sign in sign up
<<
Home , A Moment of Innocence, Blackboards, Cinema of Iran, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Gharbzadegi

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: 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 for Sale’ 91

Chapter Four. Imagining : Language and Liminality in ’s ‘Women Without Men’ 118

Part 3. Towards a Collective Language? The Influence of Chapter Five. ‘Ceasefire’: From Collectivism to Comedic Compromise? Tracing the Role of ‘Talk’ in the Popular Cinema of 146

Chapter Six. Drama, Documentary and the Dialogic in the works of 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 , 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 scholarship “women’s cinema” at various times has been associated with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood (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 made by Iranian women filmmakers, 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 visibility and popularity, as well as the complex and mutable socio-cultural role they have occupied in modern and post-revolutionary Iran. While it is imperative to stress their gender as a mean of redressing their historical and critical marginalisation, it is also important to delineate their paradoxical freedoms and restrictions, and their continuing assertion for greater agency, mobility and representation.

2 For towards the end of the twentieth century more than a dozen women filmmakers were participating in the Iranian cinema industry, with their involvement having markedly increased from the late 1980s.While women filmmakers may have only accounted for less than 6% of all directors working in Iran in 1999, the quality and proliferation of their work contributed to their prominence as respected filmmakers, both domestically and internationally (Naficy 2012b, 139). Iranian women directors’ increased visibility was in part also due to the new emphasis of the Islamic government in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Having dismantled the star system that flourished under the from the 1950s, and its association with Westernization and sexuality, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance shifted the focus to the director as both the new “star” of cinema and a symbol of intellectual and moral authority (Naficy 2012b, 185). Of those female filmmakers who emerged in the late 1980s, over half went on to direct more than one , with some of the most productive and widely recognized directors, including Puran Derakhshandeh (b. 1951), Rakshan Bani-Etemad (b. 1954), Tahmineh Milani (b.1960), Maniyeh Hekmat (b.1962), and Marzieh Meshkini (b.1969). A new generation of filmmakers have also emerged in the last fifteen years, including (b 1971), (b.1974) Samira Makhmalbaf (b. 1980), and (b. 1988). Iranian women adopted a far more central and public role as filmmakers in post- revolutionary Iran. As Naficy points out, women’s increased participation in the cinema industry, not only as directors but in small numbers as writers, technicians and producers, was representative of their growing role in “other socio-political and cultural spheres, despite their second class status before Islamic sharia law” (2012b, 94). From the early 1990s, Iranian women began campaigning for complementary rights, with articles being published in the prominent journal, Zazan (Women) that promoted a reformist and more egalitarian agenda, known as “new religious thinking (nau andishi-yi dini)” (Mir-Hosseini 2004, 212.) While the campaign for women’s rights was met with opposition from the clerical establishment and conservatives in general, it signalled the beginning of women’s public battle for greater freedoms and legal entitlements in post-revolutionary Iran. The relaxation of certain cultural and social codes, particularly under ’s presidency from 1997 to 2005, also enabled women to contribute to the nation’s growing cinematic output. Women’s public profile as filmmakers, particularly from the late 1990s,

3 was thus an important marker of their increasing involvement as productive and professional citizens in the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite significant and continuing logistical and socio-cultural constraints. While a large canon of films can be attributed to contemporary Iranian women filmmakers, only three features were made by women directors in modern Iran: Shahla Riahi’s Marjan (1956), Marva Nabili’s Khak-e sar be mohr (The Sealed Soil, 1979) and Kobra Saeedi’s Maryam va Mani (Maryam and Mani, 1979). But it is Forugh Farrokhzad’s “poetic documentary”, or, what this thesis terms, an essay film, Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black, 1964) that has been critically hailed as one of the most important and influential films of this period (Rosenbaum 2005, Dabashi 2007, Rahimieh 2010). While these earlier filmmakers may not have been constrained by the prescriptions of Islamic discourses as were their post-revolutionary counterparts, they still had to contend with the national program of modernization and Westernization as implemented by the monarchical government. From 1953 Muhammad consolidated Iran’s diplomatic ties with the United States, encouraging industrialisation and attempting to quash leftist political parties and liberal dissidents (Afary 2009, 202). As various scholars have emphasized, the Shah’s attempt at liberalizing Iran both enfranchised women with reforms and also circumscribed the nature of their campaigns and organisations (Kia 2005, Afary 2009, DeGroot 2010). The handful of women who did make films in this period thus had to negotiate the tensions between modernization and traditionalism, and the manner in which women’s cultural identities and bodies often became emblematic of the Shah’s political aspirations and failures. One of the central questions that this thesis proposes is whether these films present a common socio-political perspective regarding the status of and what aspects of women’s societal status are identified as most problematic and prohibitive. Have representations of women’s subjectivities, bodies and experiences shifted with the introduction of Islamic national discourses? With the representation of women’s sexuality being highly regulated and prescribed both socially and cinematically in post-revolutionary Iran, one of the key points of investigation will be the question of how directors specifically portray romantic relationships and desire without compromising the cinematic codes of practice enforced by the State. What aesthetic and stylistic innovations have they

4 introduced in this process? Is ‘desire’ necessarily represented through inference and codification, or does it explicitly manifest itself in the narrative structure? How do the filmmakers portray the discontinuities between the private and social selves of their characters? What , and thus formal and structural codes of practice, are adopted in the process of filmmaking? Do certain thematic or stylistic continuities emerge when the films are examined comparatively? Such research questions have been fundamental in guiding my close textual analysis and exploring how women directors have managed to balance State injunctions regarding representations of women with their own aesthetic and ideological inclinations. By examining the role of “voicing” in Iranian women’s cinema this thesis accounts for both the particularities of various socio-cultural practices and the rich body of scholarship theorising the function of the voice in cinema. It argues that Iranian women’s cinema privileges and foregrounds the “voice” through a range of aesthetic strategies, including voice-over, dialogue, self-inscription and authorial signatures. It maintains that the purpose of these various modes of “voicing” is to attain greater authority over the cinematic representation of women. But more broadly, voicing also points to the processes of identity formation, cultural belonging and participation in national and political discourses. All the films studied in this project reference the socio-cultural restrictions experienced by women in Iran, while imagining alternative realities in which individuals can enjoy greater autonomy, self-expression and political import. In order to analyse these films, this thesis will not adopt a particular theoretical framework in which to redress previous cultural or scholarly gaps in the literature. Instead, it draws upon a range of historical research, theoretical models and textual analyses. In promoting “voicing” as a central device in Iranian women’s cinema, this study underscores the importance of women’s discursive authority in film and its relationship to cultural agency within the broader socio-political context. This thesis will address the marginalisation of Iranian women filmmakers in film scholarship by approaching pre- and post-revolutionary women’s cinema with a methodology that balances material and textual analysis. This study will be sensitive to both the socio-cultural context of film production and the nuances of the cinematic text. It seeks to organize its intervention around the socio-political history, film theory and the institutional practices of women’s film culture. It will also broaden the

5 category of Iranian women’s cinema by examining the works of exiled and diasporic filmmakers. In this sense, this project attempts to be as inclusive as possible in its definition of women’s cinema and avoid further marginalizing and neglecting the rich body of work produced by women Iranian filmmakers over the past fifty years. However, this thesis is not a complete and comprehensive overview of the large body of works produced by Iranian filmmakers, with certain important filmmakers and works falling outside the scope of this project (most importantly Puran Derakhshandeh, Manijeh Hekmat and Marzieh Meshkini). It only examines one of the three pre-revolutionary fictional features made by Iranian women directors, and thus does not discuss Shahla Riahi’s important contribution of Marjan (1956). Nor does the project engage with all of those works produced by the growing field of diasporic Iranian directors (such as those by Susan Taslimi and Tina Gharavi). In choosing to privilege textual analysis and a detailed engagement with the rich layers of the diegesis, this thesis has elected to focus its primary analysis on eight films. It has selected and organised the examination of the eight films around the thematic principles of voicing, authorship and genre. While it is may be simpler to structure a thesis around the filmmakers’ biographies or the temporal sequence in which the films were produced, this thesis prefers to avoid auteurist or historical narratives as organisational principles. Instead each section has been positioned around a key concept, such as “poetic voicing” or “exilic voicing”. Such an approach allows for comparative analysis, as is performed in chapters two and six, in which aesthetic and thematic patterns may be more keenly identified, examined and explicated. It is for this reason that Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s work is analysed in two separate chapters, and is appraised for different conceptual frameworks (such as the use of the lyrical voice in the second chapter and the ethics of documentary filmmaking in the sixth chapter). It is hoped that such an approach illuminates the breadth of a filmmaker such as Bani-Etemad and the various theoretical and thematic analyses that may be applied to her work. The initial chapters of the thesis are thus grouped under the heading of “Personal Poetics and the Veiled Voice” and discuss the aesthetics and lyricism of “voicing” in relation to Forugh Farrockzad’s Khaneh siah ast (The House Is Black, 1962), Marva Nabili’s Khak-e sar be mohr (The Sealed Soil, 1977) and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Banoo- ye ordibehest (The May Lady 1999). Here the analysis is centered on the poetic voice-over

6 and the personal processes of enunciating identity and centralising the desirous and rhythmic body. The analysis of two pre-revolutionary films also means this section is interested in the representation of women’s voices, bodies and identities and the manner in which they are shaped by the intersection of modernity and tradition. The second section of the thesis, entitled “Diasporic Cinema and the Journey of Authorship” constitutes two chapters on diasporic Iranian directors and the manner in which they approach notions of self-inscription, autobiography and reflexivity. Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009) and Shirin Neshat’s Women without Men (2010) evoke the experiences of dislocation and exile through the practices of allegory and ellipsis, as well as a poeticism that continues to reference and pay homage to Forugh Farrokhzad. The final part of the thesis, “Towards a Collective Language? National Discourses and the Influence of Genre”, focuses on the issues of dialogue, narrative and the manner in which various genres (, comedy, the docu-drama and the documentary) facilitate subversive and politicized filmmaking. One chapter is dedicated to examining the role of “talk” and dialogue in Tahmineh Milani’s Atash Bas (Ceasefire, 2006), while the final chapter looks at the ethical implication of various cinematic modes, specifically the documentary and the docu-drama in Rakshan Bani-Etemad’s Ruzegar-e ma (Our Times, 2002) and Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib (The Apple, 1998). The aim of organising the thesis in this manner is to not only complicate notions of the cinematic “voice” and women’s cultural visibility, but to underscore the varied practices adopted by these filmmakers and the way in which discursive authority is strategically staged and recovered. Each of the films studied in this thesis signal an important cultural juncture in the development of the Iranian , and also in the evolution of women’s socio- cultural status in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. By beginning with Farrokhzad’s influential The House is Black (1962) and concluding with one of Iran’s younger filmmakers, Samira Makhmalbaf and her debut feature, The Apple (1998), this thesis does construct an historical narrative of Iranian women’s participation in the domestic film industry and the manner in which it corresponds with women’s campaigns for greater civil rights and personal freedoms over the past fifty years. The films thus have been chosen, in part, for the way in which they emblematise certain historical moments, socio-cultural shifts and political cycles.

7 In his scholarship on Iranian women filmmakers, Hamid Naficy (2012b) actually delineates three generations of post-revolutionary filmmakers, with among others, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad belonging to the first wave of female filmmakers, Tahmineh Milani emerging as part of the second generation and Samira Makhmalbaf signaling the arrival of a third wave. This thesis echoes Naficy’s schematization to some extent by choosing those post-revolutionary filmmakers who have been most productive, influential and critically acclaimed directors of their “generation”. Bani-Etemad has directed well over a dozen high-quality features and documentaries, not including her earlier televisual work and is one of the most domestically celebrated and internationally recognized Iranian filmmakers. It is for this reason, that this thesis has included both a fictional feature and a documentary from Bani-Etemad’s oeuvre. Tahmineh Milani and Samira Makhmalbaf have also been highly productive, while pushing the boundaries of cinematic censorship and experimenting with genre. In particular, Milani’s melodramas and comedies demonstrate the manner in which a director may approach the theme of Iranian women’s cultural marginalization and political voicelessness while remaining commercially successful and domestically popular. But this thesis has also chosen films that have not garnered so much critical attention, but attest, in different ways, to the mutable position of women’s role and authority in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977) has thus been included not only because it links the with post-revolutionary filmmaking, but also because of the way it narrates the ongoing struggle between modernity and traditionalism under the Shah. Nabili’s work additionally straddles the divide of domestic and diasporic cinema, with the film’s post-production being completed in the United States. Indeed the theme of exilic and transnational cinema is central to this thesis, as it seeks to expand the definition of Iranian cinema and adopt an inclusive approach to those women filmmakers who produce films outside of Iran’s geo-political borders. Granaz Moussavi and Shirin Neshat’s diasporic films have been included because they offer vastly different approaches to the notion of diasporic Iranian cinema. Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale was filmed almost completely in Iran, with post-production taking place in Australia, thus constituting the first ever Australian-Iranian co-production. Neshat’s Women Without Men is perhaps even more transnational, in that the film was made entirely outside of Iran, and involved a wide array of nationalities in terms of its cast and crew. Despite their differing approaches

8 to production, both films are permeated by an “exilic consciousness” and a sense of yearning for a lost homeland. The next section surveys the debates surrounding transnational cinema and argues for the importance of including diasporic and exilic filmmakers in the scholarship on Iranian cinema.

Iranian Cinema, a (Trans)? The fact that the filmmakers here are collectively described as “Iranian” is undoubtedly also problematic, as the term itself does not point to the transnational nature of filmmaking, nor the exiled and resettled nature of two of the directors considered in this thesis. The descriptor also fails to acknowledge the fact that so many Iranian films are no longer filmed, produced, funded or viewed within Iran’s geo-political borders. The debate over the classification and theory of national cinemas has intensified over the past decade. The founding scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, which attempted to formulate a broad theory regarding film and nation, has been revised and expanded upon to include a more transnational or global emphasis. A number of anthologies were published in the 2000s that advocated interdisciplinary approaches to the taxonomy and elucidation of national, world and transnational cinemas (Durovicová & Newman 2009, Badley, Palmer & Schneider 2006, Dennison & Lim 2006, Ezra & Rowden 2006, Grant & Kuhn 2006, Vatali & Willemen 2006, Chaudhuri 2005,Williams 2002, Chapman 2003, Hill & Gibson 2000, Hjort & MacKenzie 2000). A “national” cinema is now less defined by geo-political borders and the ethnicity of the director. Rather, it is frequently theorised as a site of cultural exchange in which various countries, funding bodies and individuals converge and participate. This thesis reflects the transnationalism of Iranian cinema through its inclusion of diasporic directors, but it persists with the rubric of “Iranian” because of the manner in which it speaks to director’s identification with their own cultural identity and attachment to some lived or imagined experience of homeland. As Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel argue, in relation to categorizing German Turkish cinema, instead of abandoning “identity as a critical category altogether”, references to nation and ethnicity may operate productively if they correlate to the director’s own “self-branding” (2012, 11). Indeed the representation of homeland, or vatan, is one of the key concerns of this thesis. Originating as an Arabic term, vatan initially referred to “one’s birthplace”, but later

9 came to denote one’s “home”, “city”, “country” and the “sum of one’s existence” (Kashani-Sabet 2000, 51). Its meaning continued to shift, in particular during the Constitutional Revolution when it was adopted as a signifier of territorialism, patriotism and nationalism. In the late twentieth century vatan also became associated with the notion of Islamic Identity and martyrdom (Najmabadi 2005, Langford 2012, Elling 2013,122). While there has been some excellent scholarship surveying the various cultural and historical developments of the term vatan, this thesis is more invested in examining the ambivalent and varied ways in which both indigenous and diasporic directors re-imagine and re-narrativise notions of “birthplace”, territory and homeland. It argues that diasporic directors in particular contribute new and valuable perspectives on national identity, with particular emphasis on the experiences of liminality, hybridity and deterritorialisation.While this thesis recognizes and engages with the more recent critiques of national cinema theory, it retains a focus on Iranian history, politics and culture, and the importance of homeland as both a geo-political locale and as an imagined space. Lindsey Moore (2008) argues in the introduction to her study on Arab, Muslim women filmmakers and writers, “Creative literary and film work in a globalising context of production and reception is an apposite site in which to explore the relationship between specificity and affiliation” (10). This study also tries to balance its emphasis on the local and culturally particular, with an acknowledgement of the realities of filmmaking in a highly globalised and culturally hybridised era.

Literature Review Despite the considerable body of work generated by Iranian women filmmakers, academic scholarship is only now beginning to reflect the prolific nature and quality of such films. While this thesis has relied on English language volumes and translated texts and thus the survey below does not do justice to the in-country writings on Iranian cinema in Persian, it does demonstrate the continuing gap in critical literature on women directors. Of those English-language texts, a small number of essays and book chapters have already appeared that more generally address the emergence of Iranian women directors in post- revolutionary Iran (Donmez-Colin 2004, Chaudhuri 2005, Reza Sadr 2006). Certainly

10 Naficy’s chapter on women in Iranian cinema in his fourth volume of A Social History of Iranian Cinema (2012b) is the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of women’s representation and participation in the Iranian film industry. ’s (2012) chapter on Forugh Farrokhzad and other female directors has also been important in theorizing the contribution of Iranian women filmmakers. There have also been some valuable discursive contributions on the specific productions of the most prominent women directors, in particular Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (Naficy 2000, Donmez-Colin 2004, Cobbey 2011, Langford 2012a, Tahmineh Milani (Moruzzi 2001, Rahimieh 2003, Scullion 2006, Langford 2010), Marziyeh Meshkini (Langford 2007, Dabashi 2007) and Samira Makhmalbaf (Dabashi 2001, Moore 2005, Rahimieh 2009). Several scholars have demonstrated their continuing interest and dedication in promoting, analysing and contextualising the work of Iranian women filmmakers. Aside from Naficy’s impressive body of work (2000, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b), other scholars such as Hamid Dabashi (2001, 2007, 2012), Nasrin Rahimieh (2003 2009, 2010), Shohini Chaudhuri (2003, 2005) and Michelle Langford (2007, 2010, 2012a) have also assisted in critically situating the works of Iranian women filmmakers. There has been considerably less written regarding pre-revolutionary women feature filmmakers (Naficy 1994, 2011a, Tahami 1994). Although only a handful of women directors were able to get films produced between 1956 and 1977, this remains the most glaring gap in the scholarship of Iranian women directors. There have been some studies, however, that have examined the representations of women in pre-revolutionary cinema, including Eldad E. Pardo’s article (2004) on the portrayal of women in films produced between 1968 and 1978 and Minoo Derayeh’s essay (2010) on the identity formation of characters in the Kolsh-Makmali (velvet-hat) melodramas of the 1960s and 1970s. Hamid Naficy’s volumes on pre-revolutionary cinema (2011a, 2011b) have also contributed greater understanding to the limited role women held both in front of and behind the camera prior to the revolution. During the 1990s and early 2000s scholarship on Iranian cinema fell predominantly into two critical disciplines, those that favoured sociological and historical critique and those that adopted a more auteurist mode of analysis. Within the sociologically orientated research, there was emphasis on the Islamification of cinematic production under Iran’s post-revolutionary government and the history of State implemented censorship

11 (Golmakani 1989, Mohammadi & Egan 2001, Over 2001, Farahmand 2002, Haghighi 2002, Ghazian 2002, Naficy 2002a, 2002b). A collection of essays concerned with this theme appeared in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, edited by Richard Tapper and published in 2002. Like many of the resources appearing at this time, it continued to focus on the ideological and material conditions surrounding cinema production in Iran. The political historicizing of the “New Iranian Cinema” has continued to proliferate, with several more books published that focused on the material and ideological constraints facing Iranian filmmakers (Reza Sadr 2006, Mirbakhtyar 2006, Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009). The publication of The Directory of : Iran (Jahed, 2012) has also been useful in providing a strong historical account of the emergence of Iranian cinema, as well as the development of some of its key genres and some more detailed textual analysis. Throughout the 1990s Iranian director was heralded as the ultimate Iranian and a large body of popular and scholarly criticism was published, with several books devoted entirely to examining his oeuvre (Saeed-Vafa & Rosenbaum 2003, Elena 2005, Miller et al 2009, Sani 2013). was also the subject of a collection of detailed studies and is often considered one of the most political filmmakers agitating for social change in Iran (Ridgeon 2000, Egan 2005, Dabashi 2007). Other filmmakers who have attracted attention in scholarly journals and chapters within books on Iranian cinema are , Bahram Beizai and (Dabashi 2001 & 2007, Donmez-Colin 2007, Mottahedeh 2008). More recently, there have been some critical interventions analysing Iranian cinema through the prism of globalisation and transnationality (Farahmand 2010, Gow 2011, Esfandairy 2012, Naficy 2012b). Indicating a growing diversity in the general scholarship on Iranian cinema, there have also been volumes published on the films’ links with feminist film theory (Mottahedah 2008), Shi’ite (Pak-Shiraz 2011) and Western philosophy (Erfani 2012). There exists a select number of volumes that focus exclusively on women filmmakers in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, most notably, Gonul Donmez-Colin’s Women, Islam and Cinema (2004) and Cinemas of the Other (2006), which contribute a number of biographies, interviews and introductory film analyses of Iranian women directors. In terms of works published on other national and regional women’s cinema, Lindsey Moore’s Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Post-colonial Literature and

12 Film (2008) applies a specifically postcolonial feminist framework to her subject in an attempt to redress the invisibility of Arab Muslim woman and their creative output within contemporary scholarship. Florence Martin’s Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema (2011) assumes a truly transnational perspective when examining the complex intersections of Mediterranean and Arabic culture in Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian cinema. Martin’s emphasis is thus very much on cultural liminality, hybridity and points of interstices in her analysis of Maghrebi women filmmakers. Also notable is Eylem Atakav’s (2013) text, Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender, Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation, which combines feminist film theory with an analysis of the women’s movements in Turkey during the 1980s. The fact that there has yet to be a publication specifically underscoring the significant contribution of Iranian women filmmakers means that this thesis forms a much needed intervention in both the scholarship on women’s filmmaking and the national more generally. In providing a detailed analysis of the films of seven Iranian women filmmakers, whose works span from 1962 to 2010, with a particular emphasis on the role of voice and discursive authority, this thesis contributes a new understanding to the significance and diversity of Iranian women’s films. Women directors have undoubtedly been under-represented in the scholarship of Iranian cinema, sidelined by the emphasis on the material and sociological conditions surrounding film production and the elevation of a small number of male . While there is growing interest in the productions of contemporary women filmmakers, adopting a purely post-colonial, semiotic or psychoanalytic model of analysis risks ignoring the hermeneutics of the text, as well as the mores and particularities of the Iranian socio- cultural context. This thesis seeks to broaden the definition of Iranian cinema by specifically examining the productions of women directors and extending the category to include diasporic filmmakers, documentaries, popular melodramas and essay films. Such an inclusive approach complicates the existing scholarly paradigms of Iranian auteurism and challenges the notion of a ‘pure’ national cinema. This thesis will thus address a significant gap in the existing discursive work on Iranian film and highlight a number of important cinematic works that have been critically neglected. Before reviewing some of the key theoretical material that will be explored in this project, it also important to acknowledge the socio-cultural context of this project and my

13 own positionality as a white, Australian woman who approaches the cinematic texts, and Iranian culture in general, as an ‘outsider’. Lindsay Moore writes eloquently on this issue, borrowing from Gayatri Spivak’s work, when she discusses the manner in which Westerners should always be wary of claiming to transcend their academic, cultural and geographical “enclosure” (2008, 18). Situated as a non-Iranian, adopting English-language scholarship and theory, it is imperative that my discursive contribution be understood as emerging from my own specific historical, linguistic and cultural context and limitations. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s theoretical and cinematic work challenging the inside/outside binary is often cited on this theme. Minh-ha warns against essentializing the Other’s culture, firstly as a homogenous and monolithic entity, and secondly as unknowable and shrouded, arguing against the notion of an “authenticate” and “pure” insider (2004, 382). While Minh-ha’s thesis is useful in emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of all subject positions and cultures, it is obviously equally important to avoid universalizing, Eurocentric discourses and claims of an authoritative and privileged critical position. Perhaps the most productive framework to adopt as an “outsider” is offered by Ella Shohat, when she argues for an understanding of “cultural practices” to be “articulated not in isolation but in relation” (2001, 1). That is, all indices need to be understood “not as hermetically sealed entities but rather as parts of a permeable, interwoven rationality” (Shohat 2001, 1). With Iranian cinema forming part of an intercultural and transnational exchange, this thesis thus hopes it offers one of many possible hermeneutic frameworks in which to examine Iranian women’s filmmaking. While it can never claim to disclose “insider” authority, this thesis does seek to promote the global and intercultural importance of Iranian women’s filmmaking and the manner in which the films attest to the complexity, heterogeneity and polyphony of Iranian women’s subjectivities and experiences. The next section of this introduction will begin by reviewing some of the ways in which sound is defined and understood within cinema, and more specifically the conceptualisation of women’s voices in early Hollywood, avant-garde and Iranian women’s film. This thesis argues for the relevance of feminist film theory to Iranian cinema and the manner in which women’s voices can be recognised as a source of resistance and agency. I will then turn specifically to the presence of the voice in Iranian women’s cinema and its relationship to social, cultural and sexual identity and status. I make the argument that

14 cinematic “voicing” is used to promote various forms of self-expression, from the communication of political dissidence to the more poetically inflected process of personal catharsis. Voice is also associated with identity, visibility and self-making and thus the next section of this introduction turns to the concepts of authorship, self-inscription and subjectivity. Finally this introduction will also engage and problematize the concept of genre, reviewing some of the key theoretical material in this field and demarcating those cinematic modes and genres that will be of most importance in this thesis.

Theorising the Voice in Women’s Cinema Cinematic sound has frequently been theorised as a subsidiary element, working to support the primacy of the image, but feminist film theory and women’s cinema have often worked to foreground sound and privilege the voice. The narrative and aesthetic strategies for experimenting with this sound-image interplay are various and heterogeneous, but their purpose is intrinsically related to the recovery of women’s identity and authority within film. In her critique of the ever present veiled body in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, Negar Mottahedeh (2008) formulates a reading that references 1970s feminist film theory, as much as it does an analysis of the specific socio-cultural and industrial conditions underpinning the production practices of various Iranian films. As Mottahedeh writes in her introduction, “the fundamental importance of syntax for feminist film practice and film theory has underscored that what is at issue is more than an image of women on screen and the representation of their practices” (11). This thesis similarly underscores the usefulness of feminist film theory in complicating the diverse strategies adopted by Iranian women filmmakers, in particular their experimentation with voice, authorship and genre. It is careful to avoid using the descriptor ‘feminist’ to categorize Iranian women’s films, not only due to the filmmakers’ ambivalent relationship with the term, but also its inherent association with white, Western women’s movements, histories and subject positions. Ella Shohat in her discussion of “post-Thirdworldist” women filmmakers rejects “white feminist film theory” as yet another universalizing construction of “womanhood” which ignores the particularities of “location” and “history” (2006, 291). However, this thesis argues against artificially dividing Western and Iranian film theory and practice as discrete and self- contained cultural artifacts and modes of production. Instead it assumes that there will be

15 points of overlap, commonality, cross-cultural influence and transnational exchange. Feminist film theory’s persistent emphasis on the voice as a site of resistance and enunciation proves highly relevant when also discussing the intersection of gender and identity in the context of Iranian cinema. Applying feminist film theory need not deny a film its socio-political context or historical specificity. At no point does this thesis attempt to inscribe a monolithic and all encompassing theoretical framework based in feminist film theory and practice. Women’s “voice” should always be conceptualised as a heterogeneous entity, incorporating the “conflictual diversity of women’s experiences, agendas and political visions” (Shohat 2006, 293). Theorising women’s “voicing” thus must always be married with historical background and cultural context. Feminist film theory needs to be persistently checked, and at points, countered by the “national and racial discourses, locally and globally inscribed within multiple oppressions and resistances” (Shohat 2006, 294). This thesis is thus intent on retaining an emphasis on the politics of location and the importance of historical particularity, while seeking to affirm the place of feminist film theory in analysing Iranian women’s films. Feminist film scholarship remains relevant to the Iranian women’s cinema studied here precisely because of the manner in which the voice is foregrounded. Often eschewing a physical on-screen presence, it is frequently the director’s or female protagonist’s voice that attains prominence in the narrative. Feminist film theory has countered the association and degradation of women’s subjectivities with sexuality, immanence and objectification through an emphasis on the voice as a strategy for recouping identity, power and authority. This thesis is thus suggesting that the objectives of Iranian women’s cinema frequently intersect with the aims of feminist film theory: that is, to reclaim authority over the representation of women’s identities and bodies and to use the voice as a means of asserting knowledge, agency and influence. The following brief survey of some of the key moments in the history of Western feminist film scholarship, demonstrates the manner in which such theory privileges the voice and sound, and the way in which it continues to reformulate and revisit the notions of spectatorship, representation, gender and power. Laura Mulvey’s (1975) seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” became one the most influential critical interventions in Western feminist film and cultural studies during the 1970s and 1980s. Heavily influenced by semiotic and psychoanalytic

16 theory, Mulvey underscored the commodified and objectified images predominant in mainstream Western cinema and the ideological nature of film spectatorship. Other critics, such Mary-Ann Doanne (1987) and Kaja Silverman (1988) continued to focus on the primacy of the male gaze in Hollywood cinema and its fetishizing and objectifying impulse. The female viewer was theorised as adopting a “transvestite” spectorial stance, which saw her also eroticise female protagonists, reducing them to sexual spectacles. E. Ann Kaplan (2004) has since noted that the “cine-psychoanalytic” theory of the 1970s and 1980s has been interrogated for its creation of monolithic subject positions, which neglected to attend to the particularities of historical and cultural context. The “issue of positionality” (Kaplan 2004, 1240) or the “politics of location” (Rich 1984) became a far more central concern for scholars during the 1980s, when there was greater acknowledgement of cultural difference and identity politics. Instead of focusing exclusively on the hegemonic and “masculine” nature of mainstream cinema and spectatorship, there was also greater emphasis on the aesthetics of women’s avant-garde filmmaking. Various scholars noted the affinity between experimental cinema and feminist criticism (Kuhn 1982, de Lauretis 1985, Mulvey 1989) and saw the opportunity to counter the misogynistic tendencies of mainstream Hollywood cinema through alternative modes of spectatorship. During the 1990s feminist research “shifted its theoretical spotlight from avant- garde filmmaking to cultural studies” (Cheu 2003, 23), with the former now being interrogated for its intellectual and elitist overtones. Globalisation and the intensification of transnational cinema theory and practice saw greater emphasis placed on the tensions between local and global social organisations, multiple co-existing subjectivities and the affiliation of located (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). The film spectator was no longer theorised as a passive consumer, interpolated into the propaganda of patriarchal ideology, but as an individual whose response was mediated by the particularities and cultural undercurrents of their unique subject position. Indeed the emphasis in more contemporary feminist film studies is on the competing and specified nature of cinematic meanings. It is also arguable that just as transnational cinema theory challenged the notion of geographical and cultural borders, so too “postfeminist” discourses have questioned the binaries of gender and the oppositional concepts underlying decades of feminist critique

17 (Pollit 1995, Strossen 1995). Hoi. F. Cheu (2003) argued that there is less emphasis on the identity (and thus gender) of the author/director in current scholarship and greater attention paid to the material conditions of filmmaking and the cultural and socio-political influences that come to bear on the production process. Of course, anthologies of women’s cinema continue to be published despite the reservations of post-feminist theory. Surveying the literature on women directors and European national cinemas, there appears to be a general trend of dividing a study between examining the works of female directors and then exploring the portrayal and presence of women in cinema more generally (Knight 1992, Martin-Marquez 1999, Mazierska & Ostrowska 2006). Also common to these texts is the disparagement of auteurist discourses that serve to exclude women filmmakers and reduce the complexity and breadth of a national cinema to a singular director. Julia Knight (1992), for example, structured her discussion of German women filmmakers around conceptual frameworks related to feminist film culture. She examines institutional reforms, notions of “feminine aesthetics” and twentieth century women’s movements in order to adequately understand both the socio-political significance and textual complexity of particular films. Knight’s approach may be useful in the study of Iranian women filmmakers, where the focus of Western scholarship of Iranian cinema has too often been on the achievements of particular male auteurs or the sociological history surrounding the conditions of production, as will be further elaborated. Feminist film scholarship has frequently focused on the role of the “voice” in the cinematic narrative, as a means of analysing the representation of women in both early Hollywood and contemporary cinema. Amy Lawrence (1991) argued that film theory’s preoccupation with optics and visuality needs to be redressed by greater attention to the “voice”. Lawrence constituted the voice in cinema as composing three elements: sound as reproduced through film technology, verbal discourse and the possession of an authorial viewpoint (3). Lawrence’s schema is useful in broadening our notion of the voice as not only comprising dialogue and voice-over, but also the sounds that emanate from a female character, as well as understanding its role in narrative perspective, authorship and self- inscription. Lacanian theory has been greatly influential in framing discussions on women’s voice in cinema. Lawrence and other scholars (Doanne 1985, Silverman 1988) adopted aspects of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of “lack” as a means of understanding the use of

18 language and sound in Hollywood cinema. As Lawrence writes “The special applicability of feminist film work to the study of sound stems from situating itself amongst the structuring absences, amid concepts and processes the film industry have deemed invisible or irrelevant” (110). Lawrence goes on to argue that in cinema, while the visual is associated with the masculine spectorial position, sound is feminised, “assigned the role of the perpetually supportive ‘acoustic mirror’ that reinforces the primacy of the image and of the male gaze” (111). This is a common perspective in film theory, which understands sound as primarily “subordinated to the image”, used to “complement” and “extend” the dominating visuals (Cheu 59). Interestingly even the voice-over can be theorised as a subsidiary to the construction of the image on screen, when adopted in certain ways. The voice-over became a prominent feature of storytelling in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in , literary adaptations and war films (Hollinger 1992). The voice-over provided directors with new narrative strategies for “personalis[ing] the discourse” of the cinema (Kawin 39). But theorists such as Silverman (1988) and Doane (1987) argued that the voice-over, when the narrating character is also embodied within the diegesis of the film, might operate as a feminized and thus disempowered entity. Silverman believes that this is because a film’s visual system often works against the authority of non-synchronized sound in an attempt to re-establish the primacy of the image. The female voice-over was frequently used in the films of the 1940s, particularly in the studio-created genre of the ‘Women’s Film’. Mary Ann Doanne (1987) argued that in such films the voice-over was frequently used to undermine the female protagonist, with the female narrative perspective being eventually exposed as deceptive, irrational or incomplete. Amy Lawrence points to a number of films made in the 1940s where the female voice-over is undercut by disjointed and increasingly abstract visuals, which work against the plight of the female protagonist, and the logic of her narrative perspective (136). In her analysis of Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), for example, Lawrence demonstrates that the fragmentation of the visuals throws the legitimacy of the female protagonist’s flashbacks into doubt, thus compromising the entire authorial and auditory point of view. By the conclusion of the film the female voice has become an impotent and ineffectual force within the narrative.

19 But Karen Hollinger (1992) argued that the female voice-over might operate as a form of resistance even within mainstream Hollywood cinema. Hollinger proposes the “conflict of word and image triggered by female voice-over narration” (36) works to corrode the supremacy of the male subject position with contradictory and multiple subject points of identification. The female voice-over thus breaks the unity of scopophilic investigation and fetishism and allows for more subversive, contradictory or dialectical readings. Lawrence agrees that if the voice-over is disembodied (i.e. an off-screen speaking voice), it has in fact the potential to be a narrative authority and create an empowered speaking position, even in the context of classical Hollywood cinema. Kaja Silverman (1988) also proposed that women’s experimental and avant-garde cinema situated the female subject beyond the objectifying gaze of the male spectator. In her seminal text, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988), Silverman argues that the female voice-over and other acoustic strategies can work to disrupt the ingrained hermeneutic codes of dominant cinema. By “dislodging the female voice from the female image” (166), women are freed from representational conventions that limit female characters to immanence, sexuality and passivity. This process of disembodiment can be achieved in several ways: through multiple female voice-overs, non-synchronized dialogue (or pronounced lip syncing), monologue and musical lyrics. Silverman’s intervention is very much informed by Jacques Lacan’s theory of ‘lack’ and Jacques-Alain Miller’s notion of ‘suture’. As Shohini Chaudhuri writes:

Through every frame-line and cut, cinema threatens the viewer with castration, making them aware of their own irredeemable lack by gesturing to the greater authority of the hidden enunciator. At the same time, this wound is sutured over with a signifying chain that distracts the viewer by offering meaning and narrative (2006, 49).

Chaudhuri explains that whereas suture is often understood as a visual mechanism (such as the shot/reverse-shot), for Silverman the rule of audio synchronization is also a means of maintaining the illusion of cinematic cohesion. The disembodied female voice-over is thus a means of breaking with the suturing mechanism of synchronization, allowing the female

20 identity to exist within the symbolic order (the sphere associated with language and discursive authority). Silverman also uses Freud’s “negative Oedipus Complex”, as a way of theorizing the manner in which the female subject may regain symbolic power through identifying and desiring the mother. Silverman termed this drive the “homosexual-maternal fantasmatic”. Whereas mainstream cinema works largely to limit women’s voices to the function of an “acoustic mirror” (distracting male spectators from their lack/impotence), feminist avant-garde and experimental cinema constructs ‘alternate models of female subjectivity’ (Chaudhuri 57). It is important to stress that the absence of the voice is just as significant as its occurrence within cinema. Isabel Santaolalla (1998), surveying a range of Hollywood films, argues that silence in female characters is presented as a problematic disability or affliction that must be remedied by the (often male) therapist. Through disciplining measures, presented under the guise of welfare, the female character is gradually integrated back into language and thus patriarchal society. Amy Lawrence (1991) concurs that the “mute” figure in many of the Hollywood works of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, constructs a woman who can overcome her “lack” by assuming the role of the “helpless, grateful and “dependent” female. But Lawrence associates women’s silence as part of a broader, socio-cultural development that grew out of the problematic gender politics underlying the development of early sound recording technology. Lawrence examines the early amplification and recording of women’s voices and the myths that categorized their speech as naturally “weak”, “unclear” and thus unfit for reproduction. “Evidently the ‘problem’ of the woman’s voice is always a tangle of technological and economic exigencies, each suffused with ideological assumptions about women’s ‘place’” (32). Just as this thesis details the complex process of voicing in women’s cinema, it also explores the use of silence and mutism. It examines the manner in which such an apparent “lack” may be used as a strategic tool when complemented with other forms of self-expression and dissidence. While this thesis does not adopt Lacan’s specific framework of “lack”, it is interested in the cinematic gaps, absences, silences and hidden elements of the films. Women’s sexuality, desire and private selves have historically remained hidden from the cinematic screen, forbidden by a range of religious and cultural codes and laws.

21 The Voice in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema The voice in the context of Iranian cinema has particular cultural and social significance as a result of the Islamic modesty codes that were implemented by the post-revolutionary State. In an attempt to purify Iranian cinema and demarcate it as a product of the newly emerged Shi’ite State, hijab (modesty) became a central feature in the representation and regulation of women’s bodies and subjectivity from 1982. In the new socio-political paradigm of post-revolutionary Islamic cinema, the act of looking upon non-veiled women was both sexualised and forbidden. As Mottahedah (2008) notes, the “commandments for looking (ahkam-e nigah kardan)” enforced the presence of veil as a compulsory aspect of women’s participation in the cinema industry, working on the assumption that a “non- familial heterosexual male is always present in the audience” (10). Confronted with modesty codes that restricted the realism of the film’s diegesis, many directors adopted the voice as a new site of creative expression. Both Farzaneh Milani (1992) and Hamid Naficy (2012b) have discussed the manner in which hijab had the paradoxical effect of strengthening and consolidating women’s individual voices in all of their diversity and regional accents. As Milani wrote:

Women are raising their voices, telling their tales. Even those that portray themselves as victims of society – conforming, enduring, suffering - are gaining a significant victory in being able to plead their own cases and make their stories heard in their own words. They are survivors, the ultimate rebels, irrepressible, vocal and articulate (1992, 234).

The voice in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema thus must also be considered as an instrument in the various campaigns for greater legal and personal freedoms. Ziba Mir- Hosseini makes the important point that an integral aspect of the drive for the expansion of women’s rights in the 1990s was the socio-cultural revisioning of women’s role (2004, 214). The endorsement of women as “social beings” with a political role, as opposed to the prescribed familial and spousal functions, challenged some of the most fundamental precepts upheld by the Islamic Republic of Iran (Shahidian 2002, Taheri 2011, Povey & Rostami-Povey 2013). Michelle Langford (2010) signalled the manner in which Tahmineh

22 Milani’s melodramas correlate and engage with Iranian women’s political movements and their emphasis on “practical feminism”. Langford’s article is thus a highly productive example of the manner in which voicing in the context of Iranian women’s cinema must be extrapolated, not just in terms of film theory and feminist scholarship, but via historical accounts that also situate the voice as a form of cultural and political visibility in post- revolutionary Iran. As various critics have also signalled, the films of Rakhshan Bani- Etemad reflect this socio-cultural repositioning of women, where the voice is both the site of personal, romantic and sexual revelation, as well as the vehicle for enunciating and re- imagining women’s socio-political role in Iran (Naficy 1991, 1994, Butler 2002). The voice in Bani-Etemad’s films performs the complex role of both evoking the absent body and its forbidden desires, as well as deflecting the spectorial processes of objectification and eroticisation. It enacts a dialectical role, frequently enabling revelation, subversion, and forthright disclosure, at other times remaining oblique, poetic and dissimulating. This thesis argues that the voice in Iranian women’s cinema (voice-over, dialogue, narrative perspective) is not subordinated by the visual image but often privileged. The foregrounding of the voice in these films permits intimacy and personal revelation, as well as promoting ambiguity and poeticism. Veiling is thus not only associated with both the presence of the sartorial veil and the representation and interpretation of the cinematic modesty codes, but also the notion of veiled meanings and the use of poetic inference. The relationship between veiling and voicing in Iranian women’s cinema is a complex one; connected as it is both with the process of disclosure and the masking of meaning. Veiling and voicing work dialectically, revealing and concealing, often simultaneously. While the “voice” therefore must always be situated against the specific cultural codes dictating the representation of women in Iranian cinema, this thesis proposes Iranian women filmmakers use the voice as a means of resisting and managing the prescriptions of Sharia hijab and in doing so, reclaiming ownership over the representation of women’s identities, bodies and the expression of desire.

Subjectivity, Authorship & Auteurism Voicing in this thesis not only encompasses the aesthetic practices associated with the literal, acoustic voice in cinema (the voice-over, dialogue, oral sounds) but the inscription

23 of authorship and subjectivities in general. Literary and cultural theory, philosophy, psychology and anthropology have all offered various rhetorical prisms through which to conceive “self-hood” and subjectivity. The debates surrounding the conceptualization of self in Western scholarship are outside the scope of this work, with vast bodies of literature attesting to the ongoing discussion regarding the Enlightenment, humanist view of subjectivity as unitary and coherent, as opposed to various post-structural discourses that have theorized the self as fragmented, decentered and plural. But defining the “self” is imperative: after all whose voice is being “recovered” in the process of film production? And how to begin to understand the “speaking subject” of both the director and the women being represented in their films? More recent scholarship has stressed the importance of historically situated subjectivities (Battaglia 1995, Doy 2005, Shohat 2006). Such a model avoids the pitfalls of Universalist essentialism, as well as the relativism of , underscoring the material, cultural and ideological conditions that shape selfhood. The emphasis is on positionality and relationality. This thesis draws on a number of theoretical and conceptual models of subjectivity; examining the various representations of selfhood as offered via the cinematic text. Instead of imposing a monolithic theory of subjectivity, it explores the manner in which the text invites spectators to understand identity and experience. Hamid Naficy’s (2000) thesis, for example, on the representation of subjectivity in Iranian cinema lends cultural specificity to the interiority/exteriority dichotomy that underpins the characterization of protagonist, Forugh, in Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady (Banoo-ye Ordibehesht, 1998). Heavily informed by the Islamic cultural practices of veiling and dissimulation, Naficy theorizes selfhood, and thus the voice, as that which is divided between the publically accessible, social exterior, and that which is sequestered as private. Naficy’s theory of selfhood shares affinities with the “dialogical self” model, and the manner in which identity is theorized as a site of socio-cultural contestation, in which the self is able to conform to socio-cultural norms, while “camouflaging” the resistant and individualized self (Hughes 2012). However, the chapter on Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2010) assumes a different approach, applying Michel Foucault’s writing on heterotopias (1986) and the manner in which they structure experience and subjectivity. Foucault’s ontological model stresses culture, language and power, and offers a different

24 way in which to explore representations of exile and liminality. Foucault’s writings on subjectivity have been frequently taken up by feminists since the 1980s, in particular his emphasis on socio-political power, resistance and the manner in which discourse structures and limits self-construction (Moi 1985, Taylor & Vintges 2004, McLaren 2012). Western feminisms have at various times articulated differing models of subjectivity, with conceptions of self being inflected with post-structural, Marxist, psychoanalytic, post- colonial and various other discourses. While bound by a common interest in combating gender inequality and oppression, notions of gender and thus selfhood have been imagined diversely; as dis-identified (de Lauretis (1990), performative (Butler 1990), nomadic (Braidotti 1994), constructed (Feder & Zakin 1997) and culturally and racially situated (hooks, 1981, Haraway 1988). While this thesis is interested in exploring the ways in which subjectivities may be produced via power structures and/or discourse, the theoretical and cultural models of subjectivity studied here are diverse and stimulated by the texts themselves and the manner in which they seek to represent women’s identities, voices and experiences in modern and post-revolutionary Iran. In privileging the representation of subjectivities within the various texts, this thesis also seeks to avoid what Ella Shohat termed as “hermeneutic nihilism”, instead understanding “experience” and “knowledge” as “dialogic concepts, an interlocution situated in historical time and geographical space” (2006, 8). While “voice” remains the unifying theme of this thesis, and the manner in which it may denote identity, authorial presence and discursive authority, the emphasis remains on the manner in which the cinematic text mediates and shapes representations of women’s subjectivities. Voice is theorized here as intrinsically linked to notions of authorship and authorial presence. Debates surrounding cinematic authorship have undoubtedly been influenced by literary theory and its various conceptualizations of subject formation, from the Romantic notion of authorial genius to Roland Barthes’s poststructuralist elevation of the text (to the detriment, or “death”, of the author). Auteurism or auteur theory developed during the 1950s, celebrating and extoling the stylistic and thematic continuities of certain writer- directors. Collectively a director’s body of work was conceptualized as expressing an authorial viewpoint. Feminist film theory has had an ambivalent relationship with aspects of author theory and auteurism in the past, in part due its de-emphasis on the collaborative

25 nature of film production and its veneration of primarily male directors. American film critic Pauline Kael (1963) famously derided Andrew Sarris’s adaptation of theory, for its attempt to maintain the status quo through canonization, standardization and critical exclusion. In the special edition of Camera Obscura, on “The Place of the Contemporary Female Director” (2014), Belinda Smaill argues that more recent feminist critical discourse has “moved beyond codified formulations of the auteur” (5). Instead, Smaill contends that studies of female filmmakers are not only concerned with “thematic and aesthetic questions” but also notions of “commerce and access” and the relationship between “women and cinema and the public sphere” (2014, 5). This thesis concurs with Smaill’s argument, maintaining that studies of women directors should be positioned outside of the confines and historical legacy of auteurism. Additionally, auteurism need not be confused with the study of authorial voice in women’s films. As Cheu (2007) writes “Advocating for women-made films is not an attempt to resurrect auteurism: on the contrary, the study of women’s authorial voices is a subversive act, for an unsynchronized polyphony of feminine aesthetics deconstructs the theology and the ideology of auteur worship” (69). While this thesis is cautious not to conflate women’s cinema with the notion of a “feminine aesthetic”, it strongly argues that cinematic authorship needn’t be understood as auteurism. Alison Butler makes a similar case when she notes that many women filmmakers in the West countered the misogynistic tendencies of auteur cinema through the “trope of authorial self-inscription which appears consistently in women’s avant-garde films and which forms a distinctive aspect of their practice…” (2002, 59). The strategy of self-inscription contributes, Butler argues, not necessarily to the emergence of a “coherent subject position for the author but the construction of a viable speaking position…” (61). The emphasis is thus not necessarily on biography or autobiography, but enunciation. In fact, autobiographical details may be obscured through certain authorial devices. There may be ambiguity regarding the relationship between the director and their diegetic incarnation due to the creation of multiple selves and/or the “mismatching” of “author, character and performer” (79). This thesis is thus interested in examining the relationship between the acoustic voice and authorship and the manner in which the two elements may coalesce or diverge. It makes the case that just as the voice may attest to the presence of the director; it may also conceal, complicate and diffuse the

26 authorial imprint. The voice is thus both the medium for articulating located subjectivities, and the vehicle through which identity may be represented as diverse, plural and fragmented. Notions of authorship and self-inscription also have a special relevance in the context of diasporic cinema. Hamid Naficy (2001) has argued that “accented cinema theory is an extension of authorship theory” in that the biography of the director and their own experiences of exile permeate the filmic text and reveal the complex “performance of self” (35). Accented filmmakers inscribe their films with “authorial signatures”, according to Naficy, which signify not only the “various incarnations of the author and the conditions of exile” but also the conditions of diasporic filmmaking. Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1994) famously problematized the relationship between diasporic and “writers of colour” “being condemned to write only autobiographical works”, but cinema studies is only beginning to complicate theories of authorship and diasporic cinema production. Both Christopher Gow (2011) and Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2012) make useful interventions in this area, questioning the link between the ontological status of the director as “cosmopolitan” or “diasporic” and the manner in which they assert authorship via autobiographical self-inscription or various stylistic or thematic continuities. It is therefore necessary to interrogate the correlation between diasporic cinema studies and biography. Naficy, while emphasizing autobiography and authorship, also stresses the disjuncts between the director and the various discursive identities of the exilic text (2001, 35). The emphasis in his theory of “accented cinema” is thus on the multiplicity of biographical “incarnations”. Indeed diasporic subjectivity is often celebrated for its hybridity and plurality, and the multiple ethnic, geographic and cultural allegiances that are formed via mobility and cosmopolitanism. As Vijaw Agnew argues, “the diasporic individual often has a double consciousness, a privileged knowledge and perspective that is consonant with postmodernity and globalization” (2005, 14). This project is interested both in investigating the links between diasporic cinema and self- inscription, as suggested by Naficy, and emphasizing the manner in which experiences of deterritorialisation may be represented through an aesthetic of fragmentation, ellipsis and rupture, as suggested via Shohat and others. This thesis thus maintains the relevance of investigating authorship and role of the voice as a form of authorial inscription or signature.

