized to be represented as interrelated ideas that are not to be separated. This is evident on the plot level, which shifts from mourning and death to wedding and rebirth, as well as in the music composed by Babak Amini, which moves from mourning tunes to joyful melodies to convey life’s pleasures and death’s sorrows simultaneously. The lighting is another element that changes from gloomy to bright depending on the context. The rhizomatic extensions of Bayzai’s thought have decentralized the narrative to create new concepts that challenge philosophical truth in the presence of (im)possible worlds. Mahtab’s rebirth represents the emergence of multiple new identities in other characters, as Mahu indicates in the final sequence: We should not call it a mourning ceremony, as this is not their end. They remain through our memories and their influence [on us]. They used to exist in separate bodies but now they are living in our minds. We are gathering here to celebrate their new existence. So please leave those six seats in their tribute. This is their families’ request and the natural right of those we gathered for. The rapid camera movements refer symbolically to selves and identities as dynamic concepts. This stylistic approach reminds the viewer that although traditions survive over generations, they continually change and evolve. Bayzai’s artistic connection of the death of roots with the birth of rhizomes creates a bricolage of new identities in this film. The self escapes the limits of the enveloping cultural space to become a de-territorialized and liberated individual. Paradoxically, through representing the themes of death and predestination, Bayzai introduces ideas on life and identity. In his film-making, a modern medium – cinema – is juxtaposed with conventions from the past to convey continuity. In The Crow, the sense of displacement in the case

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Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 125 of Asyih turns into mobility. In Travellers, the rootlessness of figures such as Mahrukh and Mastan brings a sense of liberation. The process of modernism had displaced these people. A connection with the past, however, makes their lives meaningful again. Bayzai’s special set-ups, camera work, sound effects, music and multiplicity of characters resonate with the conventions of ta’zyih. In both The Crow and Travellers, the local enters a global space. In the process of uprooting selves and identities, the Iranian self makes a ‘conscious choice’, in Arjun Appadurai’s words,73 to re-examine and exploit both local and global philosophies and aesthetic sensibilities. Bayzai’s choice of traditional visual arts as the aesthetic backbone of his film syntax is somewhat ironical, because ta’zyih was banned by the Pahlavi government for several years because of its so-called backward values. Other traditional visual arts such as khyimih shab bazi were also abandoned during these years, while Hollywood and local commercial movies – filmfarsi – were popularized. However, these popular arts and their philosophy could not be erased from the collective psyche. In cinema, Bayzai, the most visually literate director in the country, revived these traditions in his own modernist approach.

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CHAPTER 5 MIRRORING THE PAST, ENVISIONING THE FUTURE

Recovering forgotten history is one of Bahram Bayzai’s main themes that is conveyed by employing an allegorical film structure. His films, especially those made after 1974, are charged with a mythological language and highly metaphorical meanings. Although usually described as difficult to comprehend1 they are very popular among Iranian film-goers. For instance, Dog-Eat-Dog, a box-office success in 2001, won the People’s Choice Award in the Nineteenth International Fajr Film Festival. Bayzai remained popular even though most of his film scripts and movies over the next few years were denied an exhibition permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG, or Irshad-i Islami). During this period his occasional plays – performed only in the capital – were sold out, with many frustrated fans unable to purchase tickets. Eight years later, when he was finally able to screen his next film, While We are Sleeping (Vaghti Hamih Khabim, 2009), he won a second People’s Choice Award in the 27th Fajr Film Festival. One reason for this popularity could be that identifying with the past is a crucial element of modern Iranian identity. The construction of the modern Iranian self and individuality is based on a national consciousness in which historical and historiographical studies have played a powerful role. Similarly, Bayzai’s aesthetics raises questions about the modern self and identity and reactivates Iranian collective

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memory. His films are charged with mythological language and historical implications that make the audience revisit history. He rehistoricizes the past to problematize the status quo. Refashioning Iranian history is not only a twentieth-century phenomenon. It dates back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Persian texts such as Shahnamih were reread and reviewed. As Tavakoli-Targhi says: In the emerging Iran-time, the mythical tempos of Dasatir, Dabistan-i Mazahib, Sharistan, and Shahnamih increasingly displaced the sacred time of Islam. Reading and (re)citing these Iran-glorifying texts in a period of societal dislocation, military defeats, and foreign infiltration during the nineteenth century allowed for the rearticulation of Iranian identity and the construction of alternative forms of historical narrations and periodizations. The authorization and popular (re)citation of these narratives resulted in a process of cultural transference that intensified the desire for a recovery of the ‘forgotten history’ of ancient Iran.2 Through the revival of Zoroastrian and Persian texts in place of established Islamic texts, national identity in Iran was reshaped in the modern era. The globo-Islamic identity, a crucial and decisive meta-narrative during the Islamic empire which pronounced all its citizens as a unified nation (ummat), was to be modified by a more regional discourse based on Iranian identity and nationality (millat). The common trait in Islamic and nationalist accounts of identity is a coherent, homogeneous and unified history. Both treat history as a rigid and unchanging sequence of events. For instance, in historical and artistic texts portraying the biblical Adam or the Zoroastrian Kiumarth as the first human being, a monological cultural explanation based on fixed propositions that celebrate one culture or another is perpetuated. This self-glorifying approach is still found in some Iranian texts and art productions. Bayzai’s refashioning of history problematizes the ‘established’ aspects of Iranian culture and history. In his films, one can hardly find a coherent and homogenous world based on a monological

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perspective.3 For instance, the space in his films not merely represents the real place. It is diverse and refers to imaginative and realist ambiances in present or historical times. Through Bayzai’s imagistic and historical approach, the concept of space shows a dialogical multiplicity. In their search for identity, his characters are similarly de-territorialized as they challenge established cultural and societal beliefs.4 Moreover, Bayzai’s re-evaluation of history – opposing both the Islamic-oriented and nationalist narratives – does not rely on formal texts. His films are based on mythology and history. Yet, they are not directly informed by Persian canonical texts like Shahnamih or central Islamic texts such as the Qur’an. On the contrary, his aesthetics delves into popular artistic conventions like Iranian theatrical traditions. Also, in almost all Bayzai’s films and plays subjective and personal perspectives take precedence over social issues like war or national history. These stay in the background while individual journeys of personal growth – the conscious exploring and highlighting of private stories – is highlighted. Whether he tackles a historical-oriented notion as in Marg-i Yazdgird (The Death of Yazd-gird, 1983), or a very personal matter as in The Crow, Bayzai does not limit himself to representing ‘facts’ from a particular viewpoint, such as a national or religious one. His films are about people and can be broadly applied to humanity. Historicizing the Forgotten Subject The lead character in Perhaps Some Other Time, Kyan (Susan Taslimi) does not know who she is. Her real identity is lost in the past. She has to recover a missing history in order to know about herself, and historicizing the self plays a central role in the reconstruction of her identity. Through Kyan’s searching, the viewer faces questions of remembering, forgetting and alienation. History and identity are treated as intertwined concepts. The leading characters in most of Bayzai’s films are graceful but dominating female figures. In the process of recovering memory and through recurring themes of time and space, Perhaps Some Other Time invites the viewer to participate in remembering and reconsidering history.

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Figure 9 A flashback in Perhaps Some Other Time shows the impoverished Kyan’s mother who is about to abandon her child.

Kyan is a pregnant woman struggling with scattered but bitter childhood memories and a psychological illness, who discovers, sadly, that she is not her parents’ biological child. She then starts searching orphanages and birth archives. Not finding a satisfactory answer, she delves into her memories and family albums. Finally, she gets an answer in Vida’s home and her albums – places far from the official documented history but close to home in less formal and more private spaces. Kyan’s husband Mudabir (Darush Farhang) makes documentaries for Iranian National Television Broadcasting. Early in the film he is shown in a studio, dubbing a documentary about pollution. This montage sequence is filled with highly metaphorical images and abrupt juxtaposition of shots. The camera initially shows a familiar Tehran street scene. It then zooms out to reveal that what we just saw was a silent film being projected in a studio. The camera cuts to a low-lit composition of the film crew and finally zooms in on

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a medium shot, an unflattering view of Mudabir’s face in a hard light. Then Mudabir answers the phone. The projected documentary, at this point, provides a background for this conversation in a shallow focus. The background then moves to the foreground in sharp focus to show static images of an old Tehran quite different from the contemporary capital. The documentary portrays an elegant and tranquil city with wide streets adorned with nineteenth-century buildings, trees and a few old cars. Interestingly, the images of the old city inserted in the documentary are just paintings, not ‘real’ photographs. The fragmented montage is complemented by parallel shots of Kyan on a public phone in a busy day in downtown Tehran. On Kyan’s side, we only hear street noise. The montage continues to contrast old, elegant Tehran both with the modern city in present time (Kyan’s parallel shots) and the filmic version (Mudabir’s documentary) with a traffic jam and unattractive apartment buildings. In the documentary, traffic lights, exhaust pipes, a baby in a stroller and the stroller tire are framed in close-up and extreme close-up. A few workers wearing masks appear in a heavily polluted setting. The images of them and of the editing group in the studio are intercut. Mudabir indicates that the smoke in the scene seems extremely ‘unreal’ for a documentary. Paradoxically, his colleague confirms that this is the only real smoke that they managed to shoot. The whole sequence problematizes what is portrayed as reality, whether in documentaries or other forms of documentation. In particular, it reveals the manipulative practices used in making documentaries. In an image shown on the screen in the studio Mudabir locates a woman looking remarkably like Kyan, who rides with a strange man in a red car. He loses his concentration and fails to dub the film, and the crew decides to postpone the job to the next day. Mudabir, however, does not leave the studio. He is determined to recover the truth regarding the strange man he saw in the film with his wife. Mudabir and his colleagues stop dubbing the film, or ‘adding’ to the filmed ‘reality’. Instead, Mudabir wants to find the ‘unedited’ film stock in order to see the whole sequence that was ‘elided’ through editing. Thus, Bayzai suggests the existence of a different layer of reality, where ‘facts’ are not eliminated or added through editing and dubbing. In this way, the viewer is led to question both the reliability of a

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filmed event – whether documentary or fictional – and the accountability of extant historical documents in a broader sense. The dubbing is suspended and most of the crew leaves for the day. Mudabir returns to watch the same scene over and over to find the number plate of the red car, but to no avail. In a set of matching cuts, we see Kyan looking onto the street through a window. The low-angle shot pictures a breezy, cloudy autumn day with people on the street. The falling golden leaves, in a dusky light, create a melancholic aura. Then Mudabir is shown telephoning his wife, but when Kyan answers he remains silent. The use of medium shots to portray Mudabir echoes the images of the old city in the background. Then the camera moves to foreground the pictures of the old city. The sequence that started with images of old Tehran, finishes aesthetically with the same images. Thus, Bayzai’s editing of the closing sequence parallels and repeats the opening scene, but with the positions reversed. By employing this technique, the sequence that started with pictures of the old city on the screen ends with pictures of the old city on the wall. In the opening scene, the images of old Tehran in the documentary were used to place the focus on the present situation. In the closing scene, the same pictures of the past emphasize the ties to the past of the modern characters. Mudabir lives and works in the present, but recovering the past opens a new chapter in his life. In this way, Perhaps Some Other Time, which began with an ordinary, present time situation, turns its cinematic focus onto objects from the past. Mudabir now suspects Kyan of having an affair with another man. Her strange behaviour, because of the new findings about her true identity, a psychological illness and her pregnancy that she hides from her husband, increases his suspicion. From now on, Kyan and Mudabir’s relationship enters a stage where everything looks dubious. In order to confirm his wife’s infidelity or not, Mudabir has to search the film stock. It seems that these highly constructed documentaries are the closest he can get to reality. Kyan’s nightmarish dreams are poignantly portrayed through Bayzai’s accelerated blue-tinted montage. The excessive camera movements, jump cuts and lighting that varies from gloomy to highly lit scenes have a disorientating effect and emphasize a state of severe

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instability. As Kyan finds out more about her past, her dreams occur more frequently and with more details. Through montage techniques such as editing fragmented images, rapid travelling shots and fading of images, the film enters an expressionistic space in which Kyan battles with her nightmarish memories and dual identity. In a bluelit scene, she is shown on her bed sleeping, but apparently struggling with bad dreams. Mudabir is suddenly seen in the same room searching through Kyan’s wardrobe to find the dress he saw in the documentary. The viewer realizes that the other side of the room, where Mudabir stands, is not tinted blue but is almost grey and barely lit by a lamp that Mudabir holds. In this way, Bayzai aesthetically makes a physical and spatial separation between Mudabir and Kyan, who are virtually living in two separate worlds. Mudabir ruthlessly throws one dress after another on the bed where Kyan is sleeping. The frenetic tracking shots show his hysterical behaviour and Kyan’s suffering in her sleep. These rapid shots are repeated several times, but in the last one we see Mudabir. Then the camera moves rapidly and the viewer expects to see Kyan, but surprisingly sees Mudabir once again. It takes few seconds to realize that this is not his image but its reflection in the mirror. The camera travels another half circle to show him again. This seeming violation of the 180-degree rule would metaphorically suggest that Mudabir is extremely absorbed in his thoughts. Because the sequence is shot with a wide-angle lens but in medium to close-up shots, it results in the distortion of Mudabir’s image, of the shape of the room and of Kyan’s bed. Bayzai here engages in an interplay of images and memories and raises questions about the reliability of recovering both the past and reality. This idea recurs in different forms throughout the film. The close-up shots in which Kyan’s face fades away in a dazzling light suggest a change of time and space as she passes from ‘real’ present time to embrace a surreal moment in the past. These scenes focus on the inner life of a character and her personal pain, which is brought out by Kyan’s graphic account of her dreams when she describes them to her therapist. The scenes with the therapist are clipped and the dialogues elliptical. Long takes are used to illustrate the surreal dreams, showing Kyan running in an endless hallway

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Figure 10 Mudabir spying on Kyan in Perhaps Some Other Time. The use of rack focus in this scene places the couple in two separate mental spaces.

without reaching anywhere. She is filmed in a distant shot and the hallway ceiling is highlighted – a tribute to Citizen Kane – to emphasize her powerlessness. Long takes are repeated in the rainy scenes, to the sound of thunderstorms; Kyan passes an alley or goes down never-ending stairs while Mudabir is shown spying on her from his car. The scenes of Kyan’s mother are in black and white. Past time, in general, is signified by black-and-white images, as in the old Tehran paintings and the pictures of the film crew in the process of filming the documentary. Nevertheless, all these black-and-white images – which are supposed to be less clear – are more explicit and even illuminating in unfolding Kyan’s past than many images of her in present time. For instance, when Mudabir interrogates a tired and distressed Kyan, the reverse-angle shots showing him from her point of view are blurry and unclear. It is as if Kyan feels more at home with her internal thoughts than with external reality, which is an

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intrusion into her consciousness. The deliberately blemished editing matches her deeply problematic identity. Like many of Bayzai’s films, Perhaps Some Other Time uses rapid editing along with fast camera movements and occasional long takes. This montage-based filming breaks up the realist effects of the narrative. The contrasts of light and dark enhance a dramatic and emotional effect. The black-and-white scenes not only signify the past, but resonate with ta’zyih traditions. All the players in a ta’zyih wear black and white or neutral-coloured outfits except for Shimr, who is to murder Imam Hussein and usually wears red. After Imam’s death, all characters are in black but for Shimr and Yazid, Imam’s murderers. Bayzai’s black-and-white scenes and contrasts of light are reminiscent of a ta’zyih scene, which carries a historical connotation. All these effects make the viewer become aware that a narrative, like a play, is a manipulated and constructed product. Finally, Mudabir locates Haqnigar, the man whom he suspects of having an affair with Kyan. He finds out that Haqnigar owns an antique shop and arranges to visit him. By looking at the antique objects in a dark cellar that seems distant from the outside world and from present time, Mudabir becomes somewhat conscious of (the significance of) the past. The antique shop is a reminder of formal history and of what – selectively – is left from the past. Paradoxically, in his quest to know more about his wife, he finds out a great deal about formal history and historically ‘significant’ objects. For instance, a watch given to Nassir u-din Shah by Queen Victoria, Shah Hassan’s armour and Changiz Khan’s stamp. It is not these objects that attract Mudabir’s attention, but an ‘historically insignificant’ picture, as Haqnigar calls it, that captures his interest and makes him even more suspicious, as it noticeably resembles Kyan. Both Kyan and Mudabir find hardly any evidence in official documented history in their separate but related quests. Neither the antiques that embody official history, nor the birth archives, nor Mudabir’s documentaries reveal the past. On the contrary, Kyan’s true identity is to be recovered through a reconstruction of her personal memory, as well as in her search in more intimate spaces like pictures, family albums and homes. In Haqnigar’s house both Mudabir and Kyan are surprised when they see Vida, who looks strikingly like

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Kyan. It is at this moment that they draw closer to reality. In shots with minimal movements, we see the twin sisters who both look troubled. Subsequently, some fragmented shots of Kyan show how traumatized she is. Subliminal flashbacks portraying Kyan and her shadow on the wall signify another expressionistic moment in the film. But the shadow, ironically, does not match her position in the room. On the contrary, the shadow resembles Kyan’s mother in her routine activities. This is a vital moment for both Kyan and Vida. Vida – who felt blamed by her mother for having to give up her twin sister, as the mother could take care of only one of them – tries to recreate the lost history. She presents a picture of the twin sisters, Vida and Kyan. The viewer is now fully informed that the time and space in the present time are in fact anchored in the past and that history has intruded into the present through old pictures in a family album. This recalls a passage by André Bazin in ‘The Ontology of Photographic Image’: Hence the charm of family albums. Those gray and sepia shadows, phantom-like and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.5 In a similar fashion, family albums turn into a significant space in the film, even more significant than the hegemonic and institutionalized written history. It is in this family album or ‘embalmed time’ that Kyan finds her lost identity. She can finally see her childhood image, ‘at a set moment’, belonging to the past. What she sees here was missing in the family albums of her adoptive parents, which had pictures of her at older ages. She is seemingly living in present time, but, as the pictures represent, her identity is fully attached to the past when ‘change [is] mummified’, as Bazin says.6 Nevertheless, Kyan’s identity is not destined to be mummified in her past. Once estranged from herself, she now moves to free the self

