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2009 BRISMES Annual Conference
“FRONTIERS: SPACE, SEPARATION AND CONTACT IN THE MIDDLE EAST”
School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures (SLLC)
STATE (OF MIND) AND SPACE:
CONFLICTED SPHERES IN IRAN
In 1933, Iranian filmmaker Abdolhosein Sepanta made the first Iranian talkie the Lor Girl. It is about a provincial gypsy girl who falls in love with a city man. On her way to the city, however, she is faced with numerous roadblocks that need to be overcome. Iranian cinema itself has followed a similar fate. Mohsen Makhmalbaf in his film Once Upon A Time, Cinema tells an allegorical tale of the artistic burden of the Iranian filmmakers who thrived under the surveillance of the monarchy and then, after the Revolution, a fundamentalist regime.
Many Iranian intellectuals believe that in 1979 their ideals, along with the revolution, were hijacked by the fundamentalists, leading into the founding of a radical Islamic state. In the first part of this presentation I will investigate and explore how the political and ideological conflicts of Iran as a nation have been translated into the cinematic depiction of individual and domestic spaces, hence defining and shaping the internal anatomy of Iranian cinema as a mode of public expression in lieu of freedom of speech. And later, I shall explore how the struggle that was taken up by filmmakers within the frames of their manufactured simulacra, has extended itself into the spheres of public performance in the spectacle of digital photographs and amateur video footage. The vernacular these filmmakers express themselves in is the language that was very much derived from a poetic sense of expression. However, the same language has undergone a significant change in recent days that is worthy of discussion.
The production code that was originally drafted during the early years of cinema in Iran, made sure that the new art cannot criticise the throne and the aristocracy, as well as the clergy. After the revolution, the production code became even more rigid about revealing women’s hair and proscribing images suggestive of or showing physical contact between sexes. When one is betrayed by one’s own homeland, one’s own people and ideals, one’s identity turns into an embattled space of polarised yet dialogic conflict. This raises the problematic of representation. A problematic of this order manifests itself most excessively in places where gender roles and gender definitions are jeopardised. An immediate space in which the biggest lie about gender perception is at large is the domestic sphere.
Such limiting ideological prohibitions have forced directors like Abbas Kiarostami to seek less direct (hence, more metaphoric/symbolic) ways of portraying this conflict. Kiarostami’s 10 Ten, located and filmed entirely inside a car, focuses on domestic struggles between men and women in Islamic Iran. Such a depiction of domestic conflicts, contained within the suffocating space of a car (instead of the ‘real’ domestic space which could not be filmed in any case), renders a wholly new dimension to the definition of domestic conflicts. Gender politics contends subversively with the restrictive religious rules that interfere with the very practice of filmmaking as a means of socio-aesthetic expression in contemporary Iran. As a result, the audience never gets to see any couples together in Kiarostami’s film; rather, they travel with a woman who sews together the scattered shreds of her life, meandering her way across the streets of Tehran. It is as if the city itself is jam-packed into her car, crushing her freedom, her role as a woman -- a mother and at the same time a divorcée who has just remarried. This almost non-spatial ‘space’ provides a fresh dimension to the impossible representation of the fraught domestic sphere in Iranian cinema.
A handful of Iranian filmmakers, including the successful female filmmaker Rakhshan Bani Etemad, bring the private into public zone. In her Under the Skin of the City, where her objective is to show the dynamics of a thriving working class family, she locates them in the jungle of the highways of metropolitan Tehran. The mother feeds her children without making any physical contact while they all are hemmed in inside a borrowed car. This is an ordinary moment of everyday life that can turn into a lie if placed inside the space of a house. Therefore, Bani Etemad, in her effort to avoid lying, has her actors enact the intimate sphere of the private, inside a car, if only to lose them among thousands in the city. Or she turns the metaphoric lens of her camera towards signs and hints between lovers who cannot touch each other. When the young man finally shouts, “I love you” into the empty space of Tehran’s skyline through the window of a lift, Bani Etemad brings the public to the private space of his unspoken love. She risks the “real” to tell the stories of social conflicts at different levels. Less poetic than Makhmalbaf or Kiarostami, Bani Etemad keeps her eye on the social space of the Iranian conflict.
