Iranian Women's Cinema: Recovering Voice, Reclaiming Authority

Iranian Women’s Cinema: Recovering Voice, Reclaiming Authority Rosa Holman A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts University of New South Wales August 2014 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT 'I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.' Signed ... .R.tk .. ........ ............... .. .. .. ... ... .. .. .. ... ... Date .. .. ..1. /.~ ./ .~ P.. /.?. .. ............................. .. Table of Contents Acknowledgements A note on transliteration Introduction: Situating Iranian Women’s Cinema 1 Part 1. Articulating Desire: Bared Bodies and Free Speech Chapter One. Poetic Pronunciation: Forugh Farrokhzad and the Rhythmic Body in ‘The House is Black’ 34 Chapter Two. Intimating Desire: Veiling and Voicing in the works of Marva Nabili and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad 66 Part 2. Diasporic Cinema and the Journey of Authorship Chapter Three. Recording the Journey of Exile: Memories, Movies and the Mobile Phone in Granaz Moussavi’s ‘My Tehran for Sale’ 91 Chapter Four. Imagining Iran: Language and Liminality in Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women Without Men’ 118 Part 3. Towards a Collective Language? The Influence of Genre Chapter Five. ‘Ceasefire’: From Collectivism to Comedic Compromise? Tracing the Role of ‘Talk’ in the Popular Cinema of Tahmineh Milani 146 Chapter Six. Drama, Documentary and the Dialogic in the works of Samira Makhmalbaf and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad 173 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 216 Filmography 250 2 Acknowledgements I offer my sincerest gratitude, first and foremost, to my supervisor, Dr. Michelle Langford, who has worked tirelessly to support me throughout the duration of my candidature. Michelle’s commitment to nurturing critical scholarship in her students benefits all those who come under her tutelage. Her generous approach to supervision has greatly aided this project and I feel very fortunate to have been mentored by such a committed, passionate and supportive supervisor. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor, Professor Bill Ashcroft, who has extended his expertise at critical junctures in the process of thesis writing. I am grateful to Associate Professor Dorottya Fabian, Professor Annette Hamilton and Professor Ramaswami Haridranath for their incisive and encouraging criticism throughout the various review processes. For a deeper understanding of the highly nuanced, allegorical and colloquial forms of written and spoken Persian, I am entirely indebted to Samane Golmakani and Mahsa Salamati. For kindly reading chapters and providing helpful feedback, I must thank Laetitia Nanquette and Zoe Holman. I would also like to thank my mother, Philomena, for the time and energy spent proofreading my thesis, as well as for her enduring moral support and encouragement. Warm thanks to my dear aunt, Rosalie, for providing me with a ‘room of one’s own’ and for her generous hospitality. No mother can write a thesis without the assistance of a ‘village of carers’ and for this reason I am so grateful for the ongoing support of my partner, Paul Jones. I am also thankful for the hours of child-minding performed by devoted grandparents, Philomena and Paul Holman, as well by the wonderful carers and educators at our local crèche, kinder and school. I have benefited greatly from the experience of those who have gone before me in successfully balancing motherhood and Ph.D. study, in particular Dr. Kathryn Bowen and Dr. Georgie Arnott, whose encouragement, insight and humour have been so sustaining. Finally, I would like to thank my children, Mirabel and Theodore, for their patience and understanding during the past four years. 3 A Note on Transliterations The system of transliteration adopted in this thesis is much like the approach utilised in the journal Iranian Studies, in that with the exception of ayn (‘) and hamzeh (’), diacritical marks have been omitted. While the absence of diacritic marks is arguably problematic, in particular with the transliteration of such a Persian vowel as “a”, that may stand for both alif and fatha, this thesis has tried to adopt a simple method of translation, employing the most commonly used and recognizable anglicised forms of Persian words and names. So the letter ghaf has been represented as “gh”, as in “Mossadegh”, not “Mossadeq”. All Persian words are italicized, and when referencing an Iranian literary or cinematic title, the Persian title is provided first, with the English translation in parenthesis and then adopted in all subsequent references. This applies equally to the use of French titles and names. Passages of poetry have been quoted as they appear transliterated in their original collections. 4 Introduction: Situating Iranian Women’s Filmmaking The Question of Terminology A study delineated along gender lines is always going to be theoretically problematic. Indeed generations of critics have contested and critiqued the “women-centric” descriptor, due to its association with regressive and essentializing notions of difference, alterity and the oppositional (Kuhn 1982, Kaplan 1983, de Lauretis 1987, Mayne 1990). Within Western scholarship “women’s cinema” at various times has been associated with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood melodramas (Doanne 1987), 1970s avant-garde and counter-cinema (Johnson 1975, Mulvey 1975) and “minor” cinemas (Butler 2002). But women’s filmmaking need not be demarcated for its intrinsic “feminine aesthetic”, or a particular mode of address. Nor must it follow an auteurist model of analysis that ignores the industrial and broader socio-cultural conditions of filmmaking. Instead, the purpose of a project such as this one is to acknowledge the diverse nature of the films made by Iranian women filmmakers, the broad spectrum of strategies and practices adopted in their work, and their varied and heterogeneous subject positions. The films studied in this thesis are not necessarily bound by common production practices or even by political and geographical affiliations. Rather, this thesis argues that their commonality lies in their attempts to use the cinematic medium as a way to reclaim voice and discursive authority. But how do we begin to define an “Iranian women’s cinema”, if not by aesthetic, geographic or ideological cohesions? More recently, a new generation of critics have identified the manner in which “women’s cinema” continues to operate as a thorny and ambivalent concept (Butler 2002, Shohat 2006, Moore 2008, Naficy 2012b). As Butler astutely observes “‘women’s cinema is a complex critical, theoretical and institutional construction…a hybrid concept, arising from a number of overlapping practices and discourses, and subject to a baffling variety of definitions” (8). Such a categorisation risks “erasing” “heterogeneous identities” (Moore, 10) and “shoehorning” films under monolithic headings (Naficy, 94). While affiliations 1 based on gender difference and assumed collectivity need always be interrogated, a consideration of women’s cultural production that emphasizes breadth and heterogeneity can usefully serve to complicate the concept and canon of “women’s filmmaking”. In her study, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (2002), Butler eventually settles on the term “minor cinema” as the most fitting descriptor for those works produced by minority and marginalised women filmmakers (18). Although such a term may aptly describe many of the socio-cultural constraints confronting Iranian women filmmakers, it also unintentionally reproduces the center-periphery binary, in which the “West” is once again critically situated as dominant and central (Shohat 2006, 3). Butler’s term also fails to attest to the domestic popularity, international visibility and transnationality of many Iranian women directors and the manner in which they now occupy a central role in Iranian cultural production. Certainly, the works themselves and the circumstances under which they are produced attest to the oppressive material and ideological conditions confronting Iranian women and filmmakers in general. But the body of films now associated with such filmmakers and the status of the directors themselves, means they no longer can be considered “minor” or peripheral, although they continue to contest patriarchal privilege and cultural traditionalism. As Farzaneh Milani argues in relation to Iranian women writers, …Recognizing gender, at this point in Iranian literary history, is a necessary critical perspective. Looking at the works of women writers as written by women is an act of compensation, a search for neglected features, an examination of misconceptions, omissions, and sexually biased assumptions. It should not be construed as an attempt either to segregate women or to place them in a lower category (1992, 12). Milani’s thesis is still relevant today when deciding how to situate Iranian women filmmakers, considering their

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