Negar Mottahedeh is Assistant Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University.

Displaced Allegories

Post-Revolutionary Iranian CinemaBy NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4260-1

Contents

Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………….xiIntroduction Producing a National Cinema, a Woman’s Cinema…………………………………………..11 Nationalizing Sense Perception Bahram Bayza’I……………………………………………………152 Cleansing Vision Abbas Kiarostami, Le Secret Magnifique…………………………………………..893 Negative Aesthetics Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema and 1970s Feminist Film Theory…………………140Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………..169Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….183Index…………………………………………………………………………………………..193

Chapter One

Nationalizing Sense Perception

Bahram Bayza’i

Awestruck by the stretches of colorful landscape that fill the screen at retrospectives and international film festivals, Western journalists persistently review Iranian cinema with a sense of wonderment. What casts the industry as unique in the film festival market, however, is the uncanny way in which post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema’s fictional narratives glide between the realms of the real and of the fictional. The disintegration of boundaries between the fictional and the everyday, between temporal and spatial limits, has become a trademark of the Iranian screen since the Revolution.

This blurring of boundaries has much to do with the cinema’s efforts to counter and effectively disarticulate the cinematic voyeurism that has shaped sense perception in response to the global dominance of Hollywood cinema. The veiled figure at the threshold of Iranian cinema’s enunciative landscape guides the camera’s look at its objects. Emphatically gendered and sexualized, the nationalized technology transforms and renarrates the time and space coordinates embedded in the codes and conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. Iranian post-Revolutionary cinema’s newly purified and gendered technologies transform the cinematic image, informed as they are by a tactile, immediate, and embodied gaze. The veiled figure at the threshold of this cinema’s enunciation effectively disassembles, reassembles, and codes Iranian cinema so as to resist the conventions assigned to it by standardized and standardizing norms. The veiled figure of the Iranian woman sets the terms for the nation’s cinematic address and its narrative articulation. As Raymond Bellour incisively argues, “The American cinema is entirely dependent … on a system of representations in which the woman occupies a central place only to the extent that it’s a place assigned to her by the logic of masculine desire.” The limits set on a masculinist visuality by modesty laws in post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema, by contrast, dictate a different system of representation that ironically coincides with the antivoyeurism and negative aesthetics of the feminist avant-garde.

Given the Shiite conception of the space of the imaginal, post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema’s foundational difference from other cinemas rests on a confusion of boundaries that renders all spaces diegetic (private and public) as one and hence coextensive with the space of the cinema. Grounding the cinema’s address, the veiled female body at the cinema’s threshold engenders an uncanny traffic between this space of lived reality and that of ritual fantasy. Dictating the terms of the visual relations in the cinema, this veiled body shifts the deictic conventions that inform the construction of diegetic spaces, those that measure the distance between the far away and the close by and that animate the distinctions film is able to make between what is here, in this space, and what is elsewhere. Film generally constitutes its deixis by linking character looks. A shift in the constitution of looks in the diegesis, and between the diegesis and the spectator, transforms visual perceptions of spatiality and markedly affects film’s temporal registers; for any change in the way that space is constituted affects the cinematic codes that link shots and scenes and that produce the difference between then and now, between the past and the present in films.

This shift in visual relations away from standardized codes and conventions disintegrates narrative continuity according to classical film theory. Narrative continuity relies largely on a standard of spatial and temporal representation in order to cohere. Even a minor manipulation of visual relays has consequences for the standard construction of scenes and shot conventions. Used to reinforce the sound track, a shot-reverse shot construction typically connoting “a conversation,” for example, fails to signal the presence of two speakers in conversation if the reverse shot is absent. A minor change such as the elimination of the reverse shot that is used to link the look of the first speaker with that of the second breaks with cinematic code and fails to communicate meaning, dislodging the continuity of diegetic space and time. Like many voyeuristic codes undone by modesty laws, this shot pattern is a basic term in an established “grammar” that has become cinema’s vernacular over time-part and parcel of global sense perception.

In view of the global dominance of Hollywood codes and conventions as formal laws governing the grammar and meaning of shot constructions, film narratives lacking dominant codes of spatial and temporal continuity should in effect make little or no sense. Such would be the conventional wisdom of both apparatus and gaze theory in film studies. The crucial question, considering the success of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema in the world market (an issue I return to in chapter 3), is how these films handle the shift in spatial and temporal relations to ensure meaning (i.e. comprehensibility) despite the cinema’s deictic difference.