27 Genre Hamid Naficy argues that post-revolutionary women directors have almost exclusively worked within the mode of art cinema (2012b, 94). Azedeh Faramand (2002, 2010) has also written various accounts of the manner in which international circuits and Western film scholarship has contributed to the “genrification ” of Iranian national cinema as art cinema during the 1990s and 2000s. The conflation of nation and genre is not new, Indian cinema is persistently associated with musicals, for example, while action and martial arts spectacles often define Hong Kong cinema. While Naficy’s assessment is undoubtedly correct, this thesis seeks to complicate the notion of Iranian “art” cinema and the manner in which it encompasses and engages various other genres and cinematic modes. The term “genre cinema” is often theorised as comprising popular films (the western, the musical, science ), but it is important to stress that all cinema, irrespective of its commercial status, operates within and challenges the taxonomies of genre and classification. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson (1979) argued that “art” cinema constitutes a genre itself with its own narrative conventions and patterns of iconography. Certainly Iranian art cinema has been distinguished by its use of poeticism and a realist aesthetic. While many of the films studied in this thesis exhibit a persistent interest in lyricism and adhere to certain production practices (such as using non-actors and external locations), this thesis seeks to broaden the category of “Iranian women’s art cinema” and theorise the manner in which its formal structures borrow and coalesce with other genres. As Thomas Schatz (1991) argues in his seminal essay, is both a “static and dynamic system”, at times adhering to formulaic conventions, at other times evolving and responding to socio-political and cultural shifts and transformation. John Frow (2013) also challenges the fixity of genre classification, proposing that genre is not simply the recognition of certain “distinctive formal devices” but rather the manner in which the text is framed in relation to other texts and genres (2013, 7). Frow thus argues that while genre is predicated on certain continuities of form, thematic structures, modes of address and rhetorical functions, it also needs to be understood as a set of conventions that organise and “constrain” meaning and knowledge. Genre is therefore essentially a form of “meaning-making”, in which knowledge of a worldview is shaped, coded and produced in relation to other knowledge forms. Both Schatz and Frow’s conceptualizations of genre are

28 useful in challenging the notion of genre as static and fixed. It allows us to problematize the categories of “art” or “festival” cinema in the context of Iranian filmmaking, and theorise the manner in which this form of “knowledge” is produced and sustained in relation to other films and film genres, as well as other socio-political influences and cultural changes. Michelle Langford’s (2010) essay on Tahmineh Milani’s “Fereshteh Trilogy” is an example of how Iranian art cinema may be broadened through its inclusion of, the so-called popular, mode of melodrama. Taraneh Dadar also notes the blending of melodrama and in the work of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, demonstrating the manner in which the genre of melodrama, and indeed art cinema more generally, may be “diversified” and “complicated” (2012, 147). Such interventions challenge the static classification of “Iranian art cinema”, revealing the manner in which this genre is both defined and destabilized through an interaction with other cinematic modes. Also relevant is the work on genre by Steve Neal (2000) and his argument that films are “multiply generic”, in the sense that they adopt “intra-textual conventions” and various modes of address. Iranian art cinema, while at times certainly adhering to various stylistic conventions and production practices, encompasses a range of formal and functional strategies as well. Melodrama not only coalesces with social realism in the work of Bani-Etemad and Tahmineh Milani, but there are also slippages between the modes of the essay film, the documentary and the docu- drama in other directors’ works. Such blending of the factual and the fictional introduces various problems regarding the mediation and representation of the “real”. This project is particularly interested in investigating how authorial presence influences and permeates the realism in the work of Samira Makhmalbaf and the manner in which documentary and docu-drama evolve out of a tension between performance and “lived reality”. This thesis is also interested in how genre may shape and inflect representations of gender. As suggested in the beginning of this introduction, the melodramas produced in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940’s were often labelled as “women’s cinema” because of their particular mode of address. Linda Williams (1991) writing on the association between genre excesses (whether it be the emotional excess of melodrama or the excess of violence in action films) and the gendered bodies of the spectators is useful. Steve Neal’s scholarship on the intersection of genre and sexuality is also important, and the manner in which “genres participate in the ongoing process of construction of sexual difference and

29 sexual identity” (1980, 56). This thesis investigates the manner in which various genres, in particular the melodrama and the , may prescribe or challenge cultural stereotypes. In particular, it questions how women’s dialogue and “voice” is represented in such cinematic modes and whether certain genres may be better at facilitating a politically subversive or dissident form of cinema. By examining the essay film, the socially realist melodrama, the “”, the melodrama, the romantic comedy, the documentary and the docu-drama, this study hopes to demonstrate both the diversity of films made by Iranian women filmmakers, and also the manner in which such cinematic modes may coalesce, interact and form generic slippages. While Iranian women’s cinema may be easily indexed as a form of “auteurist”, “art” or “festival” cinema, this thesis seeks to complicate such a classification by tracing both the formal continuities and diverges within this range of cinematic modes.

*

The first chapter of this thesis examines the central position occupied by Forugh Farrokhzad as both a modern poet and filmmaker. It explores the thematic and aesthetic correlation between Farrokhzad’s poetry and her groundbreaking film, Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black, 1962). It argues that many of the central devices of the film, which create a mood of ambivalence and ambiguity, may be understood by examining the treatment of the body in Farrokhzad’s poetry. This chapter underscores the manner in which Farrokhzad’s use of sound and voice in The House is Black has been deeply influential on the development of a poetic realist aesthetic in contemporary Iranian cinema. By gesturing to the wide-ranging influence of Farrokhzad, this initial chapter not only sets up my central argument regarding the importance of poetic voicing in Iranian women’s cinema but also demonstrates how the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies of The House is Black persist in ‘national’ and diasporic Iranian films. The second chapter, “Intimating the Core Self: Veiling and Voicing in the work of Marva Nabili and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad” continues and extends the analysis of the poetic voice. It argues that many women Iranian directors have found strategies of representing the private and the intimate in their films through systems of inference, allusion and

30 poeticism. This chapter argues Bani-Etemad evokes the presence of the desirous body through the use of voicing and voice-over in Banoo-ye ordibehesht (The May Lady, 1998), while Nabili politicizes the body so that it too becomes a vessel for self-expression and articulation in Khak-e sar be mohr (The Sealed Soil, 1977). It argues that this metaphoric re-unification of the body with the voice does not attempt to unveil what is hidden, nor make women’s subjectivity entirely transparent and accessible to the spectator. Instead these cinematic texts go beyond the hierarchical and imposed dualism of veiled/unveiled and point to a state of subjectivity which is permeable, neither entirely exposed nor hidden, allowing for a more nuanced, complex and multifaceted representation of women’s private and public selves. The third chapter establishes the necessity for including exiled and diasporic filmmakers as part of a study on Iranian cinema. It argues that globalisation and the intensification of transnational cinema theory and practice has seen greater emphasis placed on the tensions between local and global cultures, organisations and subjectivities. Memory has emerged as a central issue in the work of diasporic writers, artists and filmmakers. The emphasis of this chapter is on the mediation and communication of memories in Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009). It argues that the mobile phone not only plays a central role in the storing of recollections, it also functions as an important symbol of democratic sovereignty. This chapter thus examines how mobile phone footage constitutes a form of authorial signature in Moussavi’s film, foregrounding the technologies and methodologies that must be adopted by the “accented filmmaker”. It also examines the way in which Moussavi pays homage to Iran’s pioneering modern artists, such as Forugh Farrokhzad, adopting and translating such poetic techniques as ellipsis and metaphor, as a means of evoking the trauma associated with exile and its effect on individual and collective memory. This chapter argues that although the subjectivity of the exile may be destabilised and fractured by the processes of deterritorialisation and displacement, this does not eradicate the personal, specific and located nature of their experiences and their ability to recount, and thus author, their stories. The fourth chapter discusses the manner in which Shirin Neshat poeticises the liminal space occupied by the diasporic subject in her film Women Without Men (2009). It examines the indeterminate state of “unhomeliness” that is evoked through the aesthetic

31 interplay of allegory and magical realism. It argues that Neshat’s mode of magical realism constitutes a form of cinematic poeticism, which extends beyond the fantastic to include representations of the internal workings of its protagonists, externalizing their experiences as psychological and cultural exiles. It argues that Neshat underscores the problematic nature of utopianism and the way in which hermetic communities fail not only to protect their inhabitants from the anguish of patriarchal society, but from their own anxieties and personal turmoil. It returns to the theme of lyrical ambivalence, as discussed in relation to Farrokhzad, and examines Neshat’s position regarding the possibility of a democratic and women-centered Iran, both as a geographical and historical entity, and as an imagined and poetic construct. Chapter Five shifts the emphasis to the theme of genre, in particular the manner in which the modes of melodrama and the romantic comedy influence dialogue and thus the expression of women’s voice and authority in more popular modes of address. It questions whether the romantic comedy is an appropriate vehicle for empowered cinematic voicing and whether a film such as Tahmineh Milani’s Atash Bas (Ceasefire, 2006), represents a concession to the patriarchal mores of middle-class marriage in Iran. This chapter thus investigates whether the polemical form of voicing so central to Milani’s earlier “Fereshteh” melodramas is sustainable within the context and constraints of a genre such as the romantic comedy in Ceasefire. The final chapter continues to examine the role of genre in Iranian cinema, in particular the modes of the documentary and docu-drama. The Iranian art cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s became renowned for its use of non-actors, non-scripting and real locations. Filmmakers such as Samira Makhmalbaf and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad continually blur the boundaries between seemingly factual and fictional cinema with the insertion of real and faux documentary footage. This chapter is primarily interested in the ethics of voicing in the context of dramatizing the stories of real subjects. It argues that the authorial presence and mediation of the ‘real’ by both Bani-Etemad and Makhmalbaf complicates the notion that these films automatically endow their female participants with social agency and a political voice. In films such as Bani-Etemad’s Roozehar-e ma (Our Times, 2002) Makhmalbaf’s Sib (Apple, 1998) intervention by the director at times becomes hazardous, inadvertently creating more complications for participants already encountering social

32 stigmatisation and financial destitution. This chapter thus argues that “voicing” can only be theorised as an agentic process when it follows a collaborative approach to film authorship, embracing a self-reflexive film aesthetic that also exposes the various socio-cultural strictures facing Iranian women. Throughout this thesis the aim is to illuminate representations of voice via the examination of the specific formal, thematic and production practices of the films, while adhering to the imperative of situating the films within their historical and cultural context. Voicing, however, should not be understood as the simple process of revelation and disclosure. Instead, voicing in Iranian women’s cinema is often predicated on the principles of poeticism, ambivalence and allegory. One of the central arguments of this thesis is that there exists a tension in these films between revealing and concealing (or veiling and unveiling) women’s history, experiences of homeland and selfhood. The use of inference and ‘veiled’ meanings often enables directors to construct more realistic and intimate women-centered narratives. Veiling thus not only refers to the innovative use of the sartorial veil in Iranian women’s cinema, but also to the indirect representational strategies central to the processes of storytelling.

33 Chapter One Poetic Pronunciation: Forugh Farrokhzad And the Rhythmic Body in ‘The House is Black’

Forugh Farrokhzad holds a central position in the Iranian cultural landscape, not only due to her seminal contribution to modernist poetry, but also for her far-reaching influence on the pre-revolutionary New Wave, and post-revolutionary cinema. Farrokhzad’s sole directorial effort, Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black, 1962) has been analysed for its personal and political metaphors; this chapter, however, focuses on its creation of a rhythmic and poetic soundscape. It argues that it is the sonic dimensions of The House is Black that evoke the corporeality and movement of the body, demystifying and poeticizing not only the condition of leprosy, but the experience of human embodiment more generally. This focalisation of the “rhythmic body” finds parallels in Farrokhzad’s poetry and her representation of the female body as a site of agency, pleasure and desire. But Farrokhzad’s film avoids sentimentality through its central dichotomy: a tension between darkness and light, suffering and pleasure. This chapter argues that such a dialectical tension inspires an aesthetic of ambivalence and lyricism that continues to be evident in the work of Iranian women filmmakers, both indigenous and diasporic. Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry has inspired extensive scholarship in both Persian (Shamisa 1993, Zarrinkub 1996, Karimi-Hakak 1997, Khosro-Shahi 2000, Bavandpour 2002) and English, with the most important English language contributions being Michael Hillmann’s biography (1987), Farzaneh Milani’s authoritative writings (1986, 1992, 2002) and Nasrin Rahimieh & Dominic Parviz Brookshaw’s collection of critical essays (2010). Jonathon Rosenbaum’s essay (2005) on The House is Black formed a provocative intervention into the scholarship on Farrokhzad, which was followed by various book chapters on the film, by some of the most important Iranian cinema scholars (Hamid Dabashi 2007, Nasrin Rahimieh 2010 and Hamid Naficy 2011b). Of all the essays on Farrokhzad’s film, it is perhaps Dabashi who most strenuously argues for the film to be considered in the context of Farrokhzad’s poetry and biography. He makes the thesis that the film was made at a critical juncture in the poet’s personal and creative development and

34 that her work on The House is Black consolidated Farrokhzad’s poetic maturation (2007, 42). He writes:

I am absolutely convinced that The House is Black is the missing link between her first three collections of poetry and her last two – that without her poetry we cannot understand what happens in The House is Black, and without that film we are missing something critical in the course of her poetic career (55).

Dabashi’s argument is useful in underscoring some of the striking points of confluence between Farrokhzad’s poetry and The House is Black. It promotes the film not just as an important contribution to the pre-revolutionary Iranian New Wave cinema but more broadly as an example of the founding and symbiotic relationship between Persian poetry and contemporary Iranian film. I would like to add that the parallels between Farrokhzad’s film and poetry extend beyond formal and structural concerns, to include a shared thematic preoccupation with the body, in particular an emphasis on human corporeality as a dialectical experience of pleasure and suffering, catharsis and captivity. I argue that it is this quality of ‘poetic ambivalence’ that is one of the more important characteristics of Farrokhzad’s film, and one that has been adopted and refined by generations of indigenous and diasporic directors. This chapter will begin by situating Farrokhzad and her work in the context of the socio-political developments of Modern Iran and the highly contested and politicized role of the female body in the 1950s and 1960s. I then turn specifically to questions of categorizing The House is Black, proposing that the film is best understood as an essay film as opposed to its usual classification as a “poetic documentary”. Drawing on Susan McCabe’s (2005) theory of cinematic modernism, this chapter will then examine how the use of voice, dialogue and sound in Farrokhzad’s film skillfully evokes the corporeality and “movement of the lived body” (2005, 3). It argues that Farrokhzad’s use of rhythm in The House is Black not only humanizes the condition of leprosy, but more broadly the experiences of existential and bodily suffering, and its paradoxical counterpoints, pleasure and desire. While so much critical discourse has focused on analysis of the “abject” visuals in Farrokhzad’s film, this chapter argues that Farrokhzad persistently privileges sound as a

35 means of celebrating the rhythms and cycles of the body. This chapter will conclude by demonstrating the way in which Farrokhzad’s characteristic form of has been so influential on Iranian women filmmakers. In particular, I note how the strategies of voicing, lyricism and self-reflexivity persist as central devices for claiming discursive authority in the works of both diasporic and indigenous directors. Indeed, this thesis begins its exploration of Iranian women’s cinema through Farrokhzad precisely because the poet- filmmaker’s practice of cultivating poetic ambivalence remains relevant in the contemporary representations of Iranian women’s bodies, desires and socio-cultural identity.

Forugh Farrokhzad and the Modern Iranian Woman Born in 1935 in Tehran to a middle-class family, Forugh Farrokhzad was the third of seven children. She studied until she was fifteen, transitioning to Kamal al-Molk, a technical school, where she learnt sewing and painting. Farrokhzad never formally completed her secondary school education, for at sixteen she married Parviz Shapur and at seventeen gave birth to their son, Kamyar. Although Farrokhzad had willingly married her older second cousin, Shapur, the couple were divorced after only three years. Farrokhzad lost custody of Kamyar and was denied all contact after the separation (Milani 1992). In 1955 Farrokhzad was hospitalised after a nervous breakdown, the same year her first collection of poetry, Asir (Captive), was published. Thereafter Farrokhzad made several trips to Europe (in 1956, 1960 and 1964) where she continued to write poems, short stories, letters, as well as undertake employment as a translator in Munich. She published two more collections of poetry between her sojourns, Divar (The Wall) in 1956 and Esyan (Rebellion) in 1958. At this time she also began working at the Golestan Film Workshop, first as a secretary, and later as an assistant, editor and finally as a director of The House is Black. There was and continues to be much speculation about the nature of her close relationship with the married , with Farrokhzad’s fourth collection, Tavallodi digar (Another Birth, 1964), dedicated to the writer and documentary-film maker. Farrokhzad died in a car accident on February 14, 1967, aged 32. Her final volume of poetry, entitled Imam biyavarim be aghaz-e fasl-e sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season) was posthumously published in1974.

36 Janet Afary (2009) writes that Farrokhzad’s poetry emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a larger movement of cultural modernity, in which leftist social democracy movements intersected and confronted traditionalism and Islamist religious discourses (228). From 1953 Muhammad Reza Shah consolidated Iran’s diplomatic ties with the United States, encouraging industrialisation and attempting to quash leftist political parties and liberal dissidents (Afary 2009, 202). In 1957 the Shah increased the powers of the secret police (the SAVAK) and created a culture of brutal intolerance towards political opposition. The apparent rigging of the 1961 presidential election by the Shah caused national outrage, strikes and protests. Andrew Warne (2013) notes that despite the US backed coup d’etat of 19531, the Kennedy administration had increasing doubts over the dictatorial nature of the monarchical regime during the early 1960s.

Washington’s overarching goals were to keep Iranian oil flowing and keep the Soviets out, not to spread democracy. Yet after coups and revolutions overthrew pro-U.S. dictators in places like Iraq in 1958 and Cuba in 1959, policy-makers warmed to the idea of supporting reform in Iran and throughout the decolonizing world to avoid ‘losing’ more countries…Eight years after the U.S.-orchestrated 1953 coup ended parliamentary democracy in Iran, Washington appeared poised to reverse course (Warne 2013, 237).

As part of the White Revolution launched in 1963, the government instituted various land reforms and expanded women’s civil rights. The reforms were influenced in part by the increasing pressure from the Kennedy administration to democratise Iran. As many scholars are quick to note, the conflicting narratives regarding the Shah’s program of modernization make it impossible to either entirely applaud or condemn the process of liberalisation (Kia 2005, Afary 2009, DeGroot 2010). Women were certainly enfranchised by reforms to education, health and increased access to the work place, with eight women even being admitted to Parliament in September 1963 (Afary 2009, 207). And despite the centralised and often circumscribed nature of women’s organisations under the Shah, various scholars

1 A detailed account of the 1953 coup d’état, which saw the CIA work in conjunction with the British government to remove the reformist and democratically elected President Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, is provided in Chapter 5.

37 still emphasise the important legislation introduced during this period, which extended women’s legal rights in marriage and divorce (Kia 2005, Afary 2009). “Companionate marriage and the nuclear family began to supplant strictly arranged unions and the remnants of formal polygamy within the urban middle classes…Women from the educated middle classes followed the dictates of modernity and consumer society. They went to university, got jobs, played an active role in selecting their mate and entered into companionate marriages.” (Afary 2009, 10-11). But the new “modern woman” existed in paradoxical proximity to her traditional, religious and rural counterparts, who still formed the majority and many of whom continued to “observe the veil, entered into arranged marriages and had no formal education beyond her formative school years” (Afary 2009, 11). The process of liberalization enforced by the State also attracted strong opposition from the high-ranking clerics and religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who objected to the presence of women in Parliament and the gender reforms of the White Revolution. It was not only the traditionalists and religious elite that opposed women’s enfranchisement during this time. Many leftist and progressive intellectuals also resisted aspects of women’s liberalisation because it formed part of the State’s broader social agenda (Afary 2005). Negin Nabavi (1999) characterises the rawchankefr or “modern intellectual” of this period as often secular and politically progressive and notes the shift from the Tudeh influenced communist politics of the 1940s, towards a more radical discourse of militancy and activism.2 While many intellectuals supported aspects of the Shah’s modernization there was still much suspicion and opposition to the monarchy’s dictatorial approach and tight reign over Iranian cultural life. To depict the poverty or misery that many Iranians suffered during this time was completely at odds with the Shah’s aims of projecting a democratic and modernised national image. Artists and intellectuals were subjected to harsh penalties for contravening the State’s program of censorship and repression. Freedom of expression thus became a central concern for the intellectuals, artists and writers of this period who were caught between the opposing programs of liberalism and cultural prescription. To some extent the association of the Shah with women’s movements left women without the

2 Dabashi contests the term “intellectual” as “value neutral” and prefers the concept of ‘intelligentsia’, that he argues more accurately describes that social stratum committed to ideological solutions (1986, 151).

38 support of either the conservative elite or the progressive intellectuals, who both opposed the State program of modernization and Westernization. Interestingly, it was also at this time that the Iranian state was at its most permissive regarding the representation of sex and sexuality both within film and within the public sphere more generally. The commercially successful cinema of the time, known as film farsi, was composed of melodramas, stew-pot comedies, “tough-guy” thrillers and song- and-dance musicals, that were particularly popular among male audiences.3 But far from promoting a more progressive socio-cultural role for women in modern Iran, film farsi usually only served to perpetuate degraded stereotypes of women as either chaste or corrupted (Lahiji 2002, Naficy 2011b, Talattof 2011). Popular journals and magazines also took up erotica in the form of short stories, cartoons and illustrations. As Afary underscores, in many ways, the objectified body of the “modern woman”, both within cinema and print media, was often conflated with the State program of modernity. A journal such as Towfig “ridiculed modern urban women in semi-pornographic cartoons”, presenting “female bodies as objects of desire”, while simultaneously blaming them for “male aggression”, “excessive consumerism” and “even the nation’s economic woes” (Afary 2005, 225). Afary’s broad survey of the various erotic cartoons of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates the highly politicized and contested nature of women’s emancipation in Iran and the way in which women’s bodies became emblematic of “westoxification”4, degraded sexuality and political failure. Milani (1992) forms a similar thesis when she writes, “implicitly, and at times explicitly, all the ills of society were blamed on women’s sexual promiscuity, which was soon to become synonymous with women’s liberation” (1992, 130). It is unsurprising then that Farrokhzad’s poetry has been hailed as so radical and innovative in its representation of the female body and women’s desire. Against the intersecting programs of State prescribed liberalism and ingrained traditionalism, Farrokhzad’s poetry reclaims the body, not as a projection for male orientated fantasies of eroticism or purity, but as a vehicle for autonomy and agency. Milani argues that

3 Chapter 5 provides a detailed account of the film farsi genre and its importance as a popular and commercially viable form of Iranian cinema. 4 “” or “Westoxification” gained currency as a pejorative Persian term during the 1960s, referring to the loss of Iranian cultural identity through the adoption, imitation and influence of Western (in particular American) culture.

39 Farrokhzad’s poetry was part of a broader development in women’s poetry, which centered round the processes of “self-reflection and self-revelation” (1992, 125). Female contemporaries such as Zand-Dokht Shirazi (1911-1952), Shams Kasma’i (1883-1961) and Simin Behbahani (1927-), while certainly not united as a movement or a collective, were simultaneously producing poetry that focused on the private and the personal.5 However, it was Farrokhzad who is perceived as most radically shifting the emphasis to the intensely intimate domain of romantic relationships, sexual encounters and the importance of women’s desire. Railing against the notion of the “chaste” or the “impure”, Farrokhzad repositioned women’s bodies as governed by the individual rights of each woman. Various critics have noted that Farrokhzad, while contesting and contravening the sexual and social mores of mid-twentieth century Iran, also internalises the degraded and shamed stereotypes that were perpetuated under the Pahlavi regime. While she may not explicitly identify ‘patriarchy’ as the cause of her misery, the poet is caught in a highly conflicted and ambivalent position; between finding pleasure in articulating desire and yet still being afflicted by those traditional, patriarchal values that vilify such self-expression in women (Milani 1992, 146). Indeed twentieth century Iranian poetry has been theorised as dramatizing and internalising the central socio-cultural tensions between modernity and tradition (Dabashi 1986, Milani 1992, Hamedani & Muhammad Safeer 2012). Other poets such as Mehdi Akhavan-Saless (1928 – 1990), Ahmad Shamlu (1925 - 2000) and (1928 – 1980) also expressed their socio-political disenchantment and cultural malaise through a new and direct form of poetry. Breaking with the classical rules and moulds of medieval Persian poetry, Modern Iranian poetry built upon the aesthetic innovation of Nima Yushij (1896 – 1960) and his focalisation of the everyday. Nima is often identified as instigating Iranian literary modernism with his rejection of the classical forms and themes of court and mystical poetry. Nima both infused his poetry with the impulses of the French Symbolists and European modernism more broadly, as well as creating a new form of indigenous Persian poetry (Karimi-Hakak 2001). Nima’s free verse, his thematic emphasis on the prosaic and melancholic tone provided a new aesthetic foundation and political platform for

5 Milani also notes Farrokhzad’s female predecessors, including Tahereh Quattol-ayn (1814-1852) from whom twenty poems remain and Parvin E’tessami (1907 – 1941) who published the first collection of poetry by a woman and wrote over 210 poems (2008, 5).

40 the modern Iranian poets of the 1950s and 1960s (Dabashi 1986, Karimi-Hakkak 2001, Hamedani & Muhammad Safeer 2012). The rejection and modification of traditional Persian poetic formulas freed poets to address current themes in a contemporary language. Classical poetry became associated with the out-dated discourses of traditionalism, conservatism and hierarchism. Modern Iranian poetry was not only perceived as reflecting the hopes for cultural transformation and political reformation but was central to promoting the process itself. Hillmann (1982) writes: “Modernist writers perceived themselves during the post-Mosaddeq (sic) era as the conscience of the Iranian intelligentsia and a voice of morality for the Iranian future” (11). Hillmann argues that as a result the modernist writers had a complicated relationship with the Pahlavi State, in which their aims both coalesced with and opposed the government’s program of industrial and political progress. Against this historical backdrop, Farrokhzad published her four volumes of poetry and was involved in the production of several films. The first three volumes of verse (Captive, The Wall, Rebellion) are now generally considered part of the poet’s early development, with the second phase consisting of the collection Rebirth and the posthumously published Let us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. Rebirth is viewed as part of the more complex, mature poetry which reflects not only the poet’s own process of individuation but a broader social awareness and investment in Iran’s cultural future. As Milani (1992) writes, there appears to be a shift from the confessional “I”/man in the earlier works to the more collective and socio-politically inflected “we”/ma in the final two volumes. The next sections of this chapter examines the way in which The House is Black was shaped by the themes and formal principles which emerged in Farrokhzad’s later poetic works. It argues that the film may be more productively considered as part of the tradition of the essay film, which, among other practices, self-consciously maintains the links between literature and cinema.

Situating ‘The House is Black’: Poetic Documentary or Essay Film? Made in 1962 at the Baba Daghi leper colony outside , The House is Black was commissioned and partially funded by the Anjoman-e Komak be Jozamian (The Society for Aiding Lepers). Farrokhzad conducted an initial research trip during the summer of 1962 and returned to Baba Daghi in autumn to film. The documentary was filmed over 12 days

41 with a small crew, including its producer, Ebrahim Golestan and director of photography, Soleiman Miasian. It was made without any shot list or script (Ghorbankarimi 2002), although as various scholars have argued, certain scenes have been obviously staged (Rosenbaum 2005; 15, Naficy 2011; 85). The film won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963 and was shown at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1966. It received a limited release in Iran and attracted generally positive reviews (Naficy 2011, 87). However, despite its critical acclaim within contemporary scholarship, Farrokhzad’s film was initially not influential within Iran, in part due to its limited exhibition and the fact that it was perceived by the State as taking issue with the governance of the Shah. Its impact and elevation as a modernist cinematic work in Iran arguably came later and in part was due to the screenings and critical work of those in the diaspora and within Iran after the Revolution. In much of the scholarship on the film, critics still note the tension in the film between its function as a “humanitarian documentary” and its presentation as a poetically realist (Rosenbaum 2005, Dabashi 2007, Naficy 2011). The film opens with a close-up of a woman, with significant facial deformity, gazing at herself in the mirror. What follows is a series of scenes of leprosy sufferers involved in all the prosaic activities of everyday life; , resting, sitting in conversation, brushing hair and so on, while Farrokhzad’s voice-over melancholically recites poetry and various biblical quotations. There is a distinct shift early in the film when a male voice-over (often identified as Golestan’s) provides more factual information on the condition of leprosy and its treatments, while individuals are filmed being examined by doctors and undergoing various forms of physical therapy. The film then reverts to its previous mode with scenes of everyday life in the leprosy colony, with Farrokhzad’s voice-over again reciting poetry. Various scholars (Rahimieh 2010, Naficy, Jahed 2012) have attested to the importance of Farrokhzad’s relationship with Ebrahim Golestan. Naficy (2011) argues that Farrokhzad’s development of cinematic poetic realism was significantly influenced by Golestan’s own production practices and his collaborative approach with other writers and filmmakers.6 Working as an activist, writer, translator and then filmmaker, Golestan formed

6 Kamran Talatoff (2010) has disputed the criticism whereby Golestan is cast as an artistic guide and personal muse for Farrokhzad, arguing that Golestan’s influence has been over-determined in recent scholarship.

42 the Golestan Film Workshop (GFW) in 1955.7 Naficy writes, “The GFW became a lively intellectual salon where employees and fellow intellectuals…would read and discuss poetry and other matters late into the night” (79). With little scripting, the blurring of documentary and fictional film modes and the recording of synchronous sound, Golestan’s works broke new cinematic ground with their heightened reality aesthetic and lyrical quality. Farrokhzad was first employed as a secretary at the GFW in 1956, but was soon working as an assistant, actress and editor on various projects. Her first experience of working directly with film was editing Golestan’s documentary Yek atash (A Fire, 1958 - 1961). She also codirected and coedited Ab va garma (Water and Heat, 1961). While Naficy’s identification of a “GFW house style” must be taken into consideration when examining Farrokhzad’s development as a filmmaker, it may also be worth noting the more international cinematic developments in avant-garde and modernist cinema. There has been some debate regarding the degree of influence that cinematic movements such as the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism have had on the emergence of a national form of cinematic poetic realism in Iran, both in terms of the 1960s New Wave cinema and the New Iranian cinema that emerged in post-revolutionary Iran during the 1990s and 2000s (Chaudhuri & Finn 2003, Naficy 2011, Jahed 2012). In making the link between European avant-garde filmmaking traditions and Farrokhzad’s own filmmaking practices in the 1960s I want to avoid re-instating the centrality or hegemony of Western filmmaking theory and practice. Instead, it may be valuable to observe how The House is Black emerged in correspondence or dialogue with other important modernist cinematic practices. The fact that Farrokhzad’s film won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963, at a time when German cinema was undergoing its own cultural and formal transformation, is arguably significant. In 1962 a group of filmmakers, among them Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz, issued the “Oberhausen Manifesto” which declared traditional cinema was “dead” and expressed a desire for a radically new form of German cinema. The recognition that The House is Black received a year later implies that Farrokhzad was working not only as a key member of the Iranian New Wave, but was also contributing to the emergence of a

Rather Talattoff sees the Golestan/Farrokhzad relationship, if anything, as mutually influential and argues that Farrokhzad’s creative trajectory was equally shaped by her European travels, her discussions with other leading Iranian poets and her study of classical Persian poetry. 7 Others use the term ‘studio’ or ‘unit’ (Jahed 2012, Rahimieh 2010), rather than workshop, but within this thesis, I have adopted Naficy’s term ‘workshop’.

43 more global, transnational form of cinematic modernism. The affinity between the Iranian New Wave cinema of the 1960s and its European counterparts is arguably marked both in terms of the production processes and the interdependence of film criticism and practice. Parviz Jahed contends that like the French filmmakers who begun their careers as critics and intellectuals, documenting their conceptual innovations in journals such as Cahiers du Cinema, so too filmmakers such Golestan, Farrokh Ghafferi and Houshang Kavousi also published scholarly reviews and railed against the status quo of film farsi before embarking on their careers as practitioners of art cinema (2012, 86). The fact that several filmmakers of this period trained in and incorporated the practices of casting children and non- actors also contributed to the “hybrid form that involved fictional and documentary elements” (Naficy 2011, 128). In relation to the “avant-garde documentaries” of the New Wave, as Naficy describes them, filmmakers also began experimenting with “editing timed to music” as a means of breaking with the official style of documentary-making (Naficy 2011, 129.) Similarly, Farrokhzad was also beginning to investigate the use of rhythm and music in Water and Heat (1961). As Naficy writes, “The differences between the section she directed on heat and the section on water, which Golestan directed, revealed her keen sense of rhythm and her affinity for sound, an affinity she amply demonstrated in designing the sound for Water and Heat, which included her own voice singing a lullaby” (81). Naficy thus points not only to Golestan’s influence in the context of particular production practices, but also to the way in which Farrokhzad differentiates herself from Golestan’s style and consolidates her distinct brand of poetically realist cinema, in which the treatment of sound is central. While it is important not to overstate the influence of European modernism in the work of Farrokhzad, it is useful to situate The House is Black within the broader, international framework of avant-garde filmmaking and cultural modernism. The House is Black is most frequently described as a “poetic documentary”. Rosenbaum (2005), for example, argues that within the film there exists a tension between factual and fictional filmmaking. Much like in all documentaries, particular sections have been contrived, “conjuring up a potent blend of actuality and fiction that makes the two register as coterminous rather than as dialectical” (2005, 15-16). Dabashi agrees that the “poetic realist” mode of documentary ties together “fact” and “fantasy” (2007, 61) Dabashi is careful to assert that by using the term “poetic” he does not refer to light-heartedness or

44 sentimentality, rather he is referring to what is intellectually and philosophically informed. “Poetic truth is thus no mere aesthetic claim. It posits an epistemic claim, a theorem of its own; it possesses a thematic autonomy that defines its particular take on reality” (62). Dabashi asserts that The House is Black is a form of visual poetry, an argument taken up by Ghorbankarimi (2010) who contends that Farrokhzad uses a particular kind of editing to generate this form of visual lyricism. Ghorbankarimi argues that the “medical” part of the documentary is edited with a conventional “narrative edit”, “creating a sense of continuity in a linear, sequential series of images” (141). Alternatively, the rest of the film employs a faster-paced montage technique, favouring jump cuts, and tight close-ups. Naficy makes a similar point, noting “…her poetic realism stems from her working with each shot in her films as though it were a word in a poem, with great care and precision” (2011, 84). Ghorbankarimi describes Farrokhzad’s film, via the title of her essay, as a “timeless visual essay” (2010, 137). Although Ghorbankarimi does not explicate further on the term “essay”, it is worth considering the film not necessarily as a documentary, nor even a “poetic documentary”, but indeed as an essay film. Defined as “straddling fiction and non- fiction, news reports and confessional autobiography”, the essay film, or film essay, is neither narrative cinema, traditional documentary nor experimental art cinema (Corrigan 2011, 5). Instead, the essay film functions as a form of conceptual filmmaking, invested in both self-portraiture and documenting social history. The authoritative writings of Timothy Corrigan (2011), Laura Rascaroli (2009) and Cecilia Sayad (2013), characterize the essay film as a cinematic mode that consciously maintains a dialogue between literature and film, often exposing the literary underpinnings of cinematic production. Whether it is allusions to the personal diary or a political manifesto, the essay film is defined as that which consciously engages the structures and content of the written form. In the case of Farrokhzad’s film, it is the rhythmic impulses of poetry and its formal ellipsis that so clearly link the film with her written oeuvre. While it is important to differentiate the grammar and structures of the literary essay as opposed to the more economical and elliptical form of poetry, the “essay film” is still a useful term in situating The House is Black as a type of conceptual filmmaking, with Farrokhzad’s voice- over persistently pointing to the symbiotic relationship between written poetry and cinema.

45 But perhaps even more importantly, defining Farrokhzad’s production as an essay film also allows us to engage with theories of authorship without blankly categorising The House is Black as an autobiographical exercise. It is important to stress here that this thesis makes a clear distinction between the “subjective” viewpoints of the film as an authorial intervention, as opposed to understanding it as an autobiographical piece. Indeed Rascaroli argues that the essay film is a format in which authorial presence is particularly accentuated, foregrounded through the use of the voice-over, captions or via the on-screen presence of the director, for the term “essay” implies a textual artefact that has been authored. The various debates regarding the presence and intention of the author have been well rehearsed, both in literary and cinematic theory (Woodmansee & Jaszi 1994, Wexman 2003, Grant 2008, Gerster & Staigner 2013, Caughie 2013). The privileging of the author’s biography and intention was most famously interrogated by French theorist Roland Barthes in his seminal critical intervention, “Death of an Author” (1967), in which he underscored the text as a site of contested meaning. It was not the author, Barthes argues, but the text itself that produced pluralistic readings in its diverse readership. Barthes’ intervention formed a seminal moment in post-structural and semiotic theory and was deeply influential in generating further debate on the positionality and authority of the author (Foucault 1969, Derrida 1971, Burke 1998, Spivak 1999). While this thesis does not subscribe to any particular theoretical framework regarding authorship, it does emphasize the author as a situated and embodied figure, who maintains an historical and empirical existence. Rascaroli argues persuasively that distinguishing a “subjective viewpoint” or authorial presence in a film should not be predicated on the identity or biography of the filmmaker but rather on the “performance” of authorship in the specific text itself (2009, 12). The key function of emphasizing the author, according to Rascaroli, is to examine the manner in which they establish dialogue that is rhetorical, reflexive and adopts the mode of the direct address. Authorship is thus a “product of the text’s adoption of certain strategies” (Rascaroli, 12). This thesis adopts Rascaroli’s useful definition of authorship, when distinguishing the director’s authorial presence, inscription or signature. For despite the fact that she never appears on camera, Farrokhzad’s poetic voice-over reveals the manner in which the director maintains authorial control. Chapter two provides a more detailed account of the specific relationship between voice-over and cinematic self-inscription, but it

46 is worth signalling here that Farrokhzad’s voice-over in The House is Black not only infuses the film with lyricism, but also enacts a performance of authorship. As Sayad argues, the author of the essay film “is at once confessional and investigative of both the world and the enunciating self” (2013, 35). Corrigan makes a similar claim when arguing that the articulation of the “personal point of view” in the essay film is also “public experience”. There is then a detectable tension at work in this cinematic mode between self-portraiture and the desire to document the external, socio-cultural world. The House is Black should be conceived as an essay film precisely because of the manner in which it maintains this tension between the subjective, personalised enunciator and the located world of the leprosy sufferers. Dabashi’s (2007) autobiographical reading proposes that the lepers are a reflection of Farrokhzad’s very personal guilt and shame, regarding the separation with her husband and the loss of custody of her son. “The House is Black is not about a humanist detection of beauty in the midst of misery and decrepitude…it dwells in and deliberates on the dark, the repulsive, and the grotesque, to chase the grotesqueries to their utter limits (57)”. Dabashi writes that “the woman looking into the mirror and examining her ravaged flesh [at the beginning of the film] is Forugh Farrokhzad looking from behind her camera, daring to peer into the depths of darkness, the origin of her genius (67)”. Other critics, however, have refuted Dabashi’s reading that personalises Farrokhzad’s identification with the lepers as an extension of her own guilt and self-loathing. Rahimieh (2010), for example, argues that The House is Black is more invested in portraying “the inextricable intermingling of suffering and joy...” (134), rather than dwelling on personal pain and guilt. Rahimieh also perceives the lepers functioning as a metaphor for national malaise. “…Farrokhzad holds up a mirror to her viewers and forces them to see what they have refused to see as part of themselves: the disenfranchised, deformed and disabled. By foregrounding this underside of Iranian society the poet-filmmaker questions the assumption that the nation’s house is in order.” (127). A discussion of The House is Black as an essay film may facilitate, to some extent, both Dabashi’s and Rahimieh’s readings of the film. Whilst spectators need not perceive the lepers as a literal embodiment of Farrokhzad’s “guilt”, they may interpret her compassionate portrayal of the sufferers as a form of identification, as well an attempt to stimulate greater humanitarian awareness, treatment and aid (Naficy 2011b).

47 One of the most frequently examples of the subjective viewpoint in the tradition of the essay film is the work of French filmmaker, photographer, activist and writer, Chris Marker (1921 – 2012). Marker’s work is often distinguished for the cultivation of the first person narrative and voice-over, which is intimate but also evasive. He begins his film Lettre de Sibérie (Letter From Siberia, 1957) with a voice-over stating: “I am writing you this letter, from a distant land, its name is Siberia.” But despite the direct and personal mode of address with which the film begins, Letter From Siberia interrogates the very use of voice- over and its association with ideology, narrative perspective and cultural context. In Letter From Siberia, a particular sequence of footage is repeated three times, with the voice-over providing a different narrative account with each repetition. The strategy deployed here is sometimes theorized as emblematic of Marks’ own multifaceted and elusive authorial presence (Christley 2002). Certainly the use of voice-over in an essay film such as Letter From Siberia neatly demonstrates the manner in which the voice-over may be adopted both as a means of distinguishing a personal and located “I” with the narrative, and a strategy that inscribes subjectivity as plural, elusive and unpredictable. The voice-over in essayist cinema is thus invested in an endless play with absence and presence, “confounding issues of authority” but always the “privileged tool for the author’s articulation of his or her thought…” (Rascoroli 37). Indeed the next section of this chapter argues that despite the weight given in criticism to the confronting images of the leprosy community in The House is Black, it is actually the voice, along with the various other sonic dimensions of the film, that acquire primacy. The voice is evident not only in the interchanging male and female voice-overs, but also in the dialogue in the film, the singing and intermingled voices of the inhabitants, and the various rhythmic sounds of everyday life. Rahimieh is correct in arguing that “the verbal…acquires supremacy before we are launched into the visual” (131), but this chapter argues that the “verbal” continues to operate as a powerful medium even after the introduction of the visual. In privileging the sonic dimensions of film production, and the centrality of rhythm, Farrokhzad maintains her interest in the humanised body. Just as she utilised her poetry as a means of recovering female desire and bodily agency, so too in The House is Black, Farrokhzad persists in representing the “abject body” not only as a site of suffering, but also as a source of pleasure, fulfilment and catharsis.

48

Voice and the Rhythmic Body in ‘The House is Black’ Farrokhzad begins The House is Black with a blank, dark screen, with a male voice-over warning the spectator; “On this screen will appear an image of supreme ugliness, a vision of pain no human should ignore.” Despite the fact that the voice-over refers to “images” and “vision” that will be imminently displayed, the strategy of beginning with a blank screen and a voice-over, actually points to the limits and confines of the image and underscores the more evocative, and potentially disturbing, power of the voice to conjure visions of “ugliness” and “pain”. Rahimieh argues that as a film, The House is Black is acutely aware of its parameters, that it “records its own limitations and captures a remarkable self-awareness on the part of the artist” (128). McCabe (2005) also argues a similar case in her analysis of modernist cinema and its paradoxical desire to both employ cinema as a means of “corporeality”, “bodily rhythms” and the “movement of the lived body”, while simultaneously recognizing the “unavailability” of the bodily experience as mediated through “mechanical reproduction” (3-4). McCabe goes on to argue that the use of montage editing in ultimately “ruptures fantasies of wholeness” and gestures towards the modern malaise of hysteria. Farrokhzad is undoubtedly cognisant of the constraints of cinematic reproduction, but more specifically she draws our attention to the limits of the visual image. As will be further evidenced, Farrokhzad privileges the cinematic voice as the more powerful, evocative and poetic medium, capable of suggesting the corporeality of the body. In contrast to McCabe’s understanding of modernist cinema, where montage ruptures the coherence of the body, this chapter argues that Farrokhzad’s own employment of montage and jump-cuts, far from suggesting fragmentation and hysteria, actually points to the rhythms of the “lived body” – the beating of the heart, the cycle of the breath, the sound of the foot thumping against the earth. The use of poetic voicing and a rhythmic soundscape enables Farrokhzad to more purposefully evoke her central, to employ Dabashi’s phrase, “epistemic claim” that the human body, irrespective of gender, class, ethnicity or ability, is suffused with the experiences of suffering and joy. Disability precludes neither beauty nor enjoyment of life. While often the source of pain, frailty and disease, the (disabled) body is also centralised as the foundation of pleasure,

49 desire and catharsis. Such treatment of the body has its basis in Farrokhzad’s written poetry and demonstrates the interdependence of the poet’s filmic and written oeuvres. Farrokhzad’s voice-over is clearly one of the most apparent and compelling uses of sound in The House is Black. Reciting her own poetry and fragments of biblical text, Farrokhzad’s off-screen voice intones plaintively and mournfully over the images of daily life at Baba Daghi leper colony. But Farrokhzad’s “lyrical, subjective and intimate” (Naficy 2011, 90) voice-over exists in contrast to the male voice-over, which, as aforementioned, introduces the film over a blank screen and also provides the more medicalised information early in the film, in which the symptoms and treatment of leprosy are explained. Rosenbaum describes the interchanging male and female voices as performing a dialectical role and while noting both are humanist (and humanising in tone), he identifies the male voice-over as being more “dispassionate” in tone and “factual” in function. This dialectical tension that Rosenbaum identifies between Farrokhzad’s poetic voice-over and the more “humanitarian” mode of the male voice continues throughout the film, most obviously within the classroom discussions. In the first classroom scene, very early in the film, we observe children reading from a textbook, praising God for their various physiological abilities (“Lord I praise thee for having given me hands to work with/ Eyes to see the beauty of the world”), despite the fact that the readers are so obviously suffering the ill- effects of leprosy. There is then a panning shot of all the boys, crowded onto their benches directly gazing back at the camera. This is a classic example in which Farrokhzad violates the usual conventions of filmmaking by having her subjects directly acknowledge the camera, and by implication the spectator. Then comes Farrokhzad’s off-screen voice-over: “Who is this in hell praising you, O’Lord? Who is this in hell?” In many ways this scene exemplifies what Rascaroli (2009) describes as the characteristic mode of address in the essayist film, with both the boys’ gaze and Farrokhzad’s rhetorical voice-over, directly targeting and engaging the spectator. Rascaroli insists that the voice-over within this cinematic mode avoids authoritarian meta-narratives by posing questions and encouraging reflection. In this classroom sequence, Farrokhzad’s elliptical and melancholic voice-over undercuts the pious solemnity of the boy’s religious praise and asks her spectator to consider the children’s unnamed and unspoken suffering. The prescribed thanks spoken by the boys appear incongruous, particularly after Farrokhzad’s powerful identification of the

50 boys’ condition as analogous to inhabiting “hell”. The atmosphere of this scene is reminiscent of Farrokhzad’s poem “Jomeh (“Friday”) in Tavallodi digar (Another Birth, 1964), in which the speaker despairs of their isolation and imprisonment.

An empty house A depressing house House with doors barred to the onrush of youth House of darkness and dreams of the sun House of solitude, divination and doubt House of closets, curtains, pictures and books (2010, 65).

There are various other parallels too, most obviously the phrase, “house of darkness”/ “khaneye tariki”, which so closely resembles the film’s title, Khaneh siah ast. The house, or rather the classroom and the leprosy colony more generally, is characterised by its gloom, its dimness, its atmosphere of despondency. In “Friday” Farrokhzad effectively creates this mood of claustrophobia with the repetition of the word “khaneh” (“house”). Krystyna Mazur argues that repetition in the form of syntactical parallelism is what creates rhythm in prosody (2004, 36). Even when a poem is structured elliptically and without a rhyming structure, the presence of such syntactical repetition creates a persuasive form of free-verse rhythm. In the case of the classroom scene, Farrokhzad employs a similar device when she intones “Who is this in hell praising you, O’Lord? Who is this in hell?” The classroom also initially appears to be a space completely “barred to the onrush of youth”, and pervaded by “darkness”, “divination and doubt.” Leprosy, or rather our socio-cultural understanding of disease and disability, Farrokhzad appears to be inferring, sequesters these young boys into a “hell”, forcing them to perform “empty” rituals and maintain their “depressing” isolation. But just as “dreams of the sun” still permeate the gloom of the house in “Friday”, so too Farrokhzad is anxious to underscore the manner in which the boys are also capable of expressing their own version of warmth, lightness and poetic rhythm. This is evident in the second classroom scene, one of the final in the film, in which the teacher poses questions to his students. Critics have observed that the answers given by the students acquire a poetic and philosophical tenor (Naficy 2011, 85; Rahimieh 2010,

51 133). For example, when the teacher asks a student “Why should we thank God for having a father and mother? You answer”, the boy replies, “I don’t know, I have neither.” The teacher then turns to another boy and instructs him, “You, give me the name of four beautiful things.” To which this boy answers: “Moon, sun, flower, game.” While Naficy criticizes this scene for being too “staged” and thus “reducing the documentary authenticity of the whole film project” (2011, 85), it is actually an example of Farrokhzad’s characteristic form of poetic realism and experimentation with a cinematic pacing and rhythm. It also points to the mode of the film, not as a documentary, but as aforementioned, an essay film, where the parameters between factual and fictional filmmaking, between so- called logic (as represented by the teacher’s pedagogical approach) and lyricism (evident in the boy’s poetic response) are blurred, thus endowing the film with the very “epistemic” complexity that Dabashi applauds in The House is Black. Whether the scene was scripted or not, the entire film thrives on these polarities and the manner in which the reality aesthetic of the everyday coalesces with moments of profound lyricism. The boy’s response introduces the notion of a cinematic poeticism. The onomatopoeia of the four words spoken by the boy, “mah, khorshid, gol, bazi” (moon, sun, flower, game), become a form of spontaneous, elliptical and oral poetry. Whether the boy was instructed to speak the words by Farrokhzad, or the answer was voluntarily and spontaneously devised, is not important. What is central here is the tension between the constraints of the traditional documentary structure and the possibilities of a different form of cinema, the essay film, in which poetry “underpins” the structure and maintains the dialogue between Farrokhzad’s written oeuvre and her cinematic production. The boy’s lyrical response also points to the importance of oral poetry and its central historical role in Persian prosody. There appears to have been a symbiotic relationship between the evolution of as a language in the Sasanian era (224 – 265 AD) and the development of Persian poetry in oral form, particularly in the use of epic or heroic poems (Davaran 2010). As Naficy writes, Persian prosody is often divided into that which was written for the elite in the form of court poetry, and that which evolved out of folk traditions (2011b, 222). In both cases, it is thought that poetry developed out of songs and music, and that poems were both preserved and refined through regular public performance. Interestingly, there is very little dialogue in The House is Black but the boy’s

52 contributions in the classroom hark back to this history of poetry, not simply as a literary device, but as a mode of oral performance and personal expression. The boy’s words, “mah, khorshid, gol, bazi” demonstrate that when spoken, poetry may acquire an even more powerful and therapeutic quality. One of the most striking examples of this, immediately follows the first classroom scene, where a man is shown singing, creating his own accompaniment through the clicking of his fingers and the tapping his bare foot on the paving stones. The camera begins with a close-up of the man’s twisted and deformed foot beating the ground and gradually pans up his body, only very slowly revealing the source of the powerful chanting, when the camera arrives and frames the singer’s face. Despite the disabled nature of his body, the forceful and evocative sounds emanating from the man reveal how oral forms of self-expression, such as singing and chanting, restore and animate human vitality. The man’s chanting continues as a sonic thread through the film, sometimes as a rhythmic accompaniment to the other scenes of daily life at the colony. At other times Farrokhzad repeats the scene, splicing it between static scenes of leprosy suffers, almost as if these other individuals are themselves meditating and responding to the power of his performance. McCabe (2005) contends that the modernist filmmakers were preoccupied with the possibility of cinema’s “corporeal subjectivity” and seemingly “embodied existence” (4). But as aforementioned, McCabe argues that the use of montage ultimately exposes the mechanical structures of film and suggests the fragmented and disintegrative nature of the human body (6). Farrokhzad undoubtedly employs montage-editing techniques in The House is Black, but I would argue that she uses such devices not to infer the fragmented nature of subjectivity, but to evoke the very corporeal rhythms and cycles of the human body. She evokes this sense of bodily rhythm not only through the use of voice, but also via the twang of a string being continually pulled, the squeak of a wheelbarrow and the repetitive thud of a ball hitting the earth. The presence of rhythmic sounds humanizes the inhabitants, not only normalising their everyday activity but also infusing them with lyricism and beauty. The body is not simply a site of pain and ugliness, but also represents the possibility of renewal, catharsis and pleasure. Farrokhzad’s interest in the human body as a source of paradoxical pleasure and pain has its origins in her poetry. Farrokhzad’s poetic oeuvre has been mythologised for its

53 confessional tenor, its centralisation of fraught romantic relationships and its erotic themes. The “lover” or the “beloved” figures heavily in Farrokhzad’s poetry, but unlike her predecessors’ work, “sexuality is not camouflaged by formulas, allusions, metaphors, symbols. It thrills in its directness and intensity” (Milani 1992, 144). Farrokhzad’s articulation of female desire and bodily pleasure was so innovative because of the way in which it subverted the traditional canon of classical Iranian poetry and many of the patriarchal social norms of the time. Love and desire in Persian poetry had for so long been embedded in the medieval and mystical lyrical traditions of allegorical expression. Slippages between the religious and the erotic were assumed but were always codified and veiled in symbology. In the ghazal, for example, which translates as “a conversation between lovers”, the “beloved” or the ma’shuq is idealised, and predominantly unavailable. As Amy Motlagh (2012) writes:

The beloved of the Iranian lyrical tradition symbolizes, perhaps above any other literary trope, the ambiguity of love, on which the tradition is founded. Over determined, the beloved evokes many ideas at once: the refuge of the garden; physical passion; a sacred ideal.

