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.

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 10)

IV.

Data Compression (Conclusion)

Following Blanton’s critical investigation into the media environments of nineteenth and twentieth century scholars and philosophers, this essay has suggested that Breton’s radical reimagining of the Apostle Paul’s faith and mission can be read as a reconfiguration of religion in relation to contemporary information networks. But, significantly, Blanton’s argument does not stop there: the necessary task now facing religious and secular thinkers alike is a reimagining of the medial space that they inhabit as well as a pushing-forward into the uncharted, leaving signposts along the way for future inquiry. The only thinkable way to achieve this end, as Blanton himself suggests in his repeated admonitions toward interdisciplinary cooperation, is to forget the obsessive privileging of one’s own discourse and to take seriously one’s responsibility toward the discursive traditions of others. To do so, a provisional common language, a hybrid tongue fitting for subjects of difference, will be necessary.

This means that the “Christian legacy,” if scholars and philosophers together decide that it even exists and that it can still be useful in service of justice, can no longer be possessed by one or the other, to be used merely to constitute the hegemony of one’s own discipline or empower one’s own knowledge-producing machine. Paul must be shared.

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 9)

III.6

Breton thus introduces a formal disjunction between reality and appearance, meaning that the Christian exists in the as if or as though of 1 Cor 7:29-31:

The appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. (NRSV)

And, one is tempted to add, let those who read Breton’s Saint Paul do so as though they did not read. A book that references such moving words is dancing to a close with a messianic anticipation of its own: an impetuous desire to be something other than a book.

It must be with some surprise, then, that Breton’s Saint Paul should encounter itself again, 23 years later and in English, both as a book (for the nostalgic among us) and as an instantly purchasable and downloadable stream of data. The latter option truly makes possible Paul’s dictum to buy without possessing, though this is probably not what Breton had in mind when imagining the liberative capacity of this new technology of mediation. The technological capabilities of the e-book are, of course, consistent with Breton’s demands for a new technology of mediation, making even the idea of a “concordance” seem patently anachronistic—texts are now their own concordance. But even this mediation is mediated by the market; even the one who reads this book as an e-book, with these added features, must feel a profound sense of disappointment or unfulfillment upon reaching the book’s conclusion. The spectralization of text and information has ushered in a new, semi-spectral movement of world capitalism: the commercialization of the Internet allows currency without currency to be exchanged for a book without a book—a spectralized book, which, despite everything, retains its status as “property.”

For those who purchase their e-book through Amazon.com, the book’s cover again deepens the irony: a fading wisp of smoke will be displayed on a machine called the “Kindle.” The fire of revolution, it turns out, was never even lit.

The Spectralization of Paul (Part 8)

III.5

Over and against the objections that Paul was an (inadvertent or otherwise) apologist for social order and the Pax Romana, the final chapters of Breton’s book argue for an interpretation of Paul’s mission that pursues his radical, utopian impulse. Chapter 5 focuses on Paul’s views of communion, community, churches, and the Church. To retrieve the original sense of “communion” in Paul, which, as his readers will be well aware, entailed much more than simply partaking of the Eucharist, Breton redefines the (Pauline) Christian as a creature of prepositions—the with of participation and, most importantly, the in of “being-in,” which “insinuates a more profound relation: the relation of a living being in the milieu of life where he is rooted, where he moves, in which he dwells, and where he remains, free to breathe in the native air” (128-129; italics original). The believer is in Christ, and, in the inversion, Christ is in the believer. This in turn founds a relationship and a communion through forms of abstract co-dependency rather than resemblance or authoritarian identification.

The function of community, which Breton summarizes as the “operant existence of communion” (130), makes this clear. Community is defined, above all, by a freedom from needing to be the same, whether because of external compulsions or internal anxieties that might produce a will-to-resemblance in some and a will-to-power in others (132). Community is an “unsupervised horizon” in which total dispossession, willful redistribution, and sharing are the authenticating marks (133). However, with the introduction of more converts from increasingly diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds comes the increasing complexity of internal organization and the ascendency of authority. For Breton, the construction of the Pauline church is an exemplar of a more general, perhaps inevitable, historical process: “The more a given group grows in volume and qualitative diversity, the more the menace of centrifugal forces and internal dissentions intensifies, and the more, consequently, the weight of an indisputable authority imposes itself as an intervention, putting an end to the peril” (134). To safeguard the community from collapsing into sects, Paul must maintain a universal vision through rigorous “unicity” (135) that allows the churches to form part of the Church, a non-institutional, non-hierarchical non-structure that ensures the equality of all its participants.

But what is the unicity that undergirds the Church’s universality? It is, of course, the “body of death” (140). The brief final chapter radicalizes this insight into a call to arms—or, more precisely, to disarm—that provides a profound meditation on the sublime nothingness of the cross, in the non-face of which humans cease to be humans and God ceases to be God. This folly, this openly praised scandal upon which the Greeks and the Jews alike look with bafflement and contempt, is the absolute negation of society that comes to cause community and becomes the center of communion; it is the revocation of all identity so that humans, who now share in Christ’s own kenosis, might become slaves to a symbol of failure and servants of the world that they negate. One is called, in other words, to serve while rejecting the glory of service (149), or to serve without serving. For Breton, Paul makes possible something like the “true gift,” the unqualified gift of oneself to the world. In this formula, the gift of oneself is the gift of nothing—a weight without density for a time without duration.