The Sound of a Cicada: November 2012

To this effect, Hamid Dabashi has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema, examining both 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 earlier media, including forms of illustrated public storytelling, court paintings, and, especially, Persian miniatures, the illustrations that accompanied the classics of Persian prose and poetry.

Dabashi is not the only critic to note the connection to Persian miniatures, so allow me, if you will, to dwell for a moment on this mode in Persian painting. Typically, each miniature functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose, which may be incorporated into the miniature or set en face), the context (the position of this image as one in a series of images), and the reader’s interpretation of the relationships among the various figures and the landscape in which the painting is set. In an essay on the relation between Iranian cinema and Persian miniatures, Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan goes so far as to argue that Persian miniatures “foreground deconstruction and multiple narration…hidden meanings, symbolic iconography, and intertextuality are mediating mechanisms by which the private and public spheres are regulated” (113). In addition to the function of regulation, I would argue that there tends to be a sense in which what is public and what is private are relativized.

Here is a painting of a palace scene that dates to the mid-sixteenth century where we can see this relativization of boundary and private and public space.

Note the collusion of watchers and watched in this detail on the right, a visual unit in which we can see examples of three common types of animate figural representations in Persian miniatures. First, the principal actor, the focal point of a given scene, whom we can identify as the royal figure in the center; second, the attendant, whose function is to highlight the principal actor while also enabling, in some way, his or her action, whom we can identify as the man serving him on the lower right; and finally, passive observers, who typically have no influence on the action per say but serve to guide the eyes of the painting’s external observer—you, us—whom we can identify with the three women placed above them.

This visual unit is doubled here, above and to the right.

Finally, here are two enlargements of the very top and bottom of the painting that illustrate the use of horizontals to create narrative space in a way that seems to endow the painting with a sense of temporality.

Note the way, in the upper detail, that the palace walls almost seem to dissolve into the nature scene painted just beyond them. The formal constraint of flattening and abstraction that we witness in this painting serves to deconstruct the binary between inside and outside, between public and private—here, we have insides that are outside, outsides that are inside, outsides that are outside of outside, and insides that are inside the inside. (Or something like that.)

This relativization of public/private, which I think is inherent in any articulation that links a visual image to a textual image, is crucial for A Separation, so much of which takes place in a lacuna between the public and private spheres—a gap which I think is opened up particularly in the juridical context, in which both public and private incidents and relationships come under review and where the politicization of bare life leads to the experience of utter vulnerability before the production of legal authority. In the juridical setting, economic and social inequality especially serves to destabilize this binary and introduces the effects of power into both the public and private spheres. Thus, the question of class is integral to understanding the film, as is the question of gender and society; remember that this film was made under very strict rules governing the filmic representation of gender and sexuality, and think about what this film tells us about gender relations, especially across socio-economic divisions. In our film, I also want you to pay special attention to the use of space in constructing the narrative and characters, and think about what actions happen only in public, what details are revealed only in private. Furthermore, consider both juridical and religious enunciations—there are several examples of both throughout the film—and how people represent themselves in religious and legal contexts. Finally, think about how the technology of cinema can serve not only, as in the case of the beloved miniatures, to relativize but also to revitalize the boundaries between public and private. To this effect, I want us to have the opportunity to reflect on the enigmatic ending of this film, and think about what sort of experience this caesura leaves us with: the film seems to reach a hollowed-out experience of subjectivity that, I think, has implications for the notion of privacy in a biopolitical world; the film seems to me to reach an ethical suspension of judgment before the confluence of religion and law, and, indeed, before language.

References

Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. London: Verso, 2001.

Mir-Ehsan, Mir-Ahmad-e. “Dark Light.” In Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker, 105-114. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

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