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from the photographs, as well as from the past, to create a new identity through reconciliation with the present moment. When Mudabir says: ‘We should go and visit the lady and gentleman who raised you,’ she replies: ‘mother and father.’ The whole set of events in Vida’s house, from the moment the film crew sets up the filming equipment to when Kyan and Vida see each other, and finally when Mudabir responds to their invitation by saying, ‘perhaps some other time, we will visit you’, signifies a ritual through which Kyan is transformed to embrace her adoptive parents as her ‘real’ parents. More importantly, in a ritualistic manner, she who was so concerned about her past identity transcends time and comes to terms with her past. As in other films by Bayzai with similar characters, Kyan metaphorically signifies the modern collective identity that was lost in formal history. She recovers her identity and refashions her memory in less formal but more comfortable spaces. In these more homely spaces, insignificant objects such as pictures and paintings become important. We realize that the people in Perhaps Some Other Time live in a world of objects. The antiques and the picture of Kyan’s mother in Haqnigar’s store, Vida’s expressionistic paintings, Mudabir’s film stock and equipment and Kyan’s family albums all draw in the viewer through rather static shots and slow pans and tilts. As in The Crow and Travellers, the antiques in Perhaps Some Other Time denote the characters’ ties with the past. This is also reminiscent of Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963), where objects signify the clichéd lives of the characters. In Muriel, as Crissa-Jean Chappelle observes: ‘[the characters’] banal existence has allowed them to become objects as well. Their hopeless lives revolve around objects instead of communication with others. They can’t free themselves from their rigid patterns of existence. The characters’ wasted lives resemble dusty antiques.’7 In contrast, the characters in Perhaps Some Other Time manage to leave history behind. In their journey of recovering and re-establishing their identities, they strive to know themselves and the past. The objects and their links to the past do not imprison them in history, but pave the way for personal growth in the future. Therefore, while Renais employs antique objects to reveal imprisonment in past memories, Bayzai uses the same objects to liberate his characters from the past. Although these objects emphasize the significance of the past

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in a modern understanding of self and identity, they do not limit the characters in their journey towards the future. In any event, although Kyan transcends time, knowing and coming to terms with her past is crucial for her definition of self – the ‘present self’ in Perhaps Some Other Time is not separated from the ‘historical self’. What was missing in her search for her identity was her mother, who keeps entering her dreams. She finally succeeds in getting to know her mother and her own historical self through her new-found sister, and the existence of her mother adds contextual meaning to her life. This film raises questions about imagistic authenticity in documentary, a genre supposedly engaged with reality. As mentioned, in the documentary about air pollution we are told that the smoke is artificially made. On the other hand, the heavy smoke that looks unnatural to Mudabir is said to be natural. The woman in the documentary identified by Mudabir as Kyan turns out to be Vida. The fact that the film conflates fact and illusion is also evident in Bayzai’s ironical choice of the name ‘Mudabir’, meaning ‘prudent’ or ‘far-sighted’, for Kyan’s husband – a man who was unaware of Kyan’s thoughts, fears and real identity. We then wonder to what extent Haqnigar (literally, ‘the one who sees the truth’) is accurate about the history of the antiques he describes. In a broader perspective, the viewer might wonder if Bayzai, as director, equally manipulates the viewer by combining fact with fiction to convey his point. Bayzai’s reflexive techniques problematize our understanding of facts in off-stage reality. Susan Taslimi’s performance in the film as three different figures, Kyan, Vida and the mother, provides a selfreferential frame for the potentially art-ificiality of so-called reality as the basis of history. Because of deliberately similar make-ups for Taslimi in her three roles, the audience easily recognizes her as the same person and is encouraged to remain critically distant from the fictional level on which she plays them. It compels the viewer to remain conscious about the dramatized nature of an historical account. Another self-conscious decision – a counter-cinematic practice in which fact and fiction blend – is when Kyan’s rediscovery of her sister is filmed by Mudabir’s film crew. Kyan’s new identity is to be ‘documented’ in the same way that the formal history was. In a

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textually oriented culture, people accustomed to ‘documented’ formal history tend to accept it uncritically. But seeing the film crew documenting a historical moment challenges our unconsciously uncritical approval of documents. This ‘performed’ sequence suggests the way in which history is ‘made’ or ‘constructed’. The thematic structure of Perhaps Some Other Time relies on the power of ‘image’ and challenges history by reimagining its neglected areas. Moreover, the film is anchored in the concept of ‘imagination’ in its depiction of Kyan’s dreams, Mudabir’s false speculations and Kyan and Vida’s imagining and recovering of the past. Kyan observes, reproduces and remembers images. As a modern person, she was a stranger to herself because she did not know her past identity, but recovering her lost self does not trap her in the past. In the end, the power of imagination separates her from the past as well as from reality. As the film’s title suggests, she may return to her roots to reconsider the past in Perhaps Some Other Time. In the present, though, she looks forward to the future. Not only in Perhaps Some Other Time, but in other of his films, Bayzai is deeply engaged with the re/construction and deconstruction of modern history, in particular with reconstructing the image of women. No other Iranian director has considered gender issues and the remythification of the representation of women more thoroughly. The Re-historicizing of Women Bayzai’s fourth feature, The Stranger and the Fog (1974), released new possibilities in the Iranian film industry. It was a landmark film because of its mythic language and, more importantly, for establishing a cinematic convention that historicized and remembered women.8 Before The Stranger and the Fog he was mostly engaged in directing realist films with rather explicit social concerns, like Uncle Moustache (1970), Travel (1971) and Thunder Shower (1971). In The Stranger and the Fog, however, he adopted an unprecedented mythological style in narrating the story of Ayat and Ra’na and their encounters with mysterious forces on land and sea. The people portrayed do not seem to belong to any particular ethnic group. They are mythical figures in an unknown time and location. The village in which the story

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Figure 11 The village council and Ayat in The Stranger and the Fog.

unfolds is a mysterious coastal community. The narrative is allegorical and the plot unrealistic. The motivation behind the characters’ actions seems very simple, but unknowable. In narrating the story of the villagers and the inhabitants of the sea, Bayzai uses a metaphorical language. This film was praised mostly for its complex and novel mise-en-scène and film grammar, and Bayzai spent two years and more than $300,000 in making it.9 In my view, The Stranger and the Fog is equally important because of its unparalleled focus on women and their exercise of power. It introduced a different kind of cinema that disturbs gender conventions. Up till then, women had been treated in conventionalized ways in Iranian cinema, not only in explicitly commercial films – the filmfarsi genre – and popular movies, but in Iranian new wave films too. The birth of the new wave movement in the 1960s enriched the national cinema and brought an international gravity to Iranian films. Although these films were highly engaged with social problems

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and were momentous in terms of their original cinematic stylistics, almost all of them dealt primarily with male issues. There were few exceptions to this male-centred cinema. Bita, made by Hajir Darush in 1972, was rare in its focus on femininity. It is about a girl named Bita who has an alcoholic father and a careless mother, and it examines the struggles, fears and anxieties of young women in modern Iran. It also explores the impact of family and society on abandoned women. In the rather pessimistic narrative – a common trend in Persian literature during the 1970s – Bita is eventually led into prostitution. The fact that the film script was written by Guli Taraqi, a prominent female writer of the time, may explain its unusual focus on female issues. Gugush, the leading pop singer in the pre-revolutionary period, played Bita. Although Darush invested in the film both intellectually and aesthetically by hiring Taraqi and Gugush, Bita was not recognized as an important movie in the 1970s. Both the film and its theme were soon forgotten. Surprisingly, films that were both locally and internationally acclaimed, like The Cow (1969), Qaysar (1969), Riza Muturi (Riza, the Cyclist, 1970), Aqa-yi Halu (Mr Simpleton, 1970), Sadiq, The Kurdish (1971), Still Life (1974), Secrets of the Treasure in the Jinni Valley (1974) and Deer (1974), either ignored women altogether or gave them a secondary, conventional role. Even Still Life and The Cow, which dealt with poetic representations of life from a philosophical standpoint, did not depict women realistically. Films made at that time had a socialist political agenda, explored through a male gaze. In general, the dominant trend was on the representation of masculinity, which resulted either in ignoring women or in a shallow personification of them in subservient and one-dimensional roles, such as victims of sexual mistreatment (in Qaysar), sufferers of male harassment (in The Postman, 1972) and seductresses (Secrets of the Treasure in the Jinni Valley). In the absence of a more genuine portrayal of women, films like Qaysar and Sadiq, the Kurdish were affected by cultural currents of the time, and typically personified male actors who embodied representations of power or irritated masculine energy that is suppressed. The main themes of these films are social mobility, injustice and class-related issues. In popular cinema, the robust physical presence of actors such as Muhammad Ali Fardin, Said Rod and Bihruz Vusuqi, with their

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Figure 12 There is an unprecedented focus on women in The Stranger and the Fog. Parvanih Ma’sumi as Ra’na starred as the lead figure in the film.

appealing manly gestures, complemented by the deep masculine voices of actors like Nassir Malik-Muti’i, established a male-centred aesthetics. These actors exuded energy, charm and sexual vigour. In this phase of Iranian film-making, male authority was never challenged by female resistance. Thus, the representation of femininity suggested a voiceless and static role for women as being necessary to ‘sustain’ social control and ‘normal’ parameters of gender behaviour. The starlets, including Gugush, Furuzan and Puri Bana’i, were chosen from the most attractive actresses and singers of the day as acceptable objects of desire for these handsome actors. They were ‘important’ to the narrative because of their supporting role to the male figures. Moreover, by employing these physically attractive young starlets, directors and producers were responding to the market imperatives of the time. In addition, minor actresses often performed in dance sequences that fulfilled the masculine gaze by displaying the female body.

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Although new wave cinema criticized social problems, it followed this stylistic model to a certain extent in films such as Hatami’s Tuqi (1971) and Kimiyai’s Qaysar (1969). The majority of these films were narrated in a realistic mode, but their gender representation was not based on the reality of Iranian society because it erased the identity of half the population. Bayzai, on the contrary, chooses a surreal mise-en-scène in The Stranger and the Fog and employs a highly allegorical language. His concerns are realist, because the film reimagines both men and women challenged with real problems that could happen in everyday life. It portrays the relationship between Ra’na, a widow living on the coast, and Ayat, a stranger who mysteriously appears on the beach. Sea creatures insistently haunt Ayat. They represent the ‘unknown’, because we don’t know what they are. At one point, when he gets new scars by stabbing them, the viewer probably wonders if these creatures really do exist, but they imply different aspects of his personality. They follow Ayat, from the sea to the haven of the village. Ra’na is also troubled by her dead husband’s ancestors. The village council decides that if Ayat wishes to stay in the village he should marry a local woman. Ayat, in return, asks for Ra’na’s hand. The villagers reject the suggestion but Ra’na accepts his proposal. In deep focus shots – rarely used by Bayzai – Ra’na is shown in the foreground against the villagers in a misty background. The deep focus shots in this setting convey a mysterious atmosphere. Moreover, as Naficy points out, this type of camera work represents Ra’na’s isolation and distance from the other villagers.10 Ra’na and Ayat are both strangers in their surroundings, not at home either on the land or in the sea. Therefore, they set off together in a mutual battle on both land and sea. As critics, including Naficy and Bihzad Ishqi,11 have indicated, Bayzai uses Iranian and also Japanese rituals in this film, although he abandons conventionalized and conventionalizing rituals of any kind in the process of creating new conventions. In a deviation from the hierarchy of power and privilege, male dominance – represented by the village council and by Ra’na’s in-laws – is problematized. In personifying Ra’na and rejecting conventions, traditional and patriarchal codes of behaviour are questioned.

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This ‘inclusion’ of women in Iranian film discourse becomes a tradition in Bayzai’s aesthetics. In his next film, The Ballad of Tara (1978), made just before the Islamic revolution, the leading female figure, Tara, rejects becoming a subordinated rural widow. She even veers towards adventure as she finds out about a mysterious sword among her grandfather’s possessions and faces the historical man. Thus, refashioning conventionalized gender representations becomes more controversial. Unlike Ra’na, Tara has no counterpart among the men in her village and becomes a heroine without a matching hero. Cinema is both a cultural production and a reflection of the society it represents, and it is only through exploring the historical and sociocultural contexts of films that we can appreciate their meanings. Bayzai’s restorative attempts in re-imagining women in urban, rural, historical or modern settings were a response not only to Iranian film productions at that time, but also to the written, formal, modernist history of Iran that excluded women. In his films, this reappearance of the female redefined the relations between men and women by re-membering and reconstituting the forgotten half of the society in history, albeit through a visual and artistic medium. Many national historiographical accounts in the twentieth century are written from a patriarchal viewpoint. Thus, historical narratives and the collective national memory depend on a history that was ‘construed’ by historians. It has been the historians’ perspective that created the history of gender relations and, to a certain extent, social gender arrangements. In general, it could be argued that all historical accounts are ideological products, as Maria Alonso proposes: All histories, whether spoken or written, are produced in an encounter between a hermeneutics and a field of social action which is symbolically constituted ... Much of this encounter takes place ‘after the fact’; histories are retrospectives because the contours of the past are finally delineated and fixed from the vantage point of the present. Thus, the contingency of historyas-action is always mitigated by the backward gaze of historyas-representation which orders and explains, which introduces teleology hardly evident at the time of the original events.12

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This holds true in Iranian historical accounts. As Afsaneh Najmabadi says, ‘what is considered in those narratives as unimportant and what is thus lost in those histories, becomes productive of national forgetting’.13 The history of modern Iran14 was self-consciously a history of men. Najmabadi shows that Mihdi Malikzadih, in his historiography of the Iranian constitutional revolution,15 presents a male-oriented history. He uses the words man and men (mard and mardan), ‘which in Persian do not carry the potential meaning of “generic human being(s)” ’,16 as the main focus of events. In Malikzadih’s account, the exclusion of women, except in brief digressions, is justified since he believes women were socially excluded from revolutionary activities. Other historical sources are little different in this respect. As a result, women in general seem to be absent from the collective national memory. Najmabadi provides one such example. She narrates the tale of women and girls – the daughters of Quchan – who were sold by ‘needy peasants to pay their taxes in a bad harvest year, 1905, the year preceding the Iranian constitutional revolution’, or ‘taken as booty in a raid by Turkoman tribesmen against a village settlement’ in north-eastern Iran.17 For a number of years ordinary people, Muslim preachers and social democratic militants remembered this story in poetry and prose, street songs and satire. However, the historical event vanished from later narratives of the revolution and became erased from cultural memory.18 The story of the daughters of Quchan was not categorized as ‘histories of grand ideas and great men’ like those written by Firiydun Adamiyat and Malikzadih.19 Ironically, the concept of gender was a central structuring category in the making of Iranian modernity in the beginning of the twentieth century. As Najmabadi says: Concepts central to the imagination and construction of a modern Iran were envisaged in terms related to concepts of femininity and masculinity. Nation (milat), for instance, was largely scripted as a brotherhood – at least until the first decade of the twentieth century, when women began to claim their space as sisters in the nation. The modern notion of vatan (homeland), on the other hand, was envisaged as female – as a beloved and

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as a mother. Closely linked to the maleness of milat and the femaleness of vatan was the multiple load of the concept of namus (honour), which shifted in this period between the idea of purity of woman (‘ismat) and integrity of the nation.20 By remembering the story of the daughters of Quchan, Najmabadi carries out ‘[a] recuperation of women into the national narrative and of gender into historiography’.21 In the process of writing a different account of Iranian history, scholars like Najmabadi ‘re-write’ women into the history of Iranian modernity. Earlier Iranian historiographical texts were women-free zones because of the political culture of the society. Cinema as a cultural form of expression was no exception to this ‘norm’. As discussed, in many popular and art movies women

Figure 13 Ra’na is singled out in an expressionistic set design to capture her isolation and her internal fears of the unknown.

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were subject to de-historicizing practices of national memory reinforced by the artistic media. But in films such as The Stranger and the Fog, women are represented from a more realistic viewpoint and the approach to gender issues is different. Bayzai’s reconstructing of national memory and reconsidering of the gender-oblivious national cinema is taken further in his post-revolutionary productions. Gender Representation Transformed In the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, Iranian cinema, as the dominant cultural form, changed dramatically in terms of gender representation and began to restore women’s status that had been lost through cultural amnesia. At this time, Bayzai initiated a new cinema in which women are re-historicized and re-mythified.22 His films depict the hidden layer of modern history ignored for decades, and reject official or canonical versions of the ‘history’ of culture. He integrates long-segregated elements of mythos (myth) and logos (truth) by giving mythology and the popular arts key roles in his aesthetics. In recovering Iran’s gender-oblivious history, Bayzai re-imagines women not through factual narratives, but through a metaphorical language in fictional situations that are deeply rooted in social realities. In a society where women are de-personalized and viewed collectively, Bayzai’s film-making is an oasis for female personal expression. His aesthetics glorifies women’s private and personal issues. Notions of masculinity and femininity, absent from previous Iranian films and national memory, are examined and redefined in The Stranger and the Fog, Unlike the women in films such as Qaysar and The Cow, Ra’na is not doomed to take a secondary role. She is a powerful figure who is able to decide her destiny and faces equal opportunities of domination and subjection. The representation of women in The Stranger and the Fog is rather different from Bayzai’s previous films. Although Thunder Shower has a woman (Parvanih Ma’sumi as Atifih) as a central character, she is a physically attractive but vulnerable woman who needs to be protected and loved. Atifih’s ultimate fate depends on her two lovers’ psychological battle – the teacher, a stranger to the community, and a butcher, who is

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considered the insider and a legitimate patriarchal power. In a radical shift, The Stranger and the Fog shows an independent woman who ignores the biblical words of the village council, marries a stranger and begins a search for the truth in a misty maritime bay. The film’s foggy setting allegorically suggests the complications in the journey of women and men who strive to discover meaning in life. The Stranger and the Fog established a new gendered discourse in Iranian cinema, but it is in The Ballad of Tara that gender identity and power are completely switched. Iranian film culture is here completely transformed in the portrayal of Tara as a mythic woman who is the sole fighter in the battle of life. The powerful performance of Susan Taslimi as Tara, in a primitive setting, symbolizes the power of nature, love, fertility and pleasure. Nevertheless, Tara represents more than a mere force of nature. She is a multidimensional human being who is capable of working, thinking and making choices on her own terms. In one scene she says: ‘I work for every single bite that I grab, or each breath that I take. There is no fancy in my life. Then, why shouldn’t I laugh my head off or act silly [every once in a while].’ In this film, the exercising of power, traditionally a male commodity, is delegated to Tara. The dependent femininity of Atifih in The Thunder Shower is replaced by Tara’s sober independence. On the other hand, the male figures in The Ballad of Tara are either immature (such as the boy who falls in love with Tara) or insignificant (such as Qilich). The most important male is the historical man. The inverted gender depiction in Tara, however, results in an unexpected softness in the personification of the historical man, despite his ironically ferocious appearance in a military outfit. The de-conventionalizing of gender representation, which started in Thunder Shower, is taken further in Bayzai’s later films. Unlike Kimiyai or Taqvai, who use expressive actors with an obvious physical presence, Bayzai’s leading actors are not physically powerful figures. Parviz Fanni-zadih, for instance, a short, slim man with thick spectacles who was cast as the lead (the teacher), does not represent conventional masculine attributes of vigour and sexual energy. Moreover, Bayzai’s use of normal-looking men (such as casting Hussein Parvarish as Isalat in The Crow and Parviz Pur-Husseini as Na’i’s husband in Bashu the Little Stranger (1989)), in contrast to dazzling and powerful actresses such as Ma’sumi and Taslimi, de-conventionalized gender representation

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Figure 14

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Atifih meets the teacher under the voyeuristic gaze of the whole neighborhood in Thunder Shower.

in Iranian cinema. Male figures in films, including Bashu the Little Stranger or Dog-Eat-Dog, are more vulnerable and less sophisticated than females. In a number of post-revolutionary films, such as Ibrahim Hatami-kia’s The Glass Agency (1998) and Kimiyai’s Snake’s Fang (1990) and Protest (2000), the irritated masculinity conveys the frustration caused by the Iran–Iraq war and the social chaos after the revolution. But Bayzai’s aesthetics does not follow this patriarchal model. His male figures are not portrayed as morally or physically superior to their female counterparts. In Bashu, Na’i’s husband, a farmer, is shown as a disabled man, returning from (apparently) the war front. In Dog-Eat-Dog the moral weakness of Mu’asir, as opposed to Gulrukh’s honesty and strength, suggests a problematic masculinity. In these post-revolution films Bayzai tends to show men lacking maturity and/ or morality and at times with childish sensitivities. In Tara, this immaturity is personified in the historical man and in Qilich.