Less imaginative than Bani Etemad, in his usage of poetic and metaphoric vernacular of Iranian cinema, is Davoud Mirbagheri, who focuses on the conflict of Iranian individuals desiring to leave the nation in search of brighter futures. His Snowman portrays the psychological state of an Iranian man, an émigré hopeful and investigates the relation between Iran, as the source of national conflicts, and its citizen. The protagonist, ashamed of his nationality, wants to escape to the United States. But as a man his chances of getting a visa are less than slim. He is willing to trade his identity, even his gender, to be accepted by the greatest symbol of the west in Istanbul, Turkey, the US Embassy. The film is strategically located and filmed in Turkey, a country located in the social, cultural and political interstices of Asia and Europe. While Snowman puts an Iranian citizen palpably at the crossroads of international conflict and identity crisis, many other Iranian filmmakers, focusing on domestic issues, are fearful of recreating any real domestic sphere, since domestic space cannot be replicated ‘as-is’ in cinema due to Islamic laws and restrictions.
These different films represent the numerous attempts being made by Iranian filmmakers to surpass/subvert/circumvent their artistic and social conflicts with the state, a strategic undercutting to not only survive, but continue to explore and expand the definition of the endangered (often also engendered) individual and domestic space in contemporary Iranian cinematic expression.
As Kiarostami testifies to the power of imagination and dream one will realise the fundamental presence of imagination as the vessel through which to speak the otherwise unspeakable trauma that the Iranian artist is constantly contending with. This is the preformed simulacra in contemporary Iranian cinema—what Jean Baudrillard calls, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… the map that precedes the territory… the map that engenders the territory.” Here the simulacra is fighting for survival in the space fabricated by the filmmaker who has been struggling since the 1979 Revolution. Tahineh Milani, another leading female filmmaker, was arrested for making The Hidden Half in 2001. A number of films have been banned from screening till date or rendered ineffective through severely limited and/or censored releases.
But, beyond cinema, there is a further performance that is not fabricated, but is nonetheless a simulation, not directed by any filmmaker. And that is the present space of the Iranian people’s conflict with the state machinery where Baudrillard’s semiosis points at the simulacrum. Baudrillard, citing from the Book of Ecclesiastes, asserts that “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals, that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
Up until 12th June, the Iranian filmmaker had risked his or her life to tell the tale of their subjects’ traumatic experience under the dictatorship of the fundamentalist regime, using the poetic cinematic language. Suddenly, the erstwhile subjects, but those that are behind the multitude of cameras are recomposing their new vernacular in their own blood. It was impossible for me to present my paper without acknowledging this magnificent change that is in the making, that we still are trying hard to make sense of, that we hope to move against all odds in the direction that we all desire it to go. It is the larger frame of the space within which Iranian identity is being shaped that can render full meaning to what I prepared months ago, for this conference. The frontier (or even the frontman) is no longer the Iranian filmmaker or his/her probing camera. The ones that have taken the conflict between the citizens and the state to a different level by the means of digital and virtual dissemination, constitute the new frontier.
12th June was the measure in time, the signifier of the sign, when Iranian identity within the larger narrative of ‘Iranian’-ness was morphed into the look and the location of their presence in the multitudes of their cyber images. When the vernacular was shifted and its every vertebrae was redefined through spores of poor quality mobile videos, the space of Iranian identity reached its closest to the truth of the real simulacrum within the virtual terrain of cyberspace. The defiance of these “videographers” forced the cyberspace to reshape itself to accommodate this strong force of existence that has been mobilised in a democratic act. YouTube altered the functionality of its CitizenTube to facilitate millions of Iranian users whose access to the internet can be problematic. Facebook and Google devised ways of accommodating this wave of users who are not using these tools to just see their friend’s honeymoon pictures. These were people who became who they are in Google search pages, in Facebook postings, on YouTube and in Twitter. Iran’s image, as a result is at its closest to “reality” these days within this virtual space. The Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, the borderlines with Turkey and Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan do not anymore define the location of this nation. Iran is located in every twit of millions of Twitter users, in every post of millions of Facebook subscribers, in every shaky clip of recent events of Iran on YouTube. Iran is re-shaping the very concept of photo-journalism and documentary films as frontiers in Civil Rights Movement in the age of virtual reality.
