A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 3)

The Image

Iranian films have clearly enjoyed a fair amount of critical success in the West; yet when one reads Western film critics on Iranian cinema, it is difficult to discern why—there are too many contradictions, disagreements, and confusions brought on by inconsistent and flawed critical approaches. For this reason, I want to spend the second part of this presentation focusing on developing a working theoretical framework that will, I hope, serve us well when we watch the film. First of all, I would argue that there are, for all intents and purposes, two dominant critical approaches to Iranian cinema, which we can call, provisionally, the colonialist and the revisionist approaches. The colonialist approach to Iranian cinema uses a paternal hermeneutics of Western cinematic and cultural influence. While this approach does emphasize the specificity of cinema as a technological medium, it overestimates the impact of Western cinema on the contemporary vocabulary of Iranian filmmakers and, more to the point, projects onto Iranian cinema an oedipal neurosis rooted in the critics’ own sublimated triangulation of affection, dominance, and the anxiety over being perceived as other as a working paradigm for cultural exchange. The revisionist approach to Iranian cinema, on the other hand, is properly dialectical. This approach maintains some of the paternalistic overtones of the colonialist approach but simultaneously stresses the need to examine the political, social, and artistic history of Iran. Revisionist critics emphasize both the indigenous traditions which form the cultural milieu and the specificity of the cinematic medium as a machine that restates and restructures social concerns through a globalized technology.

The dialectical approach is obviously a much more mature and workable theoretical edifice, yet, even if its insights can be salvaged, it is, I think, insufficiently critical of its own terms. The dialectic that it positions as central and essential to understanding Iranian cinema is, in fact, merely the shadow of a much larger dialectic that has formed the paradigm for the entire Western scholarly apparatus when it comes to theorizing non-Western cultures—the dialectic of “tradition” and “modernity.” Though it is not fashionable anymore, and rightly so, to think of European culture or, we might say, even more perilously, “the evolution of European civilization,” as normative, the so-called “multiple modernities” thesis tends to re-inscribe this normativity in the newfound multiplicity of subjects. The thesis uses precisely this dialectic when it seeks to illuminate the way “modernization” as an historical process is, in some way, negotiated by “tradition.” There are several reasons to be dissatisfied with this dialectic of modernity and tradition. The concepts of “modernity” as a social condition or “modernization” as an historical process only make sense if we accept European history and the case of what we might refer to more vaguely as “European civilization” as in some way normative (rather than as a set of contingent economic, social, discursive, and technological processes that collaborated to condition the “modern European subject” as a unique historical actor). Similarly, the concept of “tradition” only makes sense if we take the concept of “modernity” as normative—for, as Hamid Dabashi notes, tradition is manufactured by modernity—perhaps I might be tempted to say, more cynically (and scatologically, I apologize), that tradition is a concept that is “excreted” by modernity.

To reframe this entire question of Iranian cinema—and that is how, honestly, I feel Iranian cinema must be left, as an open question—let us leave behind the dreadful clamor of “modernity” and “tradition” and instead investigate the vestige of another epistemological category, one that will undoubtedly better serve us in this context: the image. When discussing “the image,” even in the context of cinema, it is necessary to disabuse oneself of the notion that “images” are solely a visual mode of representation. Jacques Rancière, for example, emphasizes in his book Le destin des images that too often “the image” is associated only with visual media—this being especially the case in melancholic postmodernist discourse and its investigation of how “the isolated individual and the atomized crowd” become subject to manipulation by spectacular images of capital. But if we might start with a more practical, reductive, and optimistic definition of “image”—and of course practical, reductive, and optimistic definitions typically evade the postmodernist framework—let us say instead that to make an image is to form a concept of something (either an object or a subject) by representing it. We will speak of “the image,” then, as an artifact, the “thing,” so to speak, that is left behind after the act of representation. The first images were not “graven” but pertained, rather, to socio-cultural conventions, or conventional ways of representing an object or subject through language as well as through sculpture, painting, architecture, music, and so on; and later, of course, through photography and cinema.