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Figure 15 The extreme long shot of Fanni-zadih, who is entrapped between the walls in a narrow alley shows the teacher in Thunder Shower as a fragile and powerless lover.

Through a ‘recuperative practice’, Bayzai’s cinema recognizes women with a rule-breaking dignity and boldness. From Tara to Gulrukh, women are not camouflaged within the culturally approved rhetoric of home, marriage and motherhood. Tara, a widow with two children, is not depicted as a conventionally nurturing and concerned mother. She shows a reluctant tenderness towards her children. Similarly, Asyih in

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Figure 16 The close-up of Susan Taslimi as Na’i in “Bashu: The Little Stranger” is one of the most memorable images in the history of Iranian cinema. Na’i’s powerful gaze here is bold and graceful.

The Crow does not represent a self-sacrificing wife absorbed in domestic affairs, but is more involved in her career as a teacher of the deaf and with growing plants in a greenhouse that her husband is unaware of. Na’i’s striving in the rice paddies and at home is more in tune with nature than culture. She is a single mother with two children who has to work hard to survive. The moral power of these women is not based on their sexuality. It is grounded in their work and their mystical/psychological journey of self-discovery and self-exploration, which makes them strangers to their surroundings. Although Tara is portrayed as eager and sensitive towards men (especially in the romantic incident with Qilich in the woods), on other occasions she is capable of being emotionless in her encounter with men. Bayzai’s films map out different relations of power and gender in his depiction of masculinity and femininity, gender dominance, subordination and resistance. His filmic treatment of women

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Figure 17 Na’i’s strong and independent character in Bashu: The Little Stranger interrogates the conventional gendered relations of Iranian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.

re-historicizes relations between men and women by revealing a more liberated gender identity that does not match the gendered behaviour in Iran’s official history and mainstream cinema. He conveys a new re-mythologizing of the old. From the late 1980s, many directors followed Bayzai in exploring gendered thematics. Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s Divorce Iranian Style (1998), Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Banu-yi Urdibihisht (The May Lady, 1998), Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib (The Apple, 1998), Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbih (1997) and Tahmineh Milani’s Du Zan (Two Women, 1998), Nimi-yi Pinhan (The Hidden Half, 2001) and Vakunish-i Panjum (The Fifth Reaction, 2003) are a few examples of gendered representations in contemporary Iranian cinema. However, unlike many Iranian films directed at international audiences, Bayzai does not exoticize Iranian women by interpolating social and gender issues.

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Makhmalbaf’s Gabbih (1997), for instance, an unconventional love story in a nomadic setting in Iran, projects an exotic land with unconventional gendered relations. It is undeniably one of the best Iranian art films and was critically acclaimed because of its unusual technical and thematic re-investing of gendered representation. As Dabashi says, ‘[t]hroughout Gabbih Makhmalbaf uses close-ups for showing the face of a woman in love and long shots for the man she loves – a radical reversal of the primacy of the masculine conception of love characteristic of the entire history of Iranian culture.’23 Representing nomadic (or more precisely Qashqa’i) life is an exotic experience for many urban Iranians and certainly for non-Iranian audiences, and this film was visually appealing both inside and outside the country. So much so that the Gabbih, a colourful hand-made nomadic carpet, became a sought-after item in Iran and internationally. Before 1997, it was Qashqa’i nomads who mostly used Gabbih and it was unknown even in the traditional Tehran bazaar. After the screening of Gabbih, many affluent carpet shops in northern Tehran started to sell high-quality Gabbihs and it became a significant export. In this case, the economic impact of screening a film shows how displaying the exotic can affect viewers. For many average filmgoers Gabbih seems to have been a visually rich celebration of exotic colours and lives. As Lindsey Moore says of cross-cultural audiences: Cross-cultural spectators do not merely consume but also contribute to the production of meaning in films. Laura Marks suggests that ‘as well as bearing meanings to the audiences, [films] receive impressions from the people who have seen them ... [The n]ormative spectator always already has expectations, so that ... simplistic and stereotypical representations are the kind most easily read by mainstream Western audiences’.24 Regardless of nationality, any viewer who is less acquainted with the cultural background of a film and especially a film in realistic mode, might fall into equating the narrative with the ‘real’ situation. As Moore also suggests, to some extent ‘the ethnographic object continues to be assimilated as “the real thing” despite efforts to complicate the association between the two.’25 While Makhmalbaf’s Gabbih is

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an aesthetic landmark in Iranian cinema, its exotic aura may have enhanced its publicity. In Bayzai’s films, women, like men, are troubled and face serious questions about their identities. Yet they are not presented to fascinate the non-Iranian viewer. The stories of women like Asyih in The Crow, Tara in The Ballad of Tara and Gulrukh in Dog-Eat-Dog are not exotic narratives of ‘other’ women or what ‘the West has been waiting for Iran to tell about itself’,26 but deal with universally relevant questions of self and identity. Nor does Bayzai exoticize the narrative results from his highly dramatic settings and performances, unlike Makhmalbaf, for example, who takes a poetic realist approach. He avoids the seamless editing that gives the impression of a real situation and his use of non-realistic mise-en-scène prevents the spectator from identifying the filmic space with an authentic social space. Thus, although actresses in his films have to conform to the mandatory female dress code, his female figures are not rendered as ethnographic objects representing one-dimensional Iranian characters. They have dynamic characters facing universally significant questions, and function symbolically as re-mythologized historical objects. The gendered issues in Bayzai’s films are filtered through his sophisticated language and through mythological and historical allusions. Furthermore, he does not explore gendered rights in the Islamic Iran, but at a more profound level, as a dialectic response to the canonized historical and cinematic discourses. It is true that issues such as patriarchal dominance, self and identity in his films are examined from historical and cultural standpoints. These, however, have no direct link to current political, social or religious issues. The cultural space Bayzai portrays is rather complex and is influenced by historical and mythological elements in a broader sense. The viewer can fully connect with these thematics if she or he is informed by Iran’s (in particular) and the East’s (in general) history, mythology and visual arts. Bayzai’s films do not lend themselves to stereotypical readings of gender, ideology and religion. In this way his aesthetics diverge significantly from many other Iranian films.

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CHAPTER 6 BAYZAI AND THE CONVENTIONS OF VISUAL ARTS

What is shown on the big screen is not real. For, if it were, it was not to be called art. Art is something beyond reality. It touches the reality of people’s lives. This is what we try to explore [through art].1 This description of ‘art’ by the veteran performer and actor, Izzatullah Intizami, could aptly illustrate Bayzai’s aesthetics, with its deliberately dramatic structure that draws heavily on Eastern and Iranian theatrical conventions. Before the Islamic revolution, Bayzai extensively researched (and published on) Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Iranian theatrical traditions and taught courses on these topics at the University of Tehran. This could explain his affinities as a filmmaker with the structure of drama. The influence of Iranian visual arts on his film-making is particularly significant because of their historical and cultural associations. These aspects of his films helped to reactivate Iranian popular arts both in the filmic and cultural spheres. The relation between modern cinematic techniques and the theatrical past cautions against approaching films as cultural texts, as pure signs or as language. What linguistic-oriented film theories tend to forget is that a film is a ‘staged’ event. Cinema, as film-goers perceive it, is to a great extent about actors, music, props and ‘dramatic acts’.

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As Gilberto Perez comments: Structuralist theory followed the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and attempted to extend it beyond language proper to other forms of communication. Christian Metz made the most sustained effort to apply it to film. He concluded that film is not a language in any strict sense. But the linguistic bent of film theory has persisted. One of its consequences is that, though the ordinary moviegoer naturally remains interested in the actors and other dramatic aspects of the medium, the film scholar seldom invokes theater any longer and instead considers film a form of narration. The distinction between narrative and drama goes back to Aristotle: narrative is told, recounted in the words; drama is enacted, performed by actors on a stage. Film may look like a medium of enactment, with actors, props and scenery, but the language-minded theoretician looks upon it as a narrative medium that tells stories much in the manner of words on a page.2 Furthermore, what is neglected by structuralist and poststructuralist film critics is that films are made in response to a specific historical background. We saw in chapters four and five that Bayzai’s concerns are realistic and deal with contemporary issues of Iranian society. At the same time, he draws on historical events and universal mythologies. We have also seen that modern identity is being shaped and reshaped in response to cultural and historical specifications. Bayzai achieves a unique blending of the past and the present, of theatrical conventions and present Iranian cinema, and he effectively integrates indigenous dramatic and visual culture into a modern artistic form of expression. Ultimately, his film-making has fashioned a unique modern interpretation of Iranian visual and dramatic culture. Bayzai also engaged with modern mythification, or a re/deconstruction of Iranian myths and historical narratives that would shed light on the question of modern identity. Among theatrical forms that inspired him were the conventions of ta’zyih, and as we have seen, his use of these in Travellers was significant in achieving meaning.

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Ta’zyih, or Shabih khani or Shabih gardani, is one of the oldest dramatic traditions in Iran. In modern times, ta’zyih is a form of popular passion play that portrays the events and atrocities experienced by Imam Hussein and his followers in Karbala in 61 Hijry (AD 680). The practice of ta’zyih, however, dates back to pre-Islamic times, about 3000 BC. Archaeological evidence from the ancient city of Panj-kand, 65 km from Samarqand, shows images of a passion play commemorating the Iranian hero Siyavash, who was killed by the Turani conqueror Afrasyab. Other sources such as the History of Bukhara, written in Arabic in 332 AH (AD 943), describe the ta’zyih of Siyavash that was practised in the city of Bukhara for more than 3000 years.3 The nomadic tribes of Qashqa’i in south-west Iran still practice this ta’zyih, known locally as Siyavashan or Savushun. After the Islamic conquest and the rise of the Shi’a movements in Iran, passion plays became infused with religious fables and agonising stories of the prophet Muhammad and other religious figures, particularly of his grandson and the third Imam, Imam Hussein, and his family who were ambushed and killed by Caliph Yazid and his chief commander Shimr. During the Safavid era in the tenth century, ta’zyih took on a theatrical form and its popularity grew. It became a Persian Shi’a ritual that mostly portrayed various religious myths of the ten-day journey of the prophet’s grandchildren in Karbala, and related stories. Ta’zyih experienced a temporary decline under Nadir Shah,4 but was popular again during the eleventh-century Zandiyih dynasty. Towards the end of the Qajar era in the twentieth century, the Qajar kings and authorities, as well as wealthy merchants and bazaaris, sponsored ta’zyih and it developed into a major form of entertainment in Iranian cities and villages. By then, it had been transformed into a sumptuous and complex performing art consisting of a script (ta’zyih namih) with a rhythmic didactic content, performed by two groups of muvafiq-khan-ha who play uliya’ (the Imam and his entourage) and mukhalif-khan-ha who play ashqiya’ (the enemy’s party). Muvafiq-khan-ha deliver rhythmic and poetical speeches. They normally wear black, green or white clothing. Mukhalif-khan-ha, on the other hand, merely shout, using unrefined language and a fierce tone. Their performance is highly exaggerated; they look dramatically

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comical and are characterized by brown or red costumes. Thus, it is fairly easy to recognize ‘bad guys’ from ‘good guys’. There are also a large number of siyahi lashkar (extras) who appear only in the battlefield scenes and do not speak. Both groups, along with the musical ensemble that performs the familiar festive, heroic or mourning tunes, readily identified as ta’zyih music, work under a director (ta’zyih gardan or mu’in ul-buka). The director’s role is not limited to behind the scenes. He joins the actors on stage, begins the play with some introductory lines about the story to be performed (hadith) and gives directions to the actors while they are playing. Ta’zyih is performed both indoors, in customized theatres called takiyih or hussainiyih, and outdoors. During the Qajar era, ta’zyih incorporated other forms of folk tales such as gushih, or satirical plays, usually performed after the main ta’zyih. The women’s ta’zyih was added later. Women performed this form of play, mostly in the Qajar period, exclusively for a female audience. In each city, high-status women held women’s ta’zyihs. The main theme of these passion plays is protesting against injustice, fighting evil and not tolerating oppression. The leading character chooses to die rather than to live under a dictatorship. During the Pahlavi era, ta’zyih was banned as a form of ‘backward’ traditional theatre.5 Currently, although it does not enjoy governmental or clerical support, it has been revived again. Modern performances are not as glamorous as they were, and many famous takiyihs, including Takiyih Dawlat in Tehran, have been destroyed or abandoned. In a non-realist approach, ta’zyih narrates a well-known story. Dramatic overstatement and exaggeration – which in turn are borrowed from an older theatrical tradition, naqali – is an integral part of a ta’zyih play, with dramatic irony at its centre. Therefore the spectator knows what is about to happen. Nevertheless, it evokes emotional reactions among Shi’a audiences, since it touches on their ideological and moral values as a minority group of Muslims. It is this highly spiritual and emotional connection that makes ta’zyih a unique example of World Theatre. At the same time, its format has a distancing effect. In the beginning, the audience looks joyful and ready to participate in a festive event. However, when the play starts, they weep and express their grief over the martyrdom of Imam Hussein and his

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devoted followers and the imprisonment of his family members. By the end of ta’zyih, especially when the amusing gushih starts, the festive mood returns. This detachment applies not only to passion play audiences; it is just as significant for the performers. During a play, actors switch identities to their real selves, to demonstrate their sorrow, weep, and talk about the events of Karbala. They may even take a break in the middle of the play to drink tea or chat to their fellow performers in front of the crowd. The main mukhalif-khan antagonist in particular, Shimr, makes personal comments during a ta’zyih. Dressed in dark red, he shouts and mimics the act of killing, normally in a comical fashion. Yet he abandons his role temporarily to display his grief and make empathetic comments. This reminds the audience that they are watching a performed event and not reality, which has a detachment value. Dramatic irony is at the core of ta’zyih. Both performers and spectators are aware that it is a performed event. As opposed to seamless realist plays and films, the actors in a ta’zyih are not meant to be identified with. This is why they switch to their real personalities during the play. They even hold their scripts and are obviously being directed by the ta’zeih gardan, not because they don’t know or forget their lines, but to maintain the distancing effect that is a necessary element of this theatrical form. In addition, the actors move easily on-stage and off-stage, because even in the most elaborated takiyihs the stage is a simple round construction, a few steps above the ground level where people usually stand to watch the performance. This dramatic tension makes ta’zyih different from realist performances. In fact, many ta’zyih gardans are now challenging the influence of Hollywood stylistics in ta’zyih, as Beeman and Ghaffari note: In The Ta’ziyeh of Ali Akbar, a hero, Ali Akbar goes backstage to put on a red-stained shirt and then returns to die in a very stylized manner. In one performance in Tehran seen by Ghaffari, the character playing the villain Shimr stabbed Ali Akbar once. The actor playing Ali Akbar then crawled around the stage for several minutes and Shimr stabbed him again. The scene was taken directly from a Hollywood film, and was

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so melodramatic that it distracted from the inherent power of the scene. A performer with the troupe presenting ta’ziyeh in Paris, a rather well-known actor Ghaffari had worked with in Iran, made the role of Hares so melodramatic that it was nearly unwatchable. In one scene Hares must kill the children with a knife. The actor extended the scene with the children for almost five minutes, and chose to use a dagger. Ghaffari finally asked him, ‘What are you doing? Performing surgery?’ The actor replied, ‘This is work!’ Ghaffari said, ‘No no, I don’t want any dramatic “work”. Just make the gesture of removing the thorns two times for each child, and lose the dagger.’6 Performing in a ta’zeih does not require melodramatic excess. The effectiveness of this type of drama lies in its simple stylization, which makes it a powerful theatrical form. Experienced actors, who usually inherit their roles from their fathers and are involved from an early age, perform in non-realist fashion the tragic events of Karbala. As Dabashi says, this paradoxical tension could disappoint a spectator who views drama from an Aristotelian point of view that identifies it with mimesis or imitation.7 In a mimetic perspective, drama is an imitation of an action. ‘Aristotelian mimesis is based on similitude’ while ‘ta’zyih is predicated on dissimilitude’.8 As discussed, Travellers is a ground-breaking film in its unique representation of the formal elements of ta’zyih in cinema. Although there is only one omniscient camera, the story is told from several perspectives to enhance the psychological struggles of each of the characters as they rediscover their selves and identities. Camera movements play an important role. The collective evolution of the characters creates a sense of ritual performance, which is central to ta’zyih. Like any other ritual, the Ma’arifi family’s problematization of their identities signifies ‘a collective act of creation’.9 The monologues of each character in Travellers recall the conventional monologues in ta’zyih and reveal each person’s questions and struggles. They are also significant in terms of Bayzai’s theatrical approach and his deconstruction of a pure cinematic approach. The highly refined and sophisticated lines of the characters de-centre the narrative. Thus, it resonates with the

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stylistics of ta’zyih both on verbal and visual levels. But the impact of ta’zyih on Bayzai’s aesthetics is not limited to these formal elements. By employing the rhythm of ta’zyih, he explores modern issues such as cultural identity, alienation and the concept of modernity in Iran. A Fusing of Fact and Fiction What makes ta’zyih a unique theatrical convention is its skilful fusion of history and performance. Fact and fiction become interrelated. Because of its highly stylized approach, this type of theatre is non-realistic – but paradoxically, it is also realistic because it covers significant historical events. The same artistic consolidation of the real and the unreal, or of fact/history and fiction, is at the heart of Bayzai’s aesthetics. The Death of Yazd-gird, for instance, shows his rehistoricizing of a historical event in a theatrical manner. Early in the first sequence, this film starts challenging history. Immediately after the credit titles, the spectator sees a ‘historical quotation’ that reads: ‘Thus Yazd-gird fled to Marv and entered a mill. The miller, tempted by the king’s money and jewellery, murdered him while Yazd-gird was sleeping.’ The source of this historical evidence is vaguely mentioned as ‘tarikh! (history)’. The film is a fictional account of the last king of the Sassanid dynasty, Yazd-gird, who fled the capital city of Tisfun after the Arab conquest. Disguised in a ragged garment, Yazd-gird takes refuge in a miller’s house, basically a mill. The miller, who recently lost a son in the unpopular war, lives in extreme poverty with his wife and daughter. Their only hope, amid the empire’s chaos, is that the ‘king of kings, Yazd-gird shah, the earthly representative of the God, Ahura Mazda’, will come and protect them from the invading enemy. The story begins when the king’s entourage enters the mill and finds a dead body that they suspect is the king’s. The death of the king, however, is under investigation because the commanders are not certain that this is the king’s body. They have never seen his face without the royal mask and attire, the symbols of his divinity, and the body lacks both. The commanders therefore try to find out the truth about their defeated king. The accounts given by the miller’s family are controversial. In various scenes the miller, his wife or the