The ghazal is thus preoccupied with the experiences of yearning, emoting and the pain of failing to unite with the desired object. 8 Scholars have generally argued that while Farrokhzad adopted some of the motifs and tropes of the classical Persian poets,9 she also

8 The ghazal originated as part of a “secular and well-established tradition” of court, love poetry in the tenth century. It is thought that Persian Sufi poets began adapting this form of court prosody from the eleventh century with Hakim becoming one of the first major literary figures of Persian Sufism (Wilson & Pourjavady 1987, deBruijn 1997). While Sufism still adheres to the doctrinal tenets of Islam, the emphasis is on a direct, immediate, experiential knowledge of God. “This insistence on the total involvement in mystical realisation, and a participative understanding of religious doctrine, sharply distinguished Sufism from other Islamic schools.” (Wilson and Pourjavady 1987, 2). The Iranian medieval poet, Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz (c1320–13898) is perhaps one of the best-known exponents of the ghazal, where the line between religious zeal and erotic ecstasy is frequently indistinct. Certainly Hafiz’s emphasis on the intoxicating experiences of love, beauty and nature, can be interpreted as a form of spiritual devotion but they just as potently represent the pleasures of sensuality and hedonism. Irrespective of whether Hafiz privileges the sensual or the spiritual in his ghazals, the accent remains on the importance of sentiment, self-expression and passion. As Reza Saberi notes, “It is a drunken world, outside the sober world of logical thinking, intellectual arguments, social problems, law and order” (1995, ix). 9 Simidchieva (2010), for example, points to the Sufi allusions in Farrokhzad’s “Naasha” (“Stranger”) with references to the archetypal symbology of the ghazal: the cup, the harp and act of singing. Bahmany (2010) also argues that the classic motif of the mirror also features in Farrokhzad’s earlier collection but unlike in

54 subverted the formulas and metaphors of the classical tradition. While Farrokhzad’s earlier poetry was undoubtedly influenced by the “form and diction” of the classical ghazal, “the poet skilfully remoulds classical Persian paradisiacal garden imagery and its archaic diction after her own taste…” (Brookshaw 2010, 44). Both Brookshaw and Milani (1992) elucidate the way in which Farrokhzad adopts the notion of the idealised garden as a site of romantic and sexual pleasure in “The Conquest of the Garden”, but depicts the beloved as entirely human, accessible and a romantic equal.

Everyone knows Everyone knows That we’ve found a way to the cold and silent sleep of the phoenixes That we discovered the truth in the garden In the shy glance of a nameless flower And found existence in one infinite moment When two suns gazed at one another (2010, 91).

As Brookshaw and Milani stress, in such a poem, the speaker alludes to a reciprocated and fulfilling form of romantic, and possibly sexual, encounter. The beloved is no longer painfully unattainable but a figure with which the speaker can enjoy intimacy and pleasure. Farrokhzad undoubtedly broke with the established poetic and cultural conventions by humanising the beloved and disclosing women’s romantic and sexual desire in a direct vernacular. Nasrin Rahimieh (2010) writes, “what we see in Farrokhzad’s poetry are explorations into new modes of expression not subject to the law of male desire” (4). By refusing to be the desired object or the voiceless “other”, Milani (1992) also stresses that Farrokhzad claims power and authority through her candid mode of expression and unapologetic references to female desire, bodily pleasure and sexual experience. One of the most quoted of Farrokhzad’s earlier poems, which exemplifies these impulses is “Gonah” (“Sin”), which appeared in her second collection, The Wall. Milani has written of how Farrokhzad again subverts the usual formulas of the ghazal by avoiding mystical or

medieval poetry, is not a tool for reflecting divinity but “the problematics of female subjectivity”. In later collection the mirror facilitates the more ‘liberating’ recognition of a coherent and empowered self (78).

55 spiritual overtones. The poem is “not an allegory in which the erotic love signifies love of God. Love here is human, not divine (Milani 1992, 144).”

I have sinned a rapturous sin In a warm enflamed embrace Sinner in a pair of vindictive arms Arms violent and ablaze

In that quiet vacant dark I looked into his mystic eyes Found such longing that my heart Fluttered impatient in my breast.

In that quiet vacant dark I sat beside him punch-drunk His lips released desire on mine Grief unclenched my crazy heart.

I poured in his ears lyrics of love: O my life, my lovers it’s you I want. Life-giving arms, it’s you I crave. Crazed lover, for you I thirst.

Lust enflamed his eyes Red wine trembled in the cup My body, naked and drunk Quivered softly on his breast.

I have sinned a rapturous sin Beside a body quivering and spent. I do not know what I did O God,

56 In that quiet vacant dark (2010, 7).

Milani and Brookshaw are certainly correct in claiming that Farrokhzad “remoulded” the established traditions of classical Persian poetry, by emphasizing the importance of human (as opposed to mystical) connectivity and using direct (rather than ambiguous) forms of language and expression. But Farrokhzad also maintained an emphasis on the experiences of emotional intoxication and sensual pleasure. She dwells on the “sin”, not only as an act of socio-cultural transgression, but as a process that validates the body and deepens self- knowledge. So too in The House is Black, Farrokhzad exposes the body of the lepers, not simply as abject sites of suffering and existential malaise, but as vehicles of ordinary pleasure, love and enjoyment. A young girl, already evidencing the first signs of leprosy via a rash across her angelic face, smiles as an older woman vigorously brushes her luxurious black hair. In another scene, a significantly deformed woman applies make-up before she is presented in a marital ritual. The intense drumming and singing in this scene, shifts the emphasis from the potential “grotesqueries” of the sufferers to the emotion and pleasure of this familiar rite. In another scene a boy grabs a crutch and guilelessly uses it as a toy with which to play with another child. In all of the abovementioned scenes, disease and disability are ever present but do not preclude the possibilities of pleasure and fulfilment. This is not to say that Farrokhzad is invested in sanitising the suffering of the leprosy inhabitants, only that she refutes the notion of the “abject” body and refuses to represent the individuals as impure, contaminated and undesirable. As Rahimieh writes, Farrokhzad’s film interrogates the “practice of mistreating those who have been disabled as a result of disease, even worse, condoning mistreatment and ostracization as culturally normative” (2010, 129). Just as Farrokhzad railed against the notion that women’s bodies must be segregated and veiled, so too her film interrogates the policy of quarantining leprosy suffers. Farrokhzad foregrounds the lived body of the leprosy suffer as both profoundly ordinary and innately lyrical. While Farrokhzad still centralises the experiences of suffering and pain in The House is Black, she underscores the dialectical coalescing of darkness and light and the possibility that pain and pleasure may exist in a form of poetic co-existence. The next section of this chapter charts the way in which Farrokhzad’s film, while dignifying and poeticizing the rhythmic body of the leprosy sufferer, creates an

57 atmosphere of ambivalence through her dialectical positioning of aesthetic darkness and lightness.

Poetic Ambivalence: The House is both One of the most critically analysed scenes of The House is Black depicts a man pacing an alleyway, almost obsessively touching the window ledges as he strides to and fro. Farrokhzad’s voice can be gradually discerned naming the days of the week. While this scene could be interpreted as revealing the claustrophobic, monotonous and severely quotidian nature of existence inside the leprosy colony, it also introduces the notion of temporal structures; the length of a day, a week, the passing of the seasons. This emphasis on the cyclical and repetitive nature of human existence becomes most pointed when Farrokhzad interchanges two scenes; one showing a woman breastfeeding her baby, the other depicting a dog carrying a puppy in its mouth. Farrokhzad’s voice-over is heard: “Leave me, leave me, my days are but breath. Leave me before I set out for the land of no return, the land of infinite darkness”. Several short scenes follow, edited together as a montage: children joyfully devising a game with crutches, birds flying in a sweeping arc overhead, two men playfully wrestling, before Farrokhzad’s voice-over continues: “Oh God, remember my life is wind and you have given me a time of idleness, and around me the song of happiness, and the sound of the windmill, and the brightness of the light have vanished.” When we return once more to the man pacing the alleyway, Farrokhzad continues: “Lucky are those who are harvesting now and their hands are picking sheaves of wheat.” Interestingly, there is another tension at work in these scenes – a kind of “bitter irony” that Naficy identified in the classroom scenes, where the voice-over works against the assumed meaning of the visuals. Instead of celebrating “new life” in those scenes of the baby breastfeeding and the puppy being held by its mother, Farrokhzad intones about “the land of infinite darkness.” Instead of finding joy in the two children devising a game with an implement like the crutches, Farrokhzad’s voice-over dwells on the “light” that has vanished. Overlaying such prosaic but joyful scenes with a deeply melancholic voice-over creates conflict between the audio and visuals. It also demonstrates that sound and image need not work harmoniously towards one unifying form of meaning, but may operate dialectically. Just as Chris Marker devised competing and contradictory voice-over

58 narrations in Letter from Siberia, so too Farrokhzad demonstrates the manner in which the voice may resist creating a unified and monolithic textual meta-narrative. Sound is thus not used as a supplementary medium supporting the dominance of the visual in The House is Black, but a powerful medium in its own right, which creates additional, subtle and often paradoxical layers of meaning. Farrokhzad appears to be pointing to the impermanence of human existence and the fact that all life must end in death. This thematic emphasis on the transience of experience and the cyclic nature of the natural world has its origins in classical poetry, where, for example, the passing beauty of spring is a cause for lament. In ghazal no 128, Hafiz wrote:

O gardener, I see you are ignorant of Autumn; Alas for the day when the wind carries off your tender rose. (2006, 160)

While in Hafiz’s ghazal the rose is also emblematic of the Beloved, whose death causes the Lover poet great suffering, in Farrokhzad’s essay film, death is evoked as a universal and inevitable outcome. Life is “wind”, a moment of “idleness”, always fleeting and impossible to grasp. Whether this philosophy of impermanence is intractably pessimistic has been the source of some critical disagreement. Various critics (Rosenbaum 2005, Dabashi 2007) have drawn attention to the manner in which Farrokhzad underscores the suffering of the leprosy inhabitants. Farrokhzad’s melancholic voice-over evokes the opening line of the poem “Rebirth” in which the speaker laments that, “All my existence is a dark chant”. Certainly towards the end of the film both the visual and the verbal references to “darkness” intensify, becoming more frequent and pressing. In one scene, a man walks on crutches through an orchard towards the spectator. As his body nears and eventually merges with the frame, total darkness engulfs the screen and nothing is heard but the rhythmic clump of his crutches hitting the ground. Accompanying this scene is the female voice- over, which is heard once again dwelling on the transience of human existence and the futility of seeking freedom:

59 Alas for the day is fading, the evening shadows are stretching. Our being, like a cage full of birds, is filled with the moans of captivity. And none among us knows how long it will last. The harvest season came to an end, and we did not find deliverance. Like doves we cry for justice and there is none. We wait for light, and darkness reigns.

Pessimism and existential despair dominate this scene with both the literal frame and the metaphoric allusions of the voice-over pointing to hopelessness, confinement and suffering. But Farrokhzad resists presenting a totalising and nihilistic vision in The House is Black. The rhythmic thumping of the crutch once again infuses the scene with a sense of the body’s powerful perseverance, even in the face of debilitating disease and the inevitability of death. And after several beats while the screen remains dark, a boy’s voice is heard off- screen, reading from a text in which the luminosity of Venus is discussed. The screen is then filled with the natural daylight of the classroom, which appears particularly bright after the intermission of darkness. After asking the boys the series of questions regarding ugly and beautiful things, the teacher then instructs a student to write a sentence with the word “khaneh” (house) in it. The boy’s anxious contemplation is interrupted by a scene, in which a crowd of lepers approach the camera, only to be suddenly enclosed by gates, on which is written “Leprosy Colony”. The final scene of the film then concludes with the boy carefully writing the sentence, “The House is Black”, on the blackboard. And while the film is inevitably preoccupied by ‘blackness’ and suffering, each time The House is Black appears to be inclining towards complete existential and aesthetic “darkness” Farrokhzad reintroduces “light” both cinematically and metaphorically (the references to the luminous Venus, the classroom penetrated with daylight, the boy’s references to the beauty of the “moon, sun, flower, game”). Just as the female and male voice-over co-exist in dialectical tension, so too Farrokhzad persists in oscillating between evocations of lightness and darkness in The House is Black. The abject co-exists with the beautiful, suffering coincides with pleasure and the human experience is composed of both connectivity and isolation. It is this tension between the abject and the beautiful that has lead critics, such as Rosenbaum and Rahimieh, to identify a form of “radical humanism” at work in The House is Black. But as Rahimieh notes, the term “humanism”, cannot be applied without the “much feared universalising tendencies”, which “co-opt” local, indigenous stories into the

60 “grand narratives” of European Enlightenment. Humanism, as a broad philosophical ethos, upholds the importance of human dignity, freedom, reason and responsibility, outside of the strictures of religious and metaphysical discourse. But the principle of a universal humanity or essential human identity has been challenged by post-colonial and postmodern theory as masking Eurocentricism and cultural homogenization. The debate surrounding the appropriateness of the oft-applied descriptor, “humanist” intensified with the increased international circulation of Iranian art cinema during the 1990s and 2000s. Critics continued to apply the “humanist” framework to the New Iranian Cinema, which celebrated the attributes of “smallness, decency, truthfulness, optimism, compassion and doggedness” (Naficy 2011b, 209). But in his text, Masters and Masterpieces Dabashi rails against the application of this term, addressing himself to a new generation of young filmmakers:

Iranian aesthetics are entirely purposeful and have emerged from the pain of the suffering we have as a people endured. Do not let a saccharine and generic “humanism” assimilate the specificity of your cinema – the blood and bone of its reality…. (2007, 22).

This thesis is not invested in applying or disputing the suitability of “humanism” as a philosophical framework for either Farrokhzad’s film or the new Iranian cinema more broadly. Instead it identifies this cinematic tension between “suffering” and “beauty” as emerging directly from Farrokhzad’s own poetry and her consistent interest in dignifying the human body. Poetry and film become inseparable entities within The House is Black, with Farrokhzad using the voice-over, dialogue and sound to infuse her images of the human body with a heightened sense of cinematic lyricism. Eschewing the limits of the documentary and visual polarities of “darkness” and “light”, Farrokhzad uses sound as a means of pointing to a third possibility: ambivalence. Unable to totally surrender her film to the “darkness” of existential despair or the optimism of a “saccharine” “humanism”, Farrokhzad positions The House is Black within the realms of poetic ambivalence. And it is this form of filmmaking that contains so many of the aesthetic and thematic cornerstones that went on to characterise the poetic realism of the post-revolutionary New Iranian Cinema. In the next section of this chapter I will document more specifically the influence

61 of Farrokhzad’s essay film and how her aesthetic of “ambivalence” has informed women’s Iranian filmmaking both nationally and within the cinematic work of the .

Forugh and the New Iranian Cinema Forugh Farrokhzad’s influence on pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been widely recognised in the scholarship on the poet and filmmaker (Rosenbaum 2005, Dabashi 2007, Naficy 2011). Rosenbaum goes so as far to identify The House is Black as the first New Wave film to be made in Iran, crediting Farrokhzad with introducing a new form of cinematic poetic realism, preceding even Dariush Mehrjui’s Gav (The Cow, 1969). Dabashi similarly makes a bold claim, arguing that:

The House is Black is the missing link not only between her previous three volumes of poetry and her next two, but perhaps even more poignantly between the ascent of modern Persian poetry and fiction in the 1960s and the rise of Iranian cinema in earnest in the 1970s. She represents the best that the Persian imagination had to offer, and as fate would have it she was also critically important in the rise of Iranian cinema. She touched Iranian cinema with a very specific mode of realism, a poetic realism…(2005, 68).

Dabashi’s thesis is not hyperbolic, Farrokhzad’s poetry, as part of a broader movement of Iranian literary modernism, and her ground-breaking film, have powerfully shaped the reality aesthetic of contemporary Iranian cinema and infused it with a particular kind of Persian lyricism10. Recent scholarship has certainly examined the influence of Farrokhzad on one of the most internationally celebrated Iranian filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami (Rosenbaum 2005, Sheibani 2006, Saljoughi 2012). The quality of ambivalence so marked in The House is Black has become one of the recognizable traits of Kiarostami’s own oeuvre, which Dabashi notes is “subversive of all absolutist terms of certitude” (2007, 63). From the strategy of defamiliarising “reality” by focalizing the prosaic, through to the explicit recitation of her poetry, critics have claimed that Kiarostami’s films participate in a

10 Her continuing influence also extends, of course, to literature. For example, Simine Daneshvar’s Savushun, the first novel written by an Iranian woman and still a best seller, is also permeated with the themes of The House is Black with the female heroine making weekly visits to a leprosy colony.

62 dialogue with Farrokhzad’s poetic and cinematic texts. Sara Saljoughi even argues that The House is Black and Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) form “loose bookends [to] a lush half- century in which Iranian cinema endeavored to create a new mode of seeing and spectatorship…” (520). Certainly Kiarostami’s body of work has become emblematic of the impulses of cinematic poetic realism.11 The heightened reality aesthetic of Kiarostami’s films was generated through the use of non-actors and amateurs, limited or no scripting, the predominance of outdoor locations, the use of stationary cinematography and the fusion of documentary and fictional narratives. Importantly, however, the mimetic quality of Kiarostami’s films, and the New Iranian Cinema in general, are simultaneously undermined by a self-reflexivity, intertextuality, elliptical edits, self-conscious lyricism and an integration of Persian poetry. Along with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and , Kiarostami was undoubtedly part of an important moment in Iranian cinematic history, where poetic realism was identified as a unique aspect of contemporary Iranian art cinema. While the relationship between Kiarostami and Farrokhzad has been relatively well- documented, there has been surprisingly little written regarding Farrokhzad’s broader influence on women Iranian filmmakers. In the final section of this chapter I would like to stress the importance of extending the notion of Farrokhzad’s influence to both ‘indigenous’ and ‘diasporic’ Iranian women filmmakers. The poet and filmmaker’s impact on women auteurs cannot be overstated. Farrokhzad’s legacy has been adopted in Iranian women’s cinema as a means of reclaiming discursive authority, enunciating identity and voicing desire. In the section of this thesis on diasporic filmmakers I examine the manner in which Farrokhzad’s aesthetic of ambivalence has been adopted by Shirin Neshat in Women Without Men (2010) as a means of demonstrating the equivocal and liminal position of the diasporic individual and the exiled artist, as they continue to reside between cultures and between homelands. Borrowing from Farrokhzad’s central trope of the garden, Neshat evokes the natural world as a place of pleasure and fulfilment, as well as being a site of decay and suffering. Granaz Moussavi also explicitly references Farrokhzad in her feature,

11 Kiarostami’s more recent international co-productions, made outside of Iran, arguably signify a shift in the filmmaker’s production practices and thus a new aesthetic emphasis.

6 3 My Tehran for Sale (2009), adopting the strategy of poetic ellipsis to evoke the trauma of exile and its effect on individual and collective memory. Farrokhzad’s influence on diasporic cinema is thus a central thread of this thesis and Chapters Four and Five provide detailed accounts of the manner in which the poet has significantly shaped the representation of the experiences of displacement and deterritorialisation. Dabashi (2007) has made one of the few references to the manner in which Farrokhzad has influenced Iranian women filmmakers, arguing that Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib (The Apple, 1998) shares a great many attributes with The House is Black. Chapter Six of this thesis will focus on the mode of the docu-drama and how filmmakers such as Makhmalbaf and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad have continued to experiment with the tradition of the poetic documentary or essay film. This final chapter makes the argument that Iranian women directors do not treat documentary making as a completely distinct discipline from feature filmmaking, but rather a process that creates a dialogue between fictional and factual storytelling, between the cinematic subject and the presence of the director-author. Nowhere is the influence of Farrokhzad more apparent than in one of Iran’s most important women filmmakers, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. As both a documentary and feature filmmaker, Bani-Etemad pays homage to Farrokhzad in several of her productions. The next chapter discusses the influence of Farrokhzad in terms of the use of the poetic voice- over and the importance of lyrical ambivalence in Bani-Etemad’s Banoo-ye ordibehesht (The May Lady, 1998). It examines the manner in which Bani-Etemad and Marva Nabili have found strategies of representing the ‘private’ and the ‘intimate’ in their films through systems of inference, allusion and poeticism. It looks at the relationship between voicing and veiling and the way in which women Iranian filmmakers have developed strategies of representing desire, while circumventing the regulations of cultural and cinematic modesty. Just as Farrokhzad reclaimed the female body and the representation of women’s desire in her poetry, so too Nabili and Bani-Etemad underscore the importance of narrativising women’s sexuality and poetically inscribing the experiences of sexual and romantic desire. Farrokhzad revolutionised Iranian filmmaking by demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between poetry and cinema. By self-consciously pointing to the limits and constraints of filmmaking, and the visual image in general, Farrokhzad uses the poetic voice-over and rhythmic sound in The House is Black to conjure a more complex and

64 dialectical understanding of human existence, and in particular the rhythmic body. Despite the confronting images of physical suffering in Farrokhzad’s essay film, it is the voice-over and the use of rhythmic sound that work to normalise and poeticise the experiences of the leprosy sufferers, who like women, have had their bodies characterized as abject, contaminated and degraded. The “lived body” that emerges through Farrokhzad’s innovative use of sound, is both a site of profound banality and poetic beauty. The ambivalence that emerges from this keen tension between suffering and pleasure is characteristic not only of Farrokhzad’s poetry and essay film, but also much of the art cinema that followed her untimely death in 1967. With Farrokhzad’s legacy persisting in the poetic realism of contemporary Iranian cinema, and in particular the work of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, the “lived body” of Iranian women continues to be evoked through the strategies of poeticism, ambivalence and the innovative use of sound and the voice.

65 Chapter Two Intimating Desire: Veiling and Voicing In the work of Marva Nabili and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

As a symbol of nationhood and the cultural imaginary, the veil has always been central in defining women’s status in Iran and delineating social and psychic boundaries. Protocols relating to women’s modesty (hijab) and social propriety have been enforced by successive regimes in pre-modern, modern and post-revolutionary Iran and while the codes have varied, the veil or its absence has remained central to legacies of regulation and prescription. The social conventions of veiling and unveiling have involved not only the concealing and revealing of the body, but have applied equally to the arena of women’s discourse, authorship and the voice. For it has not only been the body that has been long shrouded, forcibly exposed under the Shah and then Islamized in post-revolutionary Iran, but also the female voice that has been regulated and restricted. This chapter examines notions of veiling and voicing through the prism of two films, Marva Nabili’s Khak-e sar be mohr (The Sealed Soil, 1977) and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Banoo-ye ordibehesht (The May Lady, 1998). It argues that these films experiment with devices of exposure and concealment, both sartorial and discursive, centralising the expression of desire and the unveiled body without compromising or divulging the most intimate aspects of the protagonists’ subjectivity. Iranian cinema has been intrinsically shaped by the country’s complex history of veiling and voicing. While it is important to note that the codes have varied significantly with each historical period, both the monarchical and post-revolutionary governments instituted modesty codes for women in film. State guidelines have been responsible for affecting a schism in the cinematic representation of women: bodies are concealed and to a large extent, voices have also remained constrained. While women are certainly no longer forcibly secluded from the hetero-public sphere and the political activity of civil society, hijab has remained a powerful force in prohibiting directors from detailing the spectrum of women’s social, personal and sexual experiences. However, various Iranian women directors have found strategies of representing the ‘private’ and the ‘intimate’ in their films through systems of inference, allusion and poeticism. They have evoked the presence of the

66 body through the use of voicing and voice-over and similarly, they have politicized the body so that it too has become a vessel for self-expression and articulation. This metaphoric re-unification of the body with the voice does not attempt to ‘unveil’ what is ‘hidden’, nor make women’s subjectivity entirely transparent and accessible to the spectator. Instead cinematic texts, such as The Sealed Soil and The May Lady, go beyond the hierarchical and imposed dualism of veiled/unveiled and point to a state of subjectivity which is permeable, neither entirely exposed nor hidden, allowing for a more nuanced, complex and multifaceted representation of women’s private and public selves. This chapter begins with a brief historical account of the veil and its relationship to women’s discourse in pre-modern and modern Iran. It then examines the role of veiling in relation to Nabili’s The Sealed Soil, in particular how Nabili allegorises the conflicted experience of modernization for a young woman in rural Iran through ritualised unveiling scenes. Silence is examined as a possible tool for resistance, as is the use of the body as a site of personal and cultural protest. The second half of this chapter explores the use of ‘substitute veils’ and the lyrical voice-over in Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady, and how such aesthetic strategies are employed poetically to evoke the frisson of a romantic relationship. This chapter makes the case that both Bani-Etemad and Nabili self-consciously play with representations of unveiling and the cinematic voice (or its absence) as a means of more candidly depicting the complexity of women’s desire in modern and post-revolutionary Iran, while also referencing the socio-cultural constraints surrounding cinematic production. It argues that while such directors centralise women’s desires and sexuality, they also retain an aesthetic of poetic ambivalence that may be traced back to the lyricism and poetic realism of Forugh Farrokhzad’s prosody and cinematic work. This chapter thus continues to explore the use of the voice and its relationship to the body in women’s cinema, in particular how the voice allows its directors to inscribe desire and sensuality into the cinematic text.

The Veil and Cinematic Modesty Codes There have been several accounts of the way in which the veil and the voice are intrinsically inseparable aspects of women’s socio-political experience in Iran (Milani 1992, Najmabadi 1993, 2005, Naficy 1991, 1994, 2000). Veiling is theorized in these texts

67 not simply as a convention pertaining to the sartorial, but a complex cultural phenomenon that regulates social boundaries, codes of communication and notions of selfhood. Because veiling and sexual segregation were ostensibly part of the same program of control and seclusion in pre-modern Iran, traditionally it was not only women’s bodies that were relegated to the private, domestic, familial realm, but also their discourse (their conversations, their writings and their performances). As Farzaneh Milani writes: “Women experience their confinement not only metaphorically and mystically but also spatially, physically and verbally in their social segregation, cultural confinement and forced silence” (1992, 7). This was certainly true of the conditions for women in pre-modern Iran, but as Milani herself readily concedes, veiling in contemporary Iran is no longer the equivalent of unvoicing, nor does it necessitate silence and passivity as it did in certain socio-economic stratas. The relationship between veiling and voice is far more complex with the significance and symbolism of the veil changing dramatically with the onset of both modernity and the Islamic Revolution. As a practice veiling in Iran is both pre-Islamic and extra-Islamic but the following account is largely concerned with the emergence of veiling as a religious practice. It is thought that veiling within the context of Islam did not occur from any concrete scriptural injunction, but rather from the interpretations of the Qo’ran by Islamic authorities in Iran. References to veiling in the Qo’ran are brief and indicate that a woman should cover herself (in particular her “private parts”) and protect her modesty but do not prescribe any particular form or method of veiling (Sedghi 2007, 38; Milani 1992, 21). But as Milani explains, while the “…details of veiling may be a point of contention among theologians of different sects…the function of veiling is beyond dispute. It is to hide the woman from the view of forbidden men” (21). Forbidden men include all those outside her immediate and extended family, for whom her body signifies not only her own sexuality, but that which may stimulate male desire and impiety. The containing and concealing of a woman’s body is assumed to be paramount then to the maintenance of social and religious order and is achieved not only through the sartorial veil but via the practices of segregation and seclusion. Homes were designed to shield a woman from the hetero-social sphere and Islamic architecture was characterized by the inclusion of inner courtyards and women-only quarters (Naficy 2000). Women were literally walled into a space of homo-social

68 communion, devoted to their filial or spousal duties and thus prevented from corrupting their male counterparts with their dissipated sexuality or moral inferiority. Detailed information on the various customs of veiling before the 19th century is limited. While some accounts emphasize the Arab invasion in the 600s and the slow conversion of Iranians from Zoastrianism to Islam (El Guindi 1999, Sedeghi 2007), the pervasive use of the veil within Iran cannot be tied to any particular religious, geographical, tribal or class conventions Instead the veil must be understood as a complex historical phenomenon that emerged out of a range of socio-historical and religious conditions. But certainly by the beginning of the 19th century, the was commonly worn and gender segregation was broadly enforced. Wealthy and elite women strictly observed the veil and were primarily confined to the home, occupying themselves with embroidering, traditional instruments and the study of classical poetry and literature. Financial necessity made it essential for others to work as carpet weavers, market vendors, domestic labourers and seamstresses (Sedghi 2007, 33). As a result, the conventions of veiling were also modified depending on a woman’s class, religiosity and region. Generally, during the (1796 to 1925) women wore a variation of a three-piece costume that constituted the chador (a long veil that covered them from head to toe), the rubandeh (a short veil that masked the face) and the chaqchur (very loose trousers) (Sedghi 2007, 26; Afary 2009, 44). Afary gives an overview of the disparities in veiling based on regional customs and class, emphasizing that Gilani women, for instance, “frequented public spaces more freely, often without the chador”, while more impoverished, urban women often wore looser veils, sometimes without the rubandeh (2009, 45). Veiling was thus a heterogeneous practice influenced by social status, geography and the degree of mobility required by one’s work or home life. It is also important to acknowledge that men too had to abide by various socio-cultural customs and modes of etiquette that governed their behaviour and attire. Afsaneh Najmabadi writes that in the context of modernization, “men’s public appearance was equally important” as their female counterparts, with prescriptions regarding the veil finding their parallel in men’s “beards…hair, hat and so forth” (2005, 137). Interestingly Najmabadi notes the shaving of men’s beards was a subject that was fiercely debated in the late 19th century, with “clerical leaders issuing rulings prohibiting shaving beards” (144).

69 During the period between the late 1890s and the early 1900s governors and clerics issued various decrees as they attempted to enforce dress codes and certain standards of behaviour for both men and women. The Governor of Tehran, for example, forbade men from singing in the street and was also concerned about women appearing in public in the niqab, instead of the more modest rubandah (Najmabadi 2005, 138). Najmabadi claims that within this atmosphere of imposed segregation and homosocial seclusion there was a prevailing oral tradition, particularly in the upper classes, in which women performed plays and poetry to all-female audiences (1993; 488). Najmabadi argues that these oral and written discourses were candid and openly sexual. She sites Bibi Khanum’s text, Ma'ayeb al-rejal (Vices of Men), as an example of the mores of pre-modern women’s homosocial discourse. The treatise was written in the mid-1890s for a female audience and it rails against one particular misogynistic text of the time, Ta'dib al-niswan (Disciplining Women) that instructed men on how to castigate and control their wives. Najmabadi notes that Khanum’s text is full of sexually explicit stories, frank references to the female anatomy and contempt for the patriarchal culture of subjugation. In light of this treatise and other texts Najmabadi cites, she argues that the culture of segregation in Iran had the effect of producing a female-centered, performative culture of which sexuality and emotional candour were an integral part. Janet Afary also notes that the veil, in many ways, offered certain women the opportunity for anonymity, with women of high social status adopting the attire and veiling practices associated with lower class women in order to visit the doctor, socialize with other women, or even become involved in clandestine affairs (2009, 46-47). Afary discusses the phenomenon of the dallal-e mohabbat (literally, ‘the love broker’ or matchmaker), who in the 1880s was known for organising illicit sexual relationships for married, divorced and widowed women. Veiling, and the program of gender segregation, was thus not always practiced compliantly, with women adopting a variety of resistant and innovative measures in order to maintain social mobility and freedom. With the unveiling edict of 1936 and introduction of a politically sanctioned heterosocial space, women were permitted greater access to the public domain and enjoyed freedoms that had previously been denied them (such as undertaking education, participating in the work-place and eventually the right to vote). But Najmabadi argues that

70 women’s autonomy was still significantly curtailed by the State’s promotion of the ideal modern woman. While women were allowed to give public addresses and author journal articles, they were only endorsed if they “disciplined” their language and moderated their tone (Najmabadi 2005). According to Najmabadi the pre-modern woman was demonised as ignorant, sexually debased and uncultured. The new “modern” Iranian woman could claim a role in the public domain, but only if she employed a new metaphoric veil that purified her language and guarded her body. With the abandonment and outlawing of the sartorial veil, women were required to rigorously employ an internalised, metaphoric veil that was equally constraining and prescriptive. For those women who refused to unveil and associated their chador with protection, respect and their religious faith, the edict of January 7th, 1936 meant they could no longer appear freely covered in public without the possibility of harassment from the government’s law enforcement. Whether the objective of the unveiling policy was more concerned with undermining religious authorities and creating superficial European mores is debateable (Sedghi 2007, 90). Certainly it was not about providing women with greater choice; instead a new standard was prescribed and enforced as a symbol of Iran’s cultural entrée into modernity.

Najmabadi’s thesis regarding these tensions between the body and the voice in pre- modern and modern Iran is relevant when considering the cultural representations of veiling in Iranian women’s cinema. Najmabadi argues that women were permitted to join the hetero-social arena as unveiled participants in the modernist project, but they were still expected to embody the prescribed ideals of femininity, purity and constraint. As Najmabadi explains:

In her journey through the twentieth century modernist imagination, the new de- eroticised woman became many more characters: the well-educated mother, the companionate wife, the capable professional woman often at the service of state institutions, the sacrificing nationalist heroine, the self-less comrade. Yet this construct could not do away with her conflicting/complementary Other: the sexual woman, seething with appetites and desires, externally held in check by the veil (1993, 507).

71 As discussed in Chapter One of this thesis, this degraded, morally “loose” caricature continued to predominate in the film farsi of 1950s and 1960s and also within the semi- pornographic cartoons featured within various popular print media. Far from providing a platform for heterogeneous representations of women, the dyad of the “sacrificing nationalist heroine” versus the sexual “Other” continued as a regressive discourse throughout second half of the twentieth century in Iran. Marva Nabili’s pre-revolutionary film, The Sealed Soil teases out these very tensions regarding the identity of the modern woman. The next section of this chapter examines how Nabili dramatizes this cultural schism in the context of rural Iran. In particular, it examines how silence and mutism may be adopted as a tool for personal resistance and the way in which the body may be employed as a vehicle for self-expression and personal protest.

Silence and Ritual Unveiling in Marva Nabili’s ‘The Sealed Soil’ The 1960s proved to be a pivotal turning point in the quality and breadth of films being produced in Iran. Alongside the popular, commercially successful comedies, song-and- dance films, melodramas and thrillers associated with film farsi, “New Wave” filmmakers began producing “poetically realist” documentaries and features. Much like their counterparts in the Modernist poetry scene, New Wave directors focused upon the prosaic and the quotidian, and treated such subject matter with a lyrical sensibility or a “poetically realistic” aesthetic. The cinematic release of Dariush Mehrjui’s Gav (The Cow, 1969) represented a turning point in which art cinema became a popular and commercially viable form of filmmaking in Iran. Naficy asserts that “reality” and “realism” “constituted the foundational features of this counter-cinema, which set the reality of ordinary peoples’ lives, treated with empathy and respect, against the fiction of the official culture of spectacle perpetrated by the government and the commercial cinema.” (2011b, 340). Although she is not frequently recognized as a member of the New Wave, it may be useful to situate Nabili’s film within this cultural context of Iranian counter-cinema, which sought to interrogate the clichés and ideologies of popular and State-sanctioned cinema. While unofficially there was a more permissive attitude towards cinematic representations of sex and nudity during the 1960s and 1970s in Iran, the government was still highly sensitive towards films that contradicted its progressive image (Golmakini

72 1989, Naficy 2011b). It was due to this anticipated prohibition that Nabili secretly filmed The Sealed Soil in the Nurashgar village and then smuggled the rough cut out of Iran for editing, and eventual release. It premiered at the San Remo Film Festival in 1978, where it won the Best Director Award. Nabili went onto make one other film in her adopted homeland of America, Nightsongs (1984), which explores the struggles of an Chinese, immigrant family in New York’s Chinatown. Nabili originally pursued painting before studying filmmaking in and New York during the early 1970s. When she returned to Iran in the mid 1970s, she worked as a producer, writer and occasional director for Afsanehha-ye Kohan (Ancient Fairy Tales), a television series that focused on traditional folk-tales and myths. As Naficy writes, it was “under the guise of filming one of these television tales that she and her small crew clandestinely shot her first , The Sealed Soil…made in 1976 and released in the United States in 1978” (2011b, 375). Nabili was thus the second woman to direct a feature in Iran, the first being Shahla Riahi, who made Marjan in 1956. Riahi (b. 1926) had been a very active member of the pre-revolutionary commercial cinema industry, acting in over 72 features (Talatoff 2011). But like many public personalities associated with the Pahlavi regime, her involvement in the cinema industry was largely terminated with the Islamic Revolution, although she continued to make some cameo appearances, such as her role in Tahmineh Milani’s debut production, Bacheha-ye talagh (Children of Divorce, 1989). The fact that no features were made by women filmmakers between Riahi’s Marjan (1956) and Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977) testifies to the peripheral role women occupied in terms of film direction and production under the Pahlavi government 12 . As Hamid Dabashi observes:

Marva Nabili is so tangential to Iranian cinema that one must believe in miracles on observing how she appeared in the 1970s to establish a barely visible thread between Shahla Riahi in the 1950s, Forough Farrokhzad in the 1960s and the orchestral rise of a whole constellation of women filmmakers after the of 1979 in the 1980s (2012, 144).

12 Only one other film was made by a woman before the Islamic Revolution: Kobra Saeedi made Maryam va Mani (1978), although as scholars note this film has not been widely available, either through commercial or archival avenues (Talatoff 2010, 124).

73

Nabili’s presence in this thesis is thus important, not only due to the complex treatment of veiling and voice in The Sealed Soil but also to the manner in which the film occupies a transitional space between the pre-revolutionary epoch in which only a handful of films were made by women filmmakers under the modernising Shah, and the emergence of women directors during the 1980s and 1990s in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran. Nabili’s The Sealed Soil is set in a rural village on the threshold of enormous social and cultural transformation. A new town is being built close-by, in which the villagers are encouraged to buy land-holds. The narrative focuses on the experiences of eighteen year- old, Rooey-Bekheir, whose family anticipate a move to the new township where many of their domestic and agricultural customs will be outmoded by modernized facilities and technological advancements. Rooey-Bekheir intimates her disapproval of the modernizing trend but she also rails against aspects of village traditionalism. Having rejected one offer of marriage and threatened with more proposals, Rooey-Bekheir withdraws into an internalised state. As she enters into this meditative silence Rooey-Bekheir is increasingly drawn to an isolated area by the river where she risks rare moments of privacy and solitude. Najmabadi argues that as the “new Iranian woman” entered modernity, she was haunted by the notion of her former degraded self: veiled and erotic. Nabili directly interrogates this polarized construct of the modern woman by foregrounding acts of sartorial veiling and unveiling in The Sealed Soil. In the opening scene of the film spectators witness Rooey- Bekheir painstakingly applying her veils in preparation for the day’s domestic labour, in which she tirelessly participates. However, as Rooey-Bekheir increasingly retreats into reticence, the viewer observes her unveil over three separate scenes by the river. In the final scene she removes not only her veils but her tunic as well, as she sits with her arms outstretched in the rain. At a time where neither the traditional nor the modern world offer Rooey-Bekheir legitimate choices for her future, she must create her own domain of personal and sensual self-sufficiency. As both marriage and the new township loom worryingly, Rooey-Bekheir takes solace in silence, solitude and sensuality. Certainly, the film supports Najmabadi’s implication that women were equally constrained in the hetero- social sphere by both pre-modern and modern cultural norms. In The Sealed Soil it is a

74 group of the village patriarchs who endorse the move to the new township and while the village chief admits he cannot force Rooey-Bekhier to accept a marriage proposal, he certainly encourages her to do her duty by her elders and accept their wishes for matrimony. If Nabili is using Rooey-Bekheir and the village more broadly as an allegorical representation of the State and the Shah’s enforcement of structural and cultural modernization, the film effectively illustrates how decision-making bodies effectively excluded women at various levels. Between 1970 and 1971 Iran entered into a period of enormous political tension, as revolutionary dissent began to gain momentum across the country. While the Shah had managed to successfully squash political opposition during the 1960s through its strong alliance with the United States and adopting the tactics of a modern dictatorship, the 1970s heralded a period of stronger and more widespread resistance. A heterogeneous coalition of clerics, nationalists, intellectuals, students, Marxist guerrillas and merchants began opposing the tyranny of the monarchy, epitomised by the Shah’s attempt to institute a one- party political system in 1975 (Molavi 2010). Various scholars give accounts in which, while the Shah was enjoying the decadent celebrations associated with marking the 2,500 year-old monarchy, the intellectual and ideologue, , was gaining popular support for his more revolutionary expression of Shi’I Islam (Afary 2009). A central aspect of Shariati’s discourse was his adulation of the figure of Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, who Shariari upheld as an ideal for the revolutionary movement, and indeed the “modern” woman generally. Against Fatima’s purity and devotion for her father, husband and sons, Shariati contrasted and condemned the sexual liberation associated with Westernization and monarchical rule. The Sealed Soil thus not only engages with the tensions between village traditionalism and monarchical modernism, but the manner in which sexuality was being reconceived as part of the mounting revolutionary movement, which was guided by figures such as Shariati and his radicalization of Shi’ite Islam. Interestingly, the character of Rooey-Bekheir resists these various cultural and ideological discourses not by embracing a female-centered dialogue, but by largely abandoning language and using her body to articulate her desire for autonomy, privacy and self-expression. Nabili’s protagonist complicates the simplistic equation whereby the performance of unveiling automatically

75 endows the individual with discursive power and a political voice. Instead, The Sealed Soil demonstrates that silence may be the sole tool available to women in their confrontation with both modernity and patriarchy (whether perpetuated through the hierarchy of village traditionalism or through the ideological doctrine of militant Islam). In her chapter “Silence as Female Resistance in Marguerite Duras’s Nathalie Granger”’, E. Ann Kaplan discusses the “…politics of silence, as a female strategy to counter the destructive male urge to articulate, analyze, dissect” (1983, 95). Kaplan argues that silence enables Duras’ protagonist to resist the oppression of male-biased language and the symbolic order constructed through its discourse. Certainly Rooey-Bekheir embraces non-verbal actions and rituals to demonstrate her non-compliance with the possibility of marriage and the transition to a new, modernized existence. But as Kaplan also notes in her analysis of Natalie Granger (1972), silence as a form of dissidence is a highly problematic strategy in it that may result in women being excluded from the processes of change and empowerment. “Silence seems at best a temporary, and desperate, strategy, a defense against domination, a holding operation, rather than a politics that looks toward women finding a viable place for themselves in culture” (1983, 103). Perhaps Rooey-Bekheir’s approach is better described not as a retreat into complete silence and wordlessness but as an embrace of solitude and of non-verbal ritual. The fact that she removes her hijab in private and at her own leisure implies that Nabili is promoting both veiling and unveiling as acts of personal choice which should be performed at the liberty and discretion of each individual woman, not as broad social decrees directed from above and imperiously enforced. The unveiling scenes are staggered throughout the first half of the film. In the first instance of unveiling, Rooey-Bekheir removes one of her headscarves and sits for a moment. She then re-veils, gathers her bundle of kindling and walks home. In the second scene Rooey-Bekheir returns to the same road, finds the same clearing by the river and removes both headscarves, so that her face, hair and neck are exposed. In the final unveiling scene, Rooey-Bekheir is filmed first in a long shot, resting in the clearing with her eyes closed. As it begins to rain the frame shifts to a mid-shot where Rooey-Bekheir sits up and takes off both headscarves, unbraids her hair and removes her tunic. This is one of the few scenes in the film where the protagonist is framed more intimately, with most of

76 the narrative being filmed in long shots. The cinematography was predicated, in part, on the fact that Nabili only had a small crew, and limited technology at her disposal. But as Naficy writes, Nabili also consciously attempted to emulate the “iconographic model” of the Persian miniatures in The Sealed Soil, where individuals are portrayed as intrinsically part of their cultural environs (2011b, 376). The objective, according to Naficy, was to create an atmosphere of defamiliarisation, where audience members are encouraged to interpret characters, not via emotional identification, but rather through an engagement with the mediating socio-political factors, that informed the characters’ choices. In this sense, it is important to note that Rooey-Bekheir faces away from the camera when unveiling in the third and final scene, so that the front of her body and her facial expression are concealed. Nabili’s inclusion of this scene is both deeply subversive and simultaneously oblique in its representation of female nudity and sensuality. The camera angle prohibits the spectator from observing Rooey-Bekheir’s face and comprehending the intensity of her experience. Primary identification between Rooey-Bekheir and the spectator is thwarted and instead the viewer must speculate on what the rite signifies for the young woman. Unveiling is undoubtedly portrayed as an act of personal protest and reclamation of individual autonomy, but it is one performed privately and in the solitude of nature. A tension is at work here whereby Nabili plays with notions of exposure and concealment, hinting at Rooey-Bekheir’s private desires and her unveiled body, without ever truly compromising or exposing the most intimate aspects of the protagonist’s experience. The cinematic syntax of The Sealed Soil reflects this cyclical process of veiling/unveiling/veiling by repeating several other scenes throughout the narrative. While the scenes initially appear identical, contrasts and subtle developments slowly emerge with each repetition of the long-take. One such scene depicts a group of school children appearing from their classroom with their teacher. Among these children is Rooey- Bekheir’s younger sister. In the first scene, the children and the teacher emerge from the school building, filmed from a distance. There is a checkpoint in the middle distance that divides the village from the new town, which they pass by freely. In the second scene the camera is more focused and we can clearly see that the teacher is an unveiled woman, wearing European attire. She ushers the children home before turning back to the school building. In the third and final cycle of this scene, the children are already in the foreground

77 with the teacher. She follows them into the village, as Rooey-Bekheir is emerging on her way out, carrying a basket of washing on her head. The teacher approaches Rooey-Bekheir and gestures to a student: “He is feverish. Are you his mother?” Rooey-Bekheir ignores the teacher and continues walking down to the river. The teacher’s gradual entry into the village and eventual engagement with Rooey- Bekheir signals another highly allegorical moment in the text. The modern and mobile teacher has no language or understanding through which to communicate with Rooey- Bekheir. She automatically identifies Rooey-Bekheir as a mother, revealing her own prejudices and expectations about women inhabiting the village. The two women remain alienated and divorced from one another. It is only the children who can truly move between the two worlds, past the dividing checkpoints, communicating with both their modern schoolteacher and their traditional village elders. Rooey-Bekheir’s opportunities for formal education may have been limited for we observe her covertly teaching herself to read in the first half of the film. While Rooey-Bekheir actively unveils herself in private, at the level of language and education, it seems she is left publicly dislocated and voiceless by the arrival of modernity in rural Iran. She is neither a member of her mother’s generation and thus steeped in her community’s traditionalism, nor is she young enough to adopt the language and mobility of the school children. She is literally lost between the competing worlds, estranged and diminished by both modernization and rural community life. Naficy (2000) discusses the veil, both literal and figurative, as that which retains the boundaries between the private and public selves. Up until this point in the film, Rooey- Bekheir has managed to be both the industrious, veiled daughter and managed to participate in subversive moments of unveiled solitude. But shortly after her encounter with the schoolteacher, she discovers that she is to be presented to yet another potential husband. No longer able to screen her private horror at such a possibility, she collapses hysterically. Breaking her silence, she shrieks in protest, as she lunges around the courtyard. Thought to be possessed, the young protagonist is subjected to an elaborate exorcism. The entire village accompanies her down to the site of the ritual and then surrounds her once again on the journey back to the village once the ceremony has been completed. The division between the public and private selves has collapsed and in allowing the two to merge, Rooey-Bekheir passively submits to the re-instatement and primacy of her familial,

78 communal self. Once she has recovered, she is told again that she is to meet with a potential husband and the film concludes with Rooey-Bekheir approaching the checkpoint to the new town. It is unknown whether she will submit to or resist this latest marriage offer but the fact that the final shot is of her crossing the boundary from the village to the new town is significant. Previously she has only inhabited the village or journeyed down to the river and her proximity to the checkpoint epitomizes her future negotiation of modernized Iran. Only two years after Nabili released The Sealed Soil, the veil was once again privileged and politicised as a central motif in Iran’s political landscape. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, which saw the overthrowing of the monarchical government and its leader, the Shah, . Ayatollah was installed as the Supreme Leader, and as the highest ranked religious and political figure he established the foundations of the new Islamic Republic. With the re-introduction of compulsory veiling in post-revolutionary Iran, women were once again forced to cover their bodies and while they were not completely silenced, they were required to moderate their voices so that they too reflected modesty and virtue. In 1986, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Parliament and later the Iranian President, “cautioned women against the manner in which the feminine voice was sexually stimulating: “in their conversations women should not speak in a tone that their voice and their tone would be arousing and seducing to men”’ (Sedghi 2007, 212). Such instructions again exemplify how the voice has been perceived as an extension and reflection of the body and that like a woman’s “private parts”, it too needed to be covered, checked and purified. During the Islamic Revolution, the veil became a potent symbol of nationalism, anti- imperialism and anti-Western sentiment. Even some of those who had embraced unveiling under the Shah adopted hijab as an act of defiance against the monarch’s regime and the privileges of the educated elite (Milani 1992, 37). Unsurprisingly when Ayatollah Khomeni established government in 1979, reinstituting obligatory veiling was central to its project of Islamification. Between March 7, 1979 and April 1983, different phases of veiling were introduced and legislated until “veiling was made compulsory for all women, including non-Muslims, foreigners and tourists” (Milani 38). These policies extended to the representation of women in the cinema industry with a set of prescribed modesty codes. On 24 February 1983, the Ministry for Culture and

79 Islamic Guidance passed legislation that would attempt to purify the industry of commercialisation, decadence and Western mores (Derayeh 2010). A central component of the Islamification of the cinema industry was prohibiting the sexual commodification of women. Actresses had to strictly observe the new Islamic dress code by wearing loose fitting tunics, headscarves and the chador.

When female characters are supposed to wear things not necessarily compatible with the Islamic code of dress (as in scenes depicting family life before the revolution), the logic of reality is ignored in favour of religious junctions. If a scene involves a married couple retiring to bed, the man and the wife should go to separate ones, the woman being in full Islamic attire. Actors and actresses should have no physical contact whatsoever. A simple touch of hands in cases of actors and actresses who happen to be real-life spouses is permissible but all the other rules have to be strictly observed (Golmakini 1989, 24).

As Negar Mottahedah explains, the “cinematic desexualisation” of the 1980s and 1990s was also enforced through prohibiting the portrayal of on-screen desire; men and women were forbidden not only from touching one another, but also from exchanging desirous looks (2005, 1406). The Islamic Republic was primarily invested in promoting the role of motherhood for women, “raising god-fearing and responsible children” (Naficy 1991, 50) and hoped that cinema could be used to uphold such an ideal of femininity. In actual fact the restrictive emphasis on maternal virtue and sexual purity meant that women were virtually absent from the films of the 1980s, appearing as docile, shadowy presences who only served to bolster the noble causes of their superior male counterparts (Naficy 1994, Lahiji 2002, Derayeh 2010). But as Shahin Gerami has argued, “men are assumed to universally have benefited from the regime’s policies”, when in fact they have also been oppressed by the State’s discourse of “Islamic hypermasculinity” (257, 2003). In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, the narrow roles of martyrdom and religious self- sacrifice were offered to men, ignoring the widespread problems of unemployment, inflation and drug-use (Gerami 2003, 257). Gerami’s thesis is useful in underscoring the

80 manner in which men too bore the burden of restrictive Islamic gender discourses, and how this continues to be an under-researched aspect of Iranian cultural studies. Of course, as the broader societal modesty codes for women later relaxed somewhat (especially between 1997 and 2005 under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency), so too these prescriptions were re-interpreted and re-imagined cinematically. In the Iranian cinema of the past twenty years women are certainly not always seen wearing their chador and there have been instances of physical contact between male and female performers. However, as the persecution of actress Marzieh Vafamehr in 2011 demonstrates, draconian punishments are still threatened and instituted by the State for those who cross the established conventions of Islamic cultural mores. Vafarmehr was sentenced to 90 lashes and one year imprisonment for her role in My Tehran for Sale (2011), where she appeared without a headscarf and participated in a range of other forbidden activities in the film (such as drinking alcohol and appearing in bed with her on-screen lover). Although her sentence was reduced to three months and the lashings were dropped, her detention by authorities reveals the seriousness with which the Ahmadinejad government (2005 – 2013) considered the modesty codes and their application in cinema. While cautious optimism has surrounded the presidential election of Hassan Rouhani in August 2013, there are some indicators that modesty codes remain a central focus even for this seemingly more moderate government. was kissed on the cheek by director, Gilles Jacob, at the opening of the event, which she attended as a jury member on 18 May 2014. The resulting public furore in Iran over the formal greeting demonstrated the manner in which physical contact between unrelated men and women remains taboo and culturally unacceptable. Deputy Minister of Islamic Culture, Hossein Noushabadi was quoted in various news sources as remarking: “Those who attend intentional events should take heed of the credibility and chastity of Iranians so that a bad image of Iranian women will not be demonstrated to the world”. It was subsequently reported by the State news agency, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) that Hatami had issued an apology for the incident and any offence it caused. Although the incident occurred outside of Iran at a Western cultural event, Hatami’s censure for contravening the Islamic modesty codes demonstrates their continuing centrality as part of social and cultural life in Iran. The compulsory adoption of the veil for women, and the protocols related to hijab, thus continue to pose

81 significant challenges for Iranian directors attempting to portray the broad scope of human experience, including the personal and intimate details of women’s lives. The next section of this chapter examines the innovative use of ‘substitute veils’ and voice-over strategies in The May Lady, and how such devices enabled Rakhshan Bani-Etemad to represent women’s desire, while simultaneously situating it beyond the (male) gaze of both the viewer and the censor.