In other words, a clear delineation between the various historical forms of the linguistic image and the visual image is unnecessary in this context. This goes some way toward explaining the insistence of many film scholars and Iranian filmmakers that the aesthetics of Iranian cinema begins not with visual representation but rather with the mystical imagery and evocative musicality of classical Persian poetry. In fact, it has become something of a scholastic cliché to say that Persian art and culture are primarily aural in nature and expression, and that visual media are consequently devalued in Persian culture. But, as we shall see, things are a bit more complicated than that formulation suggests, for Persia has a rich visual culture as well, one that, in various historical moments, has been intertwined with literary culture by way of various articulations and has been utilized to create works that traverse medial boundaries and produce images simultaneously based in word and picture. Therefore, Iranian cinema is not merely the product of (or response to) globalization and cultural imperialism, but it is a form of art that has gone through a process of re-conceptualization and re-contextualization by artists operating in dynamic cultural environments that are not reducible to a dialectic between modernity and tradition. Indeed, the filmic image calls into question the distinction between modernity and tradition and disrupts any theory of their interplay, leaving, instead, a discursive space in which the technology of cinema, just as any technology before it, organizes and reorganizes social concerns and aesthetic habits.

A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 2)

Khomeini’s tacit approval of cinema as an instrument for conducting religious and ethical discourse also allowed for the reestablishment of the film industry following a quiet period, now with an entirely new (and constantly shifting) set of censorship guidelines and the oversight of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The scholar Goli M. Rezai-Rashti wrote, "On the one hand regulations introduced by the government restricted foreign films (especially Hollywood movies) in an effort to purify the public space, inadvertently strengthening indigenous filmmaking; an increasing number of feature films were produced in Iran…On the other hand, the state placed different forms of restriction and political/cultural censorship on those involved in filmmaking" (191).

In other words, it is difficult to summarize the paradoxical position of today’s Iranian filmmaker. On the one hand, he or she is encouraged to point out incidences of institutionalized inequality, to criticize social injustice, to force the audience to identify with the subjectivity of the underprivileged and the oppressed; yet, at the same time, there are muddied boundaries that must not be crossed, lest the filmmaker commit (real or imagined) sedition against the state or religious authority. Censorship has become paroxysmal in the new regime of the “democratically elected” Mahmood Ahmadinejad, which has further restricted the ability of filmmakers to criticize the government or stray from a normative moral framework (often corresponding, unsurprisingly enough, with political authority). Several filmmakers have been imprisoned, while others have been banned from making films or saddled with other exorbitant penalties for expressing some imagined attack on Ahmadinejad’s regime.

It is in this difficult context, however, that thousands of filmmakers are trained every year and over 100 films are officially financed. The critical appraisal and international reception of Iranian cinema has grown as well; by the end of the 1980s, Iranian cinema became a fixture at international film festivals and art houses around the world, winning several prestigious awards and critical acclaim, followed by the top awards of Europe’s three most important film festivals in the 90s and 2000s: the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry;

the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival for Jafar Panahi’s The Circle;

and, most recently, the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.

References

Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. “Transcending the Limitations: Women and the Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16.2 (2007): 191-206.

A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 1)

[This is a rough transcript of a presentation I gave on September 19, 2012 before a showing of the film A Separation (2011) at Missouri State University. Thanks to everyone who was present and participated in the conversation afterward.]

I want to begin with a few remarks on the history of Iranian cinema, before turning, perhaps somewhat more speculatively, to the meaning of “the image” in this context. But it behooves me to start with this massive qualification: The history of cinema in Iran is inextricably intertwined with the political and social history of Iran and is therefore much more complex than these few brief remarks will be able to show. I say this not, I hope, to undercut my own presentation, but to invigorate you all toward engaging with this film by committing further research of a kind that I am, unfortunately, unable to share with you all in the small amount of time that I have given myself. With this caveat out of the way, I will begin as close to the beginning as I can.

The earliest films in Iran date to the beginning 20th century, with several documentaries and short subjects appearing before Iran’s first feature-length film was made in 1930, with production accelerating to the extent that by the 1960s it was already possible to speak of a significant film culture in Iran. The official attitude of the regime of the Western-backed Shah was one of cautious ambivalence, championing pictures that portrayed a modern, progressive, and prosperous Iran, while suppressing those that exposed economic or social injustice. Though there was an official system of rules and regulations and the subject matter of films was closely moderated by censors, censorship seems to have been irregularly and inconsistently enforced, and when it was, it usually pertained to the political interests of the flagging regime rather than to moral or religious issues. Religious clerics, for their part, largely ignored the medium or expressed pious distaste for it, while the most conservative members of society tended to avoid movie houses.

By the 1960s and early 70s, two main film traditions had become dominant. One was the galvanic “pop-cinema,” which typically consisted of highly sexualized films, full of generic clichés and inept plagiarism, which reveled in the glitz and glamor of bourgeois urbanites while ignoring the poverty in which the vast majority of Iranians lived.