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girl describes the reality differently: 1) The king murdered the miller and is now disguised in the miller’s garment; 2) The miller murdered the king because he raped his daughter and seduced his wife. In fact, they claim that he raped and seduced the daughter and wife to encourage the miller to kill him; 3) The king committed suicide; 4) The king is still alive. The trial – and the film – do not reach a firm conclusion about the truth about Yazd-gird’s life after he is overthrown. This could suggest that the historical evidence of those who write history is partial and incomplete. The Death of Yazd-gird is a ritualistic assemblage to elucidate a hazy moment in history. When the shah’s commanders are told about the king’s crimes and sins, they are unable to continue as legitimate judges in his name. They then become the subject of the miller’s family’s questions and criticism. They are accused of abandoning their leader and behaving unjustly to them and to the king’s subjects. After a while, it is the king’s associates who become the accused. The miller’s family calls them usurpers of power who should answer to the oppressed people. Since the king has committed crimes, he has lost his legitimate power (farr-i Kyani), even to his commanders.10 By the end of the film they set up gallows to execute not the miller, but the body of the king. Cinematically, Bayzai’s The Death of Yazd-gird is a (fictive) response that seeks to rewrite history into a story (afsanih). Historically, his narrative highlights and dramatizes an ambiguous historical event. According to various accounts, Yazd-gird III was the 25- or 34-yearold emperor of the Sassanid dynasty at the time he was killed. It is ‘confirmed’ that his death took place in 31 AH (AD 651); however, the murderer or murderers, as well as their motive and how he was killed, differ in various accounts. For instance, in one account, Yazd-gird, accompanied by a few members of his family, his chef, butlers and slaves goes to the city of Marv. It is the governor of Marv, Mahuyih, who kills Yazd-gird in a mill.11 But in Rawza-tu Safa by Mir-Khund, the governor of Marv invites the Khaqan (King) of China to Marv after the dismantling of the Sassanid Empire. Yazd-gird, who lives in Marv, learns about this and flees to a mill. The miller, tempted by the king’s magnificent garments and jewellery, murders him and throws his body in the water. Other modern and ancient historians,

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Figure 18 The miller and his family in Bayzai’s cinematic version of the death of Yazd-gird are given a chance to comment on the event, while their voices were not projected in formal history.

such as Zabih u-llah Safa, Abbas Iqbal Ashtiyani and Firdawsi have explained the event in different ways. Bayzai’s dramatic version not only highlights the diverse views on this historical incident, but also re-historicizes it, as for the first time it is the miller and his family, or the oppressed (mazlum) who comment on the event. This film’s ritualistic approach recalls the formation of ta’zyih in the Safavid era. It was important for this first Shi’a dynasty in Iran to construct different images and historically significant myths to legitimize and justify its authority. The ta’zyih theatrical form re-historicized the death of Imam Hussein and his family as an important historical milestone for Shi’as. The central theme of ta’zyih is an emphasis on the concept of mazlumiyat (being wronged), associated with Hussein and his followers. The Safavids encouraged ta’zyih because it narrates the story of Karbala from the perspective of those who were wronged, not from the oppressor’s point of view. The spectators weep for Hussein

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because he was wronged by Caliph Yazid. The Shi’a are the descendants of the prophet’s grandson, who was the victim of Yazid’s oppression (zulm). This rewriting of history, in a theatrical form, from the mazlum’s perspective legitimized and strengthened principles that were vital to Shi’ism. As a non-realistic theatrical mode, ta’zyih is not interpreted as reality. But the incidents that it depicts are emotionally powerful and disturbing for the spectator. Similarly, the story of Yazd-gird, as narrated by Bayzai, is a fictionalized version of the ‘reality’ of the king’s death. On a number of occasions the characters in the film emphasize that it is merely an afsanih or a story. Yet it does not matter if it is fact or fiction. What is significant is that this is a version of reality told by those who were excluded from official historical accounts. This makes the viewer conscious of history and the way it is constructed. Moreover, the highly stylized and dramatic performances in The Death of Yazd-gird,

Figure 19 The Death of Yazd-gird is probably the most formally stylized and theatrical film made by Bayzai. Most of the story occurs within the confines of a mill, like a staged narrative.

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reminiscent of ta’zyih, remind the viewer that this is a performed event. The overstated and exaggerated acting does not draw the audience into a mimetic action that could be taken as reality, and they are able to view it not as a ‘historical’ event, but as a ‘tragic’ event of history. These are not the dead characters of a finished historical account, but live figures who are still being challenged and are subject to further judgement. The narrative becomes engaging and inspiring in the sense that, like a ta’zyih, the film consolidates death and life in order to revive its historical/fictional figures. Bayzai’s The Death of Yazd-gird is filmed mostly inside a mill. The scenes set outside are shot as if seen through the mill door or windows. This film was made in 1983, shortly after an unsettling revolution and during the devastating war with Iraq. It is probable that Bayzai had a limited budget and was forced to shoot the entire movie in the mill. Whether for financial or aesthetic reasons, the end result is a portrayal of events in a confined space. The setting, like a ta’zyih stage, is plain and simple. In the absence of an elaborate mise-en-scène, the audience is drawn into the psychology of the characters and their speeches.12 Furthermore, the narrow circle of the stage enhances the distancing effect that is characteristic of ta’zyih plays. As a result, the setting in The Death of Yazd-gird resembles not a real space, but a theatrical stage. Like a staged play, the changes of setting are only manipulated through lighting. As Azar Nafisi says: The minimalist setting of the film is filled with the characters, but these characters, on the other hand, are presented as abstract characters. They are not portrayed as individuals. It is not their individuality, but their character (mahiyat) that is at stake here. They are not given any names but titles, such as Padishah (king), commander, general, mubid (priest), the miller, woman, girl, and soldier. Thus their names are dissolved into the roles they should play.13 By employing the theatrical elements of the rich dramatic convention of ta’zyih to show how a performance can substitute and/or rehistoricize history, The Death of Yazd-gird reveals a type of reality that both thematically and formally resists being equated with historical

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reality. History is, of course, usually taken as the truth. But performance, especially a non-realist performance, has no such aim. Bayzai’s performed version of a historical event that has been the subject of speculation and controversy reinforces the view that history is merely afsanih or fiction created by those in power. By the end of the film, when the gallows is being prepared to execute the miller, the woman predicts the approach of Muslim troops. Out of fear for his own life, the general who is going to execute the sentence says: ‘The story (afsanih) is going to be the one that the family narrated earlier. Let’s hang the dead body, instead.’ Then the commander interrupts the trial (of history) to say: ‘Let’s just move. It is always the winners who write the history.’ He implies that since we are the ones who lost the battle, it is not we who should decide who killed whom. In any event, Bayzai’s fiction disturbs the victor’s account of history, or at least makes the audience rethink and revisit history.

Figure 20 Similar to Ta’zih, in The Death of Yazd-gird the set design is highly stylized and artificial.

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In Bayzai’s version of Yazd-gird’s death, there is no clear conclusion to the fate of the characters. As the woman indicates in the last sequence: ‘Now the main judges are on their way. You had a white flag, yet this was your sentence. We should only wait to see the judgment of those who carry a black flag.’ In this way The Death of Yazdgird remains suspended in uncertainty, which further deconstructs the illusion of a fixed and clear-cut reality. The film was screened at a very sensitive moment in Iranian history, only four years after the Islamic revolution. The title promised a pro-revolutionary film in tune with the government’s anti-monarchical objectives. Although in the early years after the revolution, the Islamic government denounced cinema as a corrupt Western medium, later it began to invest in propagandistic films to promote Islamic values, the imposed social changes and the war whose longevity, paradoxically, turned out to be vital for the government’s survival. Bayzai’s film was produced by Channel Two of National Television Broadcast and premiered at the first Fajr Festival in 1983. Ironically, this was its very last screening inside Iran. It is worth noting that during the Islamic revolution, the revolutionaries had constructed their image as the Muslim warriors who finally put an end to 2,500 years of kingship and corruption in Iran. This was similar to the widely held view of the Arab conquerors who defeated the Sassanid empire and replaced it with an Islamic empire that ruled Persia for centuries. The portrayal of the Arab invaders in Bayzai’s film as ‘those who would neither salute nor say farewell, neither ask nor listen to answers, but talk with their swords’ was not an attractive image for those who had put an end to a ‘corrupt kingship.’ The Death of Yazdgird undermined to some extent the image of the last king of the Persian Empire – an image that was celebrated by Mohammad Reza Shah on different occasions, including his lavish coronation in the ruins of Persepolis. But it did not glorify the image of the Muslim newcomers either. Their arrival in Persia is shown in this film as the onset of uncertainty, death and misery. The commander expresses this in highly metaphorical language when he says: ‘This is absurd! Surrender to death that is waiting on the threshold! Indefinite, like sands in a sandstorm darkening the eyes of the world!’

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During this period the Islamic republic was still insecure and not well-established regime, as it was struggling with fairly strong dissident organisations and opposition groups inside and outside Iran. Leaders in government were being assassinated. Universities were shut down because of student upheavals. In addition, the Iranian government was involved in a war with Iraq. Being ridiculed through an artistic work, especially by a prominent film-maker like Bayzai, was such an affront that the Islamic regime banned the film altogether. During the revolution and the war, the powerful discourses of ta’zyih were exploited for the Islamist cause, and were constructive in shaping the public psyche in favour of the regime. As Dabashi says: During the Islamic Revolution, the figure of Khomeini was immediately identified with that of Hussein, or even more poignantly with a conflated figure of Muhammad, Ali, and Hussein – which is to say with the most combatant saintly figures in the Islamic universe of creative imagination. By the same token, the Shah was identified with Yazid, a usurper of power, corrupt, tyrannical, banal, and demonic. The configuration of the protagonist and the antagonist in this drama 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.14 Similarly, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim in Iraq – a land that used to be Yazid’s kingdom – was identified with Yazid, Imam’s murderer, and was even called, ‘Saddam Yazid’ in the Iranian media. According to this propaganda, this modern Yazid was restaging history in his battle with the Ayatollah Khomeini/Hussein and the true Islamic warriors – that is, Iranian Shi’as. Bayzai, however, employed the discourse of ta’zyih in The Death of Yazd-gird for artistic rather than political purposes. His use of the rhythms of ta’zyih led to the banning of his film. Ironically, the manipulation by the Islamic revolutionaries of the same formal and thematic elements of ta’zyih made this non-realistic film too powerful and evocative to be screened as a purely fictional work with no historical or social implications.

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‘Dreaming Consciousness’15 In Bayzai’s film-making, space is consciously treated as a dialogical and heterogeneous concept. The past is juxtaposed with the present and reality is intermingled with imagination both in the rural and urban locations represented in his films. The unprecedented juxtaposition of past and present, or reality and dreams, problematizes the assumption of a coherent and homogeneous world. The space in Bayzai’s films resembles a Persian garden or Persian carpet, the latter being an artistic rendering of the former. Like a Persian garden, Bayzai’s films represent an enclosed space in which different and at times contrasting elements are brought together. This space signifies the cosmos in its entirety, with all its diverse elements. It is a place for spiritual solace, as well as a social space in which people interact and communicate. Bayzai’s garden-like space is also reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which conflates real and imaginative spaces. In a seminal lecture, Foucault said: The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space ... 16 The particular heterotopic world evoked by Bayzai’s aesthetics is created through ‘the magic of cinema’. Through techniques such as miseen-scène and montage, several spaces can be merged into one place. For Bayzai, mise-en-scène and in particular his editing, invest meaning by creating specific spatial auras to each film. The foggy setting in The Stranger and the Fog, for instance, enhances the characters’ uncertainty about their identities. The theatrical, stage-like mise-en-scène in The Death of Yazd-gird and the fast travelling shots in Travellers invoke a dramatic mode, as opposed to a seamless reality approach that attempts to imitate ‘real’ life situations.

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In films such as Perhaps Some Other Time and The Death of Yazdgird, the viewer cannot find what Foucault calls ‘a hierarchic ensemble of places’.17 As opposed to a ‘space of emplacement’ where dream and reality or history and story are hierarchically and systematically separated, in Bayzai’s films these notions are intermingled. In Perhaps Some Other Time the spaces of dreams and reality are interwoven to dissolve the past into the present. In The Death of Yazd-gird, the fusion of fact and fiction or of formal versions of history and an artistic interpretation of it disturb the systematic and constructed hierarchy of places. The result of the merging and fusing of incompatible sites is the formation of a specific space that in Bayzai’s films does not match the real place. On the contrary, it invokes imagined spaces that could reunite the long-disconnected concepts of myth and history. The imagined spaces in Bayzai’s movies are not neutral. We have seen how his editing, music, choice of domestic and social settings, lighting and so forth function as spatial signifiers and create meaning in his films. His imagined spaces exist within both internal and external spaces. To schematize these, I have used Henri Lefebvre’s definition of space as a concept that carries more than a physical signification: [T]he aim is to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended separately, just as molecular, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces are in physics. The fields we are concerned with are, first, the physical – nature, the Cosmos; secondly, the mental, including logical and formal abstractions; and, thirdly, the social. In other words, we are concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomenon, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.18 According to this definition, the concept of space cannot be reduced to a physical space. The spatial aura in any novel, poem or film is grasped through a combination of physical, mental and social elements in the text. Thus, two films shot in the same place can convey entirely different spatial paradigms. For example, Louis Feuillade’s

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Les vampires (1915) and Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) are both located in Paris, in the same physical place. However, in Les vampires Paris is characterized as a real location – although from a surrealist perspective – while Alphaville’s imagined location is not Paris, but an imaginary futuristic place. The two films represent different mental and social spaces. The mental space is the space of our dreams and passions. It is the internal space in which we imagine and reimagine. The social space, on the other hand, deals primarily with the external world of our social activity, although it is influenced by our projected imagination. In Bayzai’s films these imagined internal and external worlds take precedence over the immediate physical space. Thus, they usually do not fit into any real geographical place, but serve as signifiers producing specific meanings. Bayzai’s physical spaces are real urban or rural locations on a physical map. Yet they portray an imaginary space. In films such as The Ballad of Tara and The Stranger and the Fog, the location consciously signifies an imaginary space. The physical setting of both films is by the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. In both of these films, however, the costumes are chosen from diverse areas and do not match a particular ethnographical type. Likewise, the music does not signify either Gilaki or Mazandarani music but is selected from several different parts of Iran. In addition, Bayzai uses Japanese music. These different spaces and places are brought together to signify the universality of the questions and challenges faced by the characters in these films. In other films, such as The Crow and Perhaps Some Other Time, the social and mental spaces change between present and past time. Bayzai shows historical sites, like Darb-i Bagh-i Milli (The Public Garden Gate) in The Crow, to dramatize the significance of the past in defining concepts of self and identity in the present. His characters travel to the past not to take refuge there, but to illuminate their modern concerns. The conflating of history with present time reveals the relevance of the past to modernity. The spatial spheres in Bayzai’s films, juxtaposing different sites and modes, are decisive in constructing meaning. The space is highlighted as a protagonist, partly real and partly imaginary. The spatial

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paradigms set out by Bayzai signify the questions that confront humans in general, and are not specific to a geographical region. In this sense, his films should be approached from a humanist and universal perspective as well as a nationalist one. For instance, the question of identity in Travellers and Perhaps Some Other Time is a universal question related to the modern self. Through the infusion of dreams and/or magical realist moments, Bayzai represents the internal spaces of his characters and their struggles with their selves and identities. Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space has shown that through the power of imagination we live in a heterogeneous world imbued with images. We are surrounded not by dead historical accounts or sterile dreams, but by dynamic and moving images created in imagined spaces that can metamorphose our state of existence. In Perhaps Some Other Time, we saw that the internal space of Kiyan’s dreaming is portrayed by different cinematic techniques such as change of camera point of view and the movement of characters and camera within space. In this film, as in many others by Bayzai, the employing of American-style continuity editing and European-style mobile camera movement and montage enhances a dynamic spatial paradigm. This film builds the image of a disturbed internal space that is closely related to the social and physical spaces of the characters. Kiyan’s problematized internal space is associated with the recovery of social facts about her identity. The merging of dreams and history into reality creates an alternative form of reality that is not a replacement for what we normally perceive as reality. It is the result of an artistic conflation of various external places and internal spaces, reminiscent of Proust’s description of the roses painted by Elstir: ‘[these roses are] a new variety with which this painter, like some clever horticulturalist, had enriched the Rose family.’19 In Bayzai’s aesthetics, imagination functions as a form of consciousness. It is through imagination that history and art/fiction, reality and dreams are put together. Thus, imagination in his films is not suppressed but celebrated. In the filmic heterotopia that he constructs, images invoke a creative movement. Bayzai portrays, reproduces and alternates these images to reconcile the past with modernity. These images do not signify a coherent and complete world, but an ever-

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changing universe in which the heterogeneous imagination remembers the past and screens the present. Bayzai’s aesthetics displaces the past and present, as well as dreams and reality, but it prepares us to embrace a more dynamic future, because we realize that better dreaming is a key to a better reality in the future.

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CONCLUSION RESPONDING TO THE CRY OF THE SIMURGH

After the Islamic revolution in 1978–79, films became the dominant form of cultural expression in Iran and Iranian cinema developed into one of the major non-Western cinemas. The impact of Persian culture and arts on modern Iranian film-making has received enormous attention around the world in recent years, and in this book I have attempted to contextualize the poetics of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema within the larger framework of Persian modernity. To represent the relationship between Iranian cinema and the cultural systems I focused on two Iranian directors, Kiarostami and Bayzai. Kiarostami’s non-linear approach was strongly influenced by classical and modern Persian poetry, while the mosaic pattern of Bayzai’s films reflects myth, history, tradition and modernity. It is evident that Iranian cinema has been profoundly enriched by the original cultural archetypes. Yet, this does not limit it within a local – or national – consciousness and it became established in the ‘in-between spaces’, as Homi Bhabha calls it, of transnational zones. This overlapping and criss-crossing applies not only to film-making,1 but to the production, distribution and reception of Iranian films. Iranian cinema, like a few other non-Western artistic forms such as Latin American magical realist novels, created new hybrid sensibilities and gained an international status. It represents a ‘peripheral’ art form that can move towards the centre.

