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.