What my paper initially talked about was the space and state of Iran in Iranian cinema before 12th June 2009. That was when the filmmaker shot his or her subject through their artistic lens to tell their tales in symbols and signs, in metaphor and poetry. Post-12 June, the former “subject”, the sujet, is behind the camera, and the filmmaker is shifted his/her place by becoming the subject. Now, Makhmalbaf’s image is being disseminated in many spores of mobile video digits over blogs, YouTube and Facebook pages. Today, those behind the camera cannot afford to use the language of metaphor and symbols. They make symbols. They become symbols. They make Neda. They become Neda. They show bloody female bodies carried by men, they show all that they were not supposed to show. They show all that Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Bani Etemad, Majidi, Beizaie, Milani and many more, could not ever show.
In the films I discussed, I argued that the subjects (Iranian citizens who are actors, enacting an Iranian condition) are posing in front of the shooting camera to assume another body for themselves. They translate themselves in advance into an image. But the virtual images of Iranians who have been shot, twice, once by the brutal bullet of the statesmen, and then by the camera, are the vernacular with no need to be translated or assumed.
In pictures we have seen, at times the subjects on the streets of Tehran, pose willingly for the camera while knowing too well what may become of them if they are identified by the state. By risking their lives, they are defining the space of moving and still images. These images, in their own turn are defining the space of conflict, configuring the civil rights, establishing freedom of speech, looking the dictatorship in the eye. The concept of the “frontier” in the Middle East is defined anew. Hamid Dabashi in his recent article, “People Power” in Al-Ahram suggests that “[a]ll Arab and Muslim potentates ought to know that their young are watching events in Iran with a keen interest. It is not only Iranians that are wired to Facebook and Twitter, so are their brothers and sisters around the globe, throughout the Arab and Muslim world. ” It is apparent that people who are on the street to claim their civil rights are aware of the presence of multitudes of cameras. They are aware that in seconds the reality they are living and bleeding, are going to turn into their virtual reality. Their image in every second is multiplied in cyber space every time a viewer clicks. In addition to this, there are moments of life and death when the subject is not posing to be killed, but is being shot, not for the camera, nonetheless, the camera is shooting. That is the moment of innocence, the moment of truth, if truth can be defined in this sense, close to the way in which Baudrillard would have read it. Death in the space of these moving pictures and photographs captures us as it does in life. Neda was the symbolic representation of that moment. This woman in her virtual life became the frontier of the civil rights movement, her image, her running blood and her wandering gaze before she left, all captured by number of mobile phone cameras and amateur cameras. The blast of this embryologic morula is the spectacle that is going to be lived anew in every click of every viewer on the net. Dabashi in the same article warns us that “young Arabs and Muslims around the globe are not immune to the demands young Iranians are exacting at the heavy cost, courageously exposing their bare chests against the bullets and batons of tyranny.” And this is the new, the post-12th June phase of the conflict between the state and the individual’s space, the site of trauma lying at the heart of Iranian identity.
I would like to end my presentation with a quote from Roland Barthes:
What the Photograph reproduced to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always lead the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression.”
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- Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, New York, Semiotext(e), 1983, p. 2.
- Baudrillard, Jean, Book of Ecclesiastes in Simulacra & Simulations, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 166.
- Dabashi, Hamid, “People power,” Al-Ahram weekly on-line, 25 June - 1 July 2009, Issue No. 953Issue No. 953
- Dabashi, Hamid, “People power,” Al-Ahram weekly on-line, 25 June - 1 July 2009, Issue No. 953Issue No. 953
- Barthes, Roland Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, p. 4.
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