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Although global influences, including world cinema and specifically European cinema, have been significant in the rise of poetic cinema in Iran, it has drawn inspiration primarily from Persian literature and the conventions of Iranian performing arts. The Islamic revolution in 1978 had a profound effect on Iranian cinema, increasing the gaps between the (visible) political space and the artistic inner space. Political revolts and revolutions inevitably affect artistic forms of expression, as Hayward comments in relation to Western protest movements of the 1960s: ... [T]he ‘enfranchisment’ of voices/cultures ... is also an effect of ... the post-1960s in the West, the 1960s revolt against the lack of tolerance of difference that prevailed before. If we look at the pre-1960s discourses it is clear what a profound effect the 1960s had nations-wide and internationally. The social revolution of the 1960s created gaps and legitimate spaces for diversification and the possibility of multiculturalism – gaps which are constantly being renegotiated.2 In post-revolutionary Iran, film-making underwent an aesthetic transformation. This change was originally channelled by the Islamic state towards an Islamic cinema. But the state’s attempts to monopolize power and recreate a monological culture that could bring a sense of (Islamic) wholeness and continuity with Iran’s Islamic past failed. In contrast, the more indigenous Iranian cultural forms of expression, including cinema, showed an astonishing diversity in illustrating identity, class, gender and ethnicity issues. Bayzai’s films, for instance, problematize gender conventions and history. In a different way, the exclusion of women in many of Kiarostami’s films questions the social gender exclusion in post-revolutionary Iran. Paradoxically, the body of critical works and debates about this (deliberate) exclusion had the effect of making women included and seen, not on-screen, but off-screen in viewers’ imaginations. In turn, this artistic diversity interacted with a fragmentary social structure. Cinema, as the most popular form of intellectual discourse and entertainment, illustrates this multiplicity and challenges the dominant ideology.

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My discussion of Kiarostami’s and Bayzai’s aesthetics shows that in the building of a national cinema with transnational sensibilities, Iranian art films are more engaged in (re)negotiating cultural and literary aspects than dealing with current political ideologies. This is a legacy inherited from Persian cultural systems, which are charged with a unique metaphorical poetics. This significant literary dimension is intermingled with the social, religious, theoretical (and arguably) political elements of Iranian culture. For instance, ancient Persian manuscripts such as Avista, Shahnamih (and its older version, Khuday Namag), One Thousand and One Nights (and its older version, Hizar Afsan) and Kalilih va Dimnih present their words of wisdom in a symbolic and allegorical language with parallel constructions. This symbolic language informed medieval poetic genres such as Rumi’s mathnavi and Hafiz’s ghazal poetry. Metaphorical poetics are not limited to literary and religious works. An abundance of symbols, metaphors, similes and other linguistic devices characterizes Persian philosophical discourses such as Zoroastrianism, Sufism and Ishraq (illuminationism). This highly metaphorical language also found its way into everyday conversations in parabolic imagery and logic, verses, similes and metaphors. Linguistic games in Persian culture imitating the language of birds, ants, salamanders, foxes, lions and scorpions have entertained Iranian readers and spectators since pre-Islamic times. Hence, it is no surprise to see Persian metaphorical poetics play a role in modern literature and cinema. In an age of mass culture, these enduring cultural features and values have taken precedence over politics. This literary heritage lends itself to a symbolical cinema that favours ambiguity over precision. The element of ambiguity in Iranian art films is a deliberate choice stemming from Persian cultural values with highly mystical potential. As Michael Fischer writes: The mystic potentials in the mythos were developed primarily by Islamic thinkers, again with parallels in Neoplatonism in the West and the Upanishads in India. Beyond the mysticism itself, however, is the remarkable sensitivity to and skill with language, especially metaphor and symbol. Language

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often constrains and limits thought: it is a convention, a code, a system of difference which facilitates ordinary communication by making routine, repetitive, or probable certain kinds of implication, association, and logic. And yet language has the capacity to point beyond itself, to show its own limitations, and to construct meaningful locutions not constrained by conventional logic.3 In the modern era, linguistic devices have been transferred into cinema. This led to an ambiguous cinematic stylistics whose medium is the image/seen, but whose main emphasis is on the substance that is unseen. Therefore, Iranian art cinema does not exist exclusively in the illustrated images on screen. It relies on allegorical meanings (the unseen) that are derived from images (the seen). The extensive use of Persian poetry and Iranian visual arts has created metaphorical films loaded with unseen concepts that can be interpreted in various ways by the viewer. Thus, this metaphorical aesthetics is to a great extent reliant on the audience who (theoretically) complete the meaning of a film. This concept of the unseen is a pre-Islamic idea that was later developed in the systematic mystical philosophy of Ishraq. The forming of illuminationist philosophy (falsafih-yi Ishraq), was a response to Ibn Sina’s (Aviccena’s) eastern philosophy (hikma al-mustashriqyya). As a school of philosophy it was developed and redefined by Shahab-i-din Yahya Suhrivardi4 in the twelfth century. Suhrivardi was a Persian philosopher who composed more than 50 works in his short 36 years. As defined by Suhrivardi, illuminationist philosophy challenges the Aristotelian-oriented philosophy of peripateticism based on ‘the absolute, unchanging, and universal validity’5 of the truth that is, according to this theory, discoverable. But the illuminationist teaching is that the ‘future event could not be deduced at the present time and given universal validity’.6 In this philosophy, essence is more important than existence, and intuitive knowledge more significant than representational knowledge reliant on cognitive reason.7 Instead of an absolute reality, illuminationism validates a ‘continuum of reality’ consisting of intellect, soul, matter and a fourth realm called alam al-khiyal or alam al-mithal – translated as

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‘mundus imaginalis’ by Corbin.8 In this realm, ‘objects possess shape and extent but not material substance’,9 but it is as revealing and illuminating as ‘reality’. In a small treatise entitled Nafir-i Simurgh10 (The Shrill Cry of Simurgh), Suhrivardi describes the concept of illumination in an allegorical language, using the symbolic devices of Persian literature.11 The story says that in the spring, when nature rejuvenates, the hoopoe12 becomes a Simurgh bird. The shadow of its wings brings healing and its cry gives knowledge to those few who listen. Thus, the shrill cry of the legendary Simurgh brings spiritual illumination and instant knowledge. In the philosophy of illumination, Suhrivardi consolidates the language games, mythology and theoretical ontology into a philosophical statement. Ishraq has had a profound impact on Iranian culture and was one of the main philosophical discourses that legitimized Shi’ism in Iran. It also fostered Sufism.13 In poetic cinema, illuminationist ontology combines with the metaphorical aspect of Persian language to create an allegorical cinema that is represented in the film-making of directors like Bayzai and Kiarostami. Iranian poetic cinema is highly symbolic and emphasizes the unseen paradigm (’alam-i ghayb in illuminationism) as opposed to visible imagery. From an illuminationist viewpoint, what is seen can be analysed by ’aql, wisdom or scientific knowledge. But the viewer has to open his or her inner eye of wisdom in order to see ’alam-i mithal, the imaginary world. This world possesses shape and essence but does not exist physically. It is only through intuitive knowledge that one can understand the significance of a poetic film. Kiarostami’s films avoid suggesting absolute knowledge, as everything can be questioned and contradicted. This philosophy is also evident in Bayzai’s films, which illustrate a micro-’alam-e mithal where imagination is more illuminating than reality and the fixed validity of history and truth is overturned. Iranian cinema accommodates Suhrivardi’s ’alam-e mithal in the sense that it provides an ‘in-between space’ for a world of images that connects physical reality with the unseen world of the mind. What is common to both directors is the element of uncertainty when they deal with fact and fiction. In their films, there is no absolute and unchanging ‘truth’ or ‘fact’. Kiarostami’s aesthetic realism

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mingles fact and fiction. The actors are ‘real’ people, not professional actors, but the situation is ‘constructed’ by the director. It is merely a ‘performed’ event that is shown. On the surface, Bayzai’s dramatic aesthetics appears to be completely different. But it shares the same approach towards what is unconsciously taken for granted as ‘reality’. Bayzai’s characters become enlightened about their past not through historical accounts, but by investigating their inner selves and domestic/informal spaces. A highly theatrical ‘performance’ in Bayzai’s films is more realistic and revealing than ‘real’ historical texts. Both directors propose more questions than give answers, and when they do answer, it is with uncertainty. This recalls a passage from Suhrivardi’s The Philosophy of Illumination: Whoever enumerates [all of] the essentials he knows, cannot be confident of not having neglected the existence of another essential, and the person who wants to clarify or contest the statement may ask him about it [the essentials that may have remained undetected]. The person who is constructing a definition cannot, at that point, rightfully say ‘Were there other attributes [of a thing], I would know them’; for there are numerous attributes that are hidden [and he may have neglected to note them]. And it is not sufficient to say ‘Should the thing have another essential [hidden to us], we will still be able to know the essence without it.’ The answer is: ‘The reality [of a thing] is known only when the sum total of the essentials of it are known.’ This means that if it is ever possible that [the thing] have another essential that is not perceived, knowledge of reality of the thing cannot be certain. So, it has been made clear that it is impossible to obtain an [essentialist] definition in the way the Peripatetics do [i.e the formula proximate genus plus differentiǽ], which is a difficulty even their [the Peripatetics’] master [Aristotle] admits. Therefore we [the illuminationists] only make definition by means of things that specify the aggregate, organic whole.14 The philosophy of illuminationism has had a great influence on Iranian culture. It changed the dominant Aristotelian-oriented

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epistemology of Persian thinkers such as Ibn Sina towards a philosophy that relies very little on empirical examination and discovery. Ishraq still – subconsciously – informs modern Iranian culture, which is keenly attuned to the ‘essential hidden elements’ of intellectual discourses. After the Islamic revolution, Iranian cinema achieved remarkable success locally and internationally, as if both these audiences heard the shrill cry of the imaginary Simurgh in these films. In its Iranian context, cinema is one of the signifiers and agents of modernity. It explores issues of identity and authenticity in a society that has undergone traumatic political and cultural changes. But in doing so, it is to a profound extent an outgrowth of Persian literary and philosophical discourses that are deeply embedded in Iranian culture.

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NOTES

Introduction: Islamic Revolution and Aesthetic Evolution 1. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (London, 1987), p. 6. 2. Jakobson, Roman, ‘The Dominant’, in Ladinslav Mateka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, MA, 1971), pp. 82–85. 3. Ibid., p. 85. 4. Tynjanov, Juri, ‘On Literary Evolution’, in S. Bann and J. E. Bowlt (eds), Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (New York, 1973), p. 67. 5. Ibid., p. 69. 6. Ibid. 7. Bayzai, Bahram, ‘After A Hundred Years’, in Farrukh Ghafari (ed.), Iran Nameh: A Persian Journal of Iranian Studies xiv/3 (1996), p. 363. 8. Naficy, Hamid, ‘Theorizing “Third World Film” Spectatorship: The Case of Iran and Iranian Cinema’, in A. R. Guneratne and W. Dissanayak (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (New York and London, 2003), p. 197. 9. Naficy, Hamid, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), p. 27. 10. Ibid., p. 30. 11. Ibid., p. 26. 12. Mihrabi, Masud, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran: az Aghaz ta Sal’i 1357 (The History of Iranian Cinema: From the Beginning to 1979) (Tehran, 1985), p. 143. 13. Ibid., p. 175. 14. Ibid., p. 177. 15. Naficy, Hamid, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update’, in Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema, p. 28.

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16. As I remember, in the last few months before the collapse of the Pahlavi regime, the Shah promised more public and intellectual freedom in order to regain public support. As a result, journalistic and literary publications and film productions enjoyed a temporary liberation. A number of films banned in preceding years were screened and widely viewed. 17. At the time of revolution, BBC Persian Radio was called ‘the voice of revolution’ in Iran. 18. Quoted in Naficy, Hamid, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A PostKhatami Update’, in Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema, p. 29. 19. Ibid., p. 33. 20. The War Affairs Department also produced a series of documentaries and serials that were shown on different channels of national television. One of the most manipulative and propagandist documentary series, which used a poetic cinematic form to praise Iranian fighters, was Ravayat-i Fath (The Narrative of Victory), directed by Murtiza Avini. During the filming of the last episode Avini was killed by a landmine. 21. Ghazian, Hossein, ‘The Crisis in the Iranian Film Industry and the Role of Government’, in Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema, pp. 83–4. 22. Makhmalbaf stated this in an interview with Hamid Dabashi. Quoted in Dabashi, Hamid, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London and New York, 2001), p. 186. 23. Devictor, Agnes, ‘Classical Toole, Original Goals: Cinema and Public Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979–1997)’, in Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema, p. 68. 24. Ibid., p. 68. 25. Ashuri, Darush, Ma va Mudirniyat (Modernity and Us) (Tehran, 1987), p. 1.

Chapter 1 Cinema as Art: A Poetic Interpretation 1. Except for a short time in the early 1980s when MCIG, under Mohammad Khatami’s supervision, loosened its grip on Iranian films. 2. Iranian art cinema has been widely acknowledged by international audiences, see Tapper, Richard (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), pp. 1–26. Its international reception is a subject that should be addressed in detail. My focus is on the relationship between Iranian art cinema and Persian cultural paradigms.

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3. Rahimieh, Nasrin, ‘Marking Gender and Difference in the Myth of the Nation: A Post-revolutionary Film’, in Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema, p. 239. 4. Ibid., p. 259. 5. Hayward, Susan, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London and New York, 2000), p. 101. 6. It should be noted that Soviet cinema also produced a number of modernist masterpieces. See Mast, Gerald and Bruce Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, 8th edn (New York and San Francisco, 2003), pp. 117, 195. 7. Ovanes Oganians, the Armenian immigrant who made the first feature film in Iran, did not draw on literary aesthetics in his work. His first feature, entitled Abi va Rabi (Abi and Rabi, 1930), as well as his second one, Haji Aqa Actor-i Cinema (Haji Aqa, The Movie Star, 1932), used comedy to reach audiences and to ensure lucrative returns. 8. Two points need to be explained here. First, both Irani and Sipanta made their first films in India with support from Dinshah, the head of the Zoroastrian community in India. During the 1930s, Irani ran Imperial Film Studios in Bombay. Before becoming involved in film-making, Sipanta was invited to Bombay by Dinshah to research Persian texts (Mihrabi, Masud, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran: az Aghaz ta Sal’i 1357 (The History of Iranian Cinema: From the Beginning to 1979) (Tehran, 1985), p. 27). The second point relates to the familiarity of Indians with Persian literature. The interrelations between the sacred Vedas in Sanskrit and Persian texts such as Avesta date back at least 3,000 years. In the modern era, Persian was the literary and court language of the Mongol Empire in India, but in 1834 the British government abolished it as the official language of India. For more information, see Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran (New York, 2001), p. 106. 9. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Boulder, CO, 1978), p. 7. 10. Ibid., p. 2. 11. Kessler, Jascha and Amin Banani (eds), Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forough Farrukhzad (New York, 1982), p. 8. 12. Reza Suhrabi quoted in Mihrabi, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran, p. 109. 13. Dabashi, Hamid, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London and New York, 2001), p. 43. 14. During this period, poets such as Arif Ghazvini, Malik Shu’ara Bahar, Iraj Mirza and Ashraf Gilani used poetry as a means of protest against the corrupt Qajar Dynasty.

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15. Dabashi, Close Up, p. 4. 16. Baraheni, Reza, Talaa dar Mis: dar Shi’r va Shaa’iri (Gold in Copper: on Poetry and Poets), 3 vols (Tehran, 2002), p. 236. 17. Omid, Jamal, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran: 1279–1357 (The History of Iranian Cinema: 1900–1978) (Tehran, 1996), p. 1027. 18. Ibid., p. 353. 19. The term filmfarsi was originally coined by an Iranian film critic, Hushang Kavusi, who was a harsh critic of this low-quality popular genre and a passionate admirer of alternative films such as Ibrahim Gulistan’s Muj va Marjan va Khara (Wave, Coral, and Granite, 1962). 20. Mihrabi, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran, p. 97. 21. Ibid., p. 100. 22. Ibid., p. 101. 23. Ibid., p. 111. 24. In a famous scene in Qarun’s Treasure, Fardin, who is seated on the carpet by a tablecloth, eats abgusht, a traditional meat stew with onions, mostly for lower-class people. After this film was released, the expression Film Abgushti became a common term for low-quality Iranian films. 25. Omid, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran, p. 612. 26. Gulistan’s aesthetics at this stage are comparable to John Grierson’s, when the latter was supervising the making of documentaries for Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and General Post Office; (see Evans, Gary, ‘Father of Documentary Film’, John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film [Montreal, 2005], pp. 27–37). Like Grierson, who was committed to making socialist documentaries with high aesthetic standards, Gulistan made a number of artistic films in a non-narrative style for the Ministry of Petroleum. 27. Wollen, Peter, Signs and Meaning in Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1972), p. 8. 28. Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2003), p. 8. 29. Dabashi, Close Up, p. 46. 30. Omid, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran, p. 1028. 31. Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 54. 32. Wollen, Signs and Meaning, pp. 16–17.

Chapter 2 Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Ghazal 1. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1970), p. 30.

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2. This information has been gathered from John Limbert, Shiraz in the Age of Hafiz, and http://www.hafizonlove.com/bio/index.htm, http://www. farhangsara.com/fHafiz1.htm, accessed April 2011, and Reference Guide to World Literature, p. 436. 3. Yohannan, John D., ‘Hafiz’, in S. Pendergast and T. Pendergast (eds), Reference Guide to World Literature, Vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Detroit, MI, 2003), p. 436. 4. Thackston, Wheeler McIntosh, A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Bethesda, MD, 1994), p. 64. 5. Ashuri, Darush, Irfan va Rindi dar Shi’r-i Hafiz: Yik Bardasht-i Hirminutik (Mysticism and Rindi in the Poetry of Hafiz: A Hermeneutical Interpretation) (Tehran, 1998), p. 79. 6. Ibid., p. 80. 7. A qasidih is a poem of 15 lines or more in monorhyme, the main subject of which is something other than love. The first two hemistiches of this lyrical form rhyme, and each subsequent line carries this rhyme to the end of the poem, so that it looks like aa/ ba /ca and so forth. The subject of a qasidih can be praise, congratulations, invective, celebration, elegy, or religious or philosophical meditation. Qasidihs were written since the very beginning of the Islamic period by Persian poets. Rudaki (d. c. 940), the earliest post-Islamic poet from whom we have a substantial body of work, wrote qasidihs in a fully developed form. Among other prominent poets who composed qasidih are Farrukhi Sistani (d. 1037/38), Manuchihri (d. 1040), Nassir Khusraw Qubadiyani (d. 1072/77), Anvari (d. 1189/90) and Khaqani (d. 1199). Refer to Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ, 1993), p. 897. 8. Mathnavi is a narrative form of poetry written in closed rhyming couplets. It is didactic and mostly related to Sufi ideals. Sanai’s Hadaiq al Haqiqih, Attar’s Mantiq u- Tayr and Rumi’s Mathnavi Ma’navi are examples of this narrative poetic form. 9. Himasih or epic poetry is best represented by Abul Qasim Firdawsi’s Shahnamih. 10. Manzumih, roughly translated as romantic poetry, was a pre-Islamic poetic tradition that continued vigorously in the Islamic era. Manzumih was centred on the military and amorous adventures of royal characters. Fakhr-i din Gurgani’s Vis va Ramin (1054) and Nizami Ganjavi’s (d. 1209) Khamsih (Quintet) are famous examples. Four out of five poems of Khamsih are romantic accounts of the Arab lovers Layli and Majnun, the Iranian royal couple Khusraw and Shirin, the monarch Bahram V and Alexander of Macedonia.