The popular success of such films was generally transient and was probably more due to the novelty of the medium rather than any artistic or cultural value to be found therein; now these films have all been more or less forgotten, some of them deliberately lost, many of them chopped to pieces by later censors, who assure us, perhaps correctly, that their removal from circulation constitutes “no great loss.” The other film tradition of lasting significance for contemporary study stands in stark contrast to the excesses of these genre films, and they include films that one is much more likely to hear about and see today. They were less tolerated by the regime, which actively discouraged and, at times, censured the young filmmakers working in this tradition. The reaction of the Shah’s regime should come as no surprise: These films were typically shot in the mode of social realism and utilized cinema as a medium through which artists could commit social critique. These films, which have been grouped by later scholars as forming the “Iranian new wave,” often achieved considerable popular success and laid the foundations for Iranian cinema after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Still from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Salaam Cinema (1995)

Tehran, 8 March 1978

Films like The Cow, released in 1969, focused on the disenfranchised who, in the unchecked advance of global capitalism and the regime’s own disastrous race toward modernization (toward “Westernization”), were abandoned by society, maligned by the new bourgeoisie, and oppressed by those in power. It may come as a surprise—but, then again, it may not—that Ayatollah Khomeini, within a year of his ascent to the spiritual head of the new Iran, would single out this film, The Cow, which was banned under the ousted Shah, as an example of “Islamic cinema.” When we consider the relation of the revolutionaries to the cinema—and remind ourselves that between 135 and 180 cinemas were destroyed or forcibly closed in the 79 uprising as symbols of moral decadence and the elite’s simpering tolerance for Western culture—Khomeini’s articulation, or rather appropriation, of The Cow as a prototype for an authentic Islamic cinema is a profound reinterpretation of the destructive energy of the 1979 revolution, one that reoriented Iranian cinema and ushered in an entire new ethical vocabulary in which films were made.

Une Maxime

le corps

est plein

de douleur

le coeur

est vide

d’amour

si c’est

assez

alors

allez

Un Souvenir

de son parapluie

jaune

anonyme

égouttement encore avec la pluie du matin

à côté de la porte

d’un café silencieux

Music journal, 9/2012

September 1. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange. The most overrated act since, what, Radiohead?

September 3. Aaron Novik: Secret of Secrets. One of the more abrasive works of Jewish mysticism, this avant-garde jazz album, inflected with Mid-Eastern tones and industrial textures, is the most personal work yet from Aaron Novik, and it offers a bracing glimpse of the musical discourse of the current Bay-area improve scene. Despite the mystical concept, however, the influence of the decidedly non-metaphysical claustrophobia of John Zorn (credited as executive producer) is not to be underestimated in shaping Novik’s vision, nor is the guitar work of the great Fred Frith, whose playing elevates several key tracks.

September 3. Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II. Well, it lacks the sustained manic brilliance of Thee Oh Sees’ best work (namely last year’s Carrion Crawler/The Dream), and unfortunately, Dwyer and co. are not the consummate musicians or composers to generate a worthwhile full-length album without resorting to that singular monomaniacal bliss.

September 5. Mike Reed’s People, Places, and Things: Clean on the Corner. No longer content to bear witness to obscurities from the archives of Chicago jazz, Mike Reed’s fourth quartet recording moves from reconstructive historical scholarship qua jazz to the mimetic embrace of jazz composition itself. However, the historical density of these recordings is beyond reproach. In particular, the mixture of brooding, melancholy cuts (e.g., “December?”) and the more playful tunes (e.g., “Sharon”) recalls the ambiguous spirit of early Ornette Coleman.

September 5. Tatsuro Kojima: 16g. A gorgeous minimalist articulation of grief and wonder, with tracks like “Out Noise” and “Composition6” offering miniaturizations of your lost childhood so fragile that they might dissolve from the heat of your breath like paper-thin sheets of ice. The work practically coins a new emotional range for minimalist electronic music while simultaneously redefining what is possible for composers working with found sound.

September 7. Anders Jormin: Ad Lucem. A dark, moving work of vocal jazz in which almost all the lyrics are sung, get this, in Latin. Though this sounds like your paradigmatic Bad Idea, a reaction perhaps vindicated when considering previous attempts at Latin-language song-cycles in popular music (see, e.g., the poorly aged Mass in F Minor by the Electric Prunes), the vocals serve to elevate the surroundings, bridging, too, the more reserved, opaque pieces with the less restrained, abstract improvisational pieces. The intriguing synthesis results in one of the most enigmatic jazz albums of the year.

