Despite the close relationship Dabashi establishes between classical and contemporary art, Dabashi also argues that there is a fundamental tension that makes Iranian cinema signal a clear break from classical Persian arts. Dabashi argues, in terms clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”[1] that cinema marks the first time in Iranian art when human beings were portrayed as “historical” beings “as opposed to the eternal Qur’anic man” that characterizes traditional Persian art (especially painting); cinema, Dabashi argues, liberates itself from these requirements and therefore should be read as a primarily political medium.[2]
However, I think Dabashi’s analysis is inspired by a misapplication of Benjamin’s theory. For while Benjamin certainly argues, in unequivocal terms, that film destroys the potential for “aura,” filtering Iranian cinema through Benjamin’s Marxist ideological lens has some limitations since “art” in classical Persian culture did not necessarily fulfill the same social function(s) as it did in Europe.[3] A careful look at Benjamin’s vocabulary establishes its limited utility: Benjamin identifies “aura” principally with the sense of “distance” between the piece of art and its viewer, as well as the perceived value of a work of art’s “uniqueness.”[4] My research, however, has revealed that Benjamin’s notions of “distance” and “uniqueness” are not even essential aspects of Persian art, especially not in Persian painting.
Benjamin explains what he means by “distance” in a helpful footnote: “The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image…The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”[5] For Benjamin, mediums such as painting force the spectator into a subordinate role since she must always be aware of her removal, her otherness, from the complete, self-contained work of art; however, the most obvious tension between Benjamin’s “distance” and Persian painting is that a Persian painting is rarely seen as a complete, self-contained work.
Typically, each painting functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose), the context (the position of this image as one in a series), and the reader’s interpretation of the gestures and actions of the figures and the landscape in which the painting is set.[6] Persian painting, in most of its forms, does not subordinate the viewer but rather brings the viewer into critical interaction with the painting. As for “uniqueness,” it is important to note that the discourse surrounding artistic representations of the created world in Islamic societies is distinct from that in Christian (and post-Christian) Europe. In Priscilla Soucek’s enlightening essay on the place of portraiture in Persian culture, she argues that the “subordinate status” of human-made images (“when compared to the larger framework of God’s creation”) had to be established within intellectual circles to give artists the ability to produce painted portraits.[7] In that sense, it was the very lack of “uniqueness” in Persian painting—coupled with the necessary creative limitations of the artist—that ensures its place in society.[8]
If “distance” and “uniqueness” are not essential aspects of Persian art, and indeed they do not seem to be, then Benjamin’s theory (and by extension Dabashi’s analysis) of cinema as a globalized instrument of political provocation is problematic. Instead, I again find a more nuanced perspective in Godfrey Cheshire’s essay: “Where Westerners tend to view cinema as a fullness, an art-in-itself composed of and historically supplanting previous forms…much about the Iranian stance seems to posit it as an emptiness, a place where the older forms temporarily intersect and display the possibilities of their combination.”[9] In other words, while authors like Benjamin and Dabashi see the advent of cinema as a potentially devastating blow to the ability of art to distance itself from its viewer and confront its viewer with a tyrannical, ineluctable sense of its own uniqueness, Iranian culture has utilized cinema with a different conception of the uses and purposes of art—and, therefore, with markedly different thoughts about the possibilities of cinema.
I locate some of those possibilities in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. In the following section, I will briefly provide an interpretive framework of Kiarostami’s films by arguing that Persian painting, with its already noted lack of “distance” and “unique” understanding of “uniqueness,” has had a considerable influence on Kiarostami’s work, and that Kiarostami may have acquired many of his thematic concerns and aesthetic sensibilities from exposure to Persian art and the cultural discourse surrounding it. As such, his work (along with Iranian cinema) needs to be reassessed by mainstream Western academia to ensure an accurate understanding of the source of those themes and aesthetics.
NOTES
[1] Translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252.
[2] Dabashi, 15.
[3] Furthermore, Benjamin seems to imply that it is not some essential quality of film itself that makes it disjunctive from classical art, but it is the possible social function of film—its utilization as an instrument of political discourse is what signals a break from classical art (231). A closer reading of Benjamin, however, shows that he has doubts about the ability of film to successfully transform itself into a thoroughly politicized medium despite its revolutionary potential: “So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). It is also necessary to remember that Benjamin’s essay, though a powerful piece of art criticism, is a reaction to and critical reinterpretation of what he saw as “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’”—art for art’s sake, the “theology of art” (224).
[4] Ibid., 223.
[5] Ibid., 243, n5.
[6] Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, “Two Safavid Paintings: An Essay in Interpretation,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 176.
[7] “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000), 107.
[8] To prevent myself from being misread, I do not mean to suggest here that Persian painting is not powerful and evocative, for it certainly is. I only suggest, in disagreement with Dabashi and Benjamin, that painting and classical arts as a whole do not need to fill this kind of hegemonic role; the social phenomena we call “art” have various functions, which are differently defined in various cultural milieus and periods.
[9] Cheshire, 10 (emphases original).