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11. Baraheni, Reza, Talaa dar Mis: dar Shi’r va Sha’iri [Gold in Copper: on Poetry and Poets, 3 vols (Tehran, 2002), pp. 543–45]. Although rubayee (a two-line stanza with two hemistiches with an aaba rhyme scheme) is also a non-narrative poetic form, it is essentially very short, with a linear structure that holds together its thematic and formal harmony. 12. Hanaway, William, ‘Persian Poetry’, The New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 897. 13. By indicating Hafiz’s poetry, I mean his lyrical poetry or his Divan of Ghazals, as it is commonly known in Persian literature. 14. Khuram-Shahi, Baha u-din, Zihn va Zaban-i Hafiz (Hafiz’s Mind and Language) (Tehran, 1982), pp. 200–26. 15. Ibid., pp. 1–18. 16. Ibid., p. 20. 17. Ibid., p. 22. 18. I have used Sharyar Sharyari’s translation, quoted from http://www.hafizonlove.com/divan/02/071.htm. Accessed 10 March 2010. 19. Ibid., p. 20. 20. Mast, Gerald, and Bruce Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, 8th edn (New York and San Francisco, 2003), p. 416. 21. See McDonald, Keiko I., Japanese Classical Theatre in Films (Cranbury, NJ, 1994). 22. Jayran is played by the prominent pre-revolutionary actress, Minu Abrishami. 23. To some extent, Kiarostami uses visual poetics in Through the Olive Trees in showing the attractive scenery of northern Iran, seen in his long shots of olive trees and rice paddies. Apart from this film, he is mostly involved with philosophical poetics. 24. Music is used in only two scenes of the film, both of them when the boy is shown in a long shot climbing the hill to reach his friend’s house. 25. Ra’isiyan, Alireza, ‘Cinema-yi Sha’iranih, Cinema-yi Taghazzuli (Poetic Cinema, Lyrical Cinema)’, in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), pp. 31–32. 26. Ibid., p. 32. 27. Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2003), p. 59. 28. Haqshenas, Alimohammad, Maghalat-i Adabi, Zabanshinakhti (The Literary and Linguistic Articles) (Tehran, 1991), p. 184. 29. Ibid., p. 177. The definition recalls the verse by Hafiz:

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The heart, like a compass, whirling In its circle, wandering, but unwavering 30. Khuram-Shahi, Hafiz’s Mind, p. 20. 31. Baraheni, Talaa dar Mis, p. 544. 32. Hagh-shenas, Maghalat-i Adabi, Zabanshinakhti (The Literary and Linguistic Articles) (Tehran, 1991), p. 179. 33. Ibid., p.179. 34. Baraheni, Talaa dar Mis, p. 550. 35. Khuram-shahi, Hafiz’s Mind, p. 20. 36. Baraheni, Talaa dar Mis, p. 20. 37. Khuran-shahi, Hafiz’s Mind, p. 25. 38. There are a few exceptions in this regard, one of which is pointed out by Baraheni. This ghazal starts with the following verse:

39. Rosenbaum in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 35. 40. Verse is the semantic unit in Persian ghazal. A crucial element of Persian poetry, verse was ultimately modified in Hafiz and Rumi’s poetry. From a rhythmic point of view, however, the hemistich is the unit of ghazal. Each two hemistiches are united semantically and visually. The centrality of verse as a unit was a distinctive feature of the ghazal genre, but it developed later in the Indian school of poetry’s Shah Bayts (or grand verses) in Iran. 41. Baraheni, Talaa dar Mis, p. 295. 42. Any segment of a poem is visually recognizable as poetry through its form. Rhythm and metre, the verbal components, come afterward, when read. This poem by Rumi is a good example:

It is quoted in Baraheni’s Talaa dar Mis, p. 54. As Baraheni indicates, in this poem there is a direct link between the form and the poet’s emotional thought. 43. Saeed-Vafa in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 50, and Yahya Aryan-pour quoted in Baraheni, Talaa dar Mis, p. 731. 44. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 18. 45. It is noteworthy that although Kiarostami shows up quite a few times in his films – explicitly in Close-up and Homework and implicitly in Through

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the Olive Trees – to assert his authorial power, at the same time he criticizes his own authorship and directorship in Life and then Nothing and Wind Will Carry Us. 46. This is how Rumi raises the same concern:

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

which translated into: Where I am coming from, what is the purpose in living? , where I am heading to, why don’t you reveal this to me? Saeed-Vafa in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, p. 59. My translation. Limbert, John, Shiraz in the Age of Hafiz: The Glory of a Medieval Persian City (Seattle and London, 2004), p. 73. Ibid., p. 73. Harvard Film Archives, 7 June 2000, quoted in Fischer, M. J. Michael, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledge: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham, NC, 2004), p. 259. Quoted in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 124.

54. Quoted in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 107. 55. Ibid., p. 111. 56. This is taken from a report by Parviz Jahed on the BBC website, titled ‘Towards Omitting the Director from Cinema’. http://www.bbc.co.uk /persian/arts/story/2004/02/040203_la-pj-Kiyarustami.shtml. 57. Lucy, Nial, Postmodern Literary Theory (Malden, MA, 1997), p. 23. 58. Ashuri, Irfan va Rindi, p. 36. 59. Ibid., p. 73. 60. My emphasis. 61. Ashuri, Irfan va Rindi, p. 64. 62. Translated by N. J. Dawood. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Ashuri, Irfan va Rindi, p. 47. Ibid., p. 47. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, pp. 240–1. Quoted in Fischer, ibid., p. 241.

Chapter 3 Kiarostami and Modern Persian Poetry 1. Kyanush, Mahmud, Modern Persian Poetry (Ware, Herts, 1996), p. 14.

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2. Dabashi, Hamid, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London and New York, 2001), pp. 43–4. 3. Shamisa, Sirus, Naghd-i bi Shi’r-i Sohrab Sepehri (Sohrab Sepehri from a Critical Perspective) (Tehran, 1990), p. 13. 4. Sepehri, Sohrab. ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’ (The Sound of Water Steps), in Hasht Kitab (Eight Books) (Tehran, 1982), p. 291. 5. The emphasis is mine. 6. Quoted in Sirus Shamisa Nigd-i bi Forough Farrukhzad (Forough Farrukhzad from a Critical Perspective) (Tehran, 1993), p. 255. 7. ‘Another Birth’, transl. by Karim Emami, quoted in Hillmann, Michael, A Lonely Woman: Forough Farrukhzad and Her Poetry (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 112. 8. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, pp. 113–14. 9. Translated by Karim Emami and quoted in Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, p. 111. 10. Shamisa, Sohrab Sepehri from a Critical Perspective (Tehran, 1990), p. 14. 11. Moreover, in the ‘seamless reality’ that is commonly employed in mainstream productions, the camera work, lighting, sound, editing and colour do not attract the viewer’s attention because the intention is to enhance the illusion of a fixed reality. 12. Bahrami, Mihan, ‘Ziba-yi-shinasi dar Asar-i Kiarostami’ (The Aesthetics of Kiarostami’s Cinema), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), p. 26. 13. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1970), p. 28. 14. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, p. 34. 15. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, p. 292. 16. Shamisa, Sirus, Sohrab Sepehri from a Critical Perspective, (Tehran, 1990), p. 11. 17. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, pp. 77–8, and Milani, Farzaneh, in Kessler, J. and A. Banani (eds) Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forugh Farokhzad (Delmar, NY, 1982), p. 146. 18. I have used Hillmann’s translation in A Lonely Woman, p. 77. 19. I examined Farrukhzad’s poetry in its relation to Kiarostami’s film stylistics and not in regard to her life or the detailed autobiographical aspects of her poetry. For more information on these, see Hillmann, A Lonely Woman. 20. Milani, Farzaneh, ‘Forough Farrukhzad’, in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Persian Literature: Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies (Albany, NY, 1988), p. 370.

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21. ‘Paradise Regained: Farrukhzad’s “Garden Conquered” ’, in Michael Hillmann (ed.), Forough Farrukhzad: A Quarter Century Later (Austin, TX, 1988), pp. 91–105. 22. Ibid., p. 91. 23. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, p. 84. 24. Muhassisi, Muhammad Saeed, ‘Kiarostami va Mustanad-gara’i dar Asarash’ (Documentary Stylistics in Kiarostami’s Cinema), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), p. 75. 25. Ibid,, p. 75. 26. Kiarostami’s superb fresh look at subjects is capable of surprise in the most obvious matters (from an adult perspective). One such example is his poem that poeticizes and defamiliarizes a simple event such as a leaf falling on its shadow:

Autumn afternoon: a sycamore leaf falls softly and rests on its own shadow

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

I have used the translation and analysis by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Beard in their Walking with the Wind: Poems by Abbas Kiarostami (Cambridge and London, 2001), p. 57. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, pp. 298–9. Ibid., p. 396. An interview with Puriya Mahruyan in London on 18 April 2005. For more on this, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/story/2005/04/050428_ pm-Kiyārustami-iv.shtml. Accessed 10 March 2010. Although this issue is not discussed in this book, it is possible to trace the influence of Italian neorealism or French poetic realism in Kiarostami’s film-making, but his stylistics is equally affected by masters of Japanese cinema such as Jasujiro Ozu. In Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana and Chicago, 2003), p. 2. Ibid., p. 2.

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Notes 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

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Dabashi, Close Up, p. 47. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 2. Quoted in ibid., p. 2. According to Nasser Saffarian, this film was released by Gulistan Studios in a shortened or censored edition after Farrukhzad’s death. However, on the film’s 40th anniversary, Saffarian released the original film accompanied by commentaries from Iranian film-makers and critics. Gulistan initially denied that there was a second version of The House Is Black, but as I had the opportunity to see both versions, I am convinced that the one released 40 years ago was not the original. In my discussion of The House Is Black I am referring to the original version. Kessler, Jascha and Amin Banani (eds), Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forough Farrukhzad (New York, 1982), p. 6. Quoted in Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, pp. 43–44. The House Is Black was not Farrukhzad’s only film. She was an active member of Gulistan Studios, which made several prize-winning documentaries. Among other works, she assisted in the production of Gulistan’s Khisht va Ayinih (Mudbrick and Mirror, 1964) and played an unacknowledged role in it. As Hillmann says, this film shared themes with Farrukhzad’s poem, ‘Ay Marz-i Pur Guhar’ (Oh! Jewel-Studded Land), p. 55. In 1965 Farrukhzad also participated in two short films, ‘one made under the auspices of UNESCO and the other filmed in Tehran by Bernardo Bertolucci. Only six months before her death, her film-making career was on the verge of expanding beyond Iran. At the ‘Authors’ Film Festival’ in Pesaro in 1966 she was invited by some Swedish film-makers to make a film in Sweden, and had agreed to go. She also left plans for a scenario depicting the life of a Persian woman’; Banani, Amin, Introduction to Kessler and Banani, Bride of Acacias, p. 6. Moreover, Farrukhzad acted in theatre and translated a few dramas into Persian. Golmakani is quoted in the The House is Black Commentary. As Kaveh Gulistan indicates in The House Is Black Commentary, this realist pictorial approach to a social problem already existed in documentary reports in journals of that period in Iran. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 4. Amir Karrari, a member of Farrukhzad’s film crew, points out that Farrukhzad’s style required long takes at the time of shooting that were later edited into smaller segments relating to other scenes. He states that Farrukhzad would not necessarily arrange the edited parts in synchronic order. The House Is Black Commentary. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 5.

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43. Gulistan’s dispassionate account is very similar to the teacher’s critical and secular attitude to the funeral ceremony in Wind Will Carry Us. My discussion of this movie sheds light on some aspects of the villagers’ perception of reality – for example, in terms of Farzad and the local doctor – and clarifies how Kiarostami, like Farrukhzad, brings a critical two-fold version of reality to bear in regard to the villagers’ beliefs and world-view, which is both humane and self-destructive. 44. This is indicated by Ibrahim Gulistan. See Jahed, Parviz, Nivishtan ba Durbin: Ru dar Ru ba Ibrahim Gulistan (Writing with a Camera: One on one with Ibrahim Gulistan) (Tehran, 2006), p. 25. 45. Bahram Bayzai in The House Is Black Commentary. 46. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 5. 47. Jahanbegloo, Ramin, ‘Kiarostami ya Haqiqat-ju’i (Kiarostami or Finding the Truth)’, in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), p. 21. 48. Ibid., p. 21. 49. In Iran, people who are considered superior either economically or in terms of class are called by the lower-class not by their names but by the title of their class or profession, such as doctor, engineer, colonel, etc. This also holds true when people wish to show their respect to someone. Whether an individual really is a doctor or engineer, people call them by these titles as a matter of consideration. For example, they might call a nurse a doctor, or a sergeant a colonel. In modern times such title attributions could be treated sarcastically. The title of engineer given to Behzad has a humorous tone for an Iranian audience and makes the whole movie more ironical. 50. Lucy, Nial, Postmodern Literary Theory (Malden, MA, 1997), pp. 235–7. 51. Wilde, Allan, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore, MD and London, 1981), p. 2. 52. In an interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum conducted in 2000, quoted in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 112. 53. Robert Venturi’s terms quoted in Wilde, Allan Horizons of Assent, (Baltimore and London), p. 27. 54. Wilde, Horizons of Assent, p. 27. 55. The signification of this poem in Wind Will Carry Us is explained in detail below. 56. Excerpts from ‘Anthnäum Fragments’, quoted in Roberts, Andrew Michael, ‘Romantic Irony and the Postmodern Sublime: Geoffrey Hills and “Sebastian Arrurruz” ’, in Edward Larrissy (ed.), Romanticism and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK, 1999), p.144. 57. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, pp. 271–2.

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58. Shamisa, Sohrab Sepehri, p. 45. 59. I have taken this poem from a collection of Farrukhzad’s letters to her husband, Parviz Shapur, edited by her son Kamyar Shapur and by Omran Salahi, The First Love Beats of My Heart: Forough Farrukhzad’s Letters to Her Husband Parviz Shapur (Tehran, 2002), p. 269. 60. Quoted in Shapur and Salahi, pp. 269–71. 61. Roberts, ‘Romantic Irony’, p. 154. 62. Ibid., p. 151. 63. Ibid., p. 152. 64. Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN, 1998), p. 61. 65. He introduces himself to the girl who milks the cow as her fiancé’s boss when he goes to the cavern. His treatment of Farzad is also controlling and domineering. 66. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, pp. 358–9. 67. ‘Iranian Cinema at MIFF 2000’, in Senses of Cinema. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/00/9/iranian.html. Accessed 15 May 2005. 68. Gulistanih is a village near the city of Kashan, Iran. 69. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, pp. 348–52. 70. In Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, p. 113. 71. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, ‘Location (Physical Space) and Cultural Identity in Iranian Films’ (in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), pp. 200–15. 72. Bransford, Stephen, in ‘Days in the Country: Representations of Rural Space and Place in Abbas Kiarostami’s Life and then Nothing, Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Us’, see Senses of Cinema, at http://www. sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/37/muriel.html. Accessed 28 June 2006. 73. One such reaction is seen among Iranian audiences, who prefer a more aggressive and revolutionary cinematic approach, similar to the third cinema of Ibrahim Hatami-Kia or early Makhmalbaf movies. In ‘Unmediated Event Writing’, Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), p. 188., Javad Tusi, for instance, calls Kiarostami’s Rostamabad trilogy ‘a cowardly conservatism of a director who is repeating himself in Pustih and Kukir, and Rostamabad’, which is far from ‘his bold and daring perspective in Report, Traveller, and A Suite for Wedding’. 74. Karimi-Hakkak and Beard, Introduction to Walking with the Wind, p. 10. 75. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, ‘From Imagistic Esthetics to Verbal Kinetics, Recent Trends in Persian Poetry’, in the ‘Conference on Iranian Cinema as 21st Century Persian Literature’ (Austin, TX, 19–21 April 2002), p.

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10. A version of this article, ‘Contemporary Trends in Persian Poetry’, was published in Wasafiri 38 (Spring 2003), pp. 56–60. 76. Kiarostami’s film, Shirin (2009), is shot indoors, yet the whole story takes place in a movie house, again a public space. 77. Sepehri, ‘Sida-yi Pa-yi Aab’, pp. 392–3. 78.

79. This is a translation of Sipihri’s verse from ‘The Sound of Water Footsteps’:

80. Astruc, Alexandre, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra Stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (New York, 1968), pp. 18–19. 81. Ibid., p. 19. 82. Ibid., p. 20. 83. Dabashi, Close Up, p. 47.

Chapter 4 Modernity and Identity in a Cinematic Perspective 1. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran (New York, 2001), p. 9. 2. For a more detailed discussion on this subject, see Jamshid Behnam’s Iranian va Andishi-yi Tajadud (The Iranians and the Concept of Modernization, 1996). 3. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, p. 4. 4. Ibid., pp. 1–17. 5. Ibid., p. 10. 6. According to Edward Said, Orientalism (his book, Orientalism, was published in New York, 1979) as an influential perception of the Middle East occurred when the West constructed the idea of the ‘Orient’ in European thinking. In order to dominate the East and exert authority over it, the West developed academic and imaginative meanings about the Orient that were based on European superiority, not only technological, economic and military, but also a moral superiority. This Orientalism, the idea of the moral superiority of the West, was and continues to be naturalized in academic and popular discourses. When Iranians encountered and to some extent adopted Western modernism, which was closely associated

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with Eurocentric Orientalist attitudes, they accepted Europe’s hegemony and the real and imagined differences between Iranians and Westerners. Although Iran was never officially colonized, by acknowledging the West’s moral superiority, Iranians abandoned their own genuine local modernity – thereby giving rise to cultural amnesia – and took on Western narratives of modernity and modernization. As a consequence, they were ‘otherized’ by Europe’s Orientalist attitudes, and self-orientalized themselves by accepting a narrative about their own cultural, economic, technological and moral inferiority. ‘Nassir u-din shah’s son and successor, Muzaffar u-din Shah (1896–1907), was a weak and ineffectual ruler who was facing royal extravagance and the absence of incoming revenues exacerbated financial problems. The shah quickly spent two large loans from Russia, partly on trips to Europe. Public anger fed on the shah’s propensity for granting concessions to Europeans in return for generous payments to him and his officials. People began to demand a curb on royal authority and the establishment of the rule of law as their concern over foreign, and especially Russian, influence grew. ‘The shah’s failure to respond to protests by the religious establishment, the merchants, and other classes led the merchants and clerical leaders in January 1906 to take sanctuary from probable arrest in mosques in Tehran and outside the capital. When the shah reneged on a promise to permit the establishment of a “house of justice,” or consultative assembly, 10,000 people, led by the merchants, took sanctuary in June in the compound of the British legation in Tehran. In August the shah was forced to issue a decree promising a constitution. In October an elected assembly convened and drew up a constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power, an elected parliament, or Majlis, with wide powers to represent the people, and a government with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis. The shah signed the constitution on 30 December 1906. He died five days later. The Supplementary Fundamental Laws approved in 1907 provided, within limits, for freedom of press, speech, and association, and for security of life and property. According to scholar Ann K. S. Lambton, the Constitutional Revolution marked the end of the medieval period in Iran. The hopes for constitutional rule were not realised, however. ‘Muzaffar ad Din’s successor, Mohammad Ali Shah, was determined to crush the constitution. After several disputes with the members of the Majlis, in June 1908 he used his Russian-officered Persian Cossacks Brigade to bomb the Majlis building, arrest many of the deputies, and

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8.