September 7. Darius Jones Quartet: Book of Mae’bul (Another Kind of Sunrise). Darius Jones, who over the course of a trilogy of albums and various collaborations has defined himself as one of the most important and versatile voices in formal jazz, has concocted his greatest musical statement yet, a flowing and intricately composed suite that both exploits and twists free of the crystalline structures that have come to define (and confine) the genre. The tones and melodies communicate earthiness not aloofness, immanence not transcendence.

September 10. Animal Collective: Centipede Hz. The only thing left for them to do now is learn how to play their instruments. Lord knows they’ve reached the terminal point in the evolution of their sound.

September 10. Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio: Sources. This percussion-less collaboration between Louis Sclavis (clarinets), Benjamin Moussay (keys), and Gilles Coronado (elec. guitar) is intense, angular stuff, slipping in and out of the Cartesian coordinate grid with determined ease and recalling Blake’s oft-dropped phrase “frightful symmetry.” Imagine a team of synchronized swimmers improvising a new routine that also included high wire antics and you will have a rough idea of what this recording sounds like.

September 13. John Berman & His Gang: There Now. Like a nervous bird, the band flits back and forth between a skintight jazz vocabulary indebted to 78s from the 20s and 30s and more expressionistic flights of fancy, using five classic compositions and three of Berman’s own as points of departure. One of the most playful and good-humored jazz albums of the year is also one of the year’s best—it doesn’t take itself too seriously yet never sacrifices musicality or virtuosity. Consider “Liza,” which begins as a morbid Dixieland melody before mutating into something truly inspirational, and the gripping rupture of “I’ve Found New Baby,” and most of all the poetry of “Cloudy,” in which, as in several tracks on the album, the brass and woodwinds form such an opaque cloud of delicious energy that Jason Adasiewicz’s vibes swoop in to steal the show.

September 15. Tim Berne: Snakeoil. Berne’s debut-as-leader for ECM is almost certainly one of the finest releases of the upstanding label, whose preference for slow-burning jazz poses an excellent challenge to what we have come to think of as the Berne aesthetic. The longer tracks serpentine their way through Berne’s odd directives and bending, bleeding time signatures, with the players scattering and retracting and folding their individual passages into and under one another like world class origamists at work. Berne’s sidemen indeed carry plenty of the weight: Matt Mitchell’s piano, Oscar Noreiga’s slithering clarinets, and especially Ches Smith’s tone-perfect percussion perspicaciously bring Berne’s vertiginous compositional dares to life.

September 17. Noah Bernstein: Six. Bernstein, saxophonist for tUnE-yArDs, generated the money for this project through Kickstarter, but Six is much more than a mere vanity project or hesitant toe-dip into jazz waters. Bernstein is a consummate jazz musician, and while there is nothing here that hasn’t been done before, it’s worth remarking that there’s nothing here that isn’t worth hearing, either.

September 17. Jens Lekman: I Know What Love Isn’t. If I say that the preponderance of live instrumentation and the conceptual angle serve to humanize Jens, I don’t really mean it in a complimentary way.

September 19. Bob Mould: Silver Age. Not a comeback, no, but a smoothed-out, overproduced pop/rock with boring autobiographical contours. It was probably a mistake to release such a mediocre album the same year as the fine reissues of the Sugar albums, which together, as I am sure you are tired of hearing, constitute Mould’s best post-Hüsker Dü work.

September 19. Bob Dylan: Tempest. This album gets off to a mighty slow start with four off-the-cuff love songs that sound like leftovers from the already slight Together Through Life, and it finishes with an unremarkable eulogy of John Lennon that is about as obvious as George Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago” and a few decades late (suggesting to me that it’s been sitting in a box in Dylan’s attic for a while). The song about the Titanic is not, as some have suggested, an apocalyptic anatomy of destruction and ruin or a sublimated rumination of socio-cultural disintegration, though it is one of his more coherent attempts at narrative. The real stars of this set are the middle songs: the hypnotic ballad “Tin Angel” and haunting “Scarlet Town”; the bitter “Pay in Blood” and the satirical “Early Roman Kings.” But then, is there any use in writing this? What can I say about the New Dylan Album that 500 music critics haven’t already said?

September 22. Robert Glasper: Black Radio. A fairly groovy triangulation of modern jazz, hip hop, and soul music, rehearsing with confidence the type of trans-generic articulations that have already been occurring since the 80s.

September 22. Woods: Bend Beyond. Another year, another album of rustic Amerindie from Woods; whereas last year’s passable Sun and Shade was loose and jammy, Bend Beyond focuses on songcraft—which, sorry to say, doesn’t really play to the band’s strengths.