For the director Bahram Bayza’i, the ability to maintain narrative continuity and coherence notwithstanding the shifts in the film’s deixis and the resulting movement between the real and the fictional hinges on a turn to the indigenous cultural practice of the ta’ziyeh: “At the age of twenty, I saw a ta’ziyeh.” The ta’ziyeh is the annual Shiite mourning play representing the historical, political, and religious struggle that marked the defeat of the family of the Prophet Muhammad against the caliphate in Karbala in 680. The mourning play commemorates the break between the Shiite and the Sunni branches of Islam in the course of the power struggle in Karbala. It provides the enunciative landscape and the temporal and spatial tropes shaping Bayza’i’s work-an oeuvre that is popularly considered by Iranians to be genuinely and traditionally Persian in its scope. The ta’ziyeh’s dramatic tradition also affects the work of more internationally accessible Iranian auteurs such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as discussed in subsequent sections.

Judgment Day

Of the three filmmakers, however, Bahram Bayza’i is the only one whose work for the cinema has referred to the rich ta’ziyeh tradition directly. Born in 1938 in Tehran, Bayza’i is among the most popular filmmakers in Iran, even though his work often met with severe government resistance, censorship, and delay before the Iranian Revolution and has continued to do so since. A former university professor who was denied his academic position after the Revolution, Bayza’i is considered a leading authority on the history of drama in Iran and is known for his commitment to Persian folklore, his command of the Persian language, and his knowledge of Persian narrative styles in his compositions of film scripts and performance works for the theater. Biographers suggest that Bayza’i’s love for cinema was kindled at a very young age. He watched Egyptian films with his father, who enjoyed them because of his knowledge of the Arabic tongue. His mother, born to a literary family and an ardent fan of art films, enjoyed Persian movies and took her young son to the cinema at least three times a week.

Almost all of Bayza’i’s twelve major directorial efforts in fiction film to date either make a reference to a ta’ziyeh performance or use its conventions. In Death of Yazdgerd (Marg-i Yazdgerd, 1981), one of Bayza’i’s early post-Revolutionary films, a circular cinematic mise-en-scne signals the film’s affinity with the ta’ziyeh, which traditionally stages the Karbala carnage on an open circular stage. In the staging of the ta’ziyeh performance, the audience sits on the ground around a central circular platform in a large courtyard sometimes covered by an enormous white tent. Historically, women would sit in the front rows during the performance, men behind them.

In its traditional form, in a circular setting, the drama takes place both on and off stage. The ta’ziyeh role-carriers, who enact the historical events surrounding the carnage and martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Imam Husayn, and his family in Karbala, mingle with audience members, staging battles in narrow corridors stretched between the spectator-participants. The staging of the ta’ziyeh emphasizes, in this way, the temporal conjunction between the present and the past by situating the audience in the present as mourners lamenting the historical battle and the death of the Shiite heroes while role-carriers for the heroic figures resurrect history in their performance. Interwoven into the action by the movement and address of the role-carriers, ta’ziyeh audience members are also placed in the past, as participant-witnesses to the tragedy suffered by the family of the Prophet in the seventh-century battle of Karbala. The mourning play reenacts and then recollects this moment of loss as the moment that established the Shiite branch of Islam.

The ta’ziyeh’s circular stage is never “reset” or transformed in any major way. In fact, any change of scene is effected by the movement of the role-carrier himself. To go from one place to another, the actor merely announces his intention to travel and often walks or rides on horseback once around the circular stage to arrive at “the new location.” This integration of time and space, of past and present, of here and there, sets the tone of a performance in which the blurring of eras and spheres ensures the blurring of the differences that separate sensuous reality from the imaginal world, and of those that establish an actual historical happening as separate from the time of its performative transformation.

The blurring of the distinctions between past and present in the performance assumes foreknowledge of the historical happening on the part of the audience. This consciousness of history instills a sense of magical knowingness in the characters themselves in the course of the performance. As the imaginal world reveals itself on stage, the audience becomes a resurrected body-a witnessing imaginal body-conscious of the fullness of a past that is resurrected in a future that is also a now. On stage, the characters speak of the past, present, and future in one breath, as if the events to come in the historical drama have already taken place and will take place again. Thus every role-carrier openly anticipates his character’s ultimate destiny in the battle and also recognizes in death a future victory in which the family of the Prophet will emerge as hero-martyrs for a Shiite nation that is yet to materialize as the future body of Shiite Iran. In its redemption of all-time, the ta’ziyeh’s imaginal time represents the Day of Judgment.

The Travelers: Screening the Ta’ziyeh’s Temporal Tropes

The ta’ziyeh’s characteristic sense that knowledge embraces all time and that characters in effect know their end also configures Bayza’i’s narrative articulation in the film The Travelers (Mosaferan, 1992). As the character Mahtab Ma’arefi boards a vehicle that is to take her family to her sister’s wedding in Tehran in the opening sequence of The Travelers, she turns unexpectedly to the camera. In her direct address to the audience before beginning her journey from her home by the Caspian Sea, she asserts that the car she is about to board will be in an accident that will prevent her family from arriving at their destination. As if stating a known fact while, in fact, anticipating a future that is yet to be screened, she declares, “We will all die.” The family members and the driver of the car then in turn address the camera directly to identify themselves, as if registering the necessary details for the imminent police report on the accident. These gestures of direct address reiterate the film’s intimate connection with the ta’ziyeh tradition in which role-carriers at once identify with the heroes of the drama in a performative reenactment and simultaneously disassociate themselves from the heroes in reverence for the historical specificity of their lives and identities. Fantasy, fiction, and historical facts merge; time-past, present, and future-collapses; spaces run into each other. The ta’ziyeh provides in this way the spatial and temporal tropes for Iranian cinema’s post-Revolutionary address.

Bashu: Screening the Ta’ziyeh’s Spatial Tropes

Bayza’i’s first cinematic release after the Revolution, Bashu: The Little Stranger (Bashu: Gharibe-ye Koochak, 1987), relates the story of a mother (Na’i) in rural northern Iran and that of Bashu, a young boy from Khuzestan in the south. Bashu appears on Na’i’s farm having escaped the terrors of the Iran-Iraq war and having witnessed the death of his family in the course of it. Na’i works in the fields and takes care of her children, and by accepting Bashu into her family, she defies the ways of the village. When Na’i’s husband eventually returns from his long absence at the conclusion of the film, Bashu, whom the narrative has constructed as Na’i’s counterpart in a story of labor and love, accepts Na’i’s husband as the proper head of the household and as his own adopted father.

The circular ta’ziyeh stage, as well as its temporal and spatial coordinates, gives shape to a late scene in the film in which Na’i writes a letter to her absent husband. While dictating to Bashu, who transcribes her words into standard written Persian, Na’i walks about her yard, performing random chores and hanging her wet laundry out to dry. As she paces, the camera follows her in circular motion; encircling the area alongside her body, the camera restages the background. Gendered in association with Na’i’s veiled body, it transforms the scorched gravel of her private yard into the public space of war where her absent husband will receive her letter at some later time.

In the political setting of post-Revolutionary Iran, in which filmmakers are unable to show heterosexual intimacy on screen, Bashu: The Little Stranger solves the problem of visual and physical contact between an unrelated man and woman by creating a fictionally necessary spatial distance between the female lead, Na’i, and her husband. The narrative takes for granted that the husband has to be away from the farm to make a living (at war). Yet the film insists on establishing the connection between the couple, regardless of the distance separating them. In the context of censorship where heterosexual intimacy is denied on screen, Bashu utilizes the temporal and spatial tropes of the ta’ziyeh tradition to encode cotemporal perceptions of time and space as they have been cultivated on national soil and within the national dramatic tradition. Engaging the ta’ziyeh tropes of temporal and spatial continuity, the film signals “conversation” between the husband and wife without using the standard exchange of glances in the shot-reverse shot.

The circular movement of the camera to the rhythm of Na’i’s body ensures the perception of temporal continuity between the here of the farm and the elsewhere of the war as she dictates a letter to her husband. As the camera turns, as if around a circular ta’ziyeh stage, it transforms Na’i’s time and space at the farm into the time and space of her husband at war, then turns back again to the backyard and to Bashu, to signal the intimacy and the immediacy of the conversation that has taken place between the husband and wife and their intermediary, the husband’s representative, at home. While Na’i’s husband is visibly absent from most of the track, Na’i shares in his time and space while relating to the visible presence of Bashu. Troubled by the inability to maintain continuity in the face of an intimate heterosexual exchange, the scene engages the ta’ziyeh’s malleable deictic tropes. In the now-time of the present, where the elsewhere of war and the here of the everyday conjoin, Bashu emerges as the allegorical figure of the absent-yet-present beloved. The trope of the letter here stands as a displaced allegory for the impossibility of a coincident exchange of sentiment in post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema.

(Continues…)

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