The Poetics of Iranian Cinema close down the assembly. Resistance to the shah, however, coalesced in Tabriz, Esfahan, Rasht, and elsewhere. In July 1909, constitutional forces marched from Rasht and Esfahan to Tehran, deposed the shah, and reestablished the constitution. The ex-shah went into exile in Russia. ‘Although the constitutional forces had triumphed, they faced serious difficulties. The upheavals of the constitutional revolution and civil war had undermined stability and trade. In addition, the ex-shah, with Russian support, attempted to regain his throne, landing troops in July 1910. Most serious of all, the hope that the constitutional revolution would inaugurate a new era of independence from the great powers ended when, under the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907, Britain and Russia agreed to divide Iran into spheres of influence. The Russians were to enjoy exclusive right to pursue their interests in the northern sphere, the British in the south and east; both powers would be free to compete for economic and political advantage in a neutral sphere in the center. Matters came to a head when Morgan Shuster, a United States administrator hired as treasurer general by the Persian government to reform its finances, sought to collect taxes from powerful officials who were Russian protégés and to send members of the treasury gendarmerie, a tax department police force, into the Russian zone. When in December 1911 the Majlis unanimously refused a Russian ultimatum demanding Shuster’s dismissal, Russian troops, already in the country, moved to occupy the capital. To prevent this, on December 20 Bakhtiari chiefs and their troops surrounded the Majlis building, forced acceptance of the Russian ultimatum, and shut down the assembly, once again suspending the constitution. There followed a period of government by Bakhtiari chiefs and other powerful notables.’ The information on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution is quoted from The Library of Congress Country Studies, at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ cgi-bin/query/D?cstdy:1:./temp/~frd_OK22, accessed 22 April 2006. For a detailed account of this revolution, see Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grass-roots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (New York, 1996). For more information, see the following texts: Heribert, Busse (trans.), History of Persia under Qajar Rule, translated from Hasan ibn Hasan Fasa’i, Farsnami-yi Nasiri (New York, 1972), p. 221, and Avery, Peter, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge and New York, 1968), Vol. 7, p. 119.

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9. Avery et al., Cambridge History, p. 493. 10. Shaygan, Darush. Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (London, 1992), p. 51. 11. Both Afary and Ziba-Kalaam assert this idea. Refer to Afary, Janet, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (New York, 1996), p. 3. ZibaKalaam, Sadiq, Sunnat va Mudernism: Rishih Yabi Ilal’i Shikast-i Kushishhay-yi Islah Talabani dar Iran-i Asr-i Qajar (Tradition and Modernism: Finding the Reasons for the Failure of Political Reformism in Qajar Era in Iran) (Tehran, 1993), pp. 340–89. 12. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 3. 13. Dast-Ghayb, Abd ul-Ali, Girayish-hay-yi Muttazad dar Adabiyat-i Mu’asir-i Iran. (Contradictory Approaches to Contemporary Iranian Literature) (Tehran, 1993), p. 68. 14. Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Preface and Acknowledgments’ in Refashioning Iran, p. x. 15. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 12. 16. Dabashi, Hamid, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London and New York, 2001), p. 25. 17. By highlighting the impact of Khomeini’s leadership, I do not intend to underestimate the role of Iranian religious modernists, known as Nihzat-i Azadi-yi Iran, or the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), under the leadership of Mihdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Mahmud Talighani. As H. E. Chehabi points out, the LMI activities date back at least to 1953, in the Musadiq era. As a popular party in 1953–63, the LMI ‘advocated a bigger role for religion in society, whereas now [as a gesture of their dissatisfaction with the official clergy] they warn against religious dogmatism and intolerance’ (Chehabi, H. E., Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: the Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (Ithaca, NY, 1990), p. 306). But in any case, it was Imam Khomeini’s ideology of combat that ultimately took precedence over Bazargan and Taleghani’s modernist and moderate theocracy. 18. Mirsepassi, Ali, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (New York, 2000), p. 155. 19. Ibid., p. 1. 20. Ibid., p. 127. 21. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, pp. 8–9. 22. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: the Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse and New York, 1996), p. 7. 23. Ibid., p. 7.

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24. Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals, p. 7, also stated in Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, p. 2. 25. Boroujerdi, ibid., p. 882. 26. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, p. 3. Edward Said, a leading critic of Orientalism, paradoxically wrote about the ‘unequal development of Orientalism and its nemesis, Europology’ (Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, p. 18). In his Orientalism, Said speculates that the East barely made any attempt to get to know the West in a systematic way. From his perspective, the East encountered Western modernity through embracing and not analysing it. 27. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, pp. 1–16. 28. Ibid., p. 4. 29. Ibid. 30. For more on this topic, refer to the second chapter of Mast, Gerald and Bruce Kawin, A Short History of the Movies (New York and San Francisco, 2003), pp. 8–27. 31. As indicated both in M. Ali Issari’s Cinema in Iran 1900–1979 (Metuchen, NJ and London, 1989), p. 30, and The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 7, p. 792, the date of the first film made in Iran is given as 1895 – a documentary made of Muzaffar u-din Shah’s Coronation by a certain Russi Khan – but since this film does not exist and is not even referred to in Muzaffar u-din Shah’s memoir, Issari and Jamal Omid among other film critics decided not to support this claim, while Peter Avery has mentioned both of these dates. In most documents on the history of film-making in Iran, the start date is given as 1900. 32. This could be either the modern ideas of the past that were embraced by Western scholars and scientists (such as algebra, astronomy, etc.), or the employment of non-Western scholars who immigrated to Western countries, especially during the second half of the twentieth century and later. 33. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York, 1994), p. 14. 34. Ibid., p. 14. 35. Although not related to my discussion, it could be argued that Western cultures, in the wake of the modern era, have undergone a similar phase of change to accommodate tradition and modernity. 36. Tohidi, Nayereh, ‘Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism: Feminist Politics in Iran’, in Mohanty, Chandra Talpade and Ann Rosso (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1991), p. 255.

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37. Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz. ‘Location (Physical Space) and Cultural Identity in Iranian Films’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), p. 205. 38. ‘Veiled Voices: Women’s Autobiographies in Iran’, in Afsaneh Najmabadi (ed.) Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 2. 39. It is worth mentioning that the genre of autobiography has gained momentum in recent years, especially in a second language among the Iranian diaspora. Azar Nafisy’s Things I have Been Silent About (New York, 2008) is an example of autobiographical accounts written in English by Iranians in exile. 40. Among other artistic forms of expression that disallowed the centralization of the self and body are traditional painting (Iranian miniature painting) and sculpture. Prior to the emergence of Iranian modern art forms, the representation of human body was prohibited because of religious restrictions. Also, in traditional miniature painting, perspective – an important element in Western realist painting – is absent. Instead of focusing on the human body and on perspective, traditional Iranian arts took a more abstract form represented, for example, by calligraphy and tile painting. 41. I have borrowed this term from Protestantism’s infamous message that it is based on individuality and the ‘liberated spirit’ of human beings (Hoodashtian, Atta, Modernite, Jahani Shudan va Iran (Modernity, Globalization, and Iran) (Tehran, 2003), pp. 138–41. 42. The White Revolution, initiated in 1963 by the Shah, was a six-point programme of social and economic reforms aimed at turning Iran into an economic and industrial world power. Although more than 90 per cent of Iranian sharecroppers became landowners, the social reforms, such as advocating women’s rights, extending women’s right to vote and other modernization attempts, were strongly challenged by the clerics. Uniting with the feudal landed elites, the clergy widely criticized the White Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini publicly denounced the Shah’s reform plans and asked the people of Iran to boycott the referendum. His subsequent arrest caused an uprising on 5 June 1963 in Tehran and other major cities. Ironically, the monarch’s non-violent revolution ultimately contributed to his downfall 15 years later. For the role of the working class in the Islamic revolution, see Tohidi, ‘Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism’, p. 256. 43. Here, there is an interesting comparison to what happens in Bashu, the Little Stranger, where Nai’ and Bashu, who do not share a common language, manage to communicate with each other. As Nasrin Rahimieh says, ‘[T]

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44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

The Poetics of Iranian Cinema he woman’ or Nai’ ‘and the stranger’, Bashu, ‘need each other to unsettle the beliefs and customs of an established community. They must together become the outsider, the embodiment of the other side of the self, in order to put the self and the other into dialogue with each other. That such a dialogue must cut across ethnic and linguistic boundaries is underlined in the film’s juxtaposition of Persian, Arabic, and Gilaki’ (Rahimieh, Nasrin, ‘Marking Gender and Difference in the Myth of the Nation: A Post-revolutionary Film’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), p. 250). In The Crow, on the contrary, Isalat, Asyih and Alam, among others in the film, share a native language but fail to communicate. The situation in Bashu is closer to the way in which Asyih and her deaf students communicate fully by using sign language. Irani, Bahar, ‘Kalagh, Ziyafat-i Ashbah (‘The Crow, The Ghosts’ Feast’)’, in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films (Tehran, 1992), p. 329. ‘Gharibih va Mih (‘The Stranger and the Fog’)’, in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films, trans. Ahmad Mir Ala’i (Tehran, 1992), p. 286. Hoodashtian, Modernite, p. 224. Quoted in Hoodashtian, ibid., p. 40. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), p. 87. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 1991), p. 19. Bhabha, Homi, Nation and Narration (London and New York, 1990), p. 1. This term is adopted from Bhabha’s Nation and Narration, p. 4. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 5. Shaygan, Darush, Afsun Zadigi Jadid: Huviyyat-i Chihil Tikkih va Tafakkur-i Sayyar (Ex occidente lux), trans. Fatemeh Valiyani (Tehran, 2001), p. 13. Hoodastian, Modernite, p. 224. Shaygan, Afsun Zadigi, p. 13. Shaygan, Afsun Zadigi, p. 14. A comprehensive study of ta’zyih (Passion Plays) as a historical and social art form is provided in the last chapter that concentrates mainly on the relation of ta’zyih and Iranian cinema. Nura’i, Jahanbakhsh, ‘Barkhastan az Gur (‘Resurrection’),’ in Qukasian (ed.), Collection of Essays on Bayzai, p. 554.

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61. It should be noted that the binary of light versus darkness is a seminal concept in the Iranian collective memory. It signifies the constant battle of the Zoroastrian Ahura/God who symbolizes light, with Ahriman or darkness. 62. Qana’at, Hussein, ‘Musafiran az Did-gah-i Bavar-ha-yi A’in-i Kuhan (‘Travelers from the Ancient Religion’s Perspective’)’, in Qukasian (ed.) Collection of Essays on Bayzai, p. 576. 63. Zamora, Lois P. and Wendy B. Faris, ‘Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s’, in Zamora, Lois P and Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC, 1995), p. 3. 64. Ibid., p. 3. 65. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis, MN, 1987), p. 15. 66. Ibid., p. 25. 67. Ibid., p. 26. 68. Lucy, Nial, Postmodern Literary Theory (Malden, MA, 1997), p. 198. 69. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 25. 70. Bayzai’s film aesthetics is ritualistic in nature. Ritual is a communal – instead of a singular – activity and any ritual involves a group of people. Travellers that involves choral or ensemble acting, with a de-centring approach, takes on a ritualistic form. Bayzai’s highlighting of rituals is emphasized in many instances, including in Dabashi’s interview with him. 71. In another scene, when Hamdam calls Mastan to tell her about the car accident, the use of a telephoto lens brings the characters closer to one another. When the old black phone rings very loudly, the camera is positioned behind the phone to show it looming dramatically large, almost filling the screen. Mastan, Khanum Bozorg and Mahrokh are portrayed in the background through a telephoto lens. The scene is virtually twodimensional and the figures look blurred, but are on the same plane, metaphorically suggesting their shared fear. 72. This was indicated in an interview with Dabashi in Close Up, p. 78. 73. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN, 1996, p. 44.

Chapter 5 Mirroring the Past, Envisioning the Future 1.

Ishqi, Behzad, ‘Darbari-yi Gharibih va Mih’ [On The Stranger and the Fog], in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s

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204

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

The Poetics of Iranian Cinema Films, trans. Ahmad Mir Alaei (Tehran, 1992), p. 288 and Akrami, Jamshid, ‘Gharibih va Mih, Jahd dar Gharib-nama’i (The Stranger and the Fog, Striving to Make It Strange)’, in Qukasian, ibid., p. 295. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran (New York, 2001), p. 97. There is a similar movement in other artistic venues; see Darush Shaygan’s ‘At the Cutting Edge of Intersecting Worlds’, in Issa Rose, Iranian Contemporary Art (London, 2001), pp. 9–11. See the discussion about Travellers in chapter four. Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), p. 14. Ibid., pp. 14–15. This is an online article in Senses of Cinema: http://www.sensesofcinema. com/contents/05/37/muriel.html. Accessed 10 September 2009. Qukasian, Collection of Essays on Bayzai, p. 277 and Mihrabi, Masud, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran: az Aghaz ta Sal’i 1357 (The History of Iranian Cinema: From the Beginning to 1979) (Tehran, 1985), p. 167. Naficy in Qukasian, Collection of Essays on Bayzai, p. 277. Ibid., p. 279. Naficy, p. 277 and Ishqi, p. 293. Both sources are in Qukasian’s Collection of Essays on Bayzai. Alonso, Ana Maria, ‘The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1988), p. 34. Najmabadi, Afsaneh, The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, NY, 1998), p. 174. Among early twentieth-century historians whose texts are regarded as ‘canonical’ history books are Ahmad Kasravi, Firiydun Adamiyat and Mihdi Malikzadih. Malikzadih, Mihdi, Tarikh-i Inghilab-i Mashrutiyat-i Iran, 3 vols, 1949–54 (repr. Tehran, 1985). Quoted in Najmabadi, The Story of Daughters, p. 180. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., pp. 1–9. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., pp. 182–3. Ibid., p. 8. Gender representations after the Iranian revolution are not the main focus here. Suffice to say that Bayzai’s cinema played a seminal role in the transformation of cinematic gender representations in the works of younger directors such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Tahmineh Milani.

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23. Dabashi, Hamid, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London and New York, 2001), p. 207. 24. Moore, Lindsey, ‘Women in a Widening Frame: (Cross-)Cultural Projection, Spectatorship, and Iranian Cinema’, in Camera Obscura 59 (2005), p. 26. 25. Ibid., p. 25. 26. Darznik, quoted in Moore, ‘Women in a Widening Frame’, p. 19.

Chapter 6 Bayzai and the Conventions of Visual Arts 1. Izatullah Intizami in an interview with BBC Persian, 11 October 2005, my translation. 2. Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, MD, 1998), p. 15. 3. Quoted in Bayzai’s Theater in Iran (Tehran, 2001), pp. 30–31. 4. Nadir Shah was a Sunni Muslim. 5. Most of the information in this paragraph is from Bayzai’s Theater in Iran, pp. 113–56. 6. Beeman, William O. and Mohammad B. Ghafari, ‘Acting and Actor Training in Ta’zyih’, The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 49 (2005), pp. 56–7. 7. Dabashi, Hamid, ‘Ta’zyih as Theatre of Protest’, The Drama Review, ibid., pp. 94–5. 8. Ibid., p. 94. 9. In Dabashi, Close Up, p. 78. 10. According to Zoroastrianism, farr-i kiyani is the divine power a king is endowed with that legitimizes his authority. As soon as a king commits an offence, farr-i kiyani leaves him and he loses his authority as a leader. 11. Tahami-nejad, Mohammad, ‘Marg-i Yazd-gird’ (Death of Yazd-gird), in Qukasian, Zavin, Bahram Bayzai: Majmu’ih Maghalat dar Naghd va Mu’arifi-i Asar’i (A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films) (Tehran, 1992), p. 413. 12. Nafisi, Azar, ‘Marg-i Yazd-gird (Death of Yazd-gird)’, in Qukasian, Collection of Essays, p. 397. 13. Ibid., p. 397. 14. Dabashi in ‘Ta’zyih’, pp. 95–6. 15. I have adopted this term from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, p. xvi. 16. Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (New York 2002), p. 233.

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17. Ibid., p. 231. 18. Lefebvre, Henri, ‘The Production of Space’, in Michael J. Dear and Steven Flusty (eds), The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography (Oxford, 2002), p. 133. 19. Quoted in Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964), p. xxix.

Conclusion: Responding to the Cry of the Simurgh 1. For a comprehensive study of the role of Iranian cinema in the West, see Hamid Naficy’s ‘Cinematic Exchange Relations: Iran and the West’, in Nikki R. Keddie and Rudi Matthee (eds), Iran and the Surrounding World (Seattle, 2002), pp. 254–78. 2. Hayward, Susan, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London and New York, 2000), p. 95. 3. Fischer, M. J. Michael, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledge: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham, NC, 2004), pp. 20–21. 4. In Arabic-based and most English texts his name is Suhrawardi. 5. Ziai, Hossein and Oliver Leaman. ‘Illuminationist Philosophy’, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 2000), p. 701. 6. Ibid., p. 701. 7. Ibid., p. 149. 8. Corbin, Henry, En Islam Iranian (Paris, 1971). 9. Fischer, Mute Dreams, p. 136. 10. In New Persian literature the bird is called Simurgh, and in Pahlavi or Middle Persian, Sen-Murv. Simurgh is a legendary bird in Persian fairy tales, both in oral literature and in texts such as Firdawsi’s Shahnamih. Simurgh has extraordinary powers and appears in many different manifestations; as well as divine wisdom it may symbolize the perfected human being. In Persian legends, Simurgh saves (future) heroes such as the infant Zal, who was abandoned by his father Saam. In one oral tale (see Homa A. Ghahremani, ‘The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies’ website: http:// www.caissoas.com/CAIS/Mythology/Simurgh_story.htm, accessed 18 June 2006), Simurgh helps Prince Khurshid, who was thrown into a well by his brothers, Kiumarth and Jamshid. Simurgh lifts him up seven floors and gives him three feathers from his wing. Prince Khurshid is supposed to burn a feather when he needs Simurgh’s magical power. According to some Pahlavi texts, Simurgh lives in the middle of a sea in a celestial tree called Tuba, ‘which contains all the seeds of the vegetable world.