Poetic Desire in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s ‘The May Lady’ Where Najmabadi speaks of the disjunction between the unveiled woman’s private self and her constrained and “sanitized” public self, Naficy discusses Iranian subjectivity (for both men and women) in terms of an inner “core” and a public “shell” (1991, 47). The public shell is the familial, communal self that negotiates the social world, while the inner core is the secret, intimate, private self. In order for the two selves to function symbiotically and seamlessly, there needs to be a veil or a screen which protects the core self and keeps it concealed. The social strategies of “dissimulation, disavowal, aversion, indirection, evasiveness, cleverness, self-presentation and ritual courtesy” assist in maintaining this division between public and private subjectivities (Naficy 2000, 561). The veil is thus not only the sartorial hijab but according to Naficy, also the social and cultural boundary that splits the self and necessitates a range of complex and subtle communication strategies. Language, like the self and the body, is also veiled and hermeneutic. The voice as an arbiter of language may be used to reveal and conceal intentions and desires depending on the use of informal/formal address, the degree of emotion portrayed in the tone and tenor and the adoption of allegorical or poetic terms. It is important to understand, Naficy stresses, that these veiling practices are dynamic and dialectical in their application; hijab is as much about unveiling the body, the voice and the “core self” as much as it is about obscuring the intimate aspects of experience and subjectivity, “that which covers is capable also of uncovering” (Naficy 2000, 561). Obviously the references to the “core” in Naficy’s schema may problematically imply an underlying unified and coherent subjectivity, with all its inherently universalising and homogenizing overtones. But Naficy’s discussion of the schism between the public and private personas, is not interpreted here as a monolithic ontological model of subjectivity which reinstates a static and fixed subject position. Rather

82 it is understood as an exploration of the manner in which Iranian Islamic cultural mores have been received, interpreted and applied, both within social and cinematic contexts. References within this chapter to the “shell” and the “core” are thus adopted as a way of delineating what behaviours and experiences are sanctioned as socially acceptable and appropriate, and what is deemed taboo, prohibited and inviolable within the contexts, codes and rituals of hijab in post-revolutionary Iran. Naficy cites Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s film, The May Lady (1997), as a prime example of a post-revolutionary film that is both governed by and resistant to the prevailing modesty codes of the time. The May Lady was Bani-Etemad’s sixth feature film, and marked ten years of working as a director and screenwriter of social dramas. Bani-Etemad is undoubtedly Iran’s most acclaimed and widely respected female filmmaker. Hamid Naficy (2012b) identifies her as belonging to the first generation of post-revolutionary female filmmakers that emerged in the 1980s and gained credibility and visibility as filmmakers in their own right. Born in 1954, Bani-Etemad graduated from the College of Dramatic Arts in Tehran in 1979. Prior to directing her debut feature, Kharej az mahdude (Off Limits,1987) Bani-Etemad worked as a documentary filmmaker for the national Iranian television network. Bani-Etemad’s continuing interest in directing documentaries has had a discernible influence on both the style and subject matter of her fictional work, which frequently depicts the adversities of poverty, family breakdown and women’s marginal status within Iran. Films such as Nargess (1992) and Rusari Abi (The Blue Veiled, 1995) established Bani-Etemad as a respected and pioneering filmmaker within Iran. Her features continue to successfully straddle the genres of melodrama and social realism, often self- reflexively gesturing to the processes of filmmaking, and documentary making in particular. The May Lady is thus characteristic of Bani-Etemad’s oeuvre: the central character, Forugh Kian, is a documentary filmmaker and is a divorced, single mother to her adolescent son, Mani. Forugh divides her time between filming and editing her documentary on the search for the ideal Iranian mother, nurturing the sometimes obstinate and jealous Mani and conducting an affair with an off-screen lover, Mr Rahbar. But as Naficy notes:

83 …The film breaks more than just with the thematic taboos of divorce, single motherhood, and unmarried relations with men. It also expands the vocabulary and extends the grammar of veiling and modesty in cinema by introducing fascinating textual and narrative innovations – forced by the imposition of the veil. In one shot the diegetic director…arrives home from a day’s hard work filming a documentary. In a medium shot, she walks through the hallway towards her bedroom. The camera pans with her as she walks briskly in that direction. As she gets close to the door, she reaches for her headscarf and lifts it in a characteristic gesture that signals the imminent removal of the scarf. But just before the scarf is off, she disappears through a door, leaving the unmistakable impression of unveiling without having actually done it (2000, 571).

Bani-Etemad employs a range of devices for evoking the absence of the veil. Not only do these strategies assist in retaining the reality aesthetic of the narrative, they allow for a more complex portrayal of the schism between Forugh’s public “shell” and what Naficy termed as her private “core”. It is interesting to observe the manner in which Bani-Etemad endows Forugh with, what I term, “substitute” veils as a means of gesturing to those experiences that may violate the codes of hijab. Some of these (such as in the scene described above by Naficy and in another where Forugh is seen preparing herself in the morning and wearing a towel loosely over her wet hair) serve the purpose of retaining a greater reality aesthetic and evoking the daily habits of veiling and unveiling. In other scenes the function of the substitute veil is more subtle and complex; Forugh speaks intimately with Mr Rahbar on the telephone and yet neither character appears on-screen. Mr Rahbar is visually absent throughout the entire film and can only be heard as a disembodied voice. In one particular scene we hear the couple talking on the telephone. A semi-opaque curtain, that literally divides her apartment from the outside world, obscures Forugh. Instead, her presence behind the curtain is suggested solely by her voice and the shifting spectre behind the billowing curtain. In another scene, Forugh’s inner thoughts are externalised through a voice-over, while Forugh is filmed in a close-up, lying in bed. Her face is completely framed by a shadow that simultaneously acts as a veil (covering her hair and body) and suggests her unveiled state.

84 These strategies have the advantage of both complying with and circumnavigating the cinematic modesty conventions; Forugh appears suitably covered and yet her body and her private desires are strikingly evoked. It is important that these substitute veils are semi- opaque; they are neither completely transparent, nor completely dense. They reside somewhere in-between; they are porous, permeable and flexible. They hint at exposure and yet they never fully disclose the body, nor the desires of the “core self”. They neither fully reveal, nor completely conceal their object. In fact by not subscribing to notions of veiling and unveiling, Bani-Etemad also rejects a whole body of regressive binaries associated with femininity: erotic/modest, active/passive, mother/whore. Forugh, as implied by Bani- Etemad’s use of substitute veils, refuses to conform to those narrow definitions associated with the polarities of veiled and unveiled. Instead Bani-Etemad privileges allusion and intimation over strict representations of veiling or unveiling. Just as the substitute veils allow us to glimpse Forugh’s private, “core self”, so too Bani-Etemad uses the voice and voice-overs to evoke the intensity of Forugh’s romantic relationship with Mr Rahbar. As Naficy has argued, the effect of disembodying Forugh’s lover is that the voice itself is charged with heightened emotional affect and ultimately the vocal exchanges work as a “substitute for…desire” (Naficy 2000, 572). It allows Forugh and Mr Rahbar to “become one vocally” (Naficy 2000, 572) and Bani-Etemad to represent the intimacy of their relationship without compromising her adherence to the regulatory codes. The voice-over in The May Lady thus not only allows Bani-Etemad to circumnavigate certain censorship restrictions, but it also challenges the traditional conventions of representing women on screen. The use of voice-over in film has long been theorised as a tool for subversion and resistance by feminist filmmakers. Kaja Silverman’s seminal text, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988), argues that the female voice-over works to disrupt the ingrained hermeneutic codes of dominant cinema by situating the female subject beyond the objectifying gaze of the male spectator. By “dislodging the female voice from the female image” (166), women are freed from representational conventions which limit female characters to immanence, sexuality and passivity. This process of disembodiment can be achieved in several ways, through multiple female voice- overs, non-synchronized dialogue (or pronounced lip syncing), monologue and musical

85 lyrics. While Bani-Etemad does not use multiple female voices in The May Lady, the intersection of Forugh and Mr Rahbar’s voices arguably achieves a similar effect. Bodies are effaced and desire is predominantly inscribed in the film through intonation, wordplay and sound. The film opens with a monologue from Forugh in a voice-over, while a series of photographs featuring women are framed in close-up. The confluence of Forugh’s voice with the varying images of women “problematizes … corporeal assignment” (165) and again challenges the representation of the female character as a coherent, visual object. Interestingly, the use of voice-over in The May Lady can be theorized as working on two levels: both evoking the intimacy and desire of the lovers, and situating it beyond the gaze of the objectifying (male) spectator and censor. The elegiac language adopted by the lovers is also significant. The poetic tenor of their exchanges is intended to create a charged, emotional frisson, but the use of lyricism and metaphor also obscures their desire. Spectators are not meant to fully grasp the intimate nature of Forugh’s romantic relationship (the details are always literally and figuratively off-screen), but glimpse its intensity and profundity through the poetic snatches of their vocal interplay. Importantly, the central character of The May Lady shares her first name with one of the most prominent modernist Iranian poets and filmmakers: Forugh Farrokhzad. Forugh’s back-story also corresponds with the poet’s biography: both had sons by their first husbands, both were divorced shortly afterwards and were threatened with the loss of custody. The fictional Forugh of The May Lady is successful in winning guardianship of Mani, whereas, as previously noted, Farrokhzad lost the custody of her son to her former husband. Both Forughs are acclaimed documentary-makers and use poetry as a means of expressing their grief and confusion at the limited social roles prescribed for them. By endowing her central character with such a culturally significant name, Bani- Etemad is able to effectively utilize Farrokhzad’s personal and poetic legacy as part of Forugh Kian’s narrative struggle. Whereas the diegetic Forugh Kian feels conflicted by her roles as mother and lover and conducts her phone-calls and letter writing to Mr Rahbar in secret, Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry is renown for its emotionally confessional tenor, its unabashed sensuality and its renunciation of gendered stereotypes (Milani 1992, 137). The allusions to Farrokhzad’s life and her poetic oeuvre also underscore the importance of voicing as a means of compensating for Iran’s social strictures. Forugh’s

86 voice-overs in The May Lady recall many of the central thematic threads of Farrokhzad’s poetry, most importantly the tensions between voicing and unvoicing. In a poem to Mr Rahbar, Forugh explains:

The one who tells you ‘I love you’ Is a sad musician, who has lost his song, O, that love had a language to speak. There are a thousand wishes in your eyes A thousand silent canaries in my throat O, that love had a language to speak.

A static shot of Tehran accompanies this poetic voice-over. In the foreground Forugh’s car enters the freeway and the camera follows the car in a long shot. Interestingly, later voice- overs occur in scenes of Forugh driving her car. The scenes are filmed within the interior of the car, where Forugh’s eyes appear reflected in the rear-view mirror. In such scenes, Bani- Etemad self-consciously plays with notions of exteriority and interiority, with the car literally embodying the “public shell” that permits Forugh to negotiate her social role as mother and filmmaker. But beneath the contained and mobile exterior, Forugh is plagued by a sense of voicelessness, in particular her inability to articulate romantic desire. As the narrative progresses, Bani-Etemad grants the viewer greater access to Forugh’s internal turmoil over her relationship with Mr Rahbar. The spectator is no longer held at a distance by a long shot, watching Forugh’s car pass through the frame. Instead, the viewer is granted a privileged vantage point from within the car, where Forugh’s eyes are readily accessible and Mr Rahbar’s voice is heard reciting a letter in unison with Forugh. While at one level the voice-overs re-iterate Forugh’s restrictive and difficult circumstances as a divorced woman and single mother, they also point to the cathartic role of voicing in Forugh Kian’s life. Forugh’s lyrics allude to Farrokhzad’s poem, “It is Only the Voice that Remains”, published as part of Another Birth: The voice, the voice, only the voice The voice of the translucent desire of water to flow The voice of starlight pouring on the surface of the pistil of the earth

87 The voice of conception of the seed of meaning And the expansion of love’s common mind The voice, the voice, the voice, it is only the voice that remains (2010, 163).

In Forugh Kian’s poem love has no avenue for self-expression, it is rendered silent and speechless by personal inhibition and cultural prohibition. Forugh is visually represented as literally enclosed within the “public” shell of her car, negotiating the labyrinthine freeways of social convention and cultural order. But the “voice” in Farrokhzad’s poem is instinctive and effortless; permeating all aspects of cosmic, natural and human existence. In Forugh Kian’s poem, love is denied a language, whereas in Farrokhzad’s prosody, the voice provides love with a mode of expression that goes beyond the mundane and the prosaic. Thus while the diegetic Forugh may be stifled in her ability to voice desire, the allusions to her namesake, Forugh Farrokhzad, counterbalances these inhibitions and point to the unnamed, unspoken desire. Just as the body is negotiated through the use of substitute veils, never fully exposed in the dialectical tensions of veiling and unveiling, so too the female voice never makes its “core” desires fully transparent. Forugh Kian’s desire is palpable in the poetic sentiments she exchanges with Mr Rahbar and it is made even more evident in her connection to the confessional and sensual poetry of her namesake. But expressing female desire through allusion should not be interpreted as a complete exposure of the ‘core’ self and its most intimate desires. As Milani argues, authorship can itself be a concealing exercise:

Is publishing an act of unveiling or, on the contrary, an act of veiling to hide behind? Do we reveal or conceal the truth of ourselves in the poems we craft, in the stories we spin? Perhaps writers unveil only by spinning veils of another form. Perhaps the veil moves from the physical to other dimensions. Perhaps words are not only means of expression but also invisible walls we erect to contain the otherwise uncontainable? (1992, 7)

By expressing romantic and sensual desire through the medium of lyrical voice-overs, Bani-Etemad both exposes and obscures Forugh’s subjectivity and intimate desires. The

88 substitute veils enable the body to be simultaneously veiled and unveiled and so too the poetic language of the voice-overs, allow Forugh’s desire to be voiced and unvoiced. This tension between exposure and obscuring points to a form of cinema that privileges intimation and inference over transparency and monolithic meanings. Farrokhzad’s poetic ambivalence can be perceived at play here; in which suffering and pleasure, isolation and connectivity are referenced in a dialectical interplay. Forugh obliquely references her emotional and sexual desires in her phone-calls and letters with Mr Rahbar, in which she discusses her “instinctual need” for “togetherness”. Although she is denied the consolation of his physical presence, she derives comfort and pleasure via the acoustics of his voice and the particular resonance of their intertwined voices, both actual and imagined. It is the voice-over in The May Lady that facilitates and maintains the poetic ambivalence of their relationship, allowing for both the pleasure of romantic frisson and the pain of separation. Such ambivalence is most apparent in the penultimate scene, where Mani and Forugh are seen watching television when the phone rings. Believing it to be Mr Rahbar and sensing Mani’s discomfort, Forugh purposefully ignores the telephone. There is an extended blackout, as we hear a number being dialled and the phone ringing. We hear Mr Rahbar answer as the final frame shows a close-up of Forugh’s face. With her expression remaining inscrutable, we then hear Forugh announcing herself via a voice-over; “Hello, This is Forugh”. But it remains unclear as to whether Forugh will actually enunciate these words aloud, or whether the dialogue with her lover will continue to occupy the space of the imagined and the internalised. This final scene, in which we witness Forugh willingly returning her lover’s call, could indicate a new phase for the protagonist, in which she finally privileges her own desires and needs. Alternatively this moment could be read as a continuation of Forugh’s indecision over the relationship, and her preoccupation with her son’s and the broader community’s disapproval. Either way, while the division of the public and private selves may still appear insurmountably vast, Forugh continues to voice her desire, even if the articulation remains in the realm of the imagined and the internalised. The strictures of familial and community prohibition are well documented in The May Lady and The Sealed Soil, but both films are equally invested in revealing the primacy of female desire, sensuality and emotion. The State’s privileging of the veil (whether it be the figurative veil pertaining to the “new woman” in modern Iran or the Islamised veil in

89 post-revolutionary Iran) has meant that women’s desires may only be animated through rituals and practices performed covertly and privately. In The Sealed Soil it is the ceremonial process of sartorial unveiling/re-veiling/unveiling that constitutes a form of autonomy and self-expression for Rooey-Bekheir, while in The May Lady it is the voice that allows Forugh to articulate her intimate desires with her lover. Despite the performative nature of these rituals, female desire is never made fully transparent or knowable. It is only intimated through the syntax of the films and the hermeneutic frameworks of metaphor and poeticism. The enforcement of cinematic and social modesty codes by the State necessitated a form of representation that superficially concealed the female body and its expression of desires. But various women directors demonstrated that female sexuality can operate outside of the dichotomous and hierarchical logic of veiling and unveiling and instead can insinuate itself through the gaps and fissures of the cinematic text. Certainly Bani-Etemad and Nabili figure the unveiling/veiling of the body and the revealing/concealing of desire not as processes that can be imposed from above (by the government, the patriarch, the son or the community) but as rites of passage which women must be allowed to perform freely and without prohibition. Chapter One and Chapter Two of this thesis have underscored the primacy of the lyrical voice in Iranian women’s cinema as a device for evoking corporeality, and in particular the dialectical experiences of bodily pleasure and human suffering. Careful to avoid the hierarchal schematisations of the body as either pure or polluted, various Iranian women filmmakers adopt the voice as means of cinematically evoking desire and despair. While the narratives insist on foregrounding the difficulties of the downtrodden and disenfranchised (whether they be leprosy suffers in 1960s Iran, a conflicted teenager in a rural village or a divorced mother in post-revolutionary Tehran), the directors discussed in this thesis embrace an aesthetic of poetic ambivalence, which privileges allusion and ambiguity. The next section will shift its emphasis to Iranian diasporic cinema but it will continue to stress the importance of voicing, poeticism and the performance of authorship. In particular it will examine how these directors inscribe themselves into the cinematic text, using cinema as a medium to self-reflexively document the geographical and emotional hazards of exile.

90 Chapter Three Recording the Journey of Exile: Memories, Movies and the Mobile Phone in Granaz Moussavi’s ‘My Tehran for Sale’

As diasporic cinema continues to be theorised as an integrative aspect and necessary expansion of the concept of national cinema, the works of exiled and émigré filmmakers become increasingly visible in the panorama of contemporary Iranian cinema. Indeed, the inclusion of diasporic filmmakers in a study of Iranian cinema complicates cinematic representations of vatan (homeland), and the manner in which notions of birthplace, territory and national history may be re-imagined and recovered. Border crossing, the processes of enculturation and hybridisation, as well as the pain of exile, also emerge as central thematic concerns in the work of the diasporic women directors studied in this thesis. In Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009) exile is portrayed not only through the diegetic displays of nostalgia and grief, but via a self-reflexive film aesthetic that evokes the disorientation and fragmentation experienced by the Iranian exile. The techniques of distanciation and defamiliarisation signal the irreparable separation of the subject from their homeland in Moussavi’s film. Paying homage to Iran’s pioneering modern artists, in particular Forugh Farrokhzad, Moussavi adopts and translates the poetic techniques of ellipsis and metaphor, as a means of evoking the trauma associated with exile and its effect on individual and collective memory. Moussavi also underscores the importance of the mobile, digital viewing device in her film, demonstrating the manner in which the mobile phone may play an integral role in the mediation and communication of both media and memories. The mobile phone additionally functions as symbol of cinematic authorship and self-inscription. This chapter examines how mobile phone footage references the processes and politics of enacting and forming diasporic subjectivity, as well as the technologies and methodologies that must frequently be adopted by the diasporic filmmaker. The chapter begins by establishing the validity of including exiled and diasporic filmmakers as part of a study on Iranian cinema. It argues that globalisation and the intensification of transnational cinema theory and practice have seen greater emphasis placed on the tensions between local and global cultures, organisations and subjectivities.

91 This chapter then examines the use of poetic ellipsis in the narrative structure of Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale and how such a cinematic device evokes the temporal ruptures and emotional dislocation of exile. It examines the function of oral history in relation to personal and collective memories and argues that the voice may play an important role in re-envisaging national and cultural meta-narratives. This chapter argues that the mobile phone also plays an integral part in the recording and processing of memories, as well as referencing the director in the cinematic text. In particular it examines how exiled Iranian directors may approach the practices of self-reflexivity, and how the director’s presence may contribute to the “performance of self” in My Tehran for Sale. Voice in this chapter is thus examined through the prism of oral history and the manner in which it translates and shapes personal and collective memories. The voice is also embedded in the film through its presence in the score, with Moussavi emphasizing how music, rhythm and song may evoke cultural connectivity, as well as the experiences of hybridity and deterritorialisation.

Is Diasporic Cinema Iranian Cinema? The “New Iranian Cinema” of the 1980s and 1990s produced large numbers of internationally distributed films, many of which were still financed and filmed within Iran. But with so many directors now working exclusively on international co-productions in diverse geographical locations, adopting multiple languages and involving various funding bodies, the task of defining an Iranian national cinema becomes even more problematic. Current scholarship has largely celebrated the way in which the transnational paradigm frees cinema from restrictive national discourses and essentialising subjectivities. The founding scholarship of the1980s and 1990s, which attempted to formulate a broad theory regarding film and nation, has been revised and expanded upon to include a more global and intercultural emphasis. While certain scholars and anthologies have continued to define “world cinema” as all those excluding Hollywood (Hill and Gibson 2000, Chapman 2003, Chaudhuri 2005), the general trend within recent criticism avoids ‘ghetto-ising’ national cinemas as Other or alternative (Dennison and Lim 2006, Ezra and Rowden 2006, Vitali and Willeman 2006, Durovicová & Newman 2010). In many ways the theory of transnationalism, which underscores the permeability of national borders, the greater access

92 afforded by new media technologies and the tensions between mobility and homeland for immigrants, diasporas, refugees and exiles (Ezra and Rowden 2006), eschews fixed or stable notions of nationality, ethnicity or culture. The interest is rather on the in-between spaces or the interconnectedness of cultures; in particular the experiences and states of hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, cross-cultural translation and diasporic peoples and cultures (Dennison and Lim 2006, 7). While the theory of transnationalism helps relocate films within a global context, it may not be necessary to do away with the concept of national cinemas completely. As Susan Haywood (2000) argues, to frame a film within a national context is not necessarily to collude with essentialist tropes of ethnicity and historicizing myths of nationalism. Instead, it can assist in exposing and complicating the narratives and boundaries of cultural identity. Willeman and Vitali concur: films may or may nor reflect the ideological trajectory of the nation and do not necessarily support the economic or political structures from which they emerge. Rather, they should be viewed as “cultural configurations that may or may not take the form of nations” (2006, 7). It seems that what Haywood, Willeman and Vitali are advocating is not a wholesale abandonment of national film discourse but its application as one of many different framing devices, positioning each film as a discrete and autonomous entity and not presuming it reflects national or patriotic interests, themes or biases. In a recent article for Al Jazeera, seminal Iranian cinema scholar, Hamid Dabashi (2013), challenged the notion that Iranian cinema can be made outside the country’s geographical borders, where links to culture and national identity have been temporarily or permanently curtailed. Dabashi’s intervention is useful in encouraging scholars to revisit the question of what constitutes “Iranian cinema”, and national cinemas more broadly. In attempting to establish a heterogeneous and inclusive definition of Iranian cinema, this thesis puts particular accent on the significant contribution of women diasporic filmmakers. For the transnational paradigm not only broadens the scope of Iranian cinema in geo- political terms but it also assists in destabilizing the canonisation of particular male Iranian auteurs and the subsequent marginalisation of women Iranian directors. As Andrew Higson argued, the notion of homeland may still figure prominently in the films of migrant or exiled filmmakers, but there now exists a tension between “unity and disunity, between home and homelessness” (2000, 64-65). A transnational framework which focuses on the

93 permeability of national borders, the culturally decentered subjectivity of the diasporic subject and the cultural plurality of societies, is better equipped to understand this form of diasporic cinema. Naficy (2001) argued that diasporic cinema might be distinguished in part by its particular narrativising of the themes of border crossing, relocation and the processes of adaptation and enculturation. Frequently the exiled figure of the diasporic text must contend not only with the loss of kinship, culture and homeland but also with the challenges of marginalisation in their new place of residence. Certainly, this chapter adopts Hamid Naficy’s definition of a diasporic filmmaker, as its starting point in delineating what constitutes Iranian émigré cinema. In the framework of his discussion in An Accented Cinema (2001) Naficy classifies diasporic filmmakers as those who are “external” to their original homeland, but maintain a “long-term sense of ethnic consciousness and distinctiveness” (14). The use of the term “homeland” here is thus not meant to infer a discourse of unity regarding a fixed geographical locale or national identity. Instead homeland may equally suggest a site of memories or nostalgic imaginings. The importance of the term homeland is that it suggests a place of past habitation that may be contrasted with the experience of a new or adopted homeland. The diasporic subject may in fact have several, competing locales or imagined homelands – echoing Naficy’s argument that it is “multiplicity” and “hybridity” (14) that shape and underscore the diasporic experience. But it is also important to situate the notion of homeland, or vatan, as a recurring theme in Iranian religious, historical and national discourses. Initially inflected with spiritual meaning, emerging as a concept adopted by the Sufis to denote the “world beyond the material and mundane”, vatan signified not only the soil to which one would return after death but the mystical realm in which eventual unification with God was possible (Najmabadi 2005, 100). Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet gives an excellent account of the manner in which vatan became embedded within the nation’s patriotic rhetoric from the 1860s, signaling not only geo-political territory and possession but a central aspect of identity formation (2000, 50). She discusses the manner in which, for example, from the late 1870s, vatan was utilized within the press as a signifier of a communal, unifying subjectivity, in which all individual talents and possessions were derived from the soil and physical environment of Iran’s geo-political territory. Although the emphasis and associations with

94 vatan shifted with the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and then again with the Islamic Revolution (1979), vatan has remained central to nationalizing, reformist and protectionist discourses. Michelle Langford (2012) demonstrates the manner in which various post-revolutionary filmmakers reconfigured notions of vatan in their cinematic engagement with the history of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), its material and emotional aftermath and the “duty of care” required to “tend to the nation’s wounds”. What is interesting to note in the context of diasporic cinema, is the manner in which deterritorialisation and exile both liberates the director from the official nationalist rhetoric regarding vatan, but also painfully dislocates them from a central “source” of cultural identity and community. Indeed this thesis is interested in delineating how diasporic directors represent “homeland” outside the prevailing patriotic discourses, and the manner in which they may narrate a sense of geo-political community. Naficy distinguishes between external exiles and diasporic subjects, defining the exile as the individual who has “voluntarily or involuntarily left their country of origin and who maintains an ambivalent relationship with their previous and current places and culture”(2001, 12). The exile, in Naficy’s schema, does not return to their homeland and their banishment is permanent and devastating. The diasporic individual experiences more personal and political liberty in terms of their ability to come and go between homeland and hostland. The diasporic subject, according to Naficy, is more likely to be part of a collective that nurtures communal memories and idealised notions of homeland. Zohreh T. Sullivan (2001) uses a similar distinction when discussing the “exile’s forced separation from an inaccessible homeland” and the “voluntary displacement” of the diasporic subject and their persistent experiences of “contingency” and “indeterminacy” (1). While Sullivan and Naficy’s clarification of the terms “exiled” and “diasporic” are undeniably useful and important, in this chapter the experience of “exile” is not limited to the individual who has been forcibly and irrevocably expatriated in geo-political terms. Rather the term “exile” points to a state of subjectivity that more broadly describes the experiences of displacement, isolation and deterritorialisation. Filmmaking is a necessarily collective process that involves a large number of personnel, and often a number of funding sources, but in this thesis a diasporic film is defined specifically by the status of the director and their displaced or distanced

95 relationship from their original homeland. While not all émigré filmmakers originating from Iran choose to engage directly with the subject matter of Iranian culture or include any spoken Persian (Marva Nabili’s Nightsongs (1985) being a prime example), there is usually a persistent consideration of the themes of nationality, displacement and territory. Christopher Gow (2011) has warned against imposing “exilic readings” indiscriminately on diasporic films, but the hardships of displacement and deterritorialisation remain important and recurrent themes in many of the works of such filmmakers. Hamid Naficy’s (2001) own cautioning against conflating the marginal subjects of diasporic films with the status of the filmmakers themselves is also worth heeding. For while diasporic filmmakers frequently produce low-budget, collective and artisanal films, Naficy maintains that this does not indicate that diasporic filmmakers should be entirely categorised as peripheral and necessarily oppressed (2001, 46). But the conditions of diasporic filmmaking can certainly be restrictive. The experience of American-Iranian filmmaker, Tina Gharavi, in the making of her debut film I am Nasrine (2012) is a testament to the innovative, and occasionally covert, methods of film production required by the diasporic filmmaker. While Gharavi had access to an official production permit for the scenes filmed in Iran, the authorisation was in fact intended for another film on which her producer was simultaneously working. Although Gharavi’s team had been technically deemed a “second unit” for the official production, when questioned by the police Gharavi acted as a bystander while her production assistant assumed responsibility (Shooter 2013). Such subterfuge is not new when it comes to Iranian diasporic filmmaking. Understandably, due to the dangers of contravening the enforced and arbitrary censorship codes, many diasporic filmmakers choose not to risk the return to Iran to make their films, despite the fact that the diegetic worlds of their narratives are set entirely within its national borders. Shirin Neshat’s Women without Men (2009) and Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance (2011) used Morocco and Lebanon respectively as their production locales in order to simulate the . By evading Iran’s censorship policy Neshat and Keshavarz were able to directly tackle the contentious themes of rape, prostitution, sexual orientation and self-harm. The greater degree of autonomy sometimes available to the émigré director, particularly when production is undertaken outside of Iran entirely, enables the filmmaker to centralise and complicate narratives of female subjectivity. In the process diasporic directors often re-

96 conceptualise their relationship with their homeland, illuminating the most intimate and taboo aspects of their subject’s social, cultural and sexual experiences. Director, writer and actress Susan Taslimi, whose debut All Hell Let Loose (2002) concerned an expatriate Iranian family in Sweden, directly confronts the themes of re-territorialization and the consequences for successive generations. Taslimi immigrated to Sweden in 1986 from Iran and her film explores the uneasy relationship between Swedish, Iranian and American cultures. Location is inscribed in a very different manner by French-Iranian, ’s , (2007). Here the film is even more reliant on aesthetic and form to portray the content of Satrapi’s autobiography and the landscape of an imagined homeland. Most recently, Negar Azarbayjani's debut feature, Facing Mirrors (2012) was released as an Iranian-German co-production, which while set predominantly within Tehran, also includes scenes filmed in Germany. This new generation of diasporic filmmakers testifies to the heterogeneous production practices employed by contemporary filmmakers as they continue to tell Iranian stories from both inside and outside of the country’s borders. It is important that these films are considered a part of the transnational panorama of Iranian cinema and that a study of Iran’s “national cinema”, such as this thesis, persists in referencing and including exiled and diasporic Iranian films and filmmakers. Such films not only complicate notions of “Iranian” identity, they also often testify to and document the socio-cultural conditions of inhabiting contemporary Iran, without the fear of censorship or ongoing persecution. While it would be specious to frame all Iranian women’s diasporic cinema with the same thematic concerns, an examination of how mobility is focalized and represented in the émigré text is valuable. As Bill Ashcroft has argued, diaspora and the transnational need not be characterized by the crude binaries of “loss and absence” and “possibility and promise”. Instead diaspora may be understood as a condition of “mobility and in- betweenness”, which embodies both exilic consciousness and hope (2010, 75). The concept of the liminal and the in-between will be discussed at length in the next chapter in relation to Shirin Neshat’s Women without Men (2010), but it is worth noting here the centrality of mobility as a recurring motif in diasporic cinema. Notions of mobility have featured largely in migration and hybridity studies with a recurrent emphasis on the global movement of cosmopolitans and transnationals. Mobility is a useful framework because of

97 the way it encompasses both the voyaging across the geo-political boundaries of nationhood and the psychological terrain traversed by the traveller, asylum-seeker and exile. Hamid Naficy’s writing on the “process of becoming” (2005), in which the identity of the diasporic subject is remade and reconstructed in the process of relocation, is relevant here. Zygmunt Bauman’s essays on diasporic identity (2011) and the “palimpsest” nature of a renegotiated subjectivity of the migrant (1997) also contribute to the theorisation of diasporic identity. Both Naficy and Bauman emphasize the processual and continually evolving nature of identity construction and the way in which the mobility of the diasporic subject calls for endless reinvention and readjustment. But mobility, and its analogue, dislocation, need not only denote rootlessness, indeterminacy and a loss of agency. Mobility is equally about acquiring new perspectives and the productive possibility of cultural defamiliarisation. By familiarisation I refer to the process in which the diasporic subject becomes distanciated from their national and kinship culture. The diasporic director perceives their homeland and its cultural practices through both a literal and figurative new lens. In Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale the lens is embedded in the device of the mobile phone. The mobile phone not only acts as a form of digital memory, it simultaneously reconfigures the memories, enacting the process of defamiliarisation. The next section of this chapter examines the aesthetic strategies adopted by Moussavi in My Tehran for Sale and argues that they evoke the exile’s experience of temporality and recollection. In particular this chapter underscores the poetic structure of Moussavi’s film and the way in which ellipsis references the trauma and fragmentation of dislocation.

Memory and Poetic Ellipsis in ‘My Tehran for Sale’ Granaz Moussavi was born in Tehran in 1974. Like so many of her generation, Moussavi later migrated with her family to Australia in 1997. Indeed it is thought that since the 1979 Revolution and the ensuing economic and political upheaval, over one million Iranians have migrated to North America, Europe and Australia, with 35,000 Iranians now settled in Australia13. Moussavi has published four volumes of poetry, and it was her poem “Sale”, from her collection Barefoot Till Morning (2008) that formed the basis for her debut feature, My Tehran for Sale (2010). The film was the first coproduction between Iran and

13 Census Explorer, http://www.sbs.com.au/censusexplorer/

98 Australia and was filmed almost entirely in Iran, with all post-production undertaken in Australia. The film was funded by the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival, as well receiving support from filmmaker, ’s, Tehran-based production company Mij Film. It was screened at various international film festivals and gained a limited commercial release in Australia. In 2011 Moussavi gained her Ph.D. from the University of Western Sydney, and in it she gives a detailed account of the production process. She writes:

First and foremost, my personal life and artistic output has been deeply shaped by the turbulent experiences of revolution, war and immigration. I have found poetry to be a necessary survival mechanism: it has provided me the means to forge and express a contemporary Iranian identity that stands against the concrete definitions circulating both within and outside of a highly regulated and politicized society (2011, 89).

Moussavi has spent her adulthood travelling between Iran and Australia, returning to live in Tehran on a more permanent basis from 2006 to 2009. Her poem “Sale” documents the emotional hazards of migration and the manner in which the diasporic experience is characterized by the paradoxical cycles of mobility and stasis.

Stranger than a kite left behind in a closet, I am stamped and pass and miss home. The antennas aim at the sky But on the clothesline at Home My shirt is still holding God tight (Moussavi 2008, 5).

The project of undertaking film production thus formed an important opportunity for Moussavi to return to Iran in an official capacity as a director with funding and formal backing. But apart from negotiating the various bureaucratic difficulties of attaining a

99 production permit, Moussavi was also confronted by the need to accommodate Iran’s social and cinematic modesty codes. She writes in her thesis that her solution to the problem of hijab was to use wigs for her actors in those scenes where veiling would be unrealistic and to shave the head of her protagonist, Marzieh, as a way of “bypassing issues” related to “hair coverage” (Moussavi 2011). The convention of shaving actresses’ heads as a means of circumventing the necessity of veiling was not new and had certainly been adopted before, most famously in Masoud Kimiai's Sorb (Lead, 1988), Abbas Kiarostami’s Dah (Ten 2002) and in Manijeh Hekmat’s Zendan-e zanan (Women’s Prison, 2002). Moussavi believed that by making such provisions she could more freely and realistically portray the lives of Iranian youth as they navigated and challenged the social and cultural mores of post-revolutionary Iran. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that the film was never officially released within Iran, authorities took exception to Moussavi’s representation of Marzieh in My Tehran for Sale and in June 2011, the lead actress, Marzieh Vafamehr, was arrested and later sentenced to 90 lashes and one year’s imprisonment. It was not only her contravention of the modesty codes that drew the ire of the Ahmadinejad government, but also the facts that she was shown in bed with her on-screen lover and appeared drinking and drug-taking in other scenes. In October 2011 the sentence was overturned and reduced to three months imprisonment, but Vafamehr was banned from any further filmmaking activity and also prohibited from leaving the country. The events surrounding Vafamehr’s prosecution ironically evidenced the very cultural restrictions Moussavi was attempting to portray in her film, and the continuing severity of the government’s role in policing and punishing those who contravene the prevailing social and cinematic modesty codes. My Tehran for Sale revolves around the story of Marzieh (Marzieh Vafamehr), an actress in her thirties, who subsists on sewing work between rehearsals for an underground theatrical production and socialising at counter-cultural events. Although savvy and hardened to the precariousness of her life as a performer in Iran, Marzieh glimpses the possibility of another, much freer existence when her close friend, Sadaf (Asha Mehrabi) introduces her to Saman (Amir Chegini) at a dance party. Saman migrated to Australia as a child with his family and he paints an idyllic portrait of life outside Iran and quickly convinces Marzieh to return with him. Their plans descend into chaos, however, when Marzieh undertakes a routine medical check as part of her immigration screening and

100 discovers she is HIV positive. Abandoned by Saman but still gripped by the fantasy of escape, Marzieh decides to press on with her plans to leave Iran, paying a smuggler to transport her out of the country and into Australia. But Marzieh has not accounted for the unforgiving Australian immigration system, which detains her indefinitely and refuses to legitimise her status as a refugee. Imprisoned in the timeless and liminal space of the detention centre, Marzieh must choose whether to remain incarcerated indefinitely or to be deported back to her former life in Iran. The very first shot of My Tehran for Sale reveals a group of Afghans sitting in a small circle, enjoying the singing of a middle-aged man, who is also playing the traditional Afghan string instrument, the rubab. Their smiling faces are illuminated only by the incandescence of a small oil lamp. The beat is insistent and strong, reinforced by the clapping of the young men and women listening to the song. The mechanical bass of a contemporary dance track then eclipses the melody of the folksong and the next scene shows a large crowd of young Iranians, bathed in red disco lights, dancing and moving in rhythm with the electronic music, which includes the strains of a female voice. Among them are Marzieh and Sadaf, who can be seen lighting cigarettes and playfully embracing. Sadaf waves over Saman, who approaches the women with his mobile phone held out in front of him. He films Marzieh, whom he has never met before, and the next shot reveals Marzieh captured in the frame of his phone, pixelated and blurred as she dances. Marzieh and Saman dance flirtatiously and after Saman whispers in her ear, they leave the dance party and stumble towards some nearby stables. As they stand under the shelter, smoking and drinking, the bass of the dance music gradually merges with the growing beat of the Afghan folksong. The cuts between the Afghan group and the dance party continue at more regular intervals until the basij14 break up both gatherings. At this point it becomes

14 The Nirou-ye Moqavemat-e , the ‘mobilisation resistance force’, is the Iranian paramilitary organisation that was established in 1979 as part of the Islamic Republic’s new constitution. Initially devised to bolster and support the military numbers in the Iran-Iraq war, the Basij have since ‘evolved into a neighbourhood task force’, charged with the responsibility of protecting the social and religious interests of the State (Fassihi 2009). While its members are largely volunteers, a variety of official benefits are afforded to Basij members, including special consideration when applying for employment. State leaders have estimated the Basij membership to be in the millions, however, outside commentators have projected the number of uniform supporters may be closer to 90, 000, with another 300, 000 reservists (Ahmari 2012). The Basij, in particular the student branch of the organisation, has undergone a revival under President Ahmadinjad, with a new branch dedicated solely to policing moral codes and the appearance and behaviour of all citizens (Golkar 2010).

101 apparent that the Afghan singer was guarding the private residence on a rural property for the dance party and both groups are arrested and loaded onto a bus. The Afghans are deemed to be “illegals” by the interrogators and are aggressively escorted to the bus15, while the women at the dance party are ordered to make themselves decent and instructed to put on their veils. The opening sequence of My Tehran for Sale very neatly encapsulates the itinerant nature of culture and peoples in contemporary Iran, “the ‘flows’ between the local and global, and the production of transnational subjects” (Cunningham 2004, 331). It also specifically references the persistent tensions for diasporic peoples between homeland and hostland, tradition and modernity, and the competing influences of local and global practices (Bahati Kummba 2003, 6). Whereas the dislocated Afghans appear to be maintaining elements of their “traditional” culture, the young Iranians are represented as embracing modern global forms of social entertainment. The musical score, and the way in which it cuts between the “indigenous” Afghan folksong and the Western-inflected dance music works as a metaphor for the processes of globalization, which sees cultures and cultural practices become interconnected and interwoven. Despite the obvious disparities between the two forms of music, there remain elements of commonality in their performance and basic musical structure. For example, the two beats; one live and generated by the strumming and clapping and the other electronically synchronized and transmitted, continually compete, overlap and merge as the opening scenes unfold. The way in which the scores have been edited to correspond serves not only to align the two musical performances but also allies the displaced Afghan asylum seekers with the counter-cultural Iranian youth. While the two groups attempt to perform their social and cultural practices in clandestine environments, they are still discovered, censured and incarcerated for their

15 Afghans have long occupied a precarious position within Iranian society, particularly after the intensification of repatriation measures from the early 2000s. With a long history of colonial occupation and civil warfare, Afghans have been fleeing their homeland for decades, with migration to Iran escalating after the 1979 Soviet invasion of (Tober 2007). Iran initially welcomed Afghan migrants and refugees because they provided a source of cheap labour. Iran’s ideological stance of supporting their Muslim brethren, as well as the bureaucratic ambiguity surrounding what constituted proper and legal paperwork for migrants, also made Iran a viable host-country for Afghans seeking refuge from poverty and persecution (Ashrafi & Moghissi 2002). But with the introduction of a new parliamentary platform in April 2000, encouraging ‘voluntary’ return, deportations of Afghans became a more regular occurrence after the US occupation of Afghanistan commenced in 2001.

102 transgressive acts and their status as nonconformists or “illegals”. My Tehran for Sale thus begins by exposing the processes of migration, cultural exchange and hybridity as marginalising and perilous. Arjun Appadurai argued that: “…as the shapes of cultures become less bounded and tacit, more fluid and politicized, the work of cultural reproduction becomes a daily hazard” (1996, 44). Certainly Moussavi reiterates this thesis by demonstrating how particular acts and forms of personal expression are forbidden and punishable in Iran. As Hilary Cunningham notes, the post-modern reality of global migration is often characterised by the central elements of “motion and mixture” (2004, 331): that is, the global flows of people and the hybridisation of cultural identity. Moussavi plays with these notions of motion and mixture by not only foregrounding and paralleling the Afghan migrants with the Iranian youth at the rave, but also by adopting a narrative structure that experiments with fragmentation, interconnectedness and uncertainty. As the poet and filmmaker elucidates in her doctoral thesis on the process of undertaking film production, the initial script not only hoped to capture the central theme of exile as portrayed in the poem “Sale”, but also attempted to emulate the elliptical structures of poetry itself. Ellipsis is defined as the purposeful practice of syntactical omission, compression and condensation. It is a common literary and poetic device, in which a sentence may appear grammatically incomplete but retains its meaning and coherence. Ellipsis is employed in all cinematic narratives when there is a cut between scenes and it is adopted as a conventional method of portraying temporal compression and continuity. But Moussavi adopts the strategy of ellipsis in My Tehran for Sale as means of disrupting the linear progression of the plot and infusing it with fissures and moments of discontinuity. The first few scenes experiment with ellipsis as the narrative oscillates between several different spatial and temporal zones. For example, after the dance party is disbanded by the basij, the film cuts back to a scene, set two days prior to the night of the rave. Sadaf is at the wheel of a car and speeding, racing a group of men in a car next to hers on the freeway. In the passenger seat, Marzieh cautions Sadaf to slow down.

Sadaf: I can see you’re freaked out. Just wait until two nights from now.

103 Marzieh: What is happening in two nights? Sadaf: I’ll show you someone; he’s just your type. Just flirt with him and you’ll be on. Marzieh: Here we go again. Another jerk you’ve found for me. Sadaf: Excuse me, he’s a foreign citizen. Marzieh: A citizen of what hellhole? Sadaf: Watch it, he might be your lucky ticket. He’s cool.

The fact that Saman is first described in the film as a “foreign citizen” and a “lucky ticket” underscores the importance of geographical and social mobility for Marzieh. Whereas Sadaf’s open flirting with a group of men in a nearby car and reckless speeding on the freeway reveal her boldness and cheerful distain for Iranian social codes and legalities, Marzieh appears more solemn and disenchanted with the oppressive conditions of her homeland. Saman’s status as a “foreign citizen” thus introduces the notion of an imaginary, and possibly idealised elsewhere, or Otherland – free of all the constraints, fears and persecution that Marzieh has come to associate with her life in Tehran. Just as the presence of the Afghan migrants at the beginning of the film set up the binary of homeland and hostland, so too the references to Saman continue to foreground the dichotomy of the local and the global. As a foreigner, or global citizen, Saman represents the possibility of freedom and flight. The fact that Marzieh shrewdly questions Sadaf as to which “hellhole” Saman originates from ominously foreshadows Marzieh’s own eventual incarceration in an Australian detention centre. The next scene cuts back to the stables where Marzieh and Saman are still hiding after the basij have cleared out the partygoers and Afghan migrants. A horse ambles outside in the blue light of dawn. The couple cautiously emerge from the stables before the narrative cuts to an interview between Marzieh and an Australian immigration officer. Marzieh is describing how the dance party was broken up (“…it was terrible. They took everyone and broke everything”) but she is interrupted by the officer, who accuses her of changing her story. We then return to the aftermath of the dance party where Saman and Marzieh are picking through the rubbish in the barn where the rave was held. Amidst the chaos Marzieh discovers Sadaf’s mobile phone and clutches it, whispering “Poor Sadaf”. We then return once again to the interview with the immigration officer:

104

Marzieh: I can’t exactly remember whether we were in the rave or the stables when we were invaded. I can’t remember. (An interpreter translates Marzieh’s response to the immigration officer.) Immigration Officer: So you weren’t hurt then?

The narrative then performs another temporal jump, this time to a scene set in a police station, where those who attended the rave are lined up and are listening to one of their peers receiving lashes. As the camera pans past Sadaf, spectators can observe Marzieh and Saman also sitting anxiously on the bench, awaiting their punishment. But as another individual is ushered into a cell, the camera pans back across the waiting line and Marzieh and Saman are no longer in the queue. Instead the subsequent scene reveals the couple walking across misty farm fields. Saman is questioning Marzieh as to what will happen to those who were caught. Marzieh answers that “the rich ones will buy their way out and the others get punished”. Saman then hails a lift on the freeway and the couple hitch their way back to Tehran. The next shot shows the Tehran cityscape at dawn, with the film’s title slowly appearing across the frame in cursive Persian script. It is worth describing these opening scenes in detail because of the way they establish the complex, layered and elliptical nature of the narrative structure. Even in the initial few minutes, four distinct temporal episodes are introduced: the dance party, the immigration interview, the car ride and the morning following the dance party. Like the beats of the music, they merge, overlap and create a kind of temporal and spatial slippage. The scenes do not appear in sequential order and are instead spliced, interchanged and reversed. This “temporal scrambling” (Bordwell & Thompson 2004) generates ambiguity around narrative events and is suggestive of the way memories are stored and recollected. Just as Marzieh cannot precisely recall her whereabouts when the guards “invaded” the dance party, so too spectators of My Tehran for Sale are not always clear as to what is diegetic fact and what constitutes an unreliable or perhaps obscured memory. Naficy argues for the importance of memory in deciphering exilic texts and transnational films. In a discussion of Chris Marker’s films, Naficy writes that the disjointed cuts from scene to scene “are driven not by the demands of the plot or by the

105 character’s speech, glance or desire but by (their) memories” (2001, 150). So too Moussavi’s film functions as a set of recollections which are informed by forgetfulness, nostalgia and desire. In using memory as a central mechanism for structuring the narrative, Moussavi also plays with time. In fact the experience of time becomes a central feature of both Marzieh’s experience and by extension the experience of the spectator. Moussavi appears to be demonstrating the subjective, mutable nature of time and how the exile may become not only disconnected from kinship and culture, but from experiences of temporal progression and linearity. My Tehran for Sale reflects this preoccupation with time, not only through the disjunctive structures of the narrative syntax, but via explicit references in the dialogue. For example, as Marzieh and Saman walk the streets of Tehran, Marzieh describes to Saman what has happened to the country in the intervening years since his emigration. She recalls the eight-year war with Iraq and the devastating bomb raids.

Marzieh: Where were you back then? You overseas people, it’s like no matter how many years pass, time doesn’t affect you.

Marzieh’s comment introduces the notion of two very different concepts or experiences of time. In the aforementioned scene the wealthy and self-determined Iranian expatriate (the “overseas person”, the “foreign citizen”) is seen as immune to the traces and damage of time’s passing. This type of émigré resides outside Iranian national culture and (in Marzieh’s mind) appears invulnerable to the painful legacies and collective memories of Iran’s national history. Marzieh defines herself as a repository for aspects of Iranian cultural heritage, as against Saman who she implicitly chastises for abandoning and neglecting the past. She then takes Saman to a cemetery in Tehran.

Marzieh: Forugh is here. “Remember flight, the bird is mortal.” Also Ghamar and . Marzieh sings a refrain from one Ghamar-Ol Malook’s songs. Saman: You’re quite an antique. Marzieh: Go away, foreigner!

106 The Zahirodoleh cemetery in Tehran, which contains the grave of Forugh Farrokhzad and other important cultural figures, acts as both a literal and metaphoric memory site. In paying homage to such modern, female figures as the poet Farrokhzad and singer Ghamar- Ol-Malook, Marzieh stresses the importance of remembering the struggles of Iran’s pioneering women artists. The fact that Marzieh and Saman remain locked out of the cemetery, despite Marzieh’s persistent banging on the gates, is also significant. The closure of this public site may be read in terms of how Iran’s modern history has been literally by the post-revolutionary State. Victor Roudometof (2007) discusses how the modern age has seen the democratisation of national and cultural heritage: no longer reserved for the aristocracy or upper classes, a nation’s history is understood as belonging to all of its citizens. But in My Tehran for Sale Marzieh is prohibited from entering a site of cultural remembrance and instead she must retrieve and enliven the heritage herself via her voice. By quoting Forugh’s poem and singing one of Ghamar’s refrains, Marzieh constructs a brief and elliptical oral ’s modern, female artists. Interestingly Moussavi discusses, again in her thesis, the importance of Farrokhzad’s presence in the film as Marzieh’s “poetic shadow”. A portrait of Farrokhzad hangs in Marzieh’s apartment, which Moussavi hoped would become “an enduring metaphor for Marzieh’s position as a free- spirited, female artist struggling for sexual, social and artistic liberation” (2011, 116). Farrokhzad is thus an embodiment of the artistic, personal and political freedom that Marzieh herself seeks in post-revolutionary Iran. The fact that Marzieh sells this portrait in a bid to raise the funds for her migration suggests a potential loss or curtailment of her cultural identity, and thus freedom, when she does embark on her hazardous journey to Australia. Marzieh’s desire to preserve and uphold the memories of Farrokhzad through images of the poet and via her oral recitation of her poetry may also be defined as an act of political solidarity with all those artists who remain suppressed by the post-revolutionary State. Michael Frisch (1990) in his seminal work on oral history and public memory argued that oral accounts allow individuals to situate their own experiences within a broader socio-cultural narrative. As Frisch writes:

…The notion that what is most compelling about oral and public history is a

107 capacity to redefine and redistribute intellectual authority, so that this might be shared more broadly in historical research and communication rather than continuing to serve as an instrument of power and hierarchy (xx).

The elliptical oral account that Marzieh constructs is thus not only important in terms of her own personal identification with Farrokhzad, but the manner in which Marzieh can recover authority and reclaim Iran’s national history as a young woman in post-revolutionary Iran. As Frisch points out, oral accounts redefine history as that which is shared and democratized, no longer reserved for those in positions of political power and control. Marzieh’s interpretation of modern history thus redresses the perceived imbalance of women’s status in Iran as both artists and individuals, as she metaphorically unburies Farrokhzad’s poetry and Ghamar’s lyrics. Judy Giles’ (2002) work on memory and subjectivity is also relevant here, in particular Giles’ thesis that memories are “made and remade” through their expression in oral history, rather than being a “passive repository of facts”. Marzieh never represents her memories as “fact”, but rather as acts of interpretation and performance, which permit her to understand her own subjectivity within and against the broader discourses of “home”, “culture” and “history” (Giles 2002, Agnew 2005). The voice, in My Tehran for Sale, thus becomes an instrument for rehistoricizing and re- interpreting national and cultural meta-narratives. Saman, however, seems incapable of comprehending the depths of Marzieh’s attachment to Iranian history; playfully suggesting she is an “antique”. Marzieh counters his criticism by calling him a “foreigner”, again alluding to the chasm between the local and the stranger. But in many ways, Moussavi in fact casts both Marzieh and Saman as strangers. Zygmunt Bauman classifies the “stranger” as the individual who “corrupts” borders, divisions and order (1997, 47). Saman may initially appear as the obvious foreigner or stranger due to his status as an Iranian émigré who may travel freely between Australia and Iran. But Marzieh can also be categorised as a stranger, firstly as an “internal” exile and eventually as an asylum seeker. The fact that Marzieh’s identity is heavily informed by Iran’s modern history, her attachment to Farrokhzad and acts of cultural remembrance does not alter her status as an outsider and fringe-dweller in post- revolutionary Iran.

108 Moussavi’s narrative experimentation and persistent referencing of temporality points to the trauma associated with the loss of homeland for the diasporic subject. Naficy (2001) has discussed how crucial time-space configurations are key to understanding the representations of homeland in exilic cinema. According to Naficy, the exile’s experience of time may be evoked in the filmic text through open-form scenes that favour external locations, natural lighting and mobile framing. Such scenes evoke nostalgia and a utopian sense of timelessness. A more claustrophobic sense of temporality may also be suggested through closed diegetic structures and mise-en-scene that suggest panic and imprisonment. According to Naficy, films that oscillate between open and closed chronotypical forms create a “third space” or “slipzone of simultaneity and intertexuality” (212) where the boundaries between homeland and host-land blur and become indistinct. The scenes in which Marzieh tells the Australian immigration officer that she has been waiting in detention for two years, and that others have been imprisoned there for up to seven years, definitely accord with Naficy’s notion of the “closed-form chronotype”. When Marzieh pleads with the officer, arguing “I don’t have much time left”, her face is filmed in a tight close-up, with the immigration officer appearing as a dark, indistinct form in the foreground. Detained indefinitely, the incarcerated exile exists in a liminal space where normal modes of temporal progression are suspended. Marzieh is shown housed with a group of women and children in a small room, all of them awaiting their interview, bound by their collective powerlessness and anxiety. But timelessness is not only evoked through Marzieh’s literal imprisonment and the closed diegetic spaces of the detention centre. As has been previously noted, the narrative structures mimetically reflect Marzieh’s experience of lapsed time by scrambling the temporal order of scenes and often leaving their context undetermined. In the final scene of the film spectators observe Marzieh walking the streets of Tehran with her backpack. The temporal framework of the scene remains indeterminate. Has Marzieh returned to Iran having been deported from Australia? Is she recalling her final night in Iran before leaving? Or it is an imagined return, revealing a form of painful nostalgia for her beloved hometown? The scenes are neither uniformly “closed” nor “open”, as Marzieh traverses both narrow alleyways and open roads in her journey through Tehran at dusk. Rather it is the ambiguity surrounding this final scene and lack of temporal context that communicates

109 timelessness and allows it to function as a discrete and dislocated memory. Indeed the final scene demonstrates that memories in My Tehran for Sale do not operate only as recollections of the past, but may also constitute imaginings of the future. Past and future may coalesce in such reveries and become indistinct. Just as Marzieh and Saman are represented as being both at the police cells in line for lashes and simultaneously absent, so too the ending of the film posits Marzieh as both returnee and continued exile. As Naficy has suggested, by interchanging between open and closed forms, Moussavi blurs the borders between homeland and host-land, portraying her protagonist as inhabiting the interstices of culture and cultural memory. This final scene also evokes Bauman’s metaphor of the palimpsest and the way, for the diasporic subject, that past experiences may simultaneously persist and be overwritten by current and future circumstances (1997, 25). In leaving the temporal context undetermined, Marzieh’s subjectivity may be understood as a hybrid construction of recollected and “becoming” selves.

Mobiles, Movies and Recording the Performance of Self The mobile phone, a recurring prop within the film, plays an important role in the mediation and communication of memories. Not only does My Tehran for Sale reveal how the mobile phone mimics the functions of human recollection, it also signals how it may operate as an important instrument of citizen sovereignty in Iran. As has already been noted, Saman records Marzieh’s face on his mobile phone when he first meets her at the dance party. Marzieh discovers Sadaf’s abandoned mobile after the police raids and she also attempts to corroborate her story of the invaded rave by presenting the Australian immigration officer with footage recorded on her own mobile phone. Later in the narrative, the mobile phone resurfaces as a central device in which events are recorded. Niloufar, the young girl Marzieh minds for a neighbour, films a number of sequences on her new mobile phone while on a particular outing with Marzieh. The scenes include an intimate discussion between an older man and a younger woman in a doctor’s waiting room (whom gossiping women near to them suspect are in a “temporary marriage”16), a woman trying to organise

16 ‘Temporary Marriage’ or Nikah Mut’ah is a recognized and lawful form of Islamic marriage in Iran. It refers to the contract formed when a woman gives her consent to be married to a man for a nominal and ‘temporary’ period in exchange for directly receiving her bride price. As Shaela Haeri (1989) argues, while it is widely assumed that most women enter into such an arrangement out of financial necessity, there are a

110 and being refused an abortion at a clinic and a car accident in which people crowd around a dead body. The fact that all the participants are filmed unsuspectingly further illustrates the way intimate or private moments may be so readily captured in the public realm through the use of mobile, digital technologies. The division of public and private spheres has particular significance in Iranian society and is heavily informed by the practices of Islamic gender segregation and cultural codes of conduct. As Shahla Haeri has argued, “through the processes of socialization, enculturation, and education… elaborate etiquette, rituals and local customs”, as well as through architecture and veiling, the public and private domains have been zoned and gendered (1989, 76). But the pervasive use of the mobile telephone in Iran, as represented in My Tehran for Sale, works to corrode these long-held cultural and social divisions. It demonstrates that the policing and enforcing of public and private barriers may become even more impractical with the ubiquitous presence of mobile phone technology. The use of the viewing device also alludes to the historical practices and exploitation of surveillance in Iran by the State and its associated authorities. Prior to the Revolution surveillance was adopted as a means of imposing State control and authority. The violation of citizen’s privacy through the monitoring of their telecommunication, correspondence and general activity, however, has also been justified under the guise of religious necessity since the 1979 Revolution. Mehrangiz Kar writes:

The private sphere of those labelled “dissidents” is more threatened than that of other citizens. Using the legal and religious laws the regime has adopted, government agencies have brought aspects of the private life of dissidents, critics, artists and political activists under surveillance (2003, 829).

As an actress involved in an underground political theatre project, Marzieh is particularly vulnerable to the threat of government scrutiny and persecution. Although there are no explicit references to Marzieh being investigated by the police, the use of particular framing devices alludes to the draconian processes of surveillance. As Marzieh and Niloufar leave range of reasons and motivations as to why individuals choose temporary marriage for non-commercial or sexual purposes. Social segregation makes temporary marriage a convenient option for some couples in Iran who need to travel, live or socialize together but who are unrelated and are not seeking permanent marriage.

111 their block of apartments, for example, their departure is viewed from an unfamiliar vantage point, suggesting the possible presence of an unknown observer. The heaviness of the surrounding architecture in this scene, in particular the vast cement staircase and monumental windows, also introduce the notion of a totalitarian aesthetic. Marzieh and Niloufar appear diminutive and exposed in the context of the oversized apartment block. The vast, cement structures that dominate the foreground of the frame suggest the insidious and infinite nature of the government’s power. The fact that this scene is followed by various instances of Niloufar’s own clandestine filming demonstrates the power of new forms of citizen surveillance and journalism. Anna Reading, in her discussion of what she calls a “globital memory field” argues that new digital medias facilitate “virally globalised memories” (2011, 241). Reading uses the example of the way in which the death of Iranian protestor, Neda Agha Soltan, in the 2009 elections, was filmed on a mobile phone and then globally reproduced using transmedial, mobile communication technologies.

Mediated memories of events may be personally and locally produced, before being rapidly mobilised, traveling and settling in multiple, globalised dispersed sites…This movement of data made possible through digital media in combination with globalisation could be seen as a new form of collective consciousness…[a form of memory that] traverses established boundaries between the human and machine, between the organic and the inorganic (2011, 242 - 245).

Spectators never discover whether Niloufar’s recordings are ever viewed or transmitted again, but the fact that the scenes were filmed at all, and with such ease, reveals the complex role digital media plays in the storing and communicating of personal and social memories. Like the fallible human memory, the mobile telephone also translates and obscures the data it receives, stores and reproduces. The image of Marzieh at the dance party, recorded by Saman on his phone, was overexposed and infused by the red lights of the rave. The Australian immigration officer deems the footage of the police raids too indistinct to constitute any form of real evidence to support Marzieh’s claim for asylum. Similarly, the scenes filmed by Niloufar are devoid of any broader context, vulnerable to the potentially erroneous interpretations of strangers. While the mobile phone may record

112 and capture significant images that enter the global arena, such as those disturbing images of Neda’s death during the 2009 Iranian elections, at other times the technology may not be able to produce data of a suitable quality. The unverifiable nature of Marzieh’s phone footage demonstrates that media memory may be just as oblique, dim and elliptical as human recollection at times. The mobile phone may not be always able to facilitate justice or modulate events evenly; however, its prevalence as a device for recording memories in My Tehran for Sale demonstrates its relatively democratic function in capturing cultural and political activity. As opposed to the located, geographic site of the cemetery, which may be shut down and made inaccessible, even children are shown to be digitally literate and thus capable of creating mobile, memory sites. Furthermore, the fact that the mobile phone uses image- based medias, which may be transculturally translated and recognized, also makes it distinct from the oral history Marzieh constructs for Saman outside the cemetery. The film was made before the 2009 Iranian elections and the events of the mass rallies. However, Moussavi’s foregrounding of the mobile phone as an instrument and symbol of citizen sovereignty demonstrates that while it may not always guarantee freedom, it is an integral part of the contemporary life of the Iranian subject. The mobile phone thus places its user in the empowered position of simultaneous spectator and observer. It enables its subject to not only observe their cultural practices from a distance, but it also facilitates the recording of events that may be one day used to attain greater degrees of democracy and personal autonomy. The prominence of the mobile phone as a device for spectating, recording and securing memories in My Tehran for Sale also references the processes of diasporic filmmaking, and possibly even the presence of the director as well. Naficy argues that “accented cinema theory is an extension of authorship theory” in that the biography of the director and their own experiences of exile permeate the filmic text and reveal the complex “performance of self” (2001, 35). Accented filmmakers inscribe their films with “authorial signatures”, according to Naficy, which signify not only the “various incarnations of the author and the conditions of exile” but also the conditions of diasporic filmmaking (36). It is important to qualify the use of authorship theory here, and to emphasize that this thesis is more interested in identifying the possible (and often plural) speaking positions of the

113 author, rather than conflating the narrative persona with that of the director’s biography. Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2012) has usefully questioned the link between the ontological status of the director as “cosmopolitan” or “diasporic” and the manner in which they assert authorship via autobiographical self-inscription. This thesis, however, underscores the merits of Naficy’s emphasis on the multiple incarnations of the director, and their function as a metaphor for the conditions of diasporic filmmaking. The persistent foregrounding of mobile and digital devices, such as the mobile phone, for example, highlight the technologies and methodologies that must be adopted by the diasporic filmmaker. Niloufar even explains to Marzieh and Saman that her new mobile phone is able to “shoot movies.” Often deprived of an elaborate production arsenal or studio budget, the diasporic director must adopt more economic technologies and production strategies. Niloufar films scenes of Tehran on her mobile phone from the vantage point of a car window when taking a drive with Marzieh. The enforcement of censorship codes in Iran makes it even more necessary for diasporic filmmakers to adopt technologies that can be used surreptitiously, especially those by Tina Gharavi in the making of I am Nasrine when she did not obtain an official production permit from the state authorities. The “dual” camera work that constitutes the narrative structure of My Tehran for Sale also presents the spectator with multiple perspectives. Lower-grade footage representing the data filmed on the cheaper, digital devices is contrasted with the higher-grade, omniscient camera work, often providing alternative vantage points from which to observe the same scene. As Naficy is careful to underscore, diasporic filmmakers should not necessarily be classified as marginal or peripheral. Rather they are flexible and multiple in the roles they adopt in the production process. The various viewpoints thus may plausibly represent the various roles the diasporic director must perform – that of investor, writer, art director, editor and occasional actor. “By performing multiple functions, the filmmaker is able to shape a film’s vision and aesthetics and become truly its author. Authorship, therefore, is not only in the economic and aesthetic but also in the total control of the film” (2001, 49). Finally, the use of multiple perspectives reflects the globalised nature of the diasporic film and the way cultures are expressed through movement and hybridisation – through “motion and mixture”. In observing Tehran through the imperfect and grainy

114 footage of a mobile phone and then through the high-quality cinematography, spectators are permitted to view the Iranian capital through a lens that is at once local and global, intimate and public. Marzieh appears in front of the lens, filmed both by Saman and Niloufar on their mobile telephones. Much like her work with a political theatre collective, which uses mime and non-naturalistic performance, Marzieh never appears just as “herself” when being filmed. Instead she adopts the role of performer and artist, rehearsing and dancing. Using her real name in My Tehran for Sale, actress Marzieh Vafamehr’s performance of the diegetic Marzieh references the processes of identity construction and the politics of enacting and forming “identity” in filmmaking. Spectators are continually reminded of the actress behind the diegetic Marzieh and the tensions that exist between the actress and her performance of an actress. Marzieh’s apartment even features framed photographs of herself in performance. Just as the narrative is multi-layered and fragmented, so too the character of Marzieh is constructed of dual or multiple selves. As Naficy writes of diasporic cinema, there is:

…an emphasis both on a performing self and on a performance structure. Some of [the] cinematic strategies create distance among diegetic characters, between camera and diegetic subjects, and between screen and spectators. They also take the form of doppelganger characters, which depend on the existence of a split or a distance between the self and its other, observer and observed, original and copy, home and exile (2001, 271).

The multifocality of the camera perspectives and the multiple ‘Marziehs’ of My Tehran for Sale perform precisely the function flagged by Naficy of creating exilic “distance”. Distanciation and defamiliarisation are such significant devices in diasporic cinema because of the way they signal the irreparable separation of the subject from their homeland. My Tehran for Sale reflects and performs Marzieh’s journey of exile in a narrative that privileges fragmentation and multiplicity. Marzieh’s final walk through the streets of Tehran, as dusk turns to nightfall, is then not necessarily meant to signal a particular temporal episode but rather a condition of being: migration, observation, hopefulness. The

115 music that Marzieh listens to through her headphones includes the impassioned refrain of “Maybe tomorrow is our share”. Denied of her “share” of Tehran and the cultural heritage buried and secreted by the State, Marzieh’s hopes lie with the future. Isolated and in ill- health, she comforts herself in listening to music, not the Western-inflected, electronic dance music of her past, but the anguished and lyrical melodies of Iranian singer, Mohsen Namjou. The song, “Neo-Kantian Ideology”, which accompanies Marzieh’s walk through Tehran, recalls the Afghan folksong that began the film with its stark use of guitar and voice, and at a more subliminal level the presence of Western philosophical notions of transcendence through the title’s reference to the “Neo-Kantian”. Although Marzieh is adrift and exiled, some comfort is to be found through the medium of music and song, and its continuing expression of Iranian identity. Mohsen Namjou’s resonant voice evokes both the pain of displacement and some hope for a better future. Although there is a plaintive quality to Namjou’s voice, and indeed to the final scenes of My Tehran for Sale, there is none-the-less the sense that Marzieh is being represented as a survivor and an ongoing non- conformist. The prominence of the personal and possessive pronoun in the title of such a film as My Tehran for Sale demonstrates the centrality of identity, ownership and voice in Moussavi’s film. Although the life of the exile may be destabilised and fractured by the processes of deterritorialisation and displacement, the film’s title points to a coherent and located identity. Marzieh may indeed have multiple “referents of belonging” and “multifocal” perspectives but this does not eradicate the personal, situated and specific nature of her experiences, memories and hopes. Bauman’s theorisation of diasporic subjectivity as a palimpsest is useful in underscoring the way in which migration compels the individual to assume a flexible and renegotiated identity. However, it may not account for the resolve of diasporic peoples, in particular filmmakers, to ground and render their experiences through story telling and narration. As Judy Giles writes, memories play a role in the individual “struggle to construct a social and personal identity in a world in which subjectivity is both fragmented and fractured” (2002, 21). In articulating the traumatic and confounding processes of border crossing and asylum seeking, Moussavi exposes the passage of exile as collectively experienced and recollected through the representation of both private and public memories. Unlike the palimpsest that partially obscures the

116 previous layers of meaning and text, the diasporic film remains a permanent testament to the journey of geographical, and the experience of survival and psychological reterritorialisation. The next chapter continues to examine the theme of exile in the work of an Iranian diasporic filmmaker and the centrality of poeticism as a narrative strategy. Chapter Four discusses the manner in which Shirin Neshat adopts the events surrounding the 1953 coup d’état against President Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh as an allegory for the diasporic experience. But while in Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale it was ellipsis that signified the trauma of exile, in Women without Men it is the mode of magical realism that allows Shirin Neshat to portray the extra-territorial status of the diasporic subject and their occupation of an in-between and liminal “third space”.

117 Chapter Four Holding a Mirror to Iran: Liminality and Language in Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women Without Men’

In her debut feature film, Women Without Men (2009), Shirin Neshat poeticises the liminal space occupied by the diasporic subject. The indeterminate state of “unhomeliness” is evoked through the aesthetic interplay of allegory and magical realism. Neshat underscores the problematic nature of hermetic communities and the manner in which they fail, not only to protect their inhabitants from the strictures of patriarchal society, but also from personal anxieties and psychic disturbances. Women Without Men thus reveals Neshat’s ongoing ambivalence about the possibility of a democratic and women-centered Iran, both as a geographical and historical entity, and as an imagined and poetic construct. More broadly, the film demonstrates the equivocal and interstitial position of the diasporic individual and the exiled artist, as they continue to reside between cultures and between homelands. This chapter focuses much of its analysis on the mute character of Zarin in Women Without Men, and explores how silence may be adopted as a form of temporary resistance to patriarchal discourses and social orders. It explores the possibility that “voice” need not always constitute oral speech but may operate as a visual language that still effectively imparts authority and identity. Zarin’s non-verbal, paranormal language also reflects Neshat’s own decision to employ magical realism in her film as a means of conveying her disenchantment with women’s historical and cultural position within Iran. But whether a non-verbal language, and by extension the aesthetic of magical realism, is a sustainable mode for either Zarin or Neshat is questionable, with the film’s conclusion pointing to exile as a state of voicelessness and symbolic death. Made in Casablanca, Morocco, Women Without Men never seeks to recreate an “authentic” replica of Neshat’s native Iran, rather it is more interested in revealing the contradictions and slippages within discourses of national belonging. In interviews Neshat frequently positions herself explicitly as an exiled diasporic artist divided by competing homelands and cultures (Neshat 2004, Neshat 2010bb, Bresheeth 2010). Born in Qazvin, 1957, Neshat left Iran in 1975 to pursue her studies in the United States. After completing several degrees at U.C Berkeley, Neshat returned to Iran in 1990 and was stunned by the

118 “drastic transformation “ (Neshat 2004) brought about by the Islamic Revolution. Her return trips to Iran during the early 1990s inspired her first two photographic series, Veiling (1993) and Women of Allah (1993 – 1997). The images, which Neshat designed and directed, feature the artist veiled and covered in Persian poetry. In many of the stills Neshat provocatively cradles a gun or holds bullets in her hands. In part, an examination of martyrdom and the ideological fanaticism of the Islamic Revolution, these controversial works saw Neshat banned from re-entering Iran in 1996. Permanently settled in New York, Neshat started experimenting with 16mm film, often using two projectors simultaneously to create multiple-screen installation works. Neshat’s most notable double-screen installations include Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervour (2000). Such dialectical works interrogate notions of sexual difference and the way in which gender is treated and schematised within specific Iranian and Islamic cultural frameworks. Neshat’s profile was considerably bolstered after she claimed the International Award at the XLVIII for Turbulent and Rapture. In the early 2000s Neshat started worked on 35mm short films. Pulse (2001), Possessed (2001) and Touba (2002) were just a few of Neshat’s pieces that featured highly choreographed and dramatic rituals. Touba was one of the only installation works to have been exhibited in Iran, and foreshadows many of the themes and production practices adopted in Women Without Men. Touba was filmed in Oaxaca, Mexico and tells the story of a mythical character from the Koran, who is able to metamorphosize into a tree. In Touba, Neshat attempts to harmonise theoretical and aesthetic concerns with the imperatives of more sustained storytelling and character development. During the six- year prelude to the release of Women Without Men, Neshat worked on the adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1989 novella of the same name, with her husband and artistic collaborator, Shoja Azari. Neshat, has said that in the process of creating their first feature film, she and Azari attempted to "pioneer [their] own way of storytelling. It was about not following patterns or models within cinema, but following the conceptual art and poetic traditions of Iran” (Neshat, quoted in Khaleeli 2010). Neshat’s debut was largely well received in the West; it won the at the 2009 and was particularly praised for its arresting visuals and surrealist tone (Bresheeth 2010, Hardy 2010, Holden 2010, Kerr 2010, Khaleeli 2010). There were some complaints, however, that the film was too reliant on “tableaux” (Andrews 2010) and that characterization remained

119 subordinated by imagery (Romney 2010). Many reviews also noted the film’s allusions to the oppressive conditions under the current Islamic Republic, an interpretation Neshat actively encouraged, arguing that the film functions as a political commentary on the pernicious role of Western imperialism and America’s part in obstructing Iranian democracy.

I think my film is not an Iranian story but an American story. It shows Iranians as they struggled for democracy and fought against dictatorship and imperialism. It is also an American story, as it reveals how this country intervened in another country's politics for its own self-interest (2010b).

While the narrative undoubtedly centers on the disposal of the Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the actual details of the coup d’état and America’s part in the political drama, remain rather oblique in Neshat’s film. Women Without Men is not concerned with factual or historically accurate representation, but rather with allegorizing the events of 1953 and demonstrating their connection to present-day politics through the strategies of ritual, fantasy and poeticism.

The Orchard and the Legacy of the Persian Garden Despite the fact that Neshat represents the coup d’état through a poetic and allegorical prism, she is still invested in recreating the heated political atmosphere of August 1953 as it was played out on the streets. Dr Mohammad Mossadegh had been popularly elected as the Iranian Prime Minister two years before and had passed the Nationalisation Law, through which his government intended to reclaim total control of Iranian oil resources. Refusing to bow to Britain on the conditions of compensation for their previous exploitation through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, by 1952 Iran’s diplomatic ties with the were severely compromised. Mossadegh also challenged the authority of the Shah to choose the Minister of War, in a move to recoup Prime Ministerial powers as outlined in the 1906 constitution (Momayesi 2000). However, Mossadegh’s attempts at nationalisation and democratic reform threatened both Western interests and Iran’s monarchical power structure. The Truman administration, attempting to protect their own

120 oil interests, quickly became involved and attempted to mediate a solution between Iran and Britain. When talks failed the new Republican government, headed by President Eisenhower, became increasingly concerned about Western oil access and Iran’s vulnerability to communism. Operation Ajax was thus hatched: a covert operation, originally devised by British intelligence to oust Mossadegh, but ultimately implemented by the CIA. Operation Ajax became viable with the support of the Shah, who co-opted the Iranian military to assist in the removal of Prime Minister Mossadegh (Ruehsen 1993). The Mossadegh government was ousted on the 19th August 1953 by the CIA-backed coup, with General Fazlollah Zahed being installed as the new Prime Minister and the supremacy of Mohammad Reza Shah consolidated. Women Without Men depicts the struggles of four women against this backdrop of political tumult, as they find themselves bound by various Iranian patriarchal institutions and power structures. Munis (Shabnam Tolouei), an aspiring activist, is virtually imprisoned in her home by her religious and conservative brother, Amir Khan (Essa Zahir). She listens to the radio, eager for some news on the fate of Prime Minister Mossadegh, while her brother rails against her for not yet marrying. Meanwhile Faezah (Pegah Ferydony), Munis’ rather naïve and pious friend, visits her in the hope of attracting the romantic attentions of Amir Khan. Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad) is a wealthy, middle-aged woman who is unhappily married to a royalist General and who fantasies about leaving her husband and returning to a former and much more cosmopolitan romantic interest, Abbas (Bijan Daneshmand). And finally there is the character of Zarin (Orsi Toth), a prostitute in a Tehran brothel, who appears to have withdrawn into a troubled silence as a result of her ongoing sexual exploitation. The film opens with Munis pacing the terrace roof of her home. Amir Khan has prohibited her from leaving the house and she can hear the tantalizing cries from the demonstrations in the streets below her. She steps up to the ledge of the roof and momentarily pauses, before jumping to her death. The opening scene of Munis’ death establishes magical realism as a central aesthetic mode of the film. When Munis jumps from the roof ledge, there is a slow motion shot of the back of her head, her black hair billowing against the blue sky, as she is suspended mid-air. The call to prayer, heard hauntingly in the background as she anxiously wandered the terrace rooftop, is abruptly

121 replaced by an eerie silence once she jumps. There is a close-up of her face, beatific and resolute, as she falls gradually through the air. Munis is then heard, via voice-over: “Now I will have silence…and nothing”. Spectators never witness her body reach the ground, instead it is only her black chador, which crumples and flattens on the paving below, almost as if her body has vanished into the atmosphere mid-fall. After her jump, the camera remains trained on the blue sky and the slow moving clouds. The scene of the sky then fades into a shot of the earth and a tributary with rapidly moving water. There is a brief moment, however, when both the sky and the earth appear in the same frame, the two opposing spheres temporarily aligned. In Neshat’s film there is no heavenly paradise awaiting Munis, only the suspended state of liminality. This indeterminate space is evoked literally through Munis’ floating form and at a more subtle level through the frame in which the image of the earth momentarily eclipses that of the sky. In pointing to this state of in- betweenness (in-between “heaven” and “earth”, life and death, peace and turbulence), Neshat emphasizes a third state of “nothingness”. Magical realism, and its way of infusing the fantastical with the ordinary, is the perfect vehicle in which to evoke this fraught space of liminality. “Magical realism” has become a highly contested term over recent decades, with its definition and application in film and literature forming an ongoing debate (Jameson 1986, Simpkins 1988, Benyei 1997, Hart 2004, Yervasi 2008). Thought to have originated in Franz Roh’s 1925 critical commentary on post-Expressionist German paintings, “magical realism” became a recognisable literary genre from the 1940s onwards when it was adopted by a variety of Latin America writers. Its expansion to post-colonial and post-modern fiction during the 1980s inspired rigorous critical dialogue as to the characteristics and hermeneutics of magical realism. Fredric Jameson’s (1988) contribution that magical realism should not be viewed as the magical “supplementing” the real, but rather as a “… reality which is in and of itself magical or the fantastic”, is worth noting (311). In Jameson’s essay magical realism is understood as a method that naturalizes the supernatural and frames the “magical” as an inherent and indistinguishable aspect of “real”. While Benyei (1997) has argued that such a definition still relies on reductive binaries of the real and the fantastic, it is not necessary to define magical realism as an amalgam of the ordinary with the fantastic. For in Neshat’s Women without Men, the magical also

122 constitutes an expression of the mythical, the psychic and the poetic. It extends beyond the fantastic to include representations of the internal workings of its protagonists and externalizes their experiences as psychological and cultural exiles. Munis’ suicide, for example, should not be interpreted as a termination of her earthly life, nor her entrée into a heavenly paradise, but rather as Neshat defamiliarising and allegorizing the process of death. For in Women Without Men Munis’ death signals the beginnings of a new form of existence in which the character hovers literally and metaphorically on the threshold, detained within a suspended paradise, literally, a no-place or nothingness. Magical realism thus provides Neshat with an opportunity to poetically describe the experience of exile as a state of absence and loss. Spectators only observe Munis’ body once Amir Khan discovers it in the courtyard. Although inert and supine, Munis appears peaceful, lying unscathed on the cobblestones. Amir Khan buries her in a chador in the garden, while Faezah looks on sobbing. In the interim Zarin has fled the brothel and after an ill fated visit to a bathhouse and wandering the streets of Tehran in a traumatised stupor, she eventually makes her way down a deserted dirt road. It is from here that she discovers a tributary and a small archway in a stone wall, which in turn allows her to access the enclosed and lush gardens of what is about to become Fakhri’s Orchard. For after another argument with the General, Fakhri decisively leaves Tehran and buys the Orchard, where she imagines herself taking refuge from the demands of her troubled marriage. Meanwhile Munis’ death has not dampened Faezah’s determination to marry Amir Khan and she visits an elderly woman where she learns of a magical rite that she can perform in order to halt Amir Khan’s impending nuptials. It is thus at Amir Khan’s actual wedding, when trying to bury her enchanted package, that Faezah first hears Munis’ voice emanating from the earth below. Faezah begins scrounging through the dirt until she is eventually able to unearth the apparently still living Munis. The reawakened Munis wastes no time in getting to a coffee house and listening to the details of the political demonstrations on the radio. She is so absorbed by the commentary she doesn’t notice that Faezah has left her and is followed by two sinister men from the coffee house, who proceed to rape her. Munis eventually discovers Faezah cowering in an alleyway and she leads the battered and apparently shamed young woman out of Tehran. The two women, both in black , travel the same dirt road that Zarin previously walked in

123 order to reach the Orchard. Munis explains to a bewildered Faezah that she won’t be joining her in the Orchard and that she must return to Tehran. “Don’t be afraid” she reassures Faezah. “Go inside. It is for your own good.” Thus a significant chapter of the narrative begins whereby Munis joins an underground communist group in Tehran while the ailing Zarin and Faezah are treated to Fakhri’s gentle and nurturing caretaking in the Orchard. While the Orchard certainly represents an alternate sphere to the repressive socio- political world of 1953 Tehran, it does not function as a singularly safe and paradisiacal space of retreat. The Orchard is filled with the possibility of redemptive healing and personal transformation but it is also pervaded by memories of sexual violence, emotional trauma and the lure of death. Despite the physical distance from Tehran and the fact that it is enclosed by high stonewalls, the Orchard is not a hermetic social sphere, representative of an ideal or lost society. Instead the Orchard operates as a multi-faceted, reactive space that reflects and transmutes itself in response to the psychological states of the occupants. This chapter argues that the Orchard allegorizes the unresolved, complex and ambivalent relationship the exile maintains with their kinship culture and homeland. And that even in the realm of the imaginary, Neshat’s vision of the Orchard, as a kind of mythical and alternate homeland, is still bound by the pain and loss of exilic consciousness. I make the thesis that Neshat in particular foregrounds the character of Zarin as a means of embodying the process of both internal and geographic exile. I examine the way in which her loss of language and voice initially appears to signal her cultural disempowerment as a sex worker within a Tehran brothel. I introduce Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia in relationship to the cultural spaces of 1950s Tehran and the way in which he theorises the heterotopia as “undermining” and “destroying” language. Zarin’s adoption of a non-verbal, visual language once she inhabits the space of the Orchard, demonstrates how varying forms of communication may endow the individual with (albeit temporary) power and personal transformation. The Orchard is a multi-dimensional and responsive space, with different parts serving varying functions. It is composed of three distinct zones that will be designated here as the “domestic garden”, the “forest garden” and the “desert garden”. The domestic garden is that which surrounds Fakhri’s house and it is the most cultivated and regenerative

124 space of the three gardens. The forest is a more ominous and haunted area, with the trees aligned in menacing symmetry and the dim light casting the forest in a symbolic interplay of black and white shades. The third zone, the “desert garden”, is a space of flux – initially starting as a dry and barren expanse; it begins to flourish as the women undergo a course of emotional and physical healing. If the Orchard does represent an alternate world to that of 1953 Tehran, it is an imaginary and conceptual sphere that is complicated by its contradictions and internal peculiarities. Neshat obviously draws heavily on Persian, Asian, Islamic and Christian mythologies of sacred and paradisiacal gardens, with the Orchard both a place of retreat and a space of exile. As Hamid Naficy writes, the enclosed, domestic garden is a “private haven from both the violence of nature and the viciousness of society” but gardens also “act as icons, indexes and symbols of the natural order and of Iranian cosmology” (159-160, 1993). The garden is a central allegorical feature of medieval court and Sufi Persian poetry. Both as a site of sexual pleasure and spiritual yearning, the garden is often figured as a paradise that equally facilitates romantic love and mystical ecstasy. Neshat both adopts and subverts the poetic taxonomy of the garden in Women Without Men. The Orchard is both the spiritual paradise of the ghazal and an ambivalent space, pervaded by social anxiety and sexual trauma. The garden, as an equivocal poetic symbol, appeared in Neshat’s earlier photographic work, most prominently in “” (1996), in the Women of Allah series. In this work, a hand is shown in the foreground, with the fingers pressing up against a woman’s lips. Written across the hand, in Persian script, is Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem, “I Feel Sorry for the Garden”, which appeared in her posthumously published collection, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (1974). In the poem Farrokhzad details the “swollen”, “dying” garden, noting that its owner refuses to take responsibility for its distressing decline. The poem ends on an apocalyptic note:

I fear an age That has lost its heart. I am scared of the thought Of so many useless hands And of picturing so many estranged faces (2010, 101).

125

Jasmine Darznik (2010) argues that Neshat’s photographic work both borrows from and reworks Farrokhzad’s characterization of the garden as a political symbol. She writes:

In answer to the “useless hands” imagined in Farrokhzad’s poem, here Neshat extends her own hand—using it to inscribe the original Persian poem onto her subject’s hand. Hers is a legacy borne on the body, signifying not silence but its opposite, self-expression. As visually complex as the poem it invokes, “Untitled” finally expresses a striking female agency that does not deny historical repression of women in Iranian culture (111).

In the same way that Neshat appropriated Farrokhzad’s poetic garden in “Untitled”, so too she adopts the Orchard in Women without Men as an allegorical space that evokes the complex and dissonant resonances of the garden in both medieval and modern Persian poetry. The Orchard is both the mythical paradise of the ghazal, that facilitates ecstatic and spiritual transformation, and the deathly space evoked in Farrokhzad’s poetry, which certainly operates as a symbol of nationhood and cultural decline. Neshat thus continues to adopt the Persian poetic legacy of the garden-as-an-allegorical-space in her film, with it reflecting broader socio-political developments, as well as symbolizing the emotional distress of its inhabitants.

The ‘Mirror’ and the In-between Spaces Another way of understanding the Orchard is through the framework of Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopology’. In a lecture given in March 1967 (and later published as a manuscript in 1986), Foucault distinguished between utopias and heterotopias. Utopias, according to Foucault, are unreal sites that exist as inversions or analogies of real spaces. They represent society in a perfected and idealised form and thus exist in the realm of the imaginary. Then there are heterotopias, which are real, located spaces, but that exist as countersites and thus function outside the dominant or normative societal experiences. Interestingly many of the spaces that Foucault nominates as heterotopias, (cemeteries and the rites associated with death, brothels and bathhouses) all appear in the first part of the film set in Tehran. Zarin negotiates these various heterotopias on her indirect route to the Orchard. The brothel,

126 where we first discover Zarin, is depicted as a grim penitentiary, in which she must passively and hopelessly submit herself to the demands of prostitution. Her motivation to leave the brothel comes when a new customer visits, whose face transforms into a strange, featureless form as Zarin lies down on the bed. Zarin then flees the brothel and initially appears to take refugee in a hamman, a public bathhouse. Unlike the male dominated space of the brothel, women and children are the sole occupants of the bathhouse. The opening shot of the bathhouse mirrors the first scene of the Orchard, starting with an aerial view of the ornately detailed domed ceiling. Like the Orchard, the bathhouse is also filled with a kind of mist, in this case rising from the warm baths. Fingers of light cut through the steamy atmosphere and as the camera pans down spectators observe women and children, taking solace in the rituals of bathing and cleansing themselves and each other. Neshat has discussed the fact that in this scene she has attempted to re-create the atmosphere of a Jean- Leon painting, whose orientalist series featured women bathing in Turkish bathhouses (Neshat 2010b). But Zarin’s emaciated and wasted body immediately sets her apart from the other relaxed and voluptuous bathers. When an older woman approaches Zarin and attempts to assist her with her bathing, she intolerantly waves her away and instead begins to clean herself in a frenzied and brutal fashion. Eventually covered in blood and exhausted, Zarin leaves the bathhouse and stumbles upon one final heterotopia, a group of women in mourning. Uniformly covered in their black chadors and submerged in the smoke from the fire in front of them, the women emote freely and ritualistically. Saadi-Nejad (2009) has argued that the ceremonies in Neshat’s installation work, while partially based on aspects of Iranian traditionalism and Islamic practice, have been modified and dramatized in order to function more as personal rites of catharsis and personal expression. In this scene Zarin watches the mourners with a kind of painful yearning, again appearing remote and outside of their therapeutic ritual. Their collective grief, and in particular the sounds of their wailing, is starkly contrasted with Zarin’s isolation and silence. For Zarin, who is already subsisting as an ‘internal’ exile as a prostitute, the countersites, such as the bathhouse and the mourning ritual, provide little or no comfort. In fact, if anything, these heterotopias serve only to alienate Zarin further and appear to rob her of any sense of social connectivity.

127 In the Preface to The Order of Things (1970), Foucault comments on the relationship between language and the heterotopia. He writes that heterotopias

... are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which cause words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’ This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (xviii)

Foucault is obviously concerned with the ontological status of language and the manner in which it governs the “the fundamental codes of culture” (xx). But in the case of Zarin, since it is only her body that is required in the sexual transactions of the brothel, her mutism potentially only enhances her value as an erotic object and source of financial value. Zarin’s retreat from language and unwillingness to speak can be interpreted in various ways. Her silence may signal voicelessness and disempowerment: a symbol of her ongoing cultural oppression and sexual exploitation. But her lack of speech may also be symbolic of a strategy that enables her to withdraw from the structures, or “codes of culture”, inherent to patriarchal discourse. While Foucault is pointing to the manner in which heterotopias transcend conventional uses of language, making orthodox forms of communication obsolete, Zarin’s lack of language points to the patriarchal and segregated nature of cultural spaces within Iran. In Chapter Two of this thesis I discussed the problematic use of silence as a form of political resistance in relation to the character of Rooey-Bekhier in The Sealed Soil (1977). Concurring with E. Ann Kaplan’s (1983) thesis on silence as a means of countering a male-biased symbolic order, I argued that silence could be theorised as an effective strategy of resistance if utilised temporarily. Eventually individuals need to consolidate alternative methods of dissidence, communication and self-expression. Zarin’s retreat from language is figured as an aspect of her psychological isolation and socio- cultural marginalisation. Far from demonstrating political dissidence, in the context of

128 1950’s Tehran, her mutism only serves to further exclude her from any social participation and cultural agency.

Zarin’s process of healing, and thus her ability to acquire language, requires a far more radical separation from all the known and traditional forms of social and cultural catharsis. Her arrival at the Orchard signals her departure from both the repressive conditions of Tehran and also from the various “heterotopias” which have also failed to offer her refuge or recovery. The Orchard is thus representative of a third space, an ambivalent zone, composed of both real and fantastical elements. It is neither “real”, nor the “unreal”. Interestingly Foucault does offer another conceptual framework in his schema of heterotoplogy and that is the experience of the “mirror”. The mirror occupies a space between that which is unreal and utopian, and that, which is located, and heterotopian. The mirror experience is thus generated by composite elements – the psychological merging with the geographical, and the virtual coalescing with the actual.

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there (Foucault 1967/1986).

Foucault’s conceptualization of the mirror is useful in allowing us to understand the composition and function of the Orchard, not as a classical utopia nor as a heterotopic

129 “countersite”, but as a “mixed, joint experience” in which both the real and unreal unite. The Orchard literally offers the women the opportunity to observe their trauma and hopes as they are reflected and animated in the natural and magical spheres of the gardens. Emotion is externalized and is expressed poetically and fantastically without fear of prohibition or shame. Through their occupation of the Orchard the women effectively are, in Foucault’s terminology, “reconstituted” and transformed through their contact with both real and imaged elements. A pertinent example of this is Zarin’s behavior on first arriving at the Orchard. Fakhri and the Gardener (who it is important to note was the customer who visited Zarin in the brothel and whose face transformed into a blank, featureless form) first discover her body floating in a green mossy pond. At first, Zarin appears to be inert and lifeless, but as the camera zooms in, spectators can observe her shallow but persistent breathing. Her immersion in the water appears to be indicative of a contradictory state; it signals both her readiness to die but also her willingness to heal. Water, it must be noted is a reoccurring element in Women Without Men and appears to be symbolic of this “mixed, joint experience” indicating a liminal state between life and death or between the real and the unreal. Water thus becomes both the literal and figurative “mirror state” in Neshat’s film. For example, when Munis is first unearthed by Faezah in Amir Khan’s garden she walks immediately to the pristine pool and submerges herself in the blue water. Again the scene is observed from an aerial perspective and the image of Munis’ dress and petticoat billowing in the azure pool evokes the opening of a delicate and beautiful flower. Munis remains under the surface of the water for a prolonged period, again, alluding to the ever- present lure or threat of death. But the act of immersion and cleansing allows Munis to transition from a ghostly, unreal form into an embodied and vital figure, who then proceeds to engage in Tehran life as part of the Communist-Nationalist movement. While Munis goes on to operate as an activist she is both very “real” in the sense that she engages with other humans and continues to respond to the unfolding events of the coup with passion and courage; while simultaneously occupying a “virtual” sphere, beyond death and the fear of retribution. Similarly, Zarin’s presence in the pond at the Orchard symbolizes the conclusion of her life in Tehran as a prostitute and the beginning of her new existence in the Orchard. Zarin’s experience in the pond initiates the recuperative process of physical and psychological transfiguration that the traditional bathing house could not facilitate.

130 Within the Orchard, Zarin can adopt a non-verbal, magical language that operates outside the prevailing patriarchal codes and symbolic orders that dominated Tehran life. The Orchard itself is the source of her new poetic and fantastic language, reflecting and manifesting Zarin’s experiences, as she remains suspended in the liminality of the garden. Here liminality may be persuasively read as an allegory for the diasporic experience, whereby exiled individuals find themselves positioned between cultures, homelands, and between states of exilic loss and the possibility of the new.

Retreat and the Possibility of the New In fact, another way of defining the Orchard and thus the diasporic experience may be through the framework of liminality. Like the notion of Foucault’s “mirror”, liminality also refers to an in-between, ambiguous space. It references the way in which normative standards and social practices may be temporarily dissolved and inverted. Naficy proposes that “deterritorialisation and liminality engender conflicting emotions and attitudes. On one hand they produce profound dystopia – epistemic and ontological ambivalence… on the other hand [they] are capable of generating also the type of euphoria and ecstasy that comes with freedom from long-held, constraining conventions and belief-systems” (1993, 10-14). So too Zarin, as she enters into the liminal space of the Orchard, is positioned by Neshat as suspended between the states of emotional re-birth and death, just as Munis did at the beginning of the film. Jan Relf (1991), in her essay on women’s literary utopias, describes the importance of liminality in encouraging social change and transformation. Relf argues that women- centered utopias can play a positive role if viewed as temporary places of retreat and refuge. In Relf’s schema, a utopia should be characterized by its “profusion of threshold images” (138): walls, doors or shorelines that can be transgressed and/or deconstructed. It is important, Relf explains, that a women-centered utopia not be an enclosed or impenetrable space. Women must not be imprisoned or confined in their chosen space or it ceases to be any form of utopia at all. In this sense, Relf argues, the geographical terrain of the utopia reflects and emblematises the psychological and social function of this new space; and that is to withdraw from cultural and societal conventions and enjoy a discrete period of recuperation and shelter. Relf explains that this period of retreat is an important

131 transitory phase in the process of instigating new and productive social structures. It enables women to heal and transform before entering a new phase of dialogue and collaboration with their male counterparts. Relf terms the final stage of the process as the “androgynous utopia”: where patriarchal structures have dissolved and new forms of dialogue evolve between the sexes. The reference to the liminal in Relf’s schema is thus an emphasis on the temporary and processual nature of women’s utopias. They are way stations on the road to something more permanent and sustainable. In Neshat’s Women without Men, the Orchard does function as a temporary space of retreat for Fakhri, Faezah and Zarin. For a period we see Faezah and Zarin flourish under Fakhri’s careful nurturing and mothering. But as previously noted, the Orchard is not a hermetic emotional space, and pain and suffering continue to be a part of the processes of emotional and physical transformation. In this section, I will map how the Orchard may be understood as a liminal space of retreat and thus a continuing metaphor for hope and possibilities of the diasporic experience. I will outline how both the journey to and the inhabiting of the Orchard suggest a poetic re-imagining of the states of migration and re-territorialisation and how Relf’s notion of utopianism-as-retreat is initially adopted in Women without Men. While the Orchard is portrayed as enclosed and secluded in Women without Men, it accords with Relf's notion of an open, regenerative space in that it never restricts or detains its female inhabitants. The Orchard is accessed in a variety of manners by the characters, demonstrating the multiple points of entry and exit. Fakhri and Faezah gain admittance via the front gates, which are operated by the benevolent figure of gardener. As the sole male figure in the Orchard, the gardener functions as a compassionate guardian, safeguarding the women and maintaining the gardens. He is a particularly healing figure in relation to Zarin and the two characters appear to share not only an emotional connection, but also an awareness of the powers inherent in the natural spheres of the Orchard. Zarin, as previously noted, arrives at the garden via an archway in the stonewall perimeter, wading through a tributary which connects the Orchard with the outside world. Architectural archways appear frequently in the first part of the film. The entrance to Munis and her brother’s home is vaulted by a series of ornately curved archways. When Zarin flees from the brothel, spectators witness her running through a stone archway, and the café where Fakhri meets her love interest, Abbas, is enclosed by a series of glazed arches. Arches are obviously a

132 fundamental aspect of Iranian and Islamic architecture and the archways that appear in Women Without Men date from various historical periods, and have been informed by diverse structural, aesthetic and cultural concerns. Further complicating the identification of the arches in Neshat’s film is the fact that they are located and filmed in Casablanca, not Tehran. The presence then of certain architectural forms in the film should perhaps be interpreted more allegorically, as symbolic references to various aspects of Persian culture and society. In discussion with Scot MacDonald, Neshat spoke of the way in which architecture, in particular the presence of a monumental archway as used in her work, Soliloquy (1999), was representative of “culture in its traditional values” (Neshat 2004, 640). And while the archways in Neshat’s film may be obviously interpreted as symbolising the weight and prevalence of Iranian paternalism and Islamic conservatism, they also facilitate transition and transformation. The female characters move through the archways when in flight. Although fearful, they are mobile and unfettered. The most striking example of this is Zarin’s departure from Tehran. After witnessing the group of women wailing and swaying in collective mourning, Zarin climbs the stairs to a roof terrace where a large crowd of men sit prostrated in what appears to be a religious ritual. The non- naturalistic, synchronized movements of the worshippers cast the scene in an eerie, sinister atmosphere, foreshadowing the symmetry and atmosphere of the forest garden that awaits. The men are surrounded by rows of adjoining archways and while the men are prostrated, Zarin quietly rests her head against a pillar in a gesture of fatigue and reflection. But when the men suddenly sit up, Zarin starts in fright and quickly departs. On her way out of Tehran, she passes through a dark passage, at each end of which there is an archway. She then travels down a long, unsealed road until she eventually discovers a small stream and miniature archway that enables her to climb through into the Orchard. But unlike the ornate and perfectly symmetrical archways of ‘Tehran’, this archway seems almost naturally occurring and is crudely built. The act of moving through the archway signals the states of departure and both the trauma and elation of confronting the new and the unknown. In the process of escaping Tehran, and its associated bonds of oppression and affliction, the protagonists abandon the familiar territory of home or homeland. They then enter into the liminal space of the Orchard, which is no longer structured by religious and societal conventions, but by the principles of self-expression, fantasy and nature. While the Orchard

133 may appear relatively proximate to Tehran, it is as alien and strange as any hostland might appear to a new migrant or exile. Zarin and Faezah are particularly vulnerable and exhausted on arrival and the different zones of the Orchard further complicate its foreign, destabilizing atmosphere. In a sense, Neshat uses the journey from Tehran to the Orchard as an opportunity to allegorize the passages and processes of border crossing. Rejected and traumatised, the women find themselves in the dislocated state of geographical and emotional exile. But the Orchard also facilitates recuperation and restoration. It encourages its inhabitants to undergo an individual and private process of healing and transformation. In the women-centered sphere of the Orchard, Zarin needn’t conform to conventional methods of self-expression and communication. Instead she utilizes nature and magic, and thus a visual, non-verbal language as a way of articulating her needs and mood. For example, in one scene Faezah discovers Zarin sitting in the desert garden, where it appears she has created hundreds of iridescent flowers to populate the once dry and arid expanse. The relatively unambiguous motif of the flower appears to be alluding to Zarin’s growth and healing in this scene. The flower also has particular poetic resonances, especially in the context of the paradisiacal garden. Within the domain of medieval Persian poetry, the flower in full bloom may symbolize spiritual and romantic yearning. Zarin’s ability to create flowers points not only to her creative and supernatural powers, but possibly also to the expression of her own desires. For an individual who has long been silenced and dominated by others’ sexual needs, the communication of her own desires (whether they be sexual or spiritual) indicates a considerable psychological shift in Zarin. It may also indicate the development of an alternative mode of representation, and thus communication. In Lacanian terms, women’s subjectivity and sexuality cannot be articulated through the Symbolic Order because they are inherently and intractably excluded from this “masculine” sphere of subjectivity and language. Certainly Zarin’s mutism demonstrates the manner in which her role as a prostitute in patriarchal Iran has robbed her of all symbolic, or discursive, power. Unable to express her identity and desire through an inherently patriarchal cultural code, she retreats from language altogether. But French theorist, Luce Irigaray in Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977) and Ethique de la difference sexuelle (The Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1984), raised

134 the possibility of women constructing an alternative to the Symbolic Order through which they could develop a new voice, language and mode of representation. Irigarary suggests that women’s own Symbolic Order, in part, be derived from the subversive representations of the body, and she uses the “two-lips” metaphor as a means of re-valorizing concepts of femininity, sexuality and language (1984, 24). In opposition to the monolithic power of the “phallus”, the “two lips” of the labia are thus both singular and multiple, both open and closed, with the feminine thus described as “both at once”, “neither one nor two” (1984, 207). While much debate has centered around the question of Irigaray’s reification of essentialism with regards to women’s subjectivity and sexuality, the notion of the “two- lips” has been celebrated for its emphasis on multiplicity, fluidity and openness (Whitford 1991, Hendricks and Oliver 1999, Martine 2000). Like Relf’s conceptualization of a women’s utopia, Irigaray also evokes the importance of women’s space and characterizes it as a “threshold” space, with women’s subjectivity and sexuality residing outside of established dichotomies such as “masculinity” and “femininity”. In many ways the “desert garden” embodies this notion of the “threshold space”, positioned as it is between the sinister forest and the tranquility of the domestic garden. While Neshat does portray Zarin as excluded from the “Symbolic Order” of patriarchal discourse, she also indicates her ability to produce her own discursive economy via a visual, creative language. The symbology of flowers allows for a form of intra-subjective communication, in that Faezah appears to interpret the flowers as emotional and discursive signifiers, with the characters eventually sharing a tentative smile of mutual recognition. The following scene shows Zarin and Faezah sitting together on the steps of the house interacting, although the exact words exchanged are not audible. The fact that the production of the flowers, as open, ambiguous but positive symbols, stimulates this dialogue points to the importance of alternate modes of representation and address. In Zarin’s case the making of the flowers not only enables her to communicate with the other women but it also initiates a process of personal and spiritual healing. The house, located at the center of the Orchard, undoubtedly also facilitates this recuperation. There are several scenes that depict Fakhri nurturing Zarin and Faezah: creating a safe, stable space in which the women can rest and sustain themselves. The house also functions as a site of important homosocial bonding, in which the women can

135 collectively sleep, eat and communicate without fear or condemnation. Certainly Fakhri, as a matriarchal and maternal figure, is central in restoring the health and equilibrium to the ailing Zarin and Faezah. But far from representing Fakhri as an idealized mother figure or replacement patriarch, Neshat underscores Fakhri’s own fallibility and vulnerability. Indeed Fakhri’s need for romance and social stimulation, eventually eclipses her desire to nurture her young charges. One morning we see her in the garden cutting some of the abundant flowers that have begun to blossom around the house. Later, she sits down with Zarin and proposes they hold a soiree for her friend in Tehran.

Fakhri: It is such a that I don’t have to worry about you. I’ve felt like a mother to you from the moment we found you. I have an idea that I would like to talk to you about. [Faezah appears]… You know, it’s incredible. The flowers are out just as Zarin is starting to feel better. Everything seems revived. I think we ought to open the Orchard. Maybe we should have a party.

But Fakhri has misidentified the Orchard and Zarin’s “revival” as a readiness to start the next phase of development: possibly she is imagining the kind of “androgynous utopia” that Relf nominates as the phase following the women-centered utopia. Fakhri believes that lasting recuperation has been achieved and that the women are ready to re-enter and re- engage with the world of Tehran. But as soon as Fakhri voices the notion of “opening” up the Orchard to a broader social sphere, Zarin’s face darkens and she brings her hand anxiously to her mouth. One could even correlate Zarin’s gesture with the aforementioned photographic work by Neshat, “Untitled”, that shows a woman touching her lips with her fingers. Just as that work referenced Farrokhzad’s “graveyard” garden, the next scene depicts Zarin once again in the desolate desert garden. The flowers that Zarin handcrafts are metallic and sharp and the garden has returned to its previous state of dryness and atmosphere of despair. In Farrokhzad’s poem, the garden was “lonely” and “dying”, so too the once vibrant red and yellow flowers of the desert garden have all seemingly perished. Flowers thus become a potent poetic symbol in the film, signalling the transience of all

136 things and the imminence of death. Julie Scott Meisami (1979) notes that in ’s ghazal the garden is often still only a temporary paradise, ultimately ruled by the change of the seasons and inevitable threat of death and decay. She notes that just as autumn is portrayed as destroying the once fresh flowers, so too “death ultimately deprives the lover of his beloved” (7). The replacement of the red and orange flowers, with the sterile silver ones, foreshadows Zarin’s own psychological deterioration and physical demise. It is from her point of view that we observe Fakhri and Faezah deliberating over what dresses to wear for the party. Zarin’s perspective is suggested by the use of swaying hand-held camera, as if nervously peering through a window or doorframe. Suddenly, there is a loud cracking sound and a tree plunges through the window and into the house. It has been obvious up to this point that the garden responds to and mutates in sympathy with Zarin’s psychological state. As she becomes stabilised and strengthened, the garden flourishes and becomes abundant. As the prospect of the party begins to weigh upon her, the Orchard retracts into a state of dereliction, instability and emptiness, just like the deathly garden in Farrokhzad’s poem. In fact the next scene depicts Zarin lying on a bed of creepers. She is gazing at the rays of sunlight, cast through the thick canopy of trees.

Munis (voice over): The light. The air. The quiet. Now the orchard was turning, breaking under this great weight. As if it fell ill. And there was no retreat. No rest any longer.

Zarin then levitates off the ground and begins floating above the green earth. It is as if, with the Orchard ceasing to function as a sanctuary and safe-haven, Zarin too must fall “ill”. Zarin’s relationship with the Orchard is complicated; at one level she gains strength and solace from the secluded gardens. The Orchard has provided her with some sense of voice, albeit through the adoption of a non-verbal, symbolic language. But the Orchard is not in and of itself a stable, unchanging reserve. It primarily functions as a symbiotic expression of the women’s psyche and thus transmutes and arranges itself accordingly. When Fakhri proposes to invite her Tehran friends to the Orchard, the brief period of retreat abruptly ends. Neither the Orchard, nor the newly recovered women, are robust enough to withstand

137 the influx of the old and painful figures of the past. Neshat herself discussed the very fragile nature of the Orchard even before she had embarked upon production of the film.

Neshat: What is interesting is how this community falls apart. The utopia proves impossible due to the likelihood that every woman contains the flaws she is running away from in the outside world (2004, 634).

Thus the temporary recuperative space of the Orchard is abandoned and so too the possibility of language for Zarin and more hopeful outcomes for the other women. If the journey undertaken to the Orchard by Zarin, Faezah and Fakhri symbolises the reterritorialisation of the exile and migrant more broadly, then the “turning” and “breaking” of the Orchard signal a loss of optimism regarding the fate of the exile – both at home in Iran and in their new place of residence. In Women Without Men Neshat does not envisage a sustained alternative to the patriarchal oppression of 1953 Tehran. The Orchard is not, as the women may have first imagined, a permanent space of renewal, but an in-between, liminal, temporary shelter. There is to be no lasting asylum even in the mythical space of the Orchard, for after a fleeting period of respite, the exile is once again confronted by marginalisation and death.

The Third Space of Exile It is not incidental that the destruction of the women’s sanctuary is paralleled with scenes of violence in Tehran against pro-Mossadegh supporters. Neshat purposefully aligns the incursion into Iran by the British-backed CIA (the coup d’état) with the invasion of the Orchard by Tehran’s glitterati. The night of Fakhri’s soiree, the house swarms not only with socialites and intellectuals but also with the men who have haunted and traumatised the women. Amir Khan arrives and seeks out Faezah, proposing that she join his household as a second wife. Abbas appears with his American wife, seemingly oblivious to any possibility of romantic union between Fakhri and himself. Eventually the military invade the house, and after some initial threats and interrogation by a sinister General, make themselves comfortable at the party, gluttonously feeding themselves on the banquet. The

138 influx of these various personalities signals not only the death of the Orchard but also the fall of Prime Minister Mossadegh and the possibility for democratic reform in Iran. Neshat represents this particular moment in Iranian history through the symbolic event of Fakhri’s soiree, with each of these men representing an equally problematic and entrenched aspect of Iranian patriarchy and Western imperialism. Amir Khan is obviously emblematic of the limitations of conservative and fundamentalist Islam and its inherent chauvinism. Abbas, with his American wife on his arm, is representative of the Shah and his endorsement of Western neo-colonialism and the foreign control of Iran’s resources. The General symbolizes dictatorial forms of governance and negotiation. With the demise of the Orchard and the Mossadegh government, the women have no choice but to die, return to their former subjugation in Tehran or linger in the liminal, depleted space of the Orchard. Zarin passes away the night of the soiree, Faezah travels the lonely road back to Tehran and the final scene shows Fakhri leaving the house and entering the darker, more sinister space of the forest garden. The bleak conclusion to Women Without Men may seem to indicate that women may only participate in the shaping of Iran’s political and cultural future through the ghostly and supernatural realm of the afterlife. Seemingly Munis is only able to enter the political fray as a communist activist after her decision to suicide, while Zarin’s death is figured as a final act of defiance, or possible hopelessness, at the prospect of her return to Tehran as a sex-worker. But the implication of Neshat’s finale is not necessarily that women may only attain freedom, voice and prominence through the radical acts of death and self-harm. Rather Women Without Men appears to be once again signalling the significance of liminality for the exiled individual and the hardship of residing both outside and “in-between” homelands. For death is not necessarily represented as a literal termination of life in Neshat’s film, but as the entrée into the permanent space of transition. For the exiles of Women Without Men, re-assimilation and integration never truly eventuate; instead they reside eternally on the threshold. In many ways Neshat’s film is an allegorical account of the hardships of reterritorialisation and diasporic experience. It explores what it is to be divided between homelands and between cultures. In conversation with Sheryl Mosley, Neshat has said of Women without Men:

139 I could be talking to Iranians about Iran, but I am also talking to Americans about America. So what am I? I am a person who is in-between, I am not American and not Iranian, and so the work is also in-between (quoted in Bresheeth 2010).

Hamid Dabashi devotes considerable scholarship to the notion of Neshat as the “artist of the space in between”, arguing that hers “is an aesthetic of (im)permanence, a politics of (in articulation)” (2012, 120). By this Dabashi implies that Neshat’s primary mode of expression is one of poetic inference and symbolic subtext. Just as Neshat positions herself as geographically “in-between”, so too her installation and cinematic works reject didactic conclusions, preferring to insinuate meaning through gaps and multifocality, through dual screens and competing perspectives. Certainly the production values of Women Without Men also typify what Naficy has termed “interstitial” filmmaking (2001). As discussed in Chapter Three, interstitial filmmaking is the process whereby the diasporic director undertakes production not necessarily at the margins, but “astride” the cracks in the conventional systems of filmmaking. Diasporic filmmakers are “situated in the interstices of cultures and film practices” (2001, 4). Neshat’s film, while benefitting from a larger budget than most diasporic productions, may be still deemed interstitial because of the way it approaches Iranian history and culture from the outside. Unable to return to Iran to film Women Without Men, Neshat adopts Casablanca as the stand-in for Tehran, not necessarily in an attempt to create a mimetic or factual Iran, but to construct an in-between world. The “Iran” that spectators encounter in Neshat’s film is thus an Iranian, Moroccan and American hybrid; a truly paradisiacal space in the sense that it exists nowhere but in the realm of the imaginary and the poetic, born out of nostalgic longing, creativity and loss. Epitomizing the “interstitial” or global nature of the film are the various nationalities of its contributors. Orsi Toth, who plays Zarin, is a Hungarian actress, while the cinematography was by the Austrian photographer, Martin Gschlact, and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote the score. German, Austrian and French funding bodies financed the film and post-production took place across Europe and America. The film was then theatrically released in Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Hungary. Women Without Men has yet to obtain an official distributor in Iran and is unlikely to in the immediate future, but Neshat happily reported at the time of its theatrical release in the

140 West, that the film already had a strong presence on the Iranian DVD black market (Khaleeli 2010). Neshat was also confident that Iranian audiences would understand the allegorical nature of the film and its political undercurrents.

We have always had to deal with censorship, dictatorships, oppression. Artists have never been free. So for everything we say, you have to read between the lines. The message is hidden in the form of metaphors. People in Iran feel comfortable with this. But in the west you don’t need allegory, you can say what you want (Neshat, quoted in Aspden 2010).

To return to Neshat’s notion of being an “in-between” filmmaker, Women Without Men is intended to speak to both its Iranian and Western audiences, albeit, communicating vastly different messages. While Neshat has spoken about her desire to avoid becoming too didactic, the film is equally critical of Britain and America’s role in impeding Iranian democracy, as it is of Iran’s history of political oppression and tyranny. It uses the events of 1953 not only as a means of foregrounding an important moment in Iranian and American history, but as a way of metaphorically referencing the struggle for greater political freedom in 2009 and onwards. In order to understand Neshat’s ambivalent relationship to both America and Iran, Aphrodite Desiree Navab (2007) argues that one needs to appreciate both the “literal and the metaphoric” function of the “third space” inhabited by the diasporic artist. Navab discusses Neshat’s video installation works, which feature facing video installations. In the case of the aforementioned Soliloquy (1999), the spectator stands between two different film projectors: one which shows images of a young veiled Neshat in the Kurdish town of Mardin in Eastern Turkey and the other that shows Neshat navigating the labyrinthine interior of the World Trade Center. Standing between the opposing projections, the spectator is invited to inhabit the indeterminate and liminal subjectivity of the diasporic experience. Caught between cultures, homeland and identities, Neshat depicts herself in Soliloquy as neither American nor Iranian, but an individual who is permanently dislocated and alienated. Drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha, Navab argues that this third space is one of “unhomeliness”: a place of “extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (2007,

141 58). The diasporic subject is not necessarily homeless, according to Navab, but their primary identification is with the state of dispossession and estrangement. Neshat continues to dramatise this third space in Women Without Men, although the emphasis has somewhat shifted from her earlier video installation works. Instead of evoking the betwixt-and-between space of cultural hybridity, she extends the notion of liminality to apply to the nature of reality itself. Both the diegetic Tehran and the Orchard are imbued with the real and the illusory, the located and the psychological. In discussing Neshat’s photographic and installation work Saadi-Nejad has argued that “…in general Neshat’s world occupies a middle space between myth and reality” (2009, 245). The diasporic artist thus allegorizes the experience of the indeterminate and the liminal by not only portraying cultural alienation and “unhomeliness” but by also playing directly with notions of the illusory. To return to Foucault’s metaphor of the “mirror”, the diasporic artist creates a third space between the actual and the psychological as a means of describing the radical experience of indeterminacy. Foucault describes this space as a “virtual” one but in Neshat’s work, it operates poetically. While it is constructed and artificial, Neshat’s work draws on ritual and allegory as a means of extending and complicating the metaphor of liminality. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Neshat’s film is based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel, Women Without Men (1989). Like Neshat, Parsipur studied abroad, reading Chinese at the Sorbonne, before returning to Iran in 1980. Parsipur was imprisoned between 1982 and 1986 and although she was never formally charged, she still believes her imprisonment was related to the political work of her brother. After her release Parsipur had her fictional work banned in Iran. She eventually migrated permanently to the United Stated in the 1990s, where she has had several works published. While Neshat heavily modifies the narrative of Parsipur’s text (Parsipur’s novel, for instance, has five protagonists, not four), she maintains Parsipur’s central emphasis on the importance of women’s autonomy. The fact that the final scene depicts Fakhri’s resigned entrée into the unstable and unknown territory of the forest garden thus not only emblematizes Neshat’s diasporic dislocation, but also that of Parsipur’s, and exiled communities in general. Adopting magical realism as a dominant aesthetic mode allows both Neshat and Parsipur to create new women-centered narratives. History is represented, not as an

142 objective metanarrative, but as a mutable reality influenced by ancient mythology, fantasy and folklore. The fantastical and the mundane coalesce in their works in order to create new realities that are both paradisiacal and sinister. Magical realism may also be theorised as a form of political discourse, allowing the author to critique political structures, such as patriarchy and neo-colonialism, while simultaneously imagining alternate and more agentic realities. Interestingly in Parsipur’s novel, Zarin does not die at the soiree, but instead is able to transcend the hardships of reality by magically merging with her lover, the gardener, and metamorphosing into a tree. Zarin’s assimilation with the Orchard, her source of power and language, appears fitting for the character that has been devastated by exploitation and marginalisation. But at the conclusion of her work Neshat refuses to adopt magical realism as a means of envisaging more hopeful and optimistic outcomes for her protagonists. Instead she firmly resigns them to the territory of the liminal, leaving them in the indeterminate and often frightening space of “unhomeliness”. With the fall of the Orchard and the Mossadegh government, Neshat’s narrative reverts to an unambiguous tone of exilic loss and ambivalence. Unable to sustain a paradisiacal framework, even in the poetic “third” or “mirror” space of story-telling, Neshat’s conclusion seems to be a damning appraisal of both Iran’s political history and its cultural future. Dedicated to all those who participated and lost lives in the Green Movement of 2009, Neshat’s Women Without Men is as much about the oppressive conditions perpetuated by the Ahmadinejad government at the time of production, as it is about America’s pernicious role in the fall of Prime Minister Mossadegh. Zarin’s loss of language is perhaps emblematic then of Neshat’s own process of deterritorialisation and exile. Naficy writes, “One of the greatest deprivations of exile is the gradual deterioration in and potential loss of one’s original language, for language serves to shape not only individual identity but also regional and national identities prior to displacement” (2001, 24). The loss of language in exile, not only encompasses the experience of linguistic alienation, but also the death of an internal language and thus a means of constructing and expressing identity. To adopt Julia Kristeva’s theoretical praxis, the exile becomes a “stranger” to themselves, with the native tongue undergoing a form of symbolic death (1997). Zarin’s demise in Women Without Men may indeed reference

143 Neshat’s own process of bereavement for her native Farsi, or Iranian cultural discourses more broadly. But if we return to Kristeva, in particular her chapter on “Bulgaria My Suffering” in The Crises of the European Subject (2000) what emerges is not the complete loss or termination of her native tongue but its resignation to the realm of the unconscious (2000, 166). While the mother tongue assumes a subordinate role in the life of the exile, it still emerges and exists as a form of continual “suffering” through dreams and memories. The fall of the Orchard and the impossibility of re-inhabiting Iran, even as a poetic framework, certainly positions the film within the realm of exilic loss and grief. Neshat and her protagonists reside at the crossroads of language, culture and homeland. Zarin’s death, like that of Munis’ before her, indicates the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility for many women, of ever fully participating in Iran’s socio-political life once they become a political and cultural “exile”. Relegated to the margins, even the poetic discourse of magical realism cannot re-write Iran’s history of patriarchal abuse, totalitarianism and Western occupation. But the making of Women without Men has played an important role in the politicization of Neshat as a diasporic artist. Previously eager to distance herself from the label of activist or agitator (Khaleeli 2010), the events surrounding the questionable re- election of President Ahmadinejad in 2009 forced Neshat to re-think her position. Like Munis, who makes the literal and figurative leap into the liminal space of the “in-between”, but who is then able to arise from the dead to commence her part in the nationalist movement, so too Neshat’s role as a feature film-maker has taken her from the conceptual sphere of her installation works into new political territory. Neshat has remarked that she is no longer content to have her work speak for itself (Khaleeli 2010), she now must openly communicate her support for grass-roots activism in Iran and the mass demonstrations for democracy. Thus while Neshat may perceive herself perpetually on the periphery, exiled and nostalgic, with an “in-between” position such as hers, comes certain privileges and freedoms. Neshat’s work may always be poetically orientated and inscribed with allegory, but as a diasporic artist she also has the opportunity to imbue her work with both political and deeply personal overtones. The insertion of a dedication at the film’s conclusion demonstrates Neshat’s desire to remain relevant and involved in the unfolding political history of her original homeland. It reads: “Dedicated to the memory of those who lost their

144 lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran -- from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009”. Despite the exilic tone of hopelessness, the film ultimately points to the continuing struggle for freedom and equality, of which Women Without Men becomes a part. Chapters Three and Four have explored examples of diasporic filmmaking in which the experience of exile is poeticized through allusions to medieval, modern and contemporary Persian lyricism. In reflecting the structures and many of the archetypal metaphors of poetry, Granaz Moussavi and Shirin Neshat portray the liminal space occupied by the exiled individual and diasporic artist and the continuing struggle for personal and political freedom. At a more subtle level, both films also point to a tension between the oral voice and its counterpoint, the visual image. In Moussavi’s film it is the media footage filmed on the mobile phone which is introduced as a means of supporting Marzieh’s “oral history” and claim for asylum, while in Women Without Men it is a non- verbal, magical language that provides the troubled Zarin with a temporary voice and sense of identity. In both films, however, image-making is not a sustainable alternative in the quest for autonomy: Marzieh’s visual evidence is deemed insufficient by immigration officers and Zarin’s paranormal language collapses with the re-introduction of oppressive influences at Fakhri’s party. While mutism and non-verbal languages should not be dismissed as unimportant strategies of resistance in the recovery of freedom and power, in both Moussavi and Neshat’s films, visually based languages and medias fail to deliver the protagonists lasting self-sufficiency and authority. The next chapter continues to examine the role of the cinematic voice in recovering political influence and personal power, but the emphasis shifts from the modes of poeticism and magical realism in diasporic cinema to the popular domestic genres of melodrama and comedy. Chapter Five investigates what cinematic genres and conventions might be most conducive to the promotion of political and personal equality for Iranian women in the work of Tahmineh Milani. In particular it traces the role of “talk” in Milani’s films and the manner in which dialogue and vocalization are adopted as means of strategically recouping political agency and personal resilience.

145 Chapter Five ‘Ceasefire’: From Collectivism to Comedic Compromise? Tracing the role of ‘talk’ in the Popular Cinema of Tahmineh Milani

The term “feminist filmmaker” is frequently invoked in Western popular and scholarly criticism when describing Iran’s most commercially successful female filmmaker, Tahmineh Milani. Certainly Milani’s melodramas, in particular her “Fereshteh trilogy”, revolve around courageous female protagonists who champion the rights of Iranian women and rally against authoritarian male figures. In such works, Milani consistently demonstrates the necessity for homosocial sanctuary, with women actively protecting each other from predatory males and tyrannical patriarchs. Her women-centered narratives continually stress the importance of open communication, giving voice to anxieties and collective organization. The emphasis is very much on narrating one’s trials and using “talk” (haft) as a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and uniting against oppressive forces. But does the categorization of “feminism” accord with Milani’s own positioning on women’s rights? And how does it fit with Milani’s oeuvre more generally, which has also always included comedies that offer quite a different framework for encouraging greater equity for Iranian women. These more light-hearted works appear far less concerned with contesting patriarchy and more invested in attaining a romantic resolution for the female lead. Ceasefire (2005), Milani’s most successful romantic comedy, in particular emphasizes how problematic male figures can be moderated using the right psycho-spiritual tools. The emphasis is still on “talk”, but in the context of therapeutic processes that promote greater domestic harmony. The public, political dialogue appears to be replaced by an internal, emotional one, with the accent on compassionate self-talk and engaging the inner child. Certainly in Ceasefire, Milani adopts comedy as a means of suggesting alternative modes of accommodating patriarchal power. But has political vocalisation been completely replaced by psychological jargon in Ceasefire, with the film representing a gesture of conciliation towards to the Islamic Republic? Or is Milani strategically using the tropes of the romantic comedy to continue her fight for women’s rights, albeit in a more coded or seemingly light-hearted manner? This chapter traces the use of genre in Milani’s oeuvre and examines the degree to which Ceasefire still participates in the project of promoting equality for Iranian women.

146 This chapter begins by outlining Tahmineh Milani’s biography and explores the frequent, but problematic, use of the term “feminist filmmaker” in various critical sources. It then goes on to examine the figure of Fereshteh in Milani’s earlier works and the emphasis on female friendship and collectivity. It argues that Milani persistently underscores the importance of narrativising, talking and vocalizing in the Fereshteh melodramas, demonstrating the significance of the voice as a practical tool for social change. Milani has also consistently demonstrated the need for a compassionate and receptive male figure if the women are to have any success in influencing cultural change within Iran. The next section of the chapter thus also examines how Milani’s male guardians work in conjunction with the women, firstly adopting the role of receptive listener, then emerging as a more active advocate. This chapter argues that while Milani’s melodramas never envisage a systemic overhaul of the legal and religious institutions that govern Iran, they do stress the strategic use of vocalizing in women’s fight for equality, with the co-operation of a sympathetic and collaborative male figure. It then contends that Milani’s Iranian box-office hit, Atash bas (Ceasefire, 2005) signals a departure from the politicized nature of her melodramas. Ceasefire appears to be invested in formulating a far more moderate and psychological model for promoting social change. This chapter thus turns to Milani’s romantic-comedy to determine to what degree the filmmaker’s popular comedies represent a divergence from her political ethos of collectivism, voicing and activism.

Milani: The ‘Feminist’ Filmmaker? Tahmineh Milani was born in Tabriz in 1960 and graduated in architecture at the University of Science and Technology, in Tehran in 1986. Her career in filmmaking was launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s when she wrote and directed the feature Bacheha-ye talagh (Children of Divorce, 1989) and authored the screenplay for Mohammad Reza Alami’s Eshgh va marg (Love and Death, 1990). Her first comedy Digeh che khabar? (What Else is New? 1992) was the best selling film of the year and established Milani as a popular filmmaker within Iran (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009, 111) Milani’s next three films, known loosely as the “Fereshteh” trilogy, continued to draw audiences domestically, making her one of the few women Iranian filmmakers to make commercially successful films (Naficy 2012a, 94). The Fereshteh trilogy also attracted international attention with the films’ focus

147 on oppressive diegetic worlds where women struggled for equality. Do zan (Two Women, 1999), Nimeh-ye penhan (The Hidden Half, 2001) and Vakonesh-e panjom (The Fifth Reaction, 2003), are all melodramas figuring the protagonist, Fereshteh. Although each film presents a unique diegetic world with a different Fereshteh figure (all played by actress Niki Karimi), the films are linked by their common emphasis on the difficulties of attaining personal freedom within post-revolutionary Iran. Milani’s imprisonment on the 27th of August 2001, after the cinematic release of The Hidden Half and a subsequent promotional interview, saw her accused of supporting counter revolutionary activity. Despite the fact that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance had formally approved the script for The Hidden Half, Milani was still charged by the Revolutionary Council. It was only with the direct intervention of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, that Milani was released on bail on the 1st of September. Targeted by the more conservative Revolutionary Council, headed by Ayatollah Khamenei, Milani’s case demonstrated the very real risks of politicized filmmaking even during the more liberalized period of Khatami’s presidency. While Milani never achieved the same status as many other Iranian auteurs on the international film festival circuit during the 1990s and 2000s, her consistent output, her emphasis on women’s plight in Iran and her popularity with Iranian audiences, meant that Milani gradually received recognition in the West. The term “feminist” was and continues to be commonly employed within critical discourse to describe Milani’s work and her political stance in general (Moruzzi 2001, Butler 2002, Whatley 2003, Moore 2005, Scullion 2006, Zeydabadi-Nejad 2010, Brown 2011, Naficy 2012a). However as Michelle Langford points out in her discussion of Milani’s melodramas, the term “feminism” is particularly problematic in the Iranian context, where it has been “inextricably tied up with Western ideology”, especially during the Islamic Revolution (2010, 342). In interviews Milani treads carefully when discerning her own political position as a female filmmaker in Iran. In a discussion with Zeydabadi-Nejad (2010), Milani asserts that, “If you want to be a feminist in the Western sense of the word in Iran, that is not possible” (123). Thus while Milani never rejects the categorization of feminism (in fact Naficy suggests she “basks” in the label (2012a)), she certainly insinuates the difficulties of publicly identifying with and articulating such an ideological position while working domestically. In the interview with Zeydabadi-Nejad, Milani continues: “That type of [Western] feminism has no meaning

148 here. But I can say that I do my best to stand against the discrimination of women. That is all I can do here” (123). Such a discussion obviously also alludes to the problematic nature of the term “feminism” itself with its often Eurocentric, universalizing platform and transcultural concerns. Various feminist critics, Lila Abu-Lughod (1998) and Joanna Degroot (2010) among them, stress the need for the term “feminism” to be qualified, contextualized and localized, particularly when applied to Iranian gender politics, history and women’s movements. Acknowledging then the hazards of publicly associating herself with the often burdened and amorphous term of feminism, Milani prefers to define her stance as one “against the discrimination of women”. Langford describes Milani’s melodramas as a “practical strategy” which allows her to “critique the patriarchal and ideological systems” at work in Iran. Langford argues that melodrama is the vehicle that enables Milani to engage in a public, political discourse about the “underlying social, political and cultural causes of women’s oppression” (2010, 344). Thus while it is undeniable that Milani utilizes her cinematic projects to promote women’s equality in Iran, the term “feminism” is not adopted in this thesis when describing the filmmaker’s brand of politics. Instead, in this chapter, Milani’s melodramas are defined as sociopolitical works that reveal the discord experienced by many women as individuals and groups under the Islamic Republic. Milani has shown great commitment to the genres of melodrama and comedy. As popular modes of cinematic address in Iran, Milani’s films fit within a broader historical context of mainstream genre cinema. Various critics have already noted the ways in which Iranian popular cinema, in particular its melodramas, has been critically disregarded or referred to in pejorative terms because of perceived technical deficiencies and low-brow content (Langford 2010, Brown 2011, Jahed 2012). But mainstream Iranian cinema has always been significant in reflecting (and deflecting) the very particular socio-political concerns of the time. Film farsi, which literally translates as “ cinema”, denotes the popular cinema that emerged in Iran during the late 1940s and that continued to dominate under the Pahlavi regime. Composed of American influenced genre films (melodramas, thrillers and comedies), Indianesque song-and-dance films and the uniquely

149 Iranian Jaheli films 17 , film farsi was responsible for the majority of commercially successful cinema made between 1948 and 1965 (Naficy 2011b). Perhaps one of the most popular forms of film farsi during this period was the melodrama. Parviz Jahed argues that this particular genre can be divided into the sub-categories of urban melodramas, which didactically upheld the importance of family values, and the rural melodramas that engaged directly with the tensions between traditional village life and modernity (2012a, 72). Jahed argues that in many ways, “film farsi…does not want to interfere in and disturb social order but rather defend the status quo. It responds intensely against change and tries to reject modernism” (75). Another important theme of the melodramas of this time was the notion of the “new woman”, with films often displaying an ambivalent position towards the newfound independence and sexual freedom experienced by many urban women (Sadr 2006, 79). As a result, the trope of the “fallen woman” continued to be perpetuated in the melodramas of the 1950s, with the female protagonist often characterized as the corrupted “good girl” who must prove she is worthy of the male hero’s affections. “Not too far behind the apparent anti-feminism of the fallen women theme, one finds frantic distress signals of waning masculine self-confidence and an implicit indictment of a patriarchal society which, after all, was responsible for the crisis at the time” (Sadr 2006, 80). At a time of rapid transformation, in particular with the introduction of the Shah’s 1963 White Revolution, film farsi was thus important in abating anxiety about the effects of dramatic social and economic change and the changes to women’s status and freedoms (Egan 2011). But with the Shah publically funding cinema from the mid-1960, in the hope of producing higher quality productions, film farsi ceased to be the sole cinematic mode within the domestic market. The first poetically and socially realist films began to emerge from filmmakers such as Sohrab Shahid Saless, Ebrahim Golestan and Dariush Mehrjui. Arguably, however, in a film such as Golestan’s Khehst va ayne (The Brick and the Mirror 1964), which provides a socio-cultural critique of poverty and hardship, melodrama continues as an important mode of address (Sadr 2006, 128). And even with the decline of the commercial industry during the 1970s, the subsequent Islamization of the cinema

17 The Jaheli films that dominated the 1960s and 1970s Iranian cinematic landscape centered around the ‘Jahel’ archetype, a caricature of traditionalism, stupidity and immorality. The films functioned thus as a defense against modernization and social progress, with the Jahel character often ridiculing all that threatened his traditionalist world-view (Jahed 2012).

150 industry in the 1980s and the enormous success of Iranian art-house cinema abroad during the 1990s and 2000s, melodramas have continued to be produced and popularly received within Iran. Of the 480 films produced between 1966 and1977, 62% were dramas and melodramas (Naficy 1981). In fact despite the artificial divisions made between Iranian post-revolutionary popular and art-house cinema, a considerable proportion of the cinema that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s represented an interesting confluence of socially realist and melodrama tendencies. The films of Rasul Sadr-Ameli, Bahram Beyzaie and Dariush Mehrjui, like those of Golestan’s in the 1960s, continue to deploy the themes and tropes of melodrama within their socially realist films (Dadar 2012, 145). Milani’s films were certainly part of this tendency to create socially reflexive dramas that contained both stock elements of the genre, as well as infusing the narrative with more subtle and encoded elements. The post-revolutionary melodramas, particularly those of late 1990s and 2000s thus represent a significant departure from their pre-revolutionary counterparts, with their strong production values and emphasis on socio-political criticism. While much criticism has focused on the generic features of the Iranian melodramas of the 1950s and pre- Revolutionary era (Sadr 2006, Naficy 2011, Jahed 2012), there has been very little scholarship specifically cataloguing the stylistic qualities and tropes of the more contemporary Iranian melodramas. This is largely because the genre itself has modified and is now heavily influenced by the production practices and characteristics of the poetically realist mode. As Taraneh Dadar writes, “the acute…turn that Iranian melodrama took from the second decade of the Islamic Revolution has also enhanced its realism, diversified its themes, as well as complicated the generic boundaries between melodrama and other genres” (2012, 147). Michael Stewart similarly argues that contemporary Iranian melodramas evidence tendencies for both “excess” and “realism” demonstrating the shift that has taken place in both recent film scholarship and practice (2014, 235). Milani’s earliest melodramas, including her important Fereshteh trilogy, have been a part of this growing tendency towards generic intertexuality, straddling both the art-house and commercial divide to make socially relevant cinema (Langford 2010). But have her less critically acclaimed comedies similarly used genre in a self- reflexive and dissident manner? Or do her comedies represent a more formulaic and depoliticized aspect of her oeuvre? This chapter will chart the development of Milani’s

151 works and in particular the manner in which she uses dialogue, the voice and narrative in her melodramas to create politically and socially engaged films. It will then turn to Ceasefire to analyze to what degree this film still adopts “talk” as a means of interrogating the “discrimination against women” in Iran.

The ‘Fereshteh’ Melodramas and the Importance of ‘Talk’ “Melodrama” is often applied as an umbrella term to describe the wide range of sub-genres from historical costume dramas to kitchen sink family dramas (Mercer and Shlinger 2004). While melodrama may be defined via a taxonomy of certain generic features, the emphasis within current film studies is to understand genres as dynamic (Schatz 1991), cyclical (Gledhill 2000) and inter-textual (Frow 2013). Indeed Linda Williams’ seminal essay, “Melodrama Revised”, has proposed that rather than constituting a distinctive genre, or a set of sub-genres, melodrama actually functions as a pervasive cinematic mode, underlying the vast majority of (at least, American) cinematic productions (1998, 42). Williams’ intervention is useful in reconsidering melodrama, not just those made in Hollywood, but more broadly as a “form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and irrational truths through a dialectic of pathos and action” (1998, 42). Certainly melodrama is an exploration of conflict, as individuals struggle with socio-cultural conditions, articulating their experiences of anguish and disempowerment (Gledhill 1987, Schatz 1991, Zarzosa 2013, 15). According to Williams, melodrama is preoccupied with moral codes, in particular the virtue of the protagonist that goes unrecognized by the other characters (but not the spectators) until the film’s climatic conclusion (Williams 1998, 42). Ben Singer, however, has challenged aspects of Williams’ universalization of melodrama, arguing that it may be productive to still “delineate melodrama as a genre rather than an all encompassing cinematic mode…” (2013, 7). Instead, Singer proposes that we view melodrama as a “‘cluster concept’…involving different combinations of five constitutive elements: strong pathos, heightened emotionality, moral polarization, non-classical narrative mechanics and spectacular effects” (2013, 7). In combination, Williams and Singer’s approaches to melodrama allows us to view the genre as both a pervasive cinematic mode and as a form that often includes particular characteristic narrative devices, tropes and aesthetic strategies. Undoubtedly Milani’s melodramas, in particular her Fereshteh trilogy point not only

152 to the protagonist’s unrecognized “virtue” (in the eyes of her male compatriots at least and the Iranian judicial system more broadly), but also to the importance of female companionship in enduring and resisting the social conditions of patriarchal Iran. While persistently besieged by a husband/stalker/father(-in-law), Fereshteh becomes emblematic of how women may recuperate agency through female friendships, camaraderie and political collectives. Women in isolation are portrayed as vulnerable and ineffective, but Milani demonstrates that when sheltered by female friendship, women become more resilient and agentic. In Two Women, it is her long-time university friend, Roya, who supports Fereshteh and her children through the traumatic death of Fereshteh’s oppressive husband. In The Hidden Half Fereshteh is part of a women’s communist collective, the members of which attempt to protect each other once they are targeted by the pro- revolutionary basij. Finally, it is with the assistance of her supportive teacher colleagues, that Fereshteh attempts to reclaim access to her children from her tyrannical father-in-law in The Fifth Reaction. Although Fereshteh presents as a different protagonist within each film, with a unique diegetic world and very particular set of challenges, there remain important elements of continuity between the three productions that constitute the loose trilogy. In fact other characters also named “Fereshteh” have appeared in Milani’s earlier films, in particular the mystical melodrama Afsaneh-ye ah (The Legend of the Sigh 1991) and the comedy, Digeh che khabar? (What Else is New?1992). And with the exception of the final installment of the trilogy, The Fifth Reaction, the Fereshteh character always appears initially in the film as a fresh-faced, gifted, optimistic student whose hopes for academic and professional success are overridden by an overbearing male superior. In many ways, the various Fereshteh narratives present coming-of-age stories where youth and hope are curbed by the experiences of subordination and loss. It is perhaps not incidental then that the final Fereshteh installation, The Fifth Reaction, begins with the protagonist already in a state of mourning for her beloved husband, the buoyancy and hope of her youth already long behind her. So while in many ways Fereshteh is situated as the archetypal heroine of the melodrama, unjustly tormented by her male counterparts, in another sense the Fereshteh films also underscore the power that is amassed with the emotional and practical support of another woman or group of women. As Nasrin Rahimieh (2003) argued, in her discussion

153 of Two Women, the figure of Fereshteh represents both the “victimization” of Iranian women and the “possibility of alternative lives within the very fabric of dominant social and cultural norms” (158). While Milani frequently depicts her protagonist as an innocent who is preyed upon by oppressive patriarchs, she is equally represented as a crusader, who takes bold risks in her attempts to resist subordination. There thus exists an interesting tension in the characterization of Fereshteh, between vulnerability and strength, between innocence and embitterment. Importantly, Fereshteh is always liked and favoured by her female peers and colleagues, who are willing to put their own reputations at risk to assist her. But even when working together, the women of Milani’s melodramas rarely succeed in fully overcoming the significant odds that challenge them. To varying degrees, the Fereshteh figures remain in a precarious position to the very end, as their fate is decided by a powerful and privileged male figure. Williams has argued that in the melodrama the prospect of justice appears at the end, either “in the nick of time” or “too late” (1998, 42). Milani’s films, while often concluding on a note of ambivalence, definitely evoke the precariousness of women’s status in post-revolutionary Iran. Arguably Milani’s Fereshteh melodramas mirror those moments in Iranian social history when women have been actively involved in advocating for political reform, but have often been ultimately overlooked or marginalised by their male compatriots and State powers. There are several accounts of the way in which “thousands” of women participated in the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) but their campaigning did not result in them being recognised as citizens or being bestowed equal rights (Afary 1989, 70, Mahdi 2004, 428, Sedghi 2007, 46). There are also various examples of the way in which the Pahlavi regime, under Reza Shah, attempted to centralise and depoliticise women’s movements and publications, shifting the emphasis from activism to charity work, education and patriotism (Kandiyoti 1996, 379, Kashani-Sabet 2005, 38-39). The State-led process of modernisation may have presented women with greater opportunities to participate in civic life, but extended rights were sometimes only afforded to individuals who actively participated in the project of social and economic reform, thus marginalising many women from more conservative, religious and rural backgrounds. As Mana Kia writes, “Women’s rights are exchanged for the responsibilities of modern citizenship and the duty of participation in a capitalist economy” (2005, 239). In the anti-Shah political

154 protests between 1978 and 1979, women again took part in the protests in large numbers, helping bring down the Pahlavi monarch (Degroot 2010, 262). However, with the Islamisation of Iran came the loss of certain legal entitlements for women, in particular those rights associated with marriage and divorce. Degroot (2010) argues there were varying degrees of both resistance and accommodation to the new socio-political norms established by the Islamic Republic. She also emphasizes both the “defeat of women’s aspirations and rights under the Islamic Republic and their continued contestation for their place on the terrain of Shi’a Islamic Iran” (Degroot 2010, 263). Thus it is important to note that despite an endemic culture of patriarchal privilege in Iran, women’s voices and political movements have never been completely quashed by State or religious opposition. Milani’s “Fereshteh” films dramatise this tension between agency and limitation, between active participation and marginalisation, representing the various degrees of resistance, subordination and autonomy experienced by women in post-revolutionary Iran. Narrativising, talking and vocalizing are prominent features in Milani’s melodramas. Silence is associated with subservience and restriction, whereas open and forthright dialogue is shown to embolden women and allow them to share supports and collectively organize. There is a consistent and re-occurring emphasis on “talk”, both in terms of the films being heavily dialogue-driven and through the multitude of references to the word “talk” (harf) itself. Female characters often encourage each other to candidly discuss their problems, while the problematic male characters chastise the more self- assured protagonists for being too vocal or outspoken. Linda Fisher underscores the deep- rooted connection between voice and authority in her discussion of phenomenological feminism.

Presence, intentionality, and expressiveness are thus important markers in the broader identification of voice with subjectivity and identity: denoting representation, agency, selfhood, and discursive power, while the lack of voice is the emptying of such possibilities in the multi-dimensional character of silence, and silencing (2010, 84).

Milani dramatizes this association between silence as disempowerment and voice as

155 enfranchisement in the narrative of Two Women, which follows the friendship of two students, Roya (Merila Zare’i) and Fereshteh (Niki Karimi). The pair meet at university and through assisting Roya with her studies, Fereshteh develops a close bond with the warm and lively Roya. But Fereshteh’s own academic aspirations are thwarted when she is stalked by the obsessive and violent figure of Hassan (Mohammad Reza Forutan). With his advances becoming more sinister, Fereshteh is forced to leave Tehran and return to the semi-rural setting where her family resides. When Hassan continues to harass Fereshteh even within her hometown, the two characters become involved in a motor accident, which kills a child and injures another. Fereshteh’s father (Reza Khandan) accuses her of bringing shame on the family and even when pardoned by the courts, she is still thought to have acted immodestly in attracting Hassan’s attention in the first place. Fereshteh is thus coerced into marrying an older suitor, Ahmad (Atila Pesiana), of whom her father approves. A loud and emotive soundtrack accompanies the scene in which Fereshteh is forcefully persuaded to accepting Ahmad’s marriage proposal. The affecting score draws attention to Fereshteh’s silence, as Ahmad and her family decide her fate without genuine consultation. The term “melodrama”, as Thomas Schatz explains, literally refers to “those narrative forms that combine music (melos) with drama” (1981, 221). Indeed music is often theorized in melodrama as a key determinant in the creation of pathos. Music is persistently “foregrounded” (Laing 2007 3), offering “alternative narrative voices”, including the “inner voice” or the “absent voice” (Hibberd 2013, 8). In this scene, the music draws attention to Fereshteh’s silence, or “absent voice”, externalizing her anxiety over the prospect of her imminent marriage to Ahmad. In her analysis of Two Women, Michelle Langford argues that Fereshteh’s silence in scenes such as these alludes to the broader societal conventions pertaining to modesty and the “restrictions placed upon women in the public sphere after the founding of the Islamic Republic” (2010, 347). Although attempting to voice her objection, Fereshteh’s resistance is futile in the face of her father and Ahmad’s determination to finalize the arrangement. Once married to the jealous Ahmad, Fereshteh is denied access to the telephone, which is locked away and may be only used under Ahmad’s supervision. He also intercepts Fereshteh’s letters to Roya, making both women believe that their missives were unreciprocated. By directly obstructing both their written discourse and any verbal exchanges, Ahmad effectively destroys Fereshteh’s friendship with Roya and

156 maintains his wife’s isolation. Fereshteh is only able to rekindle the friendship with Roya once Ahmad becomes hospitalized many years later and is no longer capable of curbing their communication. By this point, Roya, who comes from a more urban, middle-class background, has become an architect and appears to have a happy marriage, a successful career and good relationship with her daughter. On re-establishing contact Roya immediately assists Fereshteh, convening with the hospital and housing Fereshteh and her two boys. It is Roya who takes the call from the hospital and communicates the news of Ahmad’s death. Fereshteh greets the revelation with a mixture of tentative hope and bewilderment. The final scene of the film shows Fereshteh finally awakening to the possibilities of life now that her oppressive husband has died. The dialogue between the two women unfolds in a call-and-response exchange, with Fereshteh frequently invoking her friend’s name as a way of drawing out further support and encouragement. In fact Fereshteh exclaims ‘Roya?!’ five times in this final dialogue, with Roya responding with an empathic, encouraging reply each time (“Yes, sweetheart?”, “I understand”, “You have to give it a go”). The dialogue between the two women has an almost lyrical quality, with the exchange becoming more rhythmic and emotionally charged with each invocation of Fereshteh’s plaintive “Roya?” After being silenced for so long by various male figures (the obsessive stalker, the shaming father, the jealous husband), the reciprocal nature of this exchange is essential in rebuilding Fereshteh’s hope and resilience. Whereas the loud orchestral music in earlier scenes externalized her distress and victimization, Fereshteh is now able to reclaim the acoustic power of her own voice as means of self-expression. Roya’s presence, and her contributions to the dialogue, is thus crucial to the process of Fereshteh’s gradual recovery and renewal. The notion of “polyphony” is relevant here, where collective voicing and shared dialogue produce greater empowerment and personal resilience (Kinser 2003). This final exchange is both harmonious and dialectical in nature, with the women’s voices retaining individuality, while working in unison. Importantly, Roya is not only contributing her voice to Fereshteh’s, but she is simultaneously modeling the importance of empathic listening. As Kinser (2003) has argued in the context of women’s movements, women must be equally invested in hearing, as they are in the process of speaking. Interestingly, Roya is not the only figure listening to Fereshteh’s words in this final

157 scene. Roya’s husband, Mr Moshkian, is also in the room and he too heeds Fereshteh as she vocalises her hopes and fears for the future. Earlier in the scene, Fereshteh was shown to be sitting in Roya’s lounge-room, recounting the details of her difficult marriage to Ahmad (“I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t let me”). The camera then pulls back to reveal Mr Moshkian also present in the room, sadly attentive to this final instalment of Fereshteh’s story. When the phone rings he answers it, but immediately hands it to Roya when he learns it is the hospital with news of Fereshteh’s husband. The camera, however, continues to dwell on Mr Moshkian, even as Roya receives the news of Ahmad’s death. The emphasis is thus on the attentive, empathic listening demonstrated by her husband. As Rahimieh argues in her analysis of Two Women, the presence of Roya’s husband at this pivotal point in the narrative, models a form of receptivity and support that will be crucial to the success of Fereshteh’s newfound liberty.

The final resolution of Two Women draws in a male interlocutor who embodies values diametrically opposed to those of Fereshteh’s father and husband. In fact, he is represented as Roya’s partner both at work and at home… The sharp contrast between Roya and Fereshteh’s husbands creates an alternative to the patriarchal Iranian role models…Fereshteh’s recovery from the abuses she has suffered is represented as being enabled in the supportive environment of Roya and her husband’s apartment. This space has obvious figurative meaning within the context of new gender relations. It is a space in which both the man and the woman witness and participate in the new beginning for Fereshteh (2003, 161).

As an emblematic figure, Mr Moshkian’s presence is not incidental or peripheral to this scene but demonstrates the critical role a supportive male character can play in facilitating better conditions for his female peers. By not impeding Fereshteh’s friendship with Roya, and actively encouraging her to thrive now that Ahmad has died, Roya’s husband assists in the rehabilitation of Fereshteh and in providing additional hope. Admittedly Mr Moshkian plays a relatively minor role in the film and the majority of male figures that appear in Two Women are one-dimensional ‘bad guys’: unscrupulous and ruthless in their treatment of Fereshteh and women in general. But Mr. Moshkian is not

158 an isolated male figure in Milani’s trilogy, and several other receptive, compassionate and supportive male characters emerge in the subsequent films. Certainly more nuanced, realistic representations of masculinity begin to predominate, with several male characters even proving themselves integral to the process of broader social change (Langford 2010). The brutish, ogres continue to play a central and ideological role in demeaning and restricting Fereshteh, but more complex, sensitive male role models now provide an important contrast. Perhaps one of the most important figures is the character of Khosrow (Atila Pesiani) in the second installation of the Fereshteh trilogy, The Hidden Half. The film begins with a domestic scene, with Khosrow preparing for a trip to Shiraz where he will be overseeing a court case as the judge. When his wife Fereshteh learns that the trial involves a female political prisoner who is facing the death penalty, she becomes unsettled. Even when Khosrow attempts to distract her with the daily newspapers, she brushes them aside, commenting; “No, none of them speak my language”. Fereshteh then packs her husband’s bags for Shiraz, including a letter that discloses the events of her past, most importantly her experiences as a young student activist during the revolutionary riots and protests. In the memoir she outlines how the female communist collective gathered in regular meetings and distributed pamphlets fighting against the closure of universities. She also describes her encounters with the charismatic editor and writer, Roozbeh Javid (Mohammad Nikbin), for whom she develops a romantic attachment. The content of Fereshteh’s letter is communicated via voice-over, with scenes of Khosrow in his Shiraz hotel room reading the missive interrupted by lengthy flashbacks to Fereshteh’s past. The importance of voice-over as a narrative strategy for inscribing power and authority into the text has already been discussed in this thesis. Psychoanalytic theory has been adopted to account for the way in which first person female voice-over complicates the conventional means of identifying and objectifying female protagonists (Silverman 1988, Ryan 1988). Karen Hollinger (1992), for example, argues that female voice-over creates “contested” spaces of representation, fragmenting and dividing the subjectivity of the female protagonist. The function of the voice-over as a narrative technique may be additionally complicated by Khosrow’s presence as reader and listener in The Hidden Half. As Langford argues, it is Khosrow’s “reading of the text that motivates the flashbacks that constitute the majority of the screen time” (2010, 350). The narrative may then be viewed both as

159 Fereshteh’s remembrances and also as Khosrow’s interpretation of those same events. Langford (2010) thus notes that the flashbacks in The Hidden Half emerge via the “co- narration” of Fereshteh and her husband, both figures equalling shaping and influencing the representation of Fereshteh’s story as a student in revolutionary Iran.

Additionally, by casting both Fereshteh and Khosrow as co-narrators in The Hidden Half, Milani suggests that change will only occur when women and men recognize the inequalities inscribed in Iran’s legal and political system (Langford 2010, 353).

Khosrow is not only presented as the ideal, receptive listener capable of compassionately envisaging the struggles facing women, but also as a figure qualified to enforce change via the judicial system. As a judge with the presidential department, Khosrow is in a particularly empowered and privileged position. His ability to understand and demonstrate sympathy to his wife as a former activist is also potentially extended to the anonymous female political prisoner whose fate he is deciding. Whereas Mr Moshkian in Two Women was able to provide emotional support within the domestic and emotional realm, Khosrow’s professional power benefits not only Fereshteh but also other women who may find themselves unfairly targeted for their participation in political activity. Khosrow’s appearance as a sensitive and ideal husband is heightened when contrasted with Fereshteh’s former romantic interest, Javid. Although a sympathetic and compelling character in many ways, Javid takes pleasure in sermonising and chastising the young Fereshteh. In fact the protagonist admonishes him in one particular scene for not listening and for refusing to take part in what she calls a “two-way communication”. An even more extreme version of Javid is to be found in The Fifth Reaction in the guise of Hadj Safdar (Jamshid Hashempur). This time Fereshteh’s beloved husband has died and her tyrannical father-in-law is determined to seize custody of her two boys and deny Fereshteh any long-term access. When Fereshteh pleads with Hadj Safdar to provide her with some legal entitlement to care for her children, he sternly replies, “I am the law. Don’t talk to me about the law. If I hear you talking of such things again you will never see your children”. When Fereshteh communicates the distressing news of her father-in-law’s

160 plans to her teacher colleagues, the women are stirred into action and devise a plan to transfer Fereshteh and her children out of the country before Hadj Safdar can remove them himself. There are various scenes of the women meeting covertly and making plans on the telephone. Taraneh (Merila Zare’i), Fereshteh’s closest friend who is battling her own marriage difficulties, is particularly passionate about maintaining Fereshteh’s access to her children and outwitting Hadj Safdar. But Fereshteh’s father-in-law is a powerful figure (the term Hadj is given to those in a role of community authority) and he effectively utilizes his contacts around the country to intercept and impede the women’s plans. Once Hadj Safdar does track down Taraneh, he explains that he will have her arrested. He is increasingly enraged by the manner in which Taraneh continues to reproach him and on several occasions rebukes her for being outspoken, raging, “You talk more than you are supposed to!” Hadj Safdar’s determination to quash the female voice appears to have been successful when Fereshteh is eventually imprisoned at the conclusion of the film. This time there is no benevolent Khosrow to intervene and negotiate a more equitable outcome, and the protagonist’s fate appears to be completely reliant on Hadj Safdar. Langford notes that in many ways the conclusion of The Fifth Reaction is a departure from the optimistic or more open-ended nature of Two Women and The Hidden Half. The note of hopelessness, Langford argues, may be a reflection of the level of “dissatisfaction” over the failure of any significant widespread reform pertaining to women’s rights under Khatami’s reformist presidency (2010, 263). Although the final moments of The Fifth Reaction appear to present a bleak and highly compromised future for Fereshteh and her companions, under the surveillance of the authoritarian Hadj Safdar, it is important to emphasise the diversity and range of positions depicted in Milani’s Fereshteh trilogy. Women are not represented as universally subordinated and powerless, but capable of accessing varying degrees of autonomy dependent on their socio-economic background, their husband’s character and the degree to which they are supported by female friendship. The presence of certain courageous, outspoken, privileged women (such as Roya and Taraneh) in the trilogy demonstrates how Milani is underscoring the range of socio-economic, cultural and personal factors that contribute to a woman’s quality of life in Iran and her access to various legal and personal freedoms. Milani’s melodramas do not present a victim narrative whereby all women are

161 cruelly subordinated by tyrannical patriarchs and oppressive circumstances. But the Fereshteh trilogy does underscore the vulnerability of particular women (particularly those from low socio-economic backgrounds) and politicise the importance of women’s voices in confronting discrimination. The final moments of The Fifth Reaction are certainly a reminder of how restricted some women’s choices can be when surrounded by male figures that abuse their patriarchal authority. Without the presence of a compassionate and privileged male companion willing to champion their cause, Milani exposes the extent to which women such as Fereshteh remain exposed to imprisonment, isolation and poverty.

‘Ceasefire’: Compromise or Cunning Comedy? Arguably, in Ceasefire we see the re-introduction of the supportive male archetype in the figure of the therapist. The likeable and sympathetic psychiatrist (Atila Pesiani) encourages female protagonist, Sayeh (), to give voice to her anger and anxiety over her troubled relationship with her husband, Yousef (Mohammad Reza Golzar). There is also the now familiar narrative convention, whereby Sayeh begins telling her story to the sympathetic listener, motivating a series of flashback sequences led by her voice-over. Sayeh narrates the trials of her turbulent marriage to the chauvinistic and arrogant Yousef, explaining how the two met when working on a building project together (Sayeh was overseeing the work as an engineering consultant, while Yousef was the contractor). There is immediate hostility between the pair, however, there is also the frisson of attraction and despite the cruel pranks they play on one another, they quickly decide to marry. But their domestic life is immediately made impossible by Yousef’s expectation that his wife will retreat from her professional responsibilities when she is married. When Sayeh defies him and continues to work, Yousef begins playing cruel tricks on her, which Sayeh then counters with equally outlandish and spiteful stunts. Eventually Sayeh tires of the antagonism and makes an appointment with a lawyer in an attempt to start divorce proceedings. But when she finds herself stumbling into the office of a psychiatrist, in a case of mistaken identity, she instead begins a course of psychotherapy in which Yousef eventually joins her. Despite the fact that Milani has devised another misogynistic, controlling male figure, Ceasefire represents a significant shift in both the tone adopted when analyzing

162 Yousef’s treatment of Sayeh and also in the strategies it promotes for achieving greater equity between the sexes. While vocalization and dialogue are still key to the processes of personal empowerment, the approach is now much more based on psychological and spiritual modes of communication. Ceasefire draws heavily on the principles of Lucia Capacchione’s text, Recovery of Your Inner Child (1991). The emphasis is thus very much on engaging the inner-child and releasing repressed anxieties and experiences. The public dialogue is here replaced by self-talk, with the individual drawing out various psychic personas and encouraging self-love and forgiveness. When Sayeh describes Yousef’s manner of incessantly disparaging and undermining her, the therapist proposes not a divorce but an intensive period of therapy. Interestingly, the therapy is targeted at Yousef and the last quarter of the film focuses exclusively on his transformation from chauvinistic husband to an infinitely more sensitive, progressive version of himself. Another key difference here is that Milani is experimenting with the tropes of the romantic comedy. In the very first scene when Sayeh bursts into the therapists’ office, an already waiting male patient sits sobbing theatrically and effeminately into his tissue. In Milani’s trilogy, Fereshteh’s tears were always accompanied by grave music and were emblematic of the individual’s struggle with oppressive social conditions. Here tearful paroxysms, while part of the important therapeutic process, are also a source of comedy and are often portrayed as excessive and ridiculous. Sayeh is shown to have a close female friend, Laleh, but their relationship is peripheral to the real drama. Laleh’s on-screen presence is limited to a couple of scenes, in which she appears as the archetypical female buddy, true to the romantic-comedy blueprint. Instead the emphasis here is completely centered on Sayeh and Yousef’s troubled marriage. And despite the fact that Sayeh’s dialogue with the therapist is interchanged with scenes of Yousef violently harassing various members of staff in the same building as his attempts to track down his wife, the therapist laughs good-naturedly at Sayeh’s complaints over Yousef’s abusive character. Unlike Hadj Safdar’s sinister pursuit of Fereshteh, Yousef’s aggressive attempts to locate Sayeh are portrayed as comical and potentially even endearing. Sayeh and the therapist describe Yousef as “childish” and “child-like”, despite the fact that he obviously takes pleasure in degrading and humiliating his wife, and women in general. In Two Women characters such as Hussan and Ahmad had to be killed off or jailed in order for Fereshteh to

163 be able to live autonomously but in Ceasefire Yousef’s chauvinism can be moderated by therapeutically recovering his inner-child. As a genre the narrative arc of the romantic comedy is often condensed by the axiom “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back”, in which heterosexuality and patriarchal privilege are re-affirmed and reified as normative (Schatz 1981, Horton 1991, Krutnik & Neale 2006). While the nature of the “romantic union” shifts with varying cultural paradigms (from the formal marriage contract of the Hollywood classics to the implication of loving monogamy in more contemporary American versions), the relationship between the central protagonists remains the primary consideration (Glitre 2013). Classic markers of the romantic comedy include the tropes of the “mistaken identity” and the radical (if not improbable) transformation of one of the protagonists in the process of making them a more suitable partner. Kathrina Glitre writes that one of the most frequently adopted conventions of the romantic comedy involves the “battle of the sexes”, in which “the hero and the heroine are in competition, initially disliking each other or even hating each other, but moving from antagonism to compromise” (2006, 19). In many ways, Ceasefire adheres to the classic formula of the romantic comedy, with Sayeh and Yousef’s competitive battle constituting the primary conflict, followed eventually by Yousef’s (and to a lesser degree Sayeh’s) personal transformation, which in turn allows for the couple’s reconciliation. But as Frank Krutnik and Steve Neale (2006) suggest, genres are persistently re-interpreted via the prism of socio-cultural and national context. “…On the case of the romantic comedy it is important to stress how specific films or cycles mediate between a body of conventionalized ‘generic rules’…and a shifting environment of sexual-cultural codifications” (57). How then does Milani re-interpret, or even de-stabilize the generic rules of the romantic comedy? William Brown (2011) argues that Ceasefire continues to rail against the challenges of patriarchal privilege. Brown notes that while Ceasefire borrows heavily from the conventions of the classic Hollywood romantic comedy, it does so in order to create a highly contemporary and sexually charged portrait of middle-class affluence in Tehran. In particular, Brown’s analysis stresses Sayeh’s “consummate mobility” which is suggestive of her personal strength and independence.

164 She works, for example, on building sites and is at ease navigating construction spaces that might typically be thought of as male: we first see her, framed from below, striding across a construction area. Furthermore, she manages to drive into a paint factory where Yousef is hiding and which bears the sign ‘Cowards and women not allowed in’. When she finally tracks down Yousef, she runs him off the road in her car, suggesting she is the more mobile and spirited of the two (2011, 338).

Certainly Sayeh provides a stark contrast to the Fereshteh archetype, with the Ceasefire protagonist presenting as far more feisty and provocative. Her decision to start divorce proceedings against Yousef’s will is just one example of her fearlessness and self-belief. The emphasis is no longer on the impoverished, disempowered or shamed woman but on the successful, mobile and urban, young professional. It is not Sayeh who cries desperately at the notion of being abused or abandoned by her husband, but Yousef who sobs through the therapeutic recovery of his inner-child. The final scene of Cease Fire shows Sayeh and Yousef joking and laughing together as they narrate their romantic reconnection to the therapist/audience. Yousef, who had openly expressed his desire for a submissive and compliant wife, is no longer portrayed as menacing or narcissistic. Instead he has emerged from his therapy a more flexible, likeable and moderated version of himself. While the film began with Sayeh narrating her woes to the therapist, it ends with the two protagonists “co- narrating” the story of their reconciliation. Any gender inequities have been ameliorated through the therapeutic process and the couple appear to be able to laugh off their differences now. The conclusion to Ceasefire certainly fits within the generic model of the romantic comedy and provides a stark contrast to the ambivalent endings of the Fereshteh trilogy. Deborah Thomas writes that “it is a central aspect of the romantic comedy …that the social space is transformed into something better than the repressive, hierarchical world of melodramatic films, so that the fantasies of transformation within this space replace fantasies of escape to space elsewhere” (2000, 14). In The Fifth Reaction, it was imperative that Fereshteh leave Iran in order to recover her autonomy and to retain the custody of her children. But in Ceasefire, Sayeh need not flee Tehran to protect her personal freedom; the “transformation into something better” takes place both internally and intra-subjectively with Yousef. The therapist facilitates the couple’s reunion and although Sayeh travels to the

165 Caspian Sea, the process of psychological integration and marital healing unfolds either within the safety and stability of the domestic environment or within the comfortable confines of the therapeutic suite. But does this neat resolution to Yousef’s problematic behaviour “gloss” over the more difficult questions related to the “psychological maladjustment rooted in the segregation of the sexes and the impossible conditions set for socialization between unmarried young couples” (Rahimieh 2009, 111). Whereas the Fereshteh trilogy stressed the varying degrees of difficulty that came with different socio-economic positions, Ceasefire narrows it focus to the affluent and the mobile, whose finances allow them the luxury of extended therapeutic reflection and self-actualization. The degree to which the film intends to offer a serious critique of the maltreatment of women within marriages is thus disputable. The farcical nature of the narrative, the endless sparring between Yousef and Sayeh and the final resolution of the couple’s relationship difficulties, demonstrate the degree to which Ceasefire is wrought by the very familiar tropes of the romantic comedy. Although it would be simplistic to schematize comedy as a set of generic traits, Ceasefire does exemplify some of those key devices common to the genre. Robert D. Hume (1972) argues that the comedy narrative frequently constitutes a movement from adversity to prosperity (89). The emphasis is on the “resolution and reconciliation” of a problem identified at the outset of the narrative. While Hume identifies a range of archetypical characters to be found in comedies, in particular he nominates the ambivalent protagonist, who is both “contemptible” and likeable” (91). Thus while audiences may “condescend” to such a morally objectionable figure and only offer “nominal sympathy” for their plight, they are equally “happy to see them gain their desires” in the resolution of the story (92). Yousef typifies such an archetype. Vain, lazy and self-absorbed, there is much to object to in Yousef’s character and his appalling treatment of his wife. While Sayeh is an infinitely more sympathetic character, she shares Yousef’s tendency towards arrogance, narcissism and confrontation. Sayeh’s predicament, combined with her professionalism, personal determination and headstrong attitude could have made her a very appealing heroine. She fights off an armed robber in an early scene with a can of hair spray; she enters the male dominated space of the building site with complete authority and admonishes the men over their lack of safety protocol. At several points in the narrative she attempts to institute a

166 “ceasefire” with Yousef by making him a meal and buying him flowers. But predominantly Milani portrays Sayeh as argumentative and childish. As the therapist observes while he listens to her unfolding narrative, their arguments could be described as “tit for tat”. However, by conflating many of the objectionable traits of her protagonists, Milani abnegates Yousef’s abusive tendencies and makes Sayeh complicit in their marital dysfunction. Despite the fact that Yousef cuts up Sayeh’s clothes, humiliates her at work functions, prohibits her from working with male colleagues, tricks her into believing he is having an affair and imprisons Sayeh when she does attempt to leave, divorce is never offered as a serious possibility in Ceasefire. Instead the therapist continually reassures Sayeh that Yousef’s “childish” behaviour is not beyond therapeutic assistance.

Therapist: Both of you are educated and cultured people. You’re both successful in your social lives…many things can be changed with a little bit of patience, attention and kindness. Convince him [Yousef] to come here for counselling.

The problem with Milani’s critique of Yousef in Ceasefire is principally related to the solution offered in the second half of the film. While Brown (2011) suggests that Milani still embeds the text with various elements of subversive political commentary, the centralization and adoption of popular psychology as the key strategy for ameliorating gender inequity appears inadequate when reflecting on the broader socio-cultural portrait offered by Milani in the first half of the film. It is not only Yousef who degrades his wife, but also his friend Ahmad, who has physically assaulted four of his previous wives and also Yousef’s father, who has a long history of ill-treating his mother. By shifting the focus from the endemic social problem of domestic abuse within marriage to the individualized nature of Yousef’s therapy, Milani effectively diminishes the necessity of broader, socio- cultural and judicial reform. The therapist becomes a much more important asset for the empowered Iranian woman, than the sympathetic judge or the effective divorce lawyer. When Sayeh mistakenly bursts into the psychiatrist’s office, believing the therapist to be a lawyer, she hurriedly presents him with a range of documents including “testimonies” from her colleagues regarding her ill treatment at the hands of her husband. She also casually remarks that “of course” Yousef has “bribed” some of them in order that they distort the

167 truth and thus do not support her case for divorce. Ziba Mir-Hosseini has extensively researched the inequitable nature of divorce in Iran (2000, 2002, 2007), as well as co- directing a documentary on the subject with British filmmaker Kim Longinotto, called Divorce Iranian Style (1998). As Mir-Hosseini explains, as early as February 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini began planning for the implementation of Sharia law in the provisions of marriage and divorce. Part of the eventual Islamisation of Iranian divorce law meant that “in the absence of a husband’s consent”, a woman could only appeal for divorce on the grounds of insanity and impotence (2002, 116). In 1982, however, the suffering of a wife at the hands of her husband, marital “hardship” (or haraj), also became a consideration on which to accept a request for divorce. As Mir-Hosseini writes of the convention of haraj:

But this neither settled the issue nor solved the problem for women, who continued to face difficulty in the courts. What it did was to replace the husband’s authority with that of the judge, who now had discretionary power to withhold or issue a divorce requested by women. In the absence of a clear definition, a judge could decide when and under what circumstances a marriage could be tolerable or intolerable for a woman. In practice, this not only exacerbated the problem for women but also resulted in contradictory court judgments, and added to the workload of the judiciary (2002, 118).

Various other amendments and bills have been introduced since 1982. However, women’s legal rights remain both compromised by the various patriarchal mandates passed after the Islamic Revolution, and also complicated by the introduction of certain compensatory conventions, such as haraj (Mir-Hosseini 2002). Divorce proceedings thus continue to be an arbitrary and difficult process for women in Iran. Where the desire for divorce is not mutual, women are reliant on the ruling of a judge, with whom they may not curry favour. Such realities are certainly not acknowledged in Ceasefire, where the divorce lawyer’s office remains out of sight, “one floor above” the therapist’s. Sayeh is attempting to start divorce proceedings without Yousef’s consent, and although she anxiously attempts to engage a lawyer, the emphasis is very quickly shifted to the possibility of reconciliation. A

168 “ceasefire” is advocated throughout the film, a reprieve in the war of their marriage, which will see Sayeh continue her relationship with the problematic Yousef. Thomas Schatz (1991) argues that the process identifying the genre of a film is not necessarily predicated on the inclusion of stock characters, settings or plot devices but rather on the “unity of interrelated character types whose attitudes, values and actions flesh out dramatic conflicts inherent within that community” (695). Ceasefire certainly presents a different world-view and moral understanding of patriarchal entitlement and judicial inequity than was offered in the Fereshteh melodramas. In Ceasefire, the resolution of Yousef and Sayeh’s marriage is privileged beyond the importance of Sayeh’s status as an autonomous woman. In many ways, the “happy ending” of Ceasefire invokes the final moments of Milani’s earlier successful comedy What Else Is New? (1992). In this film, the feisty Fereshteh character is expelled from university for her radical analysis of a traditional poem. When she manages to obtain a job with literary agents, the mean-spirited Madame Ezati and the equally domineering Mr Zandi, she is inspired to write her own script, which is primarily autobiographical. Despite the fact that her superiors constantly rebuke Fereshteh for her time wasting and attempting to get her own work published, the film ends suddenly and implausibly with her re-instatement at the university as a student and her marriage to Mr Zandi. The final scene of the film shows Fereshteh dressed in a white, cutting the marriage cake with Mr Zandi, surrounded by the various characters who happily observe the harmonious union of this seeming ill-suited couple. The very nature of these conclusions may suggest that Milani is potentially fulfilling the expectations of the genre (by providing a neat narrative resolution) while simultaneously and subtly undermining the conventions of the romantic comedy. The final scene of Ceasefire, for example, has Sayeh and Yousef talking to camera, narrating the success of their transformed marriage to the counsellor. As the credits begin to roll and the music swells, Yousef and Sayeh begin bickering with each other, finally dissolving into laughter. The laughter may suggest a breaking of character and thus the fantasy of reconciliation. The fact that the credits run over this last scene, also interrupting the “realism” of Yousef and Sayeh’s diegetic world, and that the audience continues to hear the actors’ off-screen laugher when the scene fades to black, may also suggest that there is no genuine solution for Sayeh and Yousef. They are simply play-acting and the “happy

169 ending” is revealed to be pure formula. But despite these inferences, which may support a more resistant, politicised reading of the conclusion, there is little else in the text that evidences a disruption or subversion of the romantic-comedy blueprint. As soon as Yousef enters the domain of the therapy suite, he begins to reveal his vulnerability. He admits to admiring Sayeh’s work ethic but declares that he is jealous that she works within a male-dominated profession. He confesses to “truly loving” his wife but fears the affection is not returned. The therapist then guides Yousef to the couch and explains that within the “adult” Yousef, there exists a more vulnerable, and also more immature, “five year-old” Yousef. The therapist goes on to justify Yousef’s obsessive jealousy over his wife, as a childish fear that Sayeh may find a “nicer play-mate who knows better games to play”. The explanation is enough to initiate Yousef’s dramatic transformation. He agrees on a trial period of separation in which both he and Sayeh can pursue therapy individually. That fact that he listens in on Sayeh’s final therapy session foreshadows his eventual transformation into a receptive and attentive listener. The therapist prescribes for Yousef a ten-day “self-discipline program” which will assist in ridding Yousef of his “inner dictatorship”. Yousef then occupies lengthy scenes writing on a white-board, reconciling the left and right spheres of his brain, the emotional and the logical, the vulnerable inner-child and the authoritarian adult. He writes a letter of apology to his inner-child, expressing his love, not only for the more infantile part of himself, but also for his wife. Once the paroxysm of tears has passed, and Yousef has taken copious notes on how to model “good behaviour”, he emerges from the ten-day program a reformed, sensitive and infinitely more expressive adult. He cleans the house, cooks Sayeh a meal and even announces to the misogynistic friend, Ahmad, that he is now the “ideal husband”. Milani’s solution and the focus on internal, psychological transformation could be theorised as a metaphor for broader social and cultural reform. The authoritarian adult or internalised “patriarchal” father is instructed to relinquish his oppressive tendencies, apologising to the more vulnerable and victimised, and encouraging them to be more vocal and expressive. But the equation of the inner-child with Iran’s female population is a highly problematic metaphor. Throughout the film the five year-old is spoken about as being “jealous”, aggressive and foolish. Thus the allegorical association of the inner child with

170 Iranian women both infantilises them and reduces their capacity to the emotional maturity of a young child. And perhaps even more questionable, is that Milani’s therapeutic solution appears to be reserved for the “cultured and educated” elite. Only the privileged are envisaged as attaining perfect domestic harmony, those who have enough “paid leave” (as Sayeh and Yousef explicitly state that they do) to partake in a ten day program of self- actualisation. The few short scenes of Sayeh undergoing her own video therapy show her stylishly dressed against the luxurious backdrop of the Caspian Sea. Yousef undergoes his own internal “process” in their immaculate and opulent home, with Sayeh mentioning that she has organised paid domestic help for all Yousef’s requirements while she is away and he undergoes the treatment. If Milani is offering therapy as the ideal solution to Iran’s endemic problem of patriarchal abuse within marriage, it is a resolution that would be financially unattainable for most. Ceasefire thus represents a departure from the Fereshteh melodramas that underscored the importance of female companionship, dialogue and vocalisation. Self- actualisation, personal catharsis and domestic harmony are privileged above the broader struggle for gender equality. Milani’s shift from political melodrama to light-hearted entertainment in recent years (Ceasefire was followed by the comedies Tasviyeh hesab (Payback, 2007) and Superstar (2009)) should also be contextualised against Ahmadinejad’s rise to power and his conservative reign as President from 2005 to 2013. While Milani’s melodramas vividly portrayed the socio-cultural difficulties experienced by the archetypal Fereshteh, they also revealed the significant hazards of politicised filmmaking in Iran. Imprisoned and threatened with the death penalty for The Hidden Half, Milani has paid a high price for remaining staunchly vocal about women’s rights in Iran. Milani’s comedies made during Ahmadinejad’s presidency may reflect the increased risks associated with the making of subversive melodramas under his conservative leadership. While her message was undoubtedly diluted by her adoption of certain generic tropes, Ceasefire’s popularity with domestic audiences demonstrated the manner in which the film still resonated with spectators. Despite the comedic tone and emphasis on internal and psychological process and resolution, Ceasefire retains a focus on the endemic “discrimination” against women in Iran. The Fereshteh trilogy was far more successful in revealing the cross-class and broader socio-cultural struggle for women, however,

171 Ceasefire still plays a role in promoting equality for women in Iran. Yousef’s transformation from traditional chauvinist to “ideal” husband may be fanciful and highly improbable, but Milani is still emphasizing the necessity of reform within the culture of contemporary marriage. Whether it is on the streets or within a therapist’s office, Milani continues to offer “talk” as the key solution to the problem of personal and political oppression of Iranian women. This chapter has argued that in the oeuvre of Tahmineh Milani, the genre of melodrama has been most successful in politicizing the plight of women in post- revolutionary Iran, mainly due to the manner in which intra-subjective dialogue between women is centralised and privileged. While it is important to underscore the manner in which films resist the taxonomies of genre, it can also be useful to identify the manner in which generic traits may determine or mediate the representation of women’s identities and their voices. The next chapter continues to examine the role of genre in the facilitation of women’s cinematic voices, in particular how the modes of the documentary and docu- drama may introduce ethical hazards. It emphasizes the notion of authorial presence and the importance of embracing a self-reflexive film aesthetic when meditating notions of the “real”. The final chapter thus assesses the degree to which Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Samira Makhmalbaf are successful in affording their female subjects an authoritative voice and political influence through the processes of non-fictional and film production.

172 Chapter Six Drama, Documentary and the Dialogic: The Author as Mediator of the ‘Real’ in the work of Samira Makhmalbaf and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

In the final scene of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s acclaimed feature, Zir-e poost-e shahr (Under the Skin of the City, 2001), spectators witness the beleaguered character of Touba being filmed by a fictional documentary crew at her work in a textiles factory. An interviewer is questioning Touba about her attitudes towards the imminent presidential election, but exasperated with what she perceives to be the dehumanizing line of enquiry, Touba turns confrontationally to the camera and poses the question: “Who the hell do you show these films to anyway?” This crucial cinematic moment embodies not only the quintessential tension between fictional and factual modes of story-telling in the oeuvre of Bani-Etemad and Iranian cinema more broadly, but it also gestures to the triadic relationship between the filmmaker, the subject and the audience, as well as the ethical implications of documenting Iranian women’s voices in an atmosphere of political uncertainty. And while Bani-Etemad’s fictional works, such as Under the Skin of the City and the previously discussed The May Lady, are undoubtedly successful in depicting the delicate and complex tensions between women’s private and public discourses in post- revolutionary Iran, documenting the real life struggles of non-fictional subjects introduces a host of new ethical concerns regarding representation. How to capture women’s voices without exposing them to further harm or stigmatisation? How to convey their struggles, their poverty and socio-cultural marginalisation without constructing a “victim narrative” that reinstates their alienation and consigns them to a legacy of public humiliation? The cinematic practices of vocalisation, dialogue and political oratory have already been theorised as means of recouping agency in this thesis. Certainly Bani-Etemad’s Ruzegar-e ma (Our Times, 2002) and Makhmalbaf’s Sib (The Apple, 1998) provide those suffering financial and cultural marginalisation with a public platform through which to find their voice and experiment with the process of discoursing. But the authorial presence and mediation of the ‘real’ by both directors complicate the notion that these films automatically endow their female participants with social agency and a political voice.

173 Intervention by the director at times becomes hazardous, inadvertently creating more complexities for participants already encountering social stigmatisation and financial destitution. This chapter thus argues that “voicing” can only be theorised as an agentic process when it follows a collaborative approach to film authorship, embracing a self- reflexive film aesthetic that also exposes the various socio-cultural strictures facing Iranian women. The chapter will begin by situating Bani-Etemad’s filmmaking within the historical framework of Iranian documentary practices more broadly. With reference to Hamid Naficy’s (2011b, 2012b) important research on this topic, it will chart the movement from the institutionalised documentary of the Pahlavi regime with its ideological and authoritarian voice-over, to the post-revolutionary, social protest documentaries informed by dialogic impulses and reality aesthetics. This chapter will then engage with Bill Nichols’ (2001) scholarship on documentary modes, arguing that Bani-Etemad adopts a reflexive and participatory form of filmmaking in Our Times that reinstates the subjective presence of the author-director with self-inscription and authorial signatures. The primary concern of this section of the chapter is the ethics of “voicing” in the context of the documentary and how successful Bani-Etemad is in providing a public platform for her subjects to practice discoursing and oratory. It argues that while Our Times operates convincingly as a self- reflexive form of documentary-filmmaking, it still must carefully negotiate the ethical hazards of filming a ‘real life’ subject and the risks for participants in detailing the trauma of their experiences of poverty and social alienation. The under-represented field of feminist documentary theory and practice has identified the necessity of repositioning the viewer in relation to the female subject, so that spectators avoid the regressive practices of objectification and victimization. The final section of the analysis of Our Times thus draws upon Alexandra Juhasz’s (2003) model of documentary practice as a means of assessing the degree to which Bani-Etemad affords her female subjects an authoritative voice and attempts to re-instate their political influence through the processes of film production.

Non-fiction Film in Iran: From the Authoritarian Voice-Over to the Dialogic Documentary In all of the accounts of early documentary filmmaking in Iran, the influence of the United States Information Services (USIS) is underscored as being central to both the distribution

174 and production of the first Persian-language newsreels and non-fiction cinema (Issari 1989, 172, Keddie & Matthee 2003, 257, Daniel & Akbar Mahdi 2006, 101, Naficy 2011b, 49). Starting with American-made newsreels dubbed into Persian in 1951, USIS trained locals in the production of 16mm and 35mm film production and with the collaboration of the Shah, set-up the Fine Arts Administration (FAA) in Tehran. The lasting effect of the partnership between the USIS and the Pahlavi government, motivated largely by the United States desire to quell the spread of communism in Iran, was the development of an “official” style of documentary that promoted the “authority” and “legitimacy” of the Shah and the Pahlavi regime (Naficy 2011b, 34). The documentary thus became an institutional form of filmmaking in which the off-screen, omniscient voice-over narration was a central feature. As Naficy writes:

This narrative device incorporated into film texts the traditions both of oral storytelling and of extratextual screen translators (dilmaj), who had previously provided live narration, cueing and interpretation of spectators. Voice-over narrative also replicated the monologic discourse of the government in the society at large…whose official viewpoint about what was depicted became the voice-over in an authoritative national accent, uttered by an unseen narrator (2011b, 75).

Naficy goes on to to argue that this institutional form of governmental filmmaking, went onto to influence many of the poetically realist documentaries of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, including those of Ebrahim Golestan. But as noted in Chapter One, the avant-garde and new wave documentaries of the 1960s also broke with many of the conventions of the authoritarian style, experimenting with synchronous sound, music, rhythm and jump-cut editing. Of course with the Islamic Revolution and the severance of the American-Iranian media collaboration, a new form of documentary filmmaking replaced the Pahlavi “statist” style (Naficy 2011b). Amateur documentaries, made by those on the streets during the upheaval of 1978-9, captured the strikes, political campaigns and mass protests on simple 8mm and 16mm cameras (Aitken 2013, 410). Such footage had the unforseen consequence of introducing a new form of political and socially realist mode of documentary filmmaking to Iran. The early films by Kianush Ayyari, Abbas Kiarostami and conveyed

175 the atmosphere and activity of the newly Islamized country, and were funded by State organisations such as the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) and Center for the Intellectual Guidance of Children and Young Adults (Naficy 2012b, 2). While the eight-year war with Iraq produced a large volume of war documentaries (which were largely ideological in nature), it was not until the election of President Khatami in 1997 and the subsequent establishment of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers that documentarians were able to develop any real autonomy in their filmmaking practices (Naficy 2012, 3). As Naficy writes:

Post-Revolutionary documentaries became dialogic, vernacular and accented, as ordinary people were allowed to speak in their own regional and ethnic dialects and personal voices and diction (51).

Naficy’s emphasis on the newly emergent voices of post-revolutionary documentaries is significant, as he details the way in which subjects spoke candidly and directly to camera (2012b, 51-52). Despite, or even perhaps as a reaction against, the Islamised codes of social propriety and modesty, documentary subjects were for the first time centralised as subjectivities in their own right, possessing diverse opinions and unique experiences. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad participated in this socially realist form of filmmaking, starting her career as a documentarian. Working initially within the television format, Bani-Etemad’s extensive documentary credits include: Farhang-e massraffi (Consumer Culture, 1984), Eshteghal-e mohajereen-e roustayee dar shah (Employment of the Rural Migrants in Town, 1985), Tadabir-e eghtesadi-ye jang (Economic Measures at the Time of War, 1986) Tamarkoz (Centralization, 1987), In film-haro be ki neshun midin? (To Whom Will You Show These Films? 1992-1994.) But Bani-Etemad’s persistent interest in the intersection of gender, politics and social conditions meant that her documentary works, as well as her fictional ones, have almost always returned to the issue of women’s role in contemporary Iran and their struggles with motherhood, divorce, drug addiction and poverty. Like so many of her colleagues working in documentary filmmaking in post- revolutionary Iran, Bani-Etemad’s works embody the tension between objective and subjective modes of storytelling. Her fictional features include continual references to the

176 process of documentary making, with both The May Lady and Under the Skin of the City containing faux documentary footage. Chapter One of this thesis discussed the “reality” aesthetic of the New Iranian cinema with the use of non-actors and amateurs, limited or no scripting, the predominance of outdoor locations, the use of stationary cinematography and long takes. The thematic focus of the everyday, the tendency towards de-dramatization and the real time or slow paced narratives also contributed to the “reality” effect of these films. Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn argued that such films countered the State’s “dogmatic constriction of reality” and attested to the “plurality of truth” as experienced by Iranians in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution (2003, 57). Like the emergence of the socially realist dialogic documentaries that proliferated under Khatami, so too the poetically realist fictional cinema emphasized the subjective, diverse and often difficult realities of life under the Islamic state. In many ways the poetically realist cinema of the 1990s and 2000s shares various aesthetic and thematic concerns with its documentary counterparts. Bound by the same impulse to bear witness to Iran’s political upheaval and cultural transformation through an emphasis on individual subjectivities, both documentary and fictional films persistently reference the coalescing of factual and poetic modes of storytelling. Typifying this impulse are Bani-Etemad’s works, in which she not only infuses her socially realist melodramas with references to non-fictional filmmaking, but ensures that her audiences are also reminded of the way in which her documentaries are informed by the principles of narrativising, drama and character identification. As Bani-Etemad explains of fictional and non-fictional filmmaking modes:

I feel they are closely interwoven, sometimes I find it hard to separate them. I can say that while I am doing the research and the shooting, that is when the documentary part comes into the picture. Although I take advantage of all the cinematic and dramatic techniques, I put all my effort to make it as close as possible to the reality of the society (2005, online).

The next section of this chapter references the debates regarding the concepts of “objectivity” and “reality” in the documentary genre and examines how Bani-Etemad

177 reflexively references the limits of factual filmmaking through the devices of self- inscription and the authorial signature. Her documentaries can undoubtedly be categorized as “dialogic” in nature, in that she encourages her participants to speak in their own voices and tell their stories. But they also gesture to Bani-Etemad’s authorial presence, through which she acknowledges the subjective nature of her own cinematic practice and her role in catalyzing the events of the documentary. The next section of this chapter explores the degree of success Bani-Etemad achieves in constructing such a “dialogic” documentary with Our Times, while also privileging the rights and needs of her participants.

‘Our Times’ and the Authorial Presence of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad There has been a great deal of debate regarding the concept of “objectivity” in documentary filmmaking and the definition of the genre itself (Nichols 1991, 2001, 2008, Cowie 1997, 2007, 2011, Renov 2004, Cousins and MacDonald 2005, Bruzzi 2006, Ward 2013, Sayad 2013). Rather than theorizing documentary as a prism through which “reality” can be neutrally filtered and mimetically represented, it is situated as a type of filmmaking informed by various practices of “mediation, interpretation, narration, presentation” (Cowie 2007, 89). Documentary filmmaking is thus understood as a subjective articulation of reality, sustained by the same creative principles that underpin fictional films (Sayad 2013, 50). And yet while it is important to persistently question the “truth claims” of the documentary, it is equally imperative to underscore the unique parameters and specific intentions of the genre. As Paul Ward recently argued, in defining documentary there must be the paradoxical understanding that the director both attempts to “capture reality” while simultaneously creatively shaping the presented version of historical events (2013, 22). It must also be noted that not all documentaries attempt to construct seamless representations of actuality, instead self-consciously pointing to the “uncertainties” surrounding reproduction and authorship (Corner 2008, 22). Bani-Etemad’s Our Times, as will be demonstrated, is an example of such a documentary that endeavors to capture a moment in Iran’s socio-political history while also attesting to the subjective processes of filmmaking. The film is set during the Presidential campaign that took place during May and June 2001, beginning 18 days prior to the election ballot. The incumbent President, Mohammad Khatami, was again promising economic and social reform. Despite disappointment in the electorate that change had been so minimal and protracted, Khatami

178 went on to be re-elected on the 8th of June 2001 with 77% of the vote (Arjomand 2009, 110). Our Times begins by following Bani-Etemad’s sixteen year-old daughter, , and her friends as they canvass for the re-election of President Khatami, under the banner of “The Youth Supporting Khatami”. Spectators witness Baran and her friends attempting to convince the disenchanted on the streets that they should re-elect Khatami, with their efforts often being met with complaints of continuing unemployment and poverty. This first section of the documentary finishes with the young group enthusiastically casting their vote and Bani-Etemad commenting, via voice-over, that “They in fact recognised the election as a chance to speak out their needs and desires.” The documentary then shifts to interviewing the various women who have put themselves forward as presidential candidates, with all of the individuals referencing the rights of women, the “downtrodden” and the poor. There is then an extended section on one particular candidate, Arezoo Bayat, a single mother who lives with her young daughter, Zeinab, and her blind mother. As she is confronted with immanent eviction, the remainder of the film follows Arezoo and her difficulty in locating a new home. With many landlords refusing to accept single mothers and her lowly wage from her work at an insurance company excluding her from much of Tehran’s housing market, the film crew trails Arezoo as she treads the streets of the city, becoming increasingly disheartened at the prospect of securing affordable housing. Bani-Etemad and her crew eventually loan Arezoo the money so that she can move, but when she returns to her work at the insurance company in the final scene of Our Times she discovers she has been dismissed due to her recent absence. The film finishes with a freeze frame of Arezoo’s face, as she recounts the experience of her time during the presidential election. Our Times is peppered by scenes of Bani-Etemad shown driving her car through the streets of Tehran, narrating and reflecting on the events of the documentary via a voice- over commentary. Reminiscent of scenes in The May Lady, the camera is positioned behind Bani-Etemad, so that only her eyes are visible in the rear-view mirror. The re-occurrence of this scene, particularly during the first half of the documentary, re-instates Bani-Etemad’s authorial presence through her on-screen bodily presence and via her voice-over. But as Cecilia Sayad astutely observes in the construction of the directorial presence in cinema: “The staging of authorship normally shifts between assertion and divestiture, palpability

179 and disappearance, exposure and masking” (2013, xxiii). So too Bani-Etemad’s presence in Our Times recreates the dialectical tension between concealing and revealing which was discussed as such a central feature of The May Lady in Chapter Two. In this case it is Bani- Etemad herself who oscillates between asserting her on-screen presence, and then receding into the role of an off-screen observer. The scenes in which Bani-Etemad appears in the car neatly encapsulate this paradox and form a kind of authorial signature throughout the film: as the director she both maintains her authority through her voice-over and her bodily presence, but she also remains “masked”, with spectators only glimpsing the director’s eyes via the reflection in the rear view-mirror. Authorship has been a central emphasis throughout this thesis, with the poetic voice-over and self-reflexivity discussed as means of inscribing the authorial presence into the cinematic narrative. In documentary films authorship continues to be asserted through the use of the voice and an aesthetic of reflexivity, but it also emerges through the unique on-screen interaction between the director, their subject and their audience. Bill Nichols’ now oft-cited theorisation of the “six modes of the documentary” (poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative) is useful in identifying some of the common conventions used in this non-fictional genre and how they position the role of the author/director within the documentary (2001, 99). Although criticised for its reductive categorisation of an increasingly heterogeneous genre (Renov 2004, Bruzzi 2006), Nichols’ schema reveals a particular interest in the authorial presence of the documentary director. Our Times arguably embodies the impulses of all six approaches, however, it most strongly evidences the reflexive and the participatory modes. Nichols defines the “reflexive mode” as that which self-consciously acknowledges the:

…processes of negotiation between the filmmaker and the viewer…rather than following the filmmaker in her engagement with the other social actors, we now attend to the filmmaker’s engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but about the problems and issues of representing it as well (2001, 125).

180 Demonstrating this very strategy, Bani-Etemad begins her film with a voice-over commentary, in which she states:

Spring, 2001: Strange, stormy days. The 8th Presidential Election in Iran. I intended to make a record of that era, but where to start? What point of view? Society was filled with a sense of fear and hope, doubt and trust.

During the course of this voice-over, the camera shifts from a streetscape in which spectators observe people hurrying across a bridge, to the interior of the car, in which we glimpse Bani-Etemad’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Bani-Etemad’s transparent acknowledgement of the problematic questions facing her as a documentary filmmaker (“…Where to start?”, “What point of view?”) exemplifies the way in which she self- reflexively gestures to the processes of film production and the subjective nature of her authorial position. To return to Nichols’ definition of the reflexive mode, “we now attend to how we represent the historical world as well as to what gets represented” (125). In shifting the camera to her own presence, however obliquely or dialectically, Bani-Etemad seems to have already answered her own question. The documentary will be, at least in part, inflected and mediated via her own experiences and viewpoints. This seems to shifts somewhat when Bani-Etemad introduces, again via voice-over, her daughter into the narrative and the campaign efforts of the “The Youth Supporting Khatami” group. But the exuberant emotion of the young campaigners is persistently offset by Bani-Etemad’s far more sobering socio-political reflections in the car. Stella Bruzzi (2006) charts the role of the female voice-over in the context of the documentary, questioning the erroneous conflation of first-person female commentary with autobiography. Bruzzi draws attention to that scholarship which persists in personalizing the female voice-over within documentary, while the male voice-over is theorised as asserting authority, objectivity and universality. As Bruzzi notes, there have been considerable developments in the use of the female voice-over in both the omniscient “voice of God” mode and as the authoritative voice of the female director. But too often, Bruzzi argues, the female director’s voice-over is still associated with access to the “internal self” and the specificity of being of woman. Bruzzi thus uses Chris Markers Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) as an example of the female

181 voice-over that problematizes this conventional association of voice with interiority. While Bani-Etemad’s voice-over asserts her authorial presence and the specificity of her position as a female filmmaker, her “masked” role in the documentary prevents it from becoming an autobiographical work or a personalised essay film. Instead she uses the platform of the voice-over to historically situate the documentary in a specific socio-cultural moment, which she then self-reflexively documents. When the documentary shifts to interviewing the various female presidential candidates, Bani-Etemad is again at pains to reference the production process itself. A scene in which we witness Bani-Etemad’s assistant, Miss Zandi, ringing the various individuals, explaining that they are making a film and inviting them to participate, precedes the interviews with the candidates. Bani-Etemad then explains via voice-over that she was “curious to find out who those women were, what they were going to do and what their motivations were.” She also admits:

…Contact with all the participants was not possible. As well as the fact that none were recognised as qualified and were not prepared to appear in front of the camera; some we could not find and others did not appear in front of the camera due to the objections of their husbands. However the conversations that I had with them revealed that women become candidates to dramatise their difficulties in the society. I decided to go back to Arezoo Bayat, who told me that she was 25 and that she has experienced so many of the problems of women that upon becoming the president, she would understand most of them.

In self-consciously referencing the obstacles in constructing a documentary about female presidential candidates, Bani-Etemad simultaneously points to the socio-cultural difficulties confronting women in Iran more generally, including the issues of modesty, the loss of women’s autonomy through marriage and the political exclusion of women more broadly, in this case the disqualification of the female candidates by Council. As Naficy observes, “Our Times represents both a celebration of reform and a protest against its limited scope but it does so through subtle characters and dialogues, not in the strident, authoritarian language of either doctrinal feminism or Marxism” (2012b, 45). Self-

182 reflexivity in the case of Bani-Etemad’s film is not only an aesthetic device that references the constructed and subjective nature of the documentary mode, but also a strategy that enables Bani-Etemad to implicitly expose the existing socio-cultural and legal strictures that inhibit women’s voices, political participation and public presence. In 1997 Khatami appointed Massoumeh Ebtekar as Iran’s first female vice-president and entrusted her with a portfolio as the minister for the environment18. But despite the persistent lobbying of the Women Factions, and the fact that women had voted in record numbers for Khatami and that there was submission of a petition signed by 163 reformist parliamentarians pushing for women’s participation in policy-making, no women were named as cabinet ministers during Khatami’s second term (Povey & Rostami Povey 2012). While several women were appointed as advisors and there were some important legal reforms, such as lifting the marital age from nine to thirteen for girls, there was great disillusionment regarding women’s lack of proper governmental representation and their inability to institute policy change from within government (Kian 2013, 48; Kian-Thiebaut 2008, 97). It appeared that Khatami’s authority continued to be significantly compromised by the non-elected conservative clerics and hard-line factions who had the power to delegitimize his government (Povey & Rostami-Povey 2012, Osanloo 2009). Khatami’s reformist rhetoric thus largely failed to translate into a widespread improvement of women’s socio-cultural status under the Islamic State. Bani-Etemad’s Our Times very succinctly captures the dual responses to Khatami’s possible re-election, as she records both the excitement and hope of her daughter and the youth movement in general, and the despair and frustration of many women as they continue to labour under a non-representative, discriminatory and marginalising government. Bani-Etemad’s presence is pivotal in negotiating these two polar responses to the electoral process and linking the narrative threads (one following her daughter, the other focusing on Arezoo). Our Times is undoubtedly a documentary that evidences the participatory mode, not only because Bani-Etemad is shown entering the houses of candidates and sitting down at their tables to interview them, but also because of the

18Two other women also indirectly participated in parliamentary affairs from 1997 to 2001; Zahra Shojaee acted as an advisor to the Minister for Interior Affairs and was director of Women’s Affairs, while Azam Nouri was deputy minister to the Minister for Cultural Affairs.

183 manner in which Bani-Etemad finds herself embroiled in the drama of the documentary narrative. Nichols writes that the participatory documentary stresses the:

…actual, lived encounter between filmmaker and subject…how they act towards one another, what forms of power and control come into play and what levels of rapport stem from this specific form of encounter” (2001, 118).

The intimacy spectators sense between Bani-Etemad and her chosen subject, Arezoo, is confirmed when we learn that the director and crew have loaned the single mother money for her to be able to secure accommodation. This turn of events not only demonstrates the strong personal bonds that have developed in the course of production, but also the manner in which Bani-Etemad ceases to be merely an external observer and begins to participate in the life of her subject. In her discussion of authorship in documentary, Sayad argues that the director may assert their presence by catalysing the events of the film, “rather than wait for them to take place in front of the camera” (2013, 73). Certainly Bani-Etemad changes the course of Arezoo’s life trajectory, and thus the course of the documentary narrative, by assisting her financially and securing her accommodation. But Bani-Etemad’s “participatory” role in the documentary precedes the narrative moment in which the director and crew loan their subject the money. The act of filming Arezoo, as she searches for rental accommodation, has seemingly already impacted on Arezoo’s eligibility or appeal as a potential rental candidate. Real-estate agents and landlords appear suspicious of the camera and the fact that Arezoo is followed by a camera crew into strangers’ homes also introduces problems and potentially contravenes the prevailing modesty codes associated with veiling. One landlord tells Arezoo that the crew cannot film inside the house, in another instance the real estate explains to a child that she must warn the occupants of a particular house to put on their veils before they allow the crew inside. While Arezoo’s status as a single mother on a low-wage undoubtedly makes finding accommodation difficult, the presence of the crew appears to be further contributing to Arezoo’s difficulty in appearing as a viable prospect to potential landlords. The line between documenting Arezoo’s social exclusion as an impoverished single mother and contributing to her struggle through the processes of production, appear especially

184 blurred in the final scenes of the film. The crew films Arezoo’s return to work, following her move into her new accommodation. But upon arrival at her workplace, Arezoo discovers she has been dismissed for her recent absence. Arezoo argues that she was forced to take three days leave in order to find a new home, but the boss shouts to the crew to stop filming and believing himself to be off-camera, accuses her of neglecting her work duties, “For what? Because madam’s gone to play in a film!” The fact that the process of film production appears to be impinging negatively on Arezoo’s already stressful and precarious existence introduces various questions regarding the ethics of documenting women’s real- life difficulties within the documentary genre. “Participation” in the subject’s life is thus not only measured by the relationship that unfolds on camera between the filmmaker and their subject, but by the off-screen, long-lasting consequences of recording events and the legacy left by the inevitable intrusion of film production. The next section of this chapter examines the politics of participating in, and thus catalysing, the life events of the documentary subject. It argues that the process of documenting women’s voices and providing a public platform for discoursing may only be empowering if the subjects are given the opportunity to contribute to their representation in the documentary via a collaborative and mutual approach to film authorship.

The Politics of the Participatory: The Ethics of Documenting Women’s Voices There has been extensive literature debating the ethics of documentary filmmaking, with critics first and foremost underscoring the necessity of minimizing harm to participants (Winston 2000, Nichols 2001, Pryluck 1976, 2005). Theorists and practitioners alike have promoted a collaborative approach to filmmaking, where subjects not only provide clear consent, but also actively engage in their representation in the documentary (Pryluck 1976, 28). Another solution offered to the potential exploitation of documentary participation is that of a reflexive aesthetic which gestures to the presence of the filmmaker and processes of production (Nichols 2001, Pryluck 2005, Sanders 2010)19. But does this self-reflexive

19 The “observational” mode of documentary is often identified as being most ethically hazardous, due to its convincing mediation of a reality aesthetic and its concentration on the private lives of the social actors (Nichols 1991, Pryluck 2005). The observational mode is usually characterized by the absence of any voice- over commentary, supplementary music, interviews, historical re-enactments or to-camera expositional pieces. Instead, spectators appear to witness “lived experience spontaneously” unfolding before the camera (Nichols 2001, 110). But as Nichols suggests, does this form of documentary promote voyeurism, exploit the good will of the participants and disingenuously promote an objective form of “reality”? (2001,111).

185 aesthetic completely protect the social actor from “harm”? And is it really possible to mitigate the power imbalances between the director and their subjects purely via a formal approach? As Pryluck queried in his seminal essay on documentary ethics, “are we asking sacrifices on one side for a positive good on another? What is the boundary between society’s right to know and the individual’s right to be free of humiliation, shame and indignity?” (1976, 24). In an interview with the World Socialist Website (WSWS) in 2005, Bani-Etemad revealed that the structure of Our Times was formed during the process of production.

WSWS: Our Times begins as a film about your daughter and her friends campaigning for Khatami in the presidential election, then it changes course and becomes a film about an oppressed woman. It seems as though you had found a more tragic story, a more crucial story? RBE: Exactly. There are many ways to look at the election. I chose to look at it from the point of view of youth and women. It was in the course of pursuing that, that this structure almost imposed itself on me, I decided to take a different direction. It was a matter of luck. WSWS: It was a matter of luck to meet her, but not to follow her situation. That was a moral and artistic choice.

Bani-Etemad discusses the development and centralisation of Arezoo’s story as “luck”, a chance happening that “imposed itself upon” her. But as the WSWS interviewers, Joanne Laurier and David Walsh, point out, Bani-Etemad’s decision to document Arezoo’s story was also a “moral and artistic choice”. In the film itself Bani-Etemad is perhaps more transparent about her motives in interviewing the various presidential candidates. When one of the interviewees explains she only agreed to undertake the interview due to Bani- Etemad’s “noble name” and Miss Zandi’s “hard-work”, and that “important” candidates would have “definitely asked to see your questions [before the interview], look into them and study them”, Bani-Etemad immediately responds with; “In which case we won’t interview them any more”. Bani-Etemad’s reply reveals that her central motivation in

186 interviewing the women is to capture their spontaneous and unrehearsed thoughts about their own socio-political status and the position of women in Iran more broadly. But two central ethical issues arise from this approach to documentary filmmaking, in which participants are not privy to the interview questions or the broader trajectory of the documentary itself. The first problem is related to the production process and the logistical complications brought about by the physical presence of a production crew, in Arezoo’s case the fact that the attendance of the camera crew potentially further alienates her from landlords and may also be a contributing factor in the loss of her the job at the insurance company. The second issue is that of representation, and whether or not the recording of Arezoo at her most distressed and vulnerable is a form of exploitation in which she becomes victimised by her social circumstances and additionally by the narrative Bani- Etemad constructs. One could plausibly argue that in her attempt to construct an emotive and compelling portrait of the poverty, discrimination and isolation facing single mothers, Bani- Etemad creates more obstacles for the already struggling and highly marginalised Arezoo. The decision to loan Arezoo money for accommodation, after being persistently rejected by landlords, may have been motivated by the recognition that filming Arezoo’s search for housing had made the process more stressful and protracted. The insinuation by the company’s manager, that Arezoo had neglected her work to participate in the documentary, also infers that Arezoo’s role in the production may have cost the subject her job. But Arezoo would have been excluded from the rental market irrespective of whether she had a crew trailing her or not, and in many ways, her fortunate connection with Bani-Etemad at least gave her the means to access accommodation at a time when she was facing imminent homelessness. The housing crisis in Tehran has been well documented, with population growth, inflation and high interest rates making the housing market particularly unaffordable for low-income earners (Amirahmadi 1990, 93, Fanni 2006, 408, Karimi 2013, 197). Not only was reasonably priced accommodation difficult to obtain under Khatami’s reign, but loans also became unaffordable. While it is impossible to quantify the degree of stigmatisation Arezoo experienced due to the presence of the camera crew in her search for accommodation, it is highly probable due to her status as a single woman and her low income that she would have still struggled to obtain anything more than the most basic

187 accommodation. What is important to note is that Bani-Etemad does not disguise the ethical hazards of filmmaking and their impact on Arezoo’s life. As Robert A. Clift argues, those documentaries that attempt to erase the ethical costs of the production process are perhaps the most disingenuous, as they fail to address the “causalities in their march toward greater public knowledge” (2011, 96). Just as Bani-Etemad referenced the arbitrary and subjective nature of the production processes of documentary filmmaking at the beginning of Our Times, so too she is transparent in revealing the personal costs for her subject in participating in the documentary and her willingness to financially compensate for this additional suffering. As it is impossible to quantify the additional burden that the documentary production placed on Arezoo’s life, it is perhaps more useful to examine the manner in which Bani-Etemad approaches her subject and how she negotiates the power balance between her role as director and Arezoo’s participation as the key subject. How does she position the viewer in relation to her subject? And what degree of authority and voice does she lend Arezoo in the process of exposing her story? In addressing the concerns of Arezoo’s representation in Our Times, it is important to return to the issue of documentary aesthetics and the degree of self-reflexivity that the film exhibits. This chapter has already argued that Bani-Etemad privileges a reflexive mode and participatory role in Our Times with her on-screen presence and authorial signatures. But as Stella Bruzzi (2006) argues, a film can employ the devices of the interview, conversations with the filmmaker and music and still operate largely as an observational documentary. Bani-Etemad’s portrait of Arezoo thus presents many of the ethical problems associated with observational documentaries, while not conforming to all of the practices associated with this cinematic mode. For Our Times undoubtedly shifts in its emphasis and aesthetic when it begins to exclusively trail Arezoo. The interviews with the presidential candidates were relatively uniform, with the subjects seated in their homes, framed in mid- shot, answering stock questions about their aspirations as political candidates. But the narrative assumes a far more intimate, observational atmosphere when it begins to follow Arezoo, with the single mother no longer speaking to camera about her endeavours, but going about her parenting and work at the insurance company, as if the camera were no longer present. In the initial scenes Arezoo smiles self-consciously, sensitive to the presence of the camera. The crew follows her into real estate offices, down busy streets,

188 into taxis and into the homes of potential landlords. Often the camera trails her at distance, so that her interactions are observed from afar, again heightening the incidental atmosphere and observational mode of the documentary. Even when spectators hear Bani-Etemad’s voice via a commentary, the film remains trained on Arezoo’s image, and there are no longer any “authorial signature scenes” of Bani-Etemad in her car. The first half of the documentary experimented with the rhythm and tempo, speeding up the footage of the youth group as they campaigned, and freezing the footage at other times. But in this section of the film, there are frequently long takes and long shots as the camera lingers on Arezoo. The scenes in which Arezoo relates to her mother and her daughter are particularly intimate, with Arezoo sending her daughter out of the room as she cries in despair at finding nowhere to live. After several days of looking for a tenancy and being persistently rejected, Arezoo arrives home, only to collapse, sobbing: “This is why I despise men, all of them.” In the interviews, Arezoo’s distress continues to be evident as she details the intimate events of her divorce from her first husband, Mohsen, Zeinab’s father, who was eventually jailed for his heroin addiction. She also shares the painful story of her second marriage, which also ended due to drug addiction and imprisonment. There is no doubt that Arezoo’s story is compelling and that she is a particularly articulate and engaging social subject. But as Alexandra Juhasz argues in her essay, “No Woman is an Object: Realising the Feminist Collaborative Video”, documentaries that attempt to reveal socio-cultural injustice have the potential to re-instate the processes of oppression and marginalisation. In discussing her role as the director of the film Released (2000), which is composed of five short videos exploring women’s experiences in prison, Juhasz stresses the importance of eschewing victim narratives:

Produced with the intention to reveal and heal injustice and pain, such performances serve primarily to cement the systems of domination, suffering, and pleasure that form the natural mechanics of both the original punishment and its depiction. In this way, the documentary exchange is also like the prison. Both systems weaken some and strengthen others, using technologies of vision and distance, all the while buttressing hegemonic power. In both the prison and the documentary, the one charged with vision wields power. Distance and difference, in both scenes, force or

189 coerce silence and testimony in turn. Class, race, and gender relations structure these interactions and are thereby solidified. And, by maintaining the classic position of subject/object, the victim documentary also necessarily reestablishes the inside/outside binarism that is not merely metaphoric but definitive of imprisonment (Juhasz 2003, 73).

The question is then by representing Arezoo as powerless to effect systematic change, has Our Times entered the hazardous terrain of the “victim documentary” in which socio- economic suffering is re-perpetuated through the filmmaking process? Juhasz and feminist scholarship of the documentary in general (Lesage 1984, Waldman & Walker 1999, Crow 2000, Juhasz 2003, Smaill 2012) have identified the need to reposition the viewer so that the spectator is provided with alternatives to the voyeuristic practices of objectification and victimization. It is useful to apply Juhasz’s schema as a means of assessing Arezoo’s representation in the film and the degree of authority and voice that Bani-Etemad affords Arezoo in Our Times. Interestingly, the scenes of Arezoo’s increasingly desperate search for accommodation are interspersed by (the off-screen) Bani-Etemad encouraging Arezoo to continue to reflect on her aspirations as a presidential candidate. “Tell me why you decided to become a candidate?” Bani-Etemad asks Arezoo, even as the single mother sits on a street corner, eating her lunch, between visiting real estate agents. Each time that Bani- Etemad questions Arezoo in this manner, the subject’s face lights up as she recounts how she would achieve greater housing opportunities for single mothers. The processes of hypothesizing and strategizing appear to energise the deflated Arezoo. As she confides to Bani-Etemad:

In my dreams I saw myself amongst the people. I thought that if I really became president I would understand all people, because I’ve been in every situation they have – poverty, uncomfortable living, addiction, and unemployment.

Later, sitting on the street, she continues: “I just wanted people to listen to what I had to say.” In persisting with the thread regarding Arezoo’s interest in politics and her own

190 personal aspirations as a politician, Bani-Etemad not only provides her subject with a platform to practice oratory, but she and the implied audience of the documentary, become the attentive listeners that Arezoo has so long desired. With women largely discounted from the formal political process, through their disqualification by the , Bani- Etemad develops an alternative public forum for women’s political voices to be publically heard. Between 2002- 2004, Our Times was shown at film festivals in such diverse locales as Boston, , Taiwan, Seoul and Locarno. As Bani-Etemad said in an interview at the time of the film’s release, “I want to set a precedent, so that all the documentaries that are being made and that don’t have a place to be shown can finally find an audience” (June 7, 2002, Texas Observer). Her commitment to distributing and screening Our Times provides an avenue for women to be re-enfranchised with a political voice and an attentive, receptive audience. While Bani-Etemad and Arezoo may be unable to overhaul the systematic patriarchal privilege of the Iranian government and its arbitrary and unjust exclusion of women, as an established and respected filmmaker, Bani-Etemad is able to exercise agency in promoting the capability of women as political thinkers through the medium of the documentary. Our Times, as Hamid Naficy notes, is believed to be one of the first documentaries to have been distributed commercially under the Islamic Republic and was screened in “fourteen theatres nationwide” (2012, 46). In her account of a “packed” screening at the Khanehy-e Honarmandan, or the Arts Forum, in Tehran, scholar and commentator Naghmeh Sohrabi (2002) writes that due to the popularity of Bani-Etemad, all seats were taken in the regular hall, and thus she and many others were forced to watch the film from a rehearsal room. Sohrabi describes Our Times “as an alternative form of protest”, which gives “dignity” to her subjects. Comparing the film to Under the Skin of the City, and in particular to the role of Touba, Sohrabi writes:

Life constantly works at breaking her but not once does Bani-Etemad allow us to victimize her, not once does she allow the audience to give credence to their superior notions of being saviors of the less privileged. She does so by creating a complex portrait of a woman whose womanhood in the Islamic Republic of Iran is merely one of her many dimensions (2002, online).

191

To return to the opening theme of this chapter and the query posed by Touba regarding the possible audiences of such documentaries, it appears that Bani-Etemad is in the unique position of having her films viewed by both domestic and international viewers. Bani- Etemad thus creates the opportunity for Arezoo’s story to be heard not only via the international film festival circuit, but also more importantly within her own country and by her fellow Iranians. The distribution of Our Times both within Iran and abroad, in which almost an hour of the film is dedicated solely to Arezoo’s story, demonstrates Bani- Etemad’s commitment to finding an audience for her documentary subjects, in which their stories can finally be “heard” by large and diverse audiences. Sohrabi underscores Bani-Etemad’s refusal to “victimize” Touba, via the complexity of the social portrait she constructs in Under the Skin of the City and that fact that her oppression is “merely” one facet of “her many dimensions”. And it appears that Bani- Etemad does afford the same degree of “dignity” to Arezoo in Our Times in encouraging her subject to recount not only her personal history, but also to discuss it within socio- political terms. Arezoo is thus portrayed as a woman negotiating highly difficult circumstances, but capable as well of interpreting them in socio-political terms and theorising solutions. The film finishes with a freeze-frame of Arezoo’s face, as she stands outside her workplace, having just been dismissed by her former boss. Her expression is one of contained grief and exhaustion. Via a voice-over, Arezoo is given one final opportunity to speak:

Mrs Bani-Etenad, I am Arezoo… On the last day of registration for the Presidential Candidacy, when I went to register I thought that people should hear what I had to say, because my thoughts were similar to theirs and my life experience was similar to theirs. On the day of the elections, in the midst of moving house, I lost my birth certificate. I couldn’t vote and the president was elected anyway. And you made a film. And I said some things. But there is still a great deal more I want to say. Maybe one day I will write it all down or maybe…

After Arezoo’s distressing experiences of having lost both her home, her employment and

192 her right to vote (and being filmed in the process), Bani-Etemad ultimately privileges her subject’s voice and her desire for an audience, with the final words of the documentary attesting to her continuing desire to speak out. Not only does Arezoo acknowledge that she “said some things”, she admits to wanting to “say more”. The “voice” of the documentary has shifted from that of Bani-Etemad’s authorial narrative to that of Arezoo’s story, thus replacing Bani-Etemad as the key orator. This final scene avoids victimizing or objectifying Arezoo’s suffering, and instead positions her as the authoritative, speaking subject. It does so through two strategies, the freeze frame and the voice-over. No longer viewed observationally from a distance or in an intimate close-up in which spectators witness her spontaneous displays of distress, Arezoo’s power in the film’s final moment emanates instead through the timber of her voice; the conviction of her tone and her emphasis that “people should hear what I have to say” and the fact “there is a still a great deal more I want to say.” The accent is almost entirely on the act of speaking itself, both acoustically through the medium of the voice-over and via Arezoo’s recurrent use of the word “say” (goft). Indeed her voice remains in this scene unwavering in its strength and assurance – inflected with the notes experience and resilience. Chapter Two discussed the importance of Kaja Silverman’s (1988) theorisation of the female voice-over as disrupting the ingrained hermeneutic codes of dominant cinema, by situating the female subject beyond the objectifying gaze of the spectator. By “dislodging the female voice from the female image” (166), Silverman argued that women were freed from representational conventions which limit female characters to immanence, sexuality and passivity. So too in this scene, Arezoo’s representation via the freeze frame and the voice-over places the emphasis on Arezoo’s agency, capability and socio-political judgment. The fact that her voice was presumably recorded in post-production also implies that Arezoo has at last been provided with the opportunity to speak in a more considered, reflective, and perhaps even rehearsed, manner. Just like President Khatami, who in several scenes is shown speaking to large crowds, so too Arezoo is permitted the opportunity to speak outside of the urgency and distress surrounding her search for accommodation. This thesis has already discussed the significance of the voice-over in terms of providing subjects with an authoritative and galvanizing medium to articulate their identity, their desires and their political hopes for the future. In exploring alternatives to the “victim narrative” Juhasz (2003) proposes that the

193 voice be used as a means of conveying the “strain”, “fatigue” and “wariness” of the subject’s experience, but in tones that are “not fearful, are notably non-didactic, and are rarely pathetic” (90). As Juhasz writes:

Instead these women present themselves as well-qualified judges of a systematic condition that they have experienced personally. So, in our video, the viewer or documentary is not set up to judge the victim. Rather, the victims judge the system(s) (2003, 90)

Certinaly Arezoo’s voice at the conlusion of the film fulfill’s Juhasz criteria for a non- victim narratives in that tenor of her voice denotes resilience and force, despite the manner in which political system has failed her. Just as Sohrabi identified the importance of “dignity” in Bani-Etemad’s characterizations, and the impossibility of audiences condescending to a figure such as Touba, so too Juhasz stresses the importance of the voice in allowing the subject to tell her own story, while avoiding the objectification and judgment by the viewer. In foregrounding Arezoo’s voice in the final moments of Our Times, Bani-Etemad effectively positions her participant as an authority on women’s suffering, while not categorizing Arezoo as a victim herself. In addressing herself to Bani- Etemad directly, “who made a film”, while she, as the social actor, “said some things”, the emphasis is placed on the reciprocal process of filmmaking. While the practice of joint authorship or collaborative representation may not be fully realized here, in the final moments of the film the participant is privileged as the expert voice, capable of articulating suffering and envisaging socio-economic alternatives. Arezoo’s final monologue also could be theorized as a gesture of consent, addressed to Bani-Etemad, in which she provides the filmmaker with permission to construct the “film”. The conclusion to Our Times thus exemplifies the principles discussed by Naficy when he described the “dialogic” impulse of the social protest documentaries, in which the subject’s unique voice is privileged above an authoritarian, omniscient or even poetic voice-over narration. In allowing Arezoo to complete the documentary in her own words, the social actor and the director enter into a dialogue in which they jointly inscribe women’s experiences in Iran. As Naficy writes,

194 If men and women were forced literally to adopt an averted gaze due to Islamicate values and their visual and collective regimes of modesty, the voice became more direct, forceful and individualized (2012b, 52).

This final scene embodies the very use of voice that Naficy identifies at work in the social protest documentary. In the freeze frame Arezoo epitomizes modesty with her black hijab and averted gaze, the frame revealing only her face and the top of her veiled shoulders. But her voice, in direct opposition, remains unconstrained as she completes her story for Bani- Etemad and the audience more generally. Interestingly, the final words of Arezoo’s monologue are “Maybe one day I will write it all down or maybe….” The repetition of the term “maybe” infuses this scene with Bani-Etemad’s characteristic element of ambiguity and indeterminacy. While Arezoo’s speech appears to re-instate her self-belief and the importance of her voice, there also remains an element of ambivalence; a recognition of the unknown, where even defiance and continued struggle do not guarantee freedom or better outcomes. In their discussion of the prevalence of the freeze-frame in Iranian cinema, Chaudhuri and Finn (2003) discuss the strategy as that which “suspends interpretation”, allowing the image to remain open and ambiguous. Arezoo’s frozen image, mirroring her final word of “maybe”, also points to the territory of the unknown and unknowable; namely Arezoo’s future prospects, her employment, her ability to care for her daughter and disabled mother, and her own emotional welfare. While it was argued that in a film such as The May Lady the dialectical impulses of concealing and revealing meant that the protagonist’s identity was always “glimpsed” and remained ambiguous, in Our Times it is the material reality that is positioned as unknowable and incomprehensible. The protagonist can only hazard a guess at her future prospects, her personal determination and strength being persistently off set by the unpredictable and problematic nature of socio-political reality in post-revolutionary Iran. Samira Makhmalbaf’s docu-drama, The Apple (1998), also concludes with a freeze- frame image, although the allegorical implications in this case are arguably far more didactic and hopeful. Grasping an apple, the symbol of “life and knowledge” (1991, 18) according to Makhmalhbaf, the blind mother in The Apple appears to be embracing her new found mobility and community integration. But what is the relationship between this final

195 image and the “reality” that Makhmalbaf is attempting to represent? And what unique challenges and advantages does the docu-drama genre bring to the project of storytelling and providing women with a vehicle for expressing their personal and political voices? The next section of this chapter discusses the centrality of the docu-drama mode to Iranian cinema and the hazards that such a reality aesthetic introduces when attempting to reconstruct a socio-historical narrative.

Samira Makhmalbaf and the making of a docu-drama, ‘The Apple’ Samira Makhmalbaf entered film production early in life, as the daughter of one of Iran’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. She was only eight years old when she appeared in her father’s production, Bicycle-ran (, 1988), graduating to the role of assistant director with the making of Sokut (The Silence, 1998). Samira left school at fifteen to pursue filmmaking exclusively, with her father and stepmother, the filmmaker Marzieh Meshkini, establishing the Makhmalbaf Film School. The government’s refusal to financially support the teaching college meant that the Makhmalbafs were forced to use the family home as the school’s base, which also doubled as the office for the production arm of the family business, the (MFH). In the four years that the MFH operated in Iran, Samira directed two short films before embarking upon her first feature at eighteen, Sib (The Apple, 1998). She then went on to direct Takhteh-Siah (, 2000), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2000. The rest of the family were also very productive members of the MFH: Mohsen made Nun-o goldoon (, 1996), Samira’s sister, Hana, directed The Day My Aunt was Ill (1997), Samira’s brother, Maysam, made the behind-the-scenes film How Samira Made Blackboards (2000) and Meshkini directed Roozi ke zan shodam (The Day I Became a Woman, 2000). But with A Moment of Innocence attracting State censorship and their autonomy increasingly restricted, the Makhmalbafs started basing their films in Afghanistan, with Mohsen directing Kandahar (2001) and Hana undertaking production on Buda az sharm foru rikht (Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame, 2007). Samira also made several films in Afghanistan, including her short film “God, Construction and Destruction” which appeared as part of the international co-production, 11 September (2002) and her final two features to date, Panj-e asr (At Five O’clock in the Afternoon, 2003) and Asbe du-pa (Two-legged Horse, 2008).

196 The family left Iran in 2005 in protest against President Ahmadinejad’s election and have been permanently based in since 2009, where they continue to operate MFH. The concept for The Apple took shape when Samira Makhmalbaf saw a television report detailing the story of twin girls, Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi, who had been taken from their parents after being imprisoned in their home for all of their twelve years. Makhmalbaf contacted the welfare agency responsible for the family and was able to gain access to the girl’s father. Once his permission had been granted she immediately undertook production, following the girls’ first eleven days after their release from the department of welfare back into the family home. The film, epitomising the spirit of the docu-drama, is a form of historical re-enactment, with the family recreating the day’s events for the camera and devising their own script. All the actors play themselves with the exception of a handful of minor parts, which are performed by Makhmalbaf’s extended family (Johnson 1999, 10). The realist aesthetic of the film is not only heightened by the lack of scripting and the use of non-actors but also by the varying quality of the footage itself and the fact that Makhmalbaf uses both 35mm and video stock. It is worth including a brief summary of the opening of the film and the changing types of footage, as a means of demonstrating how the film straddles both documentary and fictional drama practices. The Apple opens with an extended scene, filmed on 35 mm, in which neighbours sign a petition addressed to the department of welfare, regarding the imprisonment of the twelve year-old twins, who have effectively been imprisoned in their home by their highly religious father and blind mother. We learn that the girls have “never been let out”, that they cannot speak and haven’t had a “bath for years”. The petition is framed in a close-up shot, so that spectators only witness the hands of those signing the petition as the opening credits roll. An apple is then placed on top of the petition as the title appears on the screen. The next scene is filmed on a handheld video camera and follows the father, Mr Naderi, and the social worker, Mrs Mohamed, as she explains why the department has had to remove the girls from their custody. The father is then taken to the girls, where another social worker and a journalist are asking the girls a number of questions. The girls clearly struggle to understand the questions being posed to them with Massoumeh attempting to mouth the microphone and Zahra murmuring “mama” plaintively and repetitively. The footage then changes again, this

197 time to an even grainier video quality, which Makhmalbaf (Johnson 1999, 18) explains is the original televised documentary that she decided to insert into the film. The documentary footage shows Mr Naderi being interviewed, while the girls undergo a developmental assessment. The footage changes once more when the mother is escorted into the welfare centre. Makhmalbaf states that because she intended to capture the girls’ first moments after being released by the department, the initial section of film was shot on video before she had access to 35mm film stock (Johnson 1999, 19). This video footage thus shows the mother (completely covered in her chador) being reunited with her daughters after their period in care. Mrs Naderi appears angry that Zahra and Moussoumeh are unveiled and even when the social worker explains that it was required in order for their hair to be washed and cut, their mother furiously instructs them to return their veils, calling the girls “little bitches”. Mrs Naderi then requests that the girls accompany her home and promises that she will wash and properly care for them. The girls cry and murmur incoherently as the mother covers their hair with their hijabs and ushers them out of the centre, with their father. As we see the family leave the centre there is a sinister soundscape of murmuring and the footage is highly pixelated. The rest of the film is shot in 35mm with the first scene in the higher-grade footage showing the family returning home. Spectators witness Mr Naderi escorting his wife and two daughters into the house, before locking both the inner and outer courtyard doors and leaving to get ice and bread. Later that day the social worker arrives for her first visit, bringing with her the gifts of a mirror and a hairbrush for the twins. But on discovering that the father has again locked up his daughters, she releases the girls and instead imprisons Mr Naderi and his wife in their place. The rest of the film follows the girls’ adventures in the “outside world”, in particular their purchase of a bag of apples which they share with some new friends in the park (played by Makhmalbaf’s cousins), and the anguish of their father and mother, as they argue between themselves and attempt to justify their actions to the social worker. The film concludes with Mrs Mohamed giving the house key to the twins and allowing them to free their parents, after which they take their father to buy them watches, leaving their disabled mother to slowly follow them. The final scene, as aforementioned, shows Mrs Naderi grasping an apple in her hand, which has been dangled above her head on a string by a mischievous young neighbour.

198 Makhmalbaf acknowledges that The Apple is a film composed of both factual and fictional elements, as she explains in an interview with Sheila Johnson:

It is a documentary in the sense that everybody is playing themselves and I didn’t tell them what to do or say. And also because everything that happens relates to an element in their own lives. But it is fiction in that it has a storyline and some of it comes from our imagination, like the idea of having the social worker lock the father up (1999, 19).

Makhmalbaf also infuses the text with allegorical elements that heighten the fictional quality of the film, most obviously the inclusion of the apples, but also the symbolic objects of the mirrors, the watches and the images of flowers that the girls make with their hands. One could argue that the change to 35mm, after the initial scenes of video footage, clearly signals this shift in mode from documentary to dramatization. The aerial perspective, which enables spectators to view the family from a privileged vantage point, breaks from the hand-held camera work that preceded it, thus creating yet an another indication that the performance taking place has been staged and carefully choreographed. Arguably the shift from video footage to 35mm is Makhmalbaf’s attempt to acknowledge the film’s fictive parameters and gestures to the performative nature of the re-enactment. Alternatively, the use of the various types of footage could be theorised as a collapsing of the documentary and dramatic modes, in which fictional elements coalesce indistinctly with the more factual moments in the narrative. It could be argued that the inclusion of the lower grade video footage serves to blur the boundaries between the circumstances as represented in the original, televised documentary, and the reality constructed by the participants in the dramatic re-enactment. It is difficult to decipher, for example, if the scenes filmed inside the welfare centre of Mrs Naderi being reunited with Zahra and Moussemeh are a continuation of the documentary or a staged re-enactment. Paul Ward discusses the ethical implication of including archival footage within a drama- documentary, arguing that such a practice “authenticates” the fictional elements of film, creating a third cinematic space, the “irreal” (2008, 192). The irreal is neither the “objective

199 reality” of the historical event itself nor the dramatic re-enactment, but a “recognizable reality” that has been derived from the original happening. The “irreal” is thus a distinctive element of the docudrama (or documentary dramatization or drama documentary, as it is alternatively termed), where the boundaries between the subjective and objective modes of storytelling are blurred and challenged. Unlike most documentaries, the docudrama “does not assert documentary truth-values about the historical world, [but] it still maintains a close connection to documentary” through its reference to actual events and historical records (Lipkin 2002, 4). But the docu- drama may be differentiated from the documentary genre by its reliance on re-enactment, and the manner in which it approaches historical events, not as spontaneously captured, but via dramatic reconstruction. While the term “docudrama” is still contested, Leslie Woodhead’s definition of the mode as a “spectrum” with varying “gradations” of fact and fiction is useful (2005, 445). Woodhead’s definition thus points both to the versatility of the genre and the manner in which the filmmakers both employ and resist documentary conventions and practices. But Woodhead’s discussion of the docudrama, like so many theorists, centres on the televisual format, and does not reference feature length films. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple is unique in some respects in that it was intended to be viewed by audiences theatrically. Not only that, the film would be distributed through international film festival circuits, eventually winning the Jury Prize at Cannes. The reception of Makhmalbaf’s film outside of Iran is an issue addressed by Lindsey Moore (2005), in which she argues the film may be erroneously framed as a documentary on the international film festival circuit. Certainly the issue of the cross-cultural reception of Iranian films extends beyond The Apple and is pertinent when discussing many of the art-house films circulated globally at the time. As previously discussed, the heightened realist aesthetic became a widespread feature of Iranian cinema in the 1990s and 2000s, with several directors re-creating actual events with the use of non-actors (particularly children), improvisation and natural mise-en- scene. Although it is important not to conflate the poetically realist cinema that proliferated under Khatami with the specific practices of the docu-drama, it is useful to note that Iranian art cinema in general has been underpinned by this interest in the representation of reality and the “real”. As discussed in Chapter Two, Naficy (2000, 2012b) argues that such a style

200 was influenced in part by the Iranian socio-cultural practices of veiling and dissimulation, where communication is layered, lyrical and dialectical. Meaning can be both inferred and negated simultaneously, with social rituals composed of public and private discourses. But as Naficy notes, the translation of these socio-cultural practices to cinema, may:

create problems both for the authenticity of the documentary and the reality of the fictional…[in which] spectators are always kept in an ambiguous position having to constantly parse the truth of fiction from the fiction of realism” (2012b, 189).

The next section of this chapter discusses the docudrama as both a political vehicle for new and alternative historical accounts and modes of performance, and alternatively as an ethically hazardous mode that contravenes the ethical standards of protecting participants as they attempt to represent and enact their own stories.

The Docu-Drama: Cinematic Subversion or Ethical Hazard? The docu-drama has long been theorised as a potentially subversive cinematic space that facilitates new, non-hegemonic narratives (Mulvey 1989, Rapping 1997, Speer 2013). As opposed to the documentary, in which the subject is usually filmed undergoing “spontaneous lived experience”, there is the potential within the docudrama that subjects may devise and rehearse their own roles, thus engaging and participating in their own representation. Critics have argued that docu-dramas are also better at indicating their own positionality, self-reflexively referencing the limits of “objective” reproduction through their blending of factual and fictional sources (Speer 2013, 7). In his assessment of Samira Makhmalbaf’s career in 2001, Dabashi heralds the young filmmaker as the voice of a new generation of filmmakers that promotes a “vision of reality with no claim to a monopoly on truth, an insistence on the particular, and no patience for the universal” (267). The docu- drama thus becomes, for Dabashi, the ideal vehicle for representing the contested, mediated and complex nature of Iranian social reality as a form of protest against ideological authoritarianism. But how does Makhmalbaf, aside from her employment of various forms of footage, infer this multiplicity of social and narrative truths? And how does the docu- drama actually enable a subversive form of storytelling?

201 Naficy argues that The Apple primarily critiques the role of veiling, not only through its aesthetic impulses, but via its thematic emphasis on the restrictive nature of hijab (2012b, 128). Naficy discusses the manner in which Makhmalbaf persistently references Iran’s modesty codes, not only via the presence of the sartorial veil in the film, but through the imprisoning nature of , which allows the father to keep his daughters captive.“In showing the father’s draconian restriction, Makhmalbaf has turned a system of modesty into a restrictive mise-en-scene” (2012, 128). The scene in which the social worker frees the girls and encourages them to leave the oppressive confines of the courtyard and explore the outside world becomes a form of symbolic liberation. The film thus represents the possibilities of infusing an historical account with allegorical elements as a means of constructing a certain socio-cultural account. Interestingly, despite Makhmalbaf’s emphasis on the insidious patriarchal mores that determine the girls’ closeted existence, the environment outside the courtyard is deemed a safe, pleasurable and normalising space. In polar opposition to the concept of a hermetic paradise, in The Apple, it is the enclosed space of the Naderi household that is positioned as claustrophobic, and emotionally and culturally debilitating. When the girls try to return to their parents, the social worker persists in sending them back out onto the street, “Go back outside, children. I have had enough. Go out and make some friends.” Supporting this notion that the world outside the imprisoning walls of the Naderi household is nurturing and liberating, Makhmalbaf contrives that a boy selling ice creams is the first individual the girls encounter once freed by Mrs Mohamed. The girls steal an ice cream from the young boy, and although the vendor is initially angry that the girls cannot pay, a neighbour immediately volunteers the twenty tomans to cover the treat. As a gesture of good will Massoumeh also gives the boy her mirror and comb and thus participates in one of her first successful commercial and social transactions in the “outside” world. The girls go on to buy apples, to learn the rules of hopscotch with their new friends in the park and to learn to covet such fashionable objects as wristwatches. Although there are moments of fear (Zahra shrieks hysterically as she experiences the motion of a swing for the first time) and social embarrassment (Massoumeh impulsively hits her new friend in the park with her apple but quickly apologises), the girls appear to be slowly integrating and developing as social individuals. They not only have Mrs Mohamed as their advocate, but the two young girls

202 who befriended them in the park and who eventually insist to the father that the twins also be bestowed with wristwatches. Massoumeh’s instruction to her father, “Come buy us a watch” is the longest and most clearly articulated sentence by one of the twins in the entire film. The penultimate scene in which spectators witness the twins and their new friends escorting Mr Naderi out of the home, unfolds in direct opposition to the opening of the film in which the father directed his wife and daughters back into the enclosed and arresting space of the family home. But this time it is the young girls who are in control, impatiently and determinedly ushering the bewildered Mr Naderi out into the world of consumer culture. Mrs Mohamed follows them out of the courtyard and gazes upon them somewhat contentedly, seemingly fulfilled by the image of the girls’ autonomy and resolve. From developing a stronger gait, to their successful utilisation of language (“Come buy us a watch”), it appears the girls are beginning to take part in various successful social and economic exchanges. After some moments Mrs Naderi also follows them out, although her disability means she is slow and hesitant as she ventures out of the courtyard. She wraps her chador around her so that her face is completely covered and hesitates on the threshold of the doorway before shuffling out onto the laneway. As Makhmalbaf explains of finishing the film:

Even the mother, who is blind, looks at herself in the last scene. That’s something I didn’t expect. I asked her to go out and though I wasn’t sure if she would – she prefers to stay inside, lock the door and make a prison for herself in order to be safe. Then she did go out, but first she stood in front of the mirror. And the only time she laughed in the film – maybe in her entire life- was in that scene, which may be a sign of hope. But all this happened in reality; I could never have thought it up myself (Johnson 1999, 19).

As Mrs Naderi stands on the street calling to her girls, a young boy leaning out from an open window above teases her by bouncing an apple on a string near her head. The final freeze frame appears to show the mother finally releasing her hand from the cloak of her chador and successfully grasping the apple. The closing scene, together with Makhmalbaf’s

20 3 remarks, refer to a newly developed sense of optimism and resilience, not only in the young girls, but in the figure of Soragh Naderi, as she willingly ventures out of domestic imprisonment and grasps the apple; the “symbol of life and knowledge” (Johnson 1999, 19). The apple, as the reoccurring motif of pleasure and liberation, has by this time been strongly inscribed as an overridingly positive symbol. From its first appearance, on top of the petition, the apple is imbued with the principles of justice and freedom. In the course of the narrative the twins convince their father to give them the money to buy apples for themselves, which they then share and enjoy with their newfound playmates. The apple is thus not only associated with personal autonomy but with the values of social integration and social exchange. The mother’s grasping of the apple also points optimistically to Mrs Naderi’s future prospects and increased mobility. But in “real terms”, is the apple only to be enjoyed within the construct of the dramatization? Lindsay Moore (2005) points out in her analysis of the film, that Zahra and Moussemeh are in fact eventually taken away from their parents by the department of welfare and that Mrs Naderi died after production was completed.

In reality, and against the expectations raised by their physical liberation at the end of the film, social workers subsequently placed Zahra and Massoumeh in a new home and Mrs Naderi died. These sobering reminders that the film – despite its temporal proximity to and eventual participation in the events, the authenticating effects of the camera work, and active contribution of the actors – is ultimately conceived and realised as a finite narrative drama. Makhmalbaf asserts rather disingenuously ‘I don’t judge, I just show things as they are. Let people look at themselves and see what is wrong and what is right: if they want to change, they can (Moore 2005, 16).

Away from the spotlight of the cameras, it seems the apple remains out of Mrs Naderi’s grasp. In many ways, like the boy who dangles the fruit above the twins and their mother, Makhmalbaf too teases her participants with a construction of “liberation”, which is ultimately dissolved with the completion of production. Moore’s greatest concern with the film seems to centre on Makhmalbaf’s representation of Soghra Naderi, which she believes

204 reinstates the mother’s powerlessness. Moore constructs the convincing thesis that the camera becomes “another traumatic intrusion, given that Mrs Naderi remains off-screen, in the shadows of the house, or with her face completely covered” (19, 2005). The marginalisation of Mrs Naderi in the process of production is undoubtedly highly problematic. Not only was she not consulted regarding her role in the docudrama (with Mr Naderi providing consent on her behalf), but blind and unable to engage with the camera, of which she appears fearful, she becomes objectified and caricatured as the uneducated, cruel mother figure. Mr Naderi, who actively participates in his representation in the film, emerges as an almost sympathetic figure, who has been merely misguided in his treatment of the girls by his lack of education and employment opportunity. There are several scenes of him in discussion with Mrs Mohamed, while he remains locked up, and through which he is framed as a product of poverty and a highly conservative upbringing. While the film is careful to track Zahra and Moussemeh’s slow emergence from captivity and silence, Soghra remains largely invisible, disorientated and fearful. Mrs Naderi may indeed venture out of the house, but her fretful calling to her daughters and partner (“I’m scared husband, help me get my girls back…Zahra don’t go! Where have you got to? Leave my chador alone! Leave me alone. Come back! Don’t let go of the children!”) reveals that far from experiencing the final moments of the film as a form of social and emotional liberation, the girls’ disappearance with their father is interpreted as abandonment. Makhmalbaf presumably instructed the young boy to dangle the apple above the mother, which then inspired Mrs Naderi’s gesture in attempting to grasp it. But Soghra’s “performance” of fear and disorientation appears entirely spontaneous and unscripted. There is thus an uneasy and ethically dubious collision of dramatic and documentary elements in this final scene, where the “re-enactment” contains both Soghra’s “spontaneous lived experience” of disorientation and abandonment and Makhmalbaf’s attempt at allegorical reconstruction. The issue perhaps is not so much that Makhmalbaf, to employ Moore’s term, “disingenuously” misrepresents the Naderi’s future prospects as an integrated and functional household, but that Mrs Naderi remained objectified and victimized by the gaze of the camera. Cloaked in her chador and murmuring abuse in her Turkish accent, Mrs Naderi appears as the ultimate subaltern in the final scenes; with this ambivalent mother figure inspiring both pity and antipathy.

205 While the term “subaltern” continues to be misappropriated, overused and fiercely contested, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of the “historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” is relevant when discussing the representational space Makhmalbaf offers Mrs Naderi in The Apple, (1988, 91). Spivak’s original essay addressed the discourses surrounding widow immolation in , and conceptualised the subaltern specifically as a woman whose voice has been co-opted by “either indigenous male authority or colonial patriarchy” (Birla 2010, 88). The reference here to Spivak’s essay is not simply an attempt to categorise Mrs Naderi as the invisible “Other” devoid of agency, but a way of discussing the film’s refusal to enter into a dialogic exchange with Mrs Naderi. As Spivak herself iterates in the recent revisions of her original paper, it is not that the subaltern cannot speak, but that scholars must acknowledge their “complicity in the muting” of such speaking subjects (2010, 64). So too, The Apple resists providing Mrs Naderi with a representational space in which she can be understood as anything but the incoherent Other. Mrs Naderi’s anguished cries to her husband and her children do not alter the trajectory of the docudrama, with the twins and Mr Naderi failing to register the mother’s utterances. While the social worker, Mrs. Mohamed, looks on fondly as the father and twins re-enter the “outside” world in the final scene, she turn her back on the frightened Soghra, leaving her to navigate the outside world alone and unassisted. Although earlier in the film, Mrs Mohamed pressed Mrs Naderi to seek help and visit a doctor, in the final moments, the social worker no longer appears to heed the mother’s voice. The film seems to overlook the fact that not only were the twins confined within their prison of the Naderi household, but with them at all times was their mother, who was also divested of mobility, social contact and developmental growth. There is even a scene in which the father berates his wife for imprisoning the children, despite the fact that he is the sole keeper of the key and seemingly the true jailer. Mrs Mohamed’s role in relation to Mrs Naderi is worth noting, for it appears that she participates in the film not only as a social actor, but also as a surrogate director, who catalyzes the key events of the docudrama. It is Mrs Mohamed, for example, who locks both parents into the home and releases Zahra and Moussemeh and directs them to leave the house and make friends. And it is Mrs Mohamed who eventually returns the key to the twins and allows them to free Mr and Mrs Naderi. This analysis of social worker-as-surrogate-director is not an attempt to demonize the figure of Mrs

206 Mohamed, who appears genuinely intent on assisting the family, but it does question the manner in which Makhmalbaf asserts her influence over the diegetic world of the Naderi household. Emblematic perhaps of Makhmalbaf’s own attitude towards the difficult and disabled mother and her resistance to participating in the docudrama, Mrs Mohamed appears disinterested in engaging the figure of Mrs Naderi in any dialogic exchange. While ambivalence and ambiguity remain the cornerstones in the poetic representation of subjectivity within women’s Iranian cinema, spectators are unable even to glimpse Soghra Naderi’s identity outside her status as a disabled and disempowered “outsider”. While Mrs. Mohamed sits attentively and listens to Mr Naderi and the story of his own difficult personal history, Makhmalbaf offers no such exchange for the disorientated and objectified Mrs Naderi. Alternatively, the social-worker-as-director trope refers spectators to the fictive nature of the film and its function as a site of meta-cinema. Rupturing the cohesion of the narrative, such reflexivity enunciates the film’s positionality and its various industrial and social restrictions. As Negar Mottahedah argues, it is the veiled, female figures of post- revolutionary cinema that remind viewers of the mediated nature of the cinematic narrative, which in turn serves as a “displaced allegory of the conditions regulating these processes within the national industry” (109). In such a reading, the veiled Mrs Naderi is not the subaltern whose utterances fail to be heeded by the social actors of the film, and by extension Makhmalbaf as the director, but the figure who emblematizes the limits of cinematic story-telling in Iran and the oppressive modesty codes governing women’s lives more broadly. Hindering such a reading, however, is the status of The Apple, not as a fictive construct, but as a performance that unfolds within the slippery, hybridised mode of the docu-drama. The “displaced allegory” in the context of Makhmalbaf’s film is not that which serves to self-reflexively remind viewers of production processes and industrial constraints, but in fact the very reverse: the coalescing of fictive and factual elements that work to retain the ambiguity of the presented material. Roi Wagner writes, “the subaltern cannot speak whenever her speech is mediated through interpretation and replication mechanisms that foreclose her exercise of power through speech” (2012, 101). Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple certainly demonstrates the complexity of mediating speech in the context of the docudrama. Centralising women as

207 subjects and providing them with the opportunity to “perform” their story and emote freely is not adequate, with female participants needing to be actively involved in providing consent and shaping their representation within the film. If the camera and process of production are experienced as a “traumatic intrusion”, women equally need to be given the right to opt out, rather than appearing in the film as a shadowy, diminished presence, immobile and victimized. While the documentation of trauma and personal difficulty attests to the ongoing struggles and challenges for women and girls in Iran, it potentially also compounds their socio-cultural marginalisation and status as powerless and disabled. The strategy of foregrounding the voice, through the practices of interviews, voice-overs and a self-reflexive film aesthetic that clearly positions the role of the author/director, assists in allowing women’s voices to be experienced as “direct, forceful and individualized” (Naficy 2012b). In such an ideal framework the voice of the female participant enters into a dialogue, not only with the director, but also with the broader audience, in which their complex and dialectical encounters with disillusionment and hope are clearly projected and heard. Despite the different tropes and taxonomies employed within the various genres of melodrama, romantic comedy, documentary and docu-drama, Chapters Five and Six have signalled the manner in which dialogue remains central as a strategy in promoting equality for women. Whether it is the scripted “talk” in one of Milani’s melodramas or a spontaneous to-camera monologue in a Bani-Etemad documentary, voicing is undoubtedly a tactic for recouping personal power and attesting to the constraints of life in post- revolutionary Iran. While this thesis has pointed to the cultural particularities and aesthetic specificities of these various cinematic modes, it has also gestured to the slippages between genres; the manner in which melodrama and social realism coalesce in the works of Milani and Bani-Etemad, and even more broadly, the way in which documentary and poetically realist fiction film maintain a persistent dialogue in the oeuvres of so many contemporary Iranian filmmakers. The purpose of underscoring such generic intertextualities is to broaden the category of Iranian women’s cinema, not as a form of exclusive art cinema limited only to the international film festival circuit, but as a heterogeneous cluster of films that operate as both popular and aesthetically sophisticated cultural artefacts. To return to John Frow’s definition of genre, as that which “actively generates and shapes knowledge of the world”

208 (2013, 2), Iranian women’s cinema contributes a pluralistic portrait of women’s experiences as citizens in Iran, and the manner in which resistance and accommodation continue to be forged.

209 Conclusion

Reclaiming Authorship and Discursive Authority in Iranian Women’s Cinema: “Modes of expression not subject to the law of male desire”.

In Performing Authorship, Cecilia Sayad heralds the tentative “revival of the auteur” in contemporary film scholarship (2013, 141). No longer a spectre that haunts the cinematic text as a cultural construct, Sayad proposes that the auteur/author might be reclaimed as embodied, historically situated and capable of permeating the cinematic text via their “presence” and “performance”. This cautious renewal of the film-maker-as-author (Dudley 2000, Naficy 2001, Polan 2001, Rascaroli 2009, Fox 2011, Corrigan 2011) has productive implications for the study of women filmmakers. Not only does an emphasis on the socio- cultural specificity of the author have the potential to redress the historical marginalisation of women directors, both in the film industry and within critical scholarship, but it also illuminates the socio-political context that has contributed to this widespread invisibility and omission. While auteurism may be productively theorised as an important strategy for recouping recognition for women directors and challenging the canonisation of their male counterparts, this thesis has preferred to employ the concepts of authorship and authorial presence to describe the relationship between the director and their cinematic text. In discussing the “multiple incarnations” (Naficy 2001), personifications and performances of the author via the cinematic text, film studies can conceive of the author as both a flexible and viable concept. This thesis has thus celebrated the author/filmmaker as very much “alive” and situated, but not reducible to an essence, a “feminine aesthetic” or a biography. The various permeations of authorship in Iranian women’s cinema have therefore been delineated, primarily through an analysis of voicing. The voices have been identified as diverse, manifesting in the cinematic text via heterogeneous strategies, sometimes not constituting a literal acoustic voice at all, but a silence, a fissure, an enigmatic gap. At other times, the voice is foregrounded as a literal vocal entity, expressed via the voice-over, the recitation of poetry, or dialogue that privileges the importance of intra-subjective “talk”. While this thesis has underscored the centrality of the lyrical voice and the notion of ambivalence in Iranian women’s “art cinema”, it has also attempted to point to those moments of generic slippage, in which the voice manifests itself across cinematic modes and taxonomies. It has thus argued that the voice remains one of the most important

210 constituents of Iranian women’s filmmaking, both as an aesthetic strategy and a means of re-instating socio-political visibility and influence. For voicing infers not only the consolidation of artistic authority, but also the opportunity to opine, analyse and re- historise. The female voice is thus in perpetual flux, alternating between the roles of authoritative historian and political analyst, as well as that of the poet, lyrically reclaiming the body and the expression of its desires. One of the key questions posed at the beginning of this thesis was whether representations of women’s subjectivities, bodies and experiences have shifted with the introduction of Islamic national discourses. With the representation of women’s sexuality being highly regulated and prescribed, both socially and cinematically, in post- revolutionary Iran, this thesis was concerned with how directors portrayed romantic relationships and desire without compromising the cinematic codes of practice enforced by the State. Although this thesis has argued that cinematic modesty codes have been central in generating a codified poetic aesthetic (identified here as an aesthetic of “veiling”) in many ways, this mode of representation predates the formalisation of hijab by the post- revolutionary government. Arguably, the lyrical voice of Iranian cinema may be traced back to the poetic realism of Forugh Farrokhzad and the New Wave movement of the 1960s. Not only did Farrokhzad’s The House is Black centralize the poetic voice, but also it is also privileged an aesthetic of ambivalence and a dialectical mode of representation. So too, the expression of desire in Iranian women’s cinema may be frequently characterised by this tension between revelation and disclosure. To return to the words of Nasrin Rahimieh and Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Farrokhzad’s innovation was instituting “modes of expression not subject to the law of male desire” (2010, 4). Similarly, the portrayal of desire and the representation of the most intimate aspects of women’s subjectivity avoid fantasies of eroticism and purity, creating a discursive space beyond voyeurism and objectification, prescription and censorship. This thesis has been careful to avoid the descriptor “feminist” when discussing the ideological orientation of the films in question. Iranian women filmmakers have themselves been cautious, and at others times adamant, to distance themselves from such a universalising, hegemonizing and Eurocentric idiom. Yet it has been productive to observe the manner in which the aims of feminist film theory do at times coalesce with the strategies employed by some Iranian women filmmakers; creating

211 films that centralise women’s experiences, while eschewing the regressive dichotomies and discourses associated with both modernist and traditionalist conceptions of femininity and women’s socio-cultural status. While Western feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s was centrally concerned with conceptualising the role of spectatorship and the manner in which the practices of voyeurism and scopophilia objectified, eroticized and victimized women on screen, Iranian women filmmakers have been confronted by a different set of challenges – namely, by the formalisation of the modesty codes instituted by the Islamic government. It would be specious to ignore the very specific, particular and local contestations surrounding the representation of women in Iranian cinema and the manner in which identity, sexuality and relationships are informed by a history of Persian poeticism, hijab and the corresponding practices of “dissimulation”, discretion, “performativity” and “indirection” (Naficy 2012b). Indeed, voice in this thesis has been conceived as intersecting historically, theoretically and textually with the practices of veiling, modesty and lyricism. ‘Veiling’ has referred to both the culture of poeticism that characterizes Iranian cinema, as well as the formal cinematic guidelines that constrain and mediate its representation. Iranian governments since the inception of cinema have projected particular sensitivities and implemented cinematic guidelines with varying degrees of bureaucracy and severity. State protocols surrounding film production have been applied unevenly, with surprising degrees of political critique and artistic freedom at times being tolerated. However, President ’s reign (2005 – 2013) will undoubtedly be remembered for his government’s strenuous clampdown on the film industry and the curtailing of directors’ personal and artistic freedoms. It was not only Marzieh Vafamehr who was persecuted for contravening the modesty codes with her role in My Tehran for Sale, but many others, such as Jafar Panahi and his family, who were arrested and charged with producing anti-government propaganda. The appointment of the more moderate Hassan Rouhani to the role of President in June 2013 fostered some hope regarding the reinstatement of filmmakers’ entitlements and autonomy. Indeed, there were promising developments when Iran’s foremost cinema guild, The House of Cinema, was re-opened in September 2013. Later, at the launch of the 32nd Fajr Film Festival in January 2014, the Minster of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Ali Jannati, read out a message from President Rouhani, announcing that

212 “a new era has dawned” in which directors would be free to travel between “East and West” (1 February 2014, Tehran Times). President Rouhani also encouraged the relaxation of certain restrictions pertaining to other forms of media, with greater access afforded to previously prohibited social media sites, alongside promises of less television censorship. Yet twelve months later, Rouhani’s presidency has brought about “mixed messages” regarding artistic freedom (Zahedpour 2014). Documentary-maker and actress Mahnaz Mohammadi began serving a five-year prison sentence on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security,” and “propaganda against the state” in June 2014, for her apparent work with BBC Persian. Another actress and filmmaker, , was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October 2013, with speculation that it was the broadcast of her documentary on BBC Persian that again instigated charges of collusion. Like Mohammad Khatami, President Rouhani’s power to legislate and institute greater freedoms for filmmakers, and for citizens in general, appears to be compromised by clerical powers and a continuing spirit of hardline, cultural conservatism. The “voices” of Iranian cinema will thus continue to be mediated by the “veils” of hijab, cinematic modesty codes, political rhetoric and censorship. The voices will remain diverse and dissident, but domestic productions will at times continue to be arbitrated by the ongoing struggle between reformist and traditionalist political and cultural forces. Diasporic cinema plays an important role in challenging the constraints prevalent in the Iranian domestic film industry, as well as allowing filmmakers to produce cinema without fear of persecution and censorship. This thesis has argued that diasporic cinema can continue to be relevant and engage with national and historical discourses, while being created outside the country’s geopolitical borders. It has proposed that an important aspect of Iranian women’s cinema is re-visioning and re-constructing Iran’s political and cultural meta-narratives. Indeed, the project of reclaiming vatan outside of nationalist, patriotic and patriarchal frameworks remains a central objective of diasporic cinema. While the experiences of exile and deterritorialisation inflect and mediate such historical reconstructions and remembrances, they also endow filmmakers with the freedom to engage with such taboo themes as rape, sexual orientation, prostitution and drug use. Iranian diasporic women filmmakers are thus frequently able to directly address that which

213 may have been buried or omitted as part of the project of re-asserting women’s presence and role in national and collective memories and historical narratives. This is not to say that women working within the domestic industry are necessarily oppressed or perpetually marginalized, or that artistic integrity is always compromised by hijab, State intervention and fear of persecution. One of the central questions proposed in this thesis was whether the relevant films presented a common socio-political perspective regarding the status of women in Iran and what aspects of women’s societal status were identified as most problematic and prohibitive. In comparing a range of films, this thesis has emphasized the manner in which socio-economic circumstances dramatically influence the degree of mobility experienced by women in post-revolutionary Iran. Women who have access to fairly paid work, and who are supported in their autonomy by a male partner or family member, are represented as enjoying far greater freedoms than those who struggle with poverty and social isolation. While this project has emphasized the significant manner in which patriarchal privilege curtails the rights of women through both legal and cultural conventions, Iranian women’s cinema reflects the diverse subject positions assumed by women and the degree to which socio-economic status varies the quality and mobility of their lives. This thesis constitutes the first extended piece of scholarship on Iranian women’s cinema, examining eight films dating from 1962 to 2010. In adopting a comparative approach, this project has gestured to points of overlap and stressed the distinctive approach to “voicing” expressed by each of the films. Of course, analysis of Iranian women’s filmmaking need not be limited to the role and representation of the voice. The richness of the texts presents a multitude of other hermeneutic and theoretical possibilities. This thesis has attempted to invoke the importance of voicing and voices, while remaining attentive to socio-cultural context and film theory, as well as to the structures of the texts themselves. It has proposed that the analysis of voicing provides one possible avenue through which to understand the representations of subjectivities and socio-cultural experiences, but it certainly does not claim to be an exhaustive study. As stated in the introduction, this study has selected only a handful of filmmakers, with various important pre- and post- revolutionary filmmakers falling outside the scope of the project. The fact that it was only able to include seven filmmakers attests to the need for continuing scholarly and critical

214 work to be performed in this area of Iranian cinema and its intersections with gender and cultural studies. This thesis defined “women’s cinema” by the status of the director, as opposed to the broader categorisation that includes those films that foreground “women- centric” themes, irrespective of the gender of the filmmaker. While the evolution of women’s roles in Iranian cinema has been analysed in some important papers and texts (Naficy 1994, Moruzzi 1998, Lahiji 2002, Pardo 2004, Mottahedeh 2008, Derayah 2010, Naficy 2012b), there is still much work to be done on the representation of women in pre- and post-revolutionary cinema. