Contextualizing Iranian Cinema (Part 1)
When discussing Iranian cinema, most scholars make much of the fact that Iran originally acquired the medium from Europe and therefore focus on the supposed influence Western cinema holds over contemporary Iranian filmmakers. Godfrey Cheshire is a scholar who takes a different approach: in an excellent essay on the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he attacks the shortsightedness and superficiality of the comparisons many scholars make while arguing for an alternate approach that emphasizes “Iranian context” before the context of world cinema.[1] Western scholars are probably more comfortable assuming a Euro-American source of Iranian cinematic vocabulary, which goes some way toward explaining why so few professional film critics are willing to entertain the notion that the cultural context of these films might have more influence in shaping the outlook of Iranian filmmakers than the art house classics many filmmakers from Iran have likely never even seen.
Perhaps in response to Cheshire’s call, recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the study of Iranian political and social issues for their relation to contemporary cinema,[2] but this seems to me to be a similarly shortsighted approach, since it deemphasizes the importance of history and the possible influence of forms of art specific to Iran—namely, Persian painting. To Cheshire’s concerns, then, I would add the limitations of focusing only on current events to explain all of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Iranian cinema. In what follows, I want to sketch a rough genealogy of cinema in Iran that will uncover some of the cultural and artistic roots of its contemporary expressions in Iran today.
Hamid Dabashi, expatriate scholar of Iranian studies, has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema—its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to Iranian still photography of the late nineteenth century forward; he writes, “The historical antecedent of these pictorial representations of frozen realities was Persian court painting, and the narrative miniatures that illustrated the classics of Persian prose and poetry…”[3] But cinema, Dabashi also notes, is a medium open and accessible to a mass audience, so it also finds commonalities with coffee house narrative paintings and other forms of illustrated public storytelling.[4] Ultimately, though cinema is a transnational medium and therefore subject to cross-cultural, comparative analysis, it has been incorporated in a distinct way into an already-existing set of artistic mediums with a complementary set of guiding aesthetic assumptions.
The relationship between classical Persian art and cinema today that Dabashi proposes finds a reasonable explanation in what the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (though Dabashi himself never uses this term). In this case, I would suggest that there exists a set of acquired aesthetic sensibilities and tastes common in Persian culture, which is reflected in its art; certain commonalities, thematic and aesthetic, link contemporary Iranian film to photography in Iran and further back to its court paintings and coffee house illustrations and so on.[5] Dabashi’s argument, once modified this way, allows a new appraisal of Iranian cinema as a whole—not merely as the product of (or response to) Western globalization and cultural imperialism, but as a form of art that is (though borrowed from the West) re-conceptualized and re-contextualized by Iranian artists even as it is assimilated into the interrelated network of Iranian art. We should not be surprised, therefore, when motifs in classical Persian art are echoed in contemporary cinema—for example, when the subjects of Persian miniatures are reflected by filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami—for what else would Iranian films reflect first but Iran?
NOTES
[1] “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25.4 (2000), 9.
[2] See, for instance, Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
[3] Dabashi, 15.
[4] Ibid., 15
[5] For Bourdieu’s most eloquent explication and application of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The discussion on pages 72-95 (“Structures and the Habitus”) is particularly useful. Bourdieu, of course, sees habitus as being applicable to much more than only art, but for the purposes of my essay, which is a work of art history rather than social anthropology, I prefer to use a more limited definition of habitus than Bourdieu’s and define it rather simply as a set of embodied aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.