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11.

12.

13.

14.

207

Whenever Simurgh flies up from the tree one thousand branches grow, and whenever she sits on it, one thousand branches break and the seeds fall into the water.’ In Shahnamih, Simurgh’s abode is on top of the Qaf mountain, which probably refers to the Alburz mountain. ‘She lives nearby in a jungle. Every year she lays three eggs and each year her chicks are eaten by a serpent. If you could kill the serpent, she surely would take you home’ (Ghahremani, ‘Simurgh’). In several tales, Simurgh is so luminous that it could injure any eye that looks at it or even at its reflection in a mirror. The metaphorical language of the philosophy of illuminationism has caused controversy in its interpretation(s). Suhrivardi was very conscious of this. The hoopoe bird in Persian poetics is the symbol of wisdom and famous for its sharp-sightedness. In Attar’s Conference of Birds, the hoopoe takes the lead in the birds’ journey to find Simurgh, who symbolizes the truth. For a brief examination of the impact of illuminationism on Islam and the Islamic revolution, see Michael Fischer’s Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledge: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (131–147). Also Illumination in Islamic Mysticism, which also explores the influence of this philosophy on Sufism. Part One, I, The Seventh Rule. Translated by Ziai in Ziai and Leaman, ‘Illuminationist Philosophy’, pp. 181–2.

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Hoodashtian, Atta, Mudirniti, Jahani Shudan va Iran (Modernity, Globalization, and Iran). (Tehran, 2003). Irani, Bahar, ‘Kalagh, Ziyafat-i Ashbah’ (The Crow, The Ghosts’ Feast), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films (Tehran, 1992), pp. 325–9. Issa, Rose, Iranian Contemporary Art (London, 2001). Issari, M. Ali, Cinema in Iran 1900–1979 (Metuchen, NJ and London, 1989). Jahanbegloo, Ramin, ‘Kiarostami ya Haqiqat-ju’i’ (Kiarostami or Finding the Truth), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), pp. 19–23. Jahed, Parviz, Nivishtan ba Durbin: Ru dar Ru ba Ibrahim Gulistan (Writing with a Camera: One on one with Ibrahim Gulistan) (Tehran, 2006). ——, ‘Mahtab, and Kiarostami’s Digital Camera and Minimalism’, at http://www. bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/story/2004/02/040203_la Kiarostamimahtab. shtml, accessed 20 August 2006. Jakobson, Roman, ‘The Dominant’, in Ladinslav Mateka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, MA, 1971), pp. 105–10. Javadi, Hasan and Susan Sallee (trans.), Another Birth: Selected Poems of Forough Farrukhzad and Essays (Emeryville, CA, 1981). Jurji, Edward Jabra, Illumination in Islamic Mysticism: A Translation, with an Introduction and Notes, based upon a Critical Edition of Abu-Al-Mawahib Al-Shadhili’s Treatise entitled Qawanin Hikamal_Ishraq (Lahore, 1938). Karimi-Hakkak. Ahmad, An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Boulder, CO, 1978). ——, ‘From Imagistic Esthetics to Verbal Kinetics, Recent Trends in Persian Poetry’, Conference on Iranian Cinema as 21st Century Persian Literature, University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX, 19–21 April 2002). Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad and Michael Beard, ‘Introduction’ to in Walking with the Wind: Poems by Abbas Kiarostami, trans. A. Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Bread (Cambridge and London, 2001), pp. 5–13. Kessler, Jascha and Amin Banani (eds), Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forough Farrukhzad (Delmar, NY, 1982). Khuram-Shahi, Baha u-din, Zihn va Zaban-i Hafiz (Hafiz’s Mind and Language) (Tehran, 1982). Kyanush, Mahmud, Modern Persian Poetry (Ware, UK, 1996). Kiarostami, Abbas, Walking with the Wind: Poems by Abbas Kiarostami, trans. A. Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Bread (Cambridge and London, 2001). The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London and New York, 1977).

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Naficy, Hamid, ‘Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), pp. 26–66. ——, ‘Theorizing “Third World Film” Spectatorship: The Case of Iran and Iranian Cinema’, in Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayak (eds), Rethinking Third Cinema (New York and London, 2003), pp. 183–201. Nafisi, Azar, ‘Marg-i Yazd-gird’ (Death of Yazd-gird), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films (Tehran, 1992), pp. 383–99. Najmabadi, Afsaneh, The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, NY, 1998). Nura’i, Jahanbakhsh, ‘Barkhastan az Gur’ (Resurrection), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films (Tehran, 1992), pp. 556–72. Omid, Jamal, Tarikh-i Cinema-yi Iran: 1279–1357 (The History of Iranian Cinema: 1900–1978) (Tehran, 1996). Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, MD, 1998). Qukasian, Zavin, Majmu’ih Maqalat dar Naghd va Mu’arifi’i Asar’i Bahram Bayzai (A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films) (Tehran, 1992). ——, Majmu’ih Maqalat dar Naghd va Mu’arifi-yi Asar’i Abbas Kiarostami (A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films) (Tehran, 1997). Ra’isiyan, Alireza, ‘Cinema-yi Sha’iranih, Cinema-yi Taghazzuli’ (Poetic Cinema, Lyrical Cinema), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), pp. 31–38. Rahimieh, Nasrin, ‘Marking Gender and Difference in the Myth of the Nation: A Post-revolutionary Film’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), pp. 238–54. Roberts, Andrew Michaels, ‘Romantic Irony and the Postmodern Sublime: Geoffrey Hills and “Sebastian Arrurruz” ’, in Edward Larrissy (ed.), Romanticism and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK, 1999), pp. 141–57. Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault: Selections from The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York, 2003). Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2003). Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, ‘Location (Physical Space) and Cultural Identity in Iranian Films’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002), pp. 200–15. Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1979). Sepehri, Sohrab, Hasht Kitab (Eight Books) (Tehran, 1982).

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Shamisa, Sirus, Naghd-i bi Shi’r-i Sohrab Sepehri (A Critique on Sohrab Sepehri’s Poetry) (Tehran, 1990). ——, Nigahi bi Forough Farrukhzad (Forough Farrukhzad from a Critical Perspective) (Tehran, 1993). Shapur, Kamyar and Omran Salahi (eds), The First Love Beats of My Heart: Forough Farrukhzad’s Letters to Her Husband Parviz Shapur (Tehran, 2002). Shaygan, Darush, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (London, 1992). ——, Afsun Zadigi Jadid: Huviyyat-i Chihil Tikkih va Tafakkur-i Sayyar (Ex occidente lux), trans. Fatemeh Valiyani (Tehran, 2001). ——, ‘At the Cutting Edge of Intersecting Worlds’, in Issa Rose (ed.), Iranian Contemporary Art London, 2001), pp. 9–11. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York, 1994). Tahami-nejad, Mohammad, ‘Marg-i Yazd-gird’ (Death of Yazd-gird), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Bahram Bayzai’s Films (Tehran, 1992), pp. 411–19. Tapper, Richard (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London and New York, 2002). Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran (New York, 2001). Thackston, Wheeler McIntosh, A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry: A Guide to the Reading and Understanding of Persian Poetry from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Bethesda, MD, 1994). Tohidi, Nayereh, ‘Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism: Feminist Politics in Iran’, in Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1991), pp. 251–71. Tusi, Javad, ‘Vaqayi’-nigari Bi-vastih’ (Unmediated Journalism), in Zavin Qukasian (ed.), A Collection of Essays on Abbas Kiarostami’s Films (Tehran, 1997), pp. 188–93. Tynjanov, Juri, ‘On Literary Evolution’, in Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (eds), Russian Formalism; A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (New York, 1973), pp. 66–78. Wilde, Allan, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore and London, 1981). Wollen, Peter, Signs and Meaning in Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1972). Yohannan, John D, ‘Hafiz’, in Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast (eds), Reference Guide to World Literature, Vol. 1, 3rd edn (Detroit, MI, 2003), pp. 436–7. Zamora, Lois P. and Wendy B. Faris, ‘Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s’, in Zamora, Lois P and Wendy B. Faris (eds),

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FILMOGRAPHY

Avini, Sayyid Murtiza, Ravayat-i Fath (The Narration of Victory), 1980–1993, TV documentary series, IRIB. Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan, Banu-yi Urdibihisht (The May Lady), 1998. ——, Nargiss, 2000. Bayzai, Bahram, Amu Sibilu (Uncle Moustache), 1970. ——, Safar (Travel), 1971. ——, Ragbar (Thunder Shower), 1971. ——, Gharibih va Mih (The Stranger and the Fog), 1974. ——, Kalagh (The Crow), 1977. ——, Chirikih-yi Tara (The Ballad of Tara), 1978. ——, Marg-i Yazd-gird (The Death of Yazd-gird), 1983. ——, Bashu: Gharibih-yi Kuchak (Bashu: The Little Stranger), 1986. ——, Shayad Vaqti Digar (Perhaps Some Other Time), 1988. ——, Musafiran (Travellers), 1992. ——, Sag-Kushi (Dog-Eat-Dog), 2001. Cocteau, Jean, Les parents terrible, 1948. Daruish, Hajir, Bita, 1972. Farmanara, Bahman, Shazdih Ihtijab (Prince Ehtejab), 1974. Farrukhzad, Forough, Khanih Siyah Ast (The House is Black), 1962. Feuillade, Louis, Les vampires, 1915. Ghaffari, Farrukh, Junub-i Shahr (Downtown), 1958. ——, Shab-i Quzi (The Night of the Hunchback), 1964. Godard, Jean Luc, Alphaville, 1965. Gulistan, Ibrahim, Muj va Marjan va Khara (Wave, Coral and Granite), 1962. ——, Khisht va Ayinih (Mudbrick and Mirror), 1965. ——, Asrar-i Ganj-i Darrih-yi Jini (Secrets of the Treasure in the Jinni Valley), 1974. Hatami, Ali, Aqa-yi Halu (Mr Simpleton), 1969. ——, Tuqi 1970. ——, Hizar Dastan (TV Serial, IRIB), 1979–89.

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Hatami, Ali, Haji Washington, 1982. Hatami-kia, Ibrahim, Az Karkhih ta Rhein (From Karkheh to Rhein), 1993. ——, Ajans-i Shishi’i (The Glass Agency), 1998. Irani, Ardishir, Dukhtar-i Lur (The Lor Girl), 1933. Khachikiyan, Samuel, Faryad-i Nimih Shab (Midnight Scream), 1961. ——, Yik Ghadam ta Marg (One Step to Death), 1961. ——, Delhurih (Anxiety), 1962. Kiarostami, Abbas, Nan va Kuchih (Bread and the Alley), 1970. ——, Musafir (The Traveller), 1972. ——, Zang-i Tafrih (Recess), 1973. ——, Du Rah-i Hal Barayi Yik Mas’alih (Two Solutions for One Problem), 1975. ——, Guzarish (Report), 1977. ——, Dandan Dard (Toothache), 1980. ——, Bi Tartib ya Bidun-i Tartib (Orderly or Disorderly), 1981. ——, Avali-ha (First Graders), 1984. ——, Khanih-yi Dust Kujast? (Where Is the Friend’s House?), 1987. ——, Mashq-i Shab (Homework), 1990. ——, Nama-yi Nazdik (Close Up), 1990. ——, Zindigi va Digar Hich/ va Zindigi Idamih Darad (Life and then Nothing/ And Life Goes On), 1992. ——, Zir-i Dirakhtan-i Zaytun (Through the Olive Trees), 1994. ——, Ta’m-i Gilas (Taste of Cherry), 1996. ——, Bad Ma ra ba Khud Khahad Burd (The Wind Will Carry Us), 1999. ——, A.B.C. Africa, 2001. ——, Dah (Ten), 2002. Kimiyai, Masud, Qaysar, 1969. ——, Riza Muturi (Reza, the Cyclist), 1970. ——, Baluch, 1972. ——, Gavazn-ha (The Deer), 1974. ——, Safar-i Sang (The Journey of Stone), 1978. ——, Dandan-i Mar (Snake’s Fang), 1990. ——, I’tiraz (Protest), 2000. Longinotto, Kim, and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Divorce Iranian Style, 1998. Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, Tubih-i Nasuh (Nasuh’s Repentance), 1983. ——, Du Chashm-i Bi-Su (Two Blind Eyes), 1983. ——, Baykut (Boycott), 1985. ——, Arusi-yi Khuban (Marriage of the Blessed), 1988. ——, Nubat-i Ashighi (A Time for Love), 1991. ——, Gabbih, 1997. Makhmalbaf, Samira, Sib (The Apple), 1998.

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Filmography

219

Malik-Muti’i, Nassir, Suda-garan-i Marg (The Traders of Death), 1962. Mehrjui, Darush, Gav (The Cow), 1969. ——, Pust-chi (Postman), 1972. ——, Dayirih-i Mina, 1978. ——, Hamun, 1990. ——, Sara, 1993. ——, Layla, 1996. Misqali, Farshid, Aqa-yi Hayula (Mr Monster), 1970. Milani.Tahmineh, Du Zan (Two Women), 1998. ——, Nimi-yi Pinhan (The Hidden Half), 2001. ——, Vakunish-i Panjum (The Fifth Reaction), 2003. Naderi. Amir, Marsiyih (Lamentation), 1978. Oganians, Avanes, Abi va Rabi (Abi and Rabi), 1930. ——, Haji Aqa, Actur-i Cinema (Haji Aqa, The Movie Star), 1932. Pontecorvo, Gillo, Battle of Algiers, 1966. Renais, Alain, Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel or The Time of Return), 1963. Saffarian, Nasser, ‘The House Is Black’ Commentary, 2002. Sepanta, Abdul Hussein, Firdawsi, 1934. ——, Shirin va Farhad (Shirin and Farhad), 1934. ——, Layli va Majnun (Layli and Majnun), 1937. Shahid-Sales, Sohrab, Yik Ittifaq-i Sadih (One Simple Event), 1972. ——, Tabi’at-i Bijan (Still Life), 1974. Taqvai, Nassir, Sadiq Kurdih (Sadiq, The Kurdish), 1971. Vertov, Dzigo, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929. Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane, 1941. Yasami, Siyamak, Aqa-yi Qarn-i Bistum (Mr Twentieth Century), 1964. ——, Ganj-i Qarun (Qarun’s Treasure), 1965.

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INDEX

Al-i Ahmad, Jalal, 96, 97, 99 Ballade of Tara, The, 103, 104, 144, 148, 171 Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan, 101 The May Lady, 34, 152 Nargiss, 101–102 Baraheni, Reza, 20, 30–41 Bashu: The Little Stranger, 12,148, 149, 151, 152, (201–202) n. 43 Bayzai, Bahram, 93–175 Bazin, André, 27, 107, 109, 136 Bread and Alley, 24–25 Constitutional Revolution, 94–96, 101, 145, (197–198) n. 7, Close Up, 37, 41, 49 Crow, The, 104–113, 148, 151 Dabashi, Hamid, 18–19, 20, 58, 69, 92, 153,160, 168, Death of Yazd-gird, The, 161–170 Dog-Eat-Dog, 103, 127, 149 Dominant, The, 1–10 Farabi Cinema Foundation (FCF), 7, 11 Filmfarsi, 22–23 Farrukhzad, Forough, 18, 57–92 Gabbih, 12, 152–153 Ghafari, Farrukh, 18, 19 Ghazal, 27–55 Gulistan, Ibrahim, 18, 22, 23,70, 71

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Hafiz, 27–32, 38–46, 51, 53, 55 Haqshenas, Alimuhammad, 39–40 Hatami, Ali, 33, 34, 35, 143 Hatami-kia, Ibrahim, 8, 149 Hillmann, Michael, 60, 64, 66 Homework, 48, 49, 72–73 Hoodashtian, Atta, 107, 113 House Is Black, The, 18, 19, 69–73 Identity Iranian cinema, 93, 99–126, 127–154 Iranian history, 96, 97–99, 127–129 Irani, Ardishir, 16, (185) n. 8 Israq, 44, 177–181 Jakobson, Roman, 2–3 see also Dominant Kanun (aka The Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), 8, 20–25 Khachikiyan, Samuel, 22 Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, 87 Khuram-shahi, Baha u-din, 30, 32, 39–40 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 5–6, 96, 99, 168 Kiarostami, Abbas, 11–92 Kimiyai, Masud, 23, 143, 149 Life and then Nothing (aka And Life Goes on), 38, 44, 45, 48, 61, 63, 67

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Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 6, 8, 69, 80, 153–154 Ma’sumi, Parvanih, 108, 142, 147, 148, Mehrjui, Darush, 19, 20, 34, 35, 96, The Cow, 18–19, 101,141 Layla, 33 Sara, 32–33 Mihrabi, Massoud, (185) n.8 Milani, Farzaneh, 64, 65, 66, 102 Milani, Tahmineh, 13, 152, (204) n. 22 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG), 11, 127, (184) n.1 Mirsepassi, Ali, 97 Modern Persian Poetry, 17–18, 57–92 Modernism, 93, 100, 105, 112, 125 Modernity, 19, 93–125 Modernization, 93–96,100–101, 105, 106, 110, 112–113 Naficy, Hamid, 5, 143 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 145–146

Shamisa, Sirus, 58, 61, 64, 78 Sipanta, Abdul-Hossein, 16, (185) n. 8 Stranger and the Fog, The, 103, 107, 139–148, 171 Taslimi, Susan, 103, 129, 138, 148, 151 Taste of Cherry, 9, 13, 42, 45, 49–55, 85, 86, 88 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, 94, 98, 112, 128 Through the olive Trees, 61–64, 67, 71 Thunder Shower, 19, 23, 102, 139, 147, 148, 149, 150 Travellers, 113–125, 156, 160, 169, 172, (203) n. 70 Tynjanov, Juri, 2–3 Ta’zyih, 9, 113, 115, 120, 125, 135, 156–168 Ten, 42, 47, 48

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 25, 44, 48, 68, 69, 70, 72

Where Is the Friend’s House?, 9, 35–38, 41, 44, 49, 67, 69, 81, 88 Wind Will Carry Us, 41, 48, 49, 67, 68, 69, 74–77, 80–81, 83, 85, 86, 88–90 Women in pre-revolutionary films, 140–143 re-historicizing, 139–154

Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, 36, 86, 101 Sepehri, Sohrab, 57–92

Yasami, Siyamak, 22–23 Yushij, Nima, 17, 57, 96

Perhaps Some Other Time, 104, 129–139, 170, 171, 172 Persian literature relation to early Iranian cinema, 16 relation to new wave cinema, 8–9, 16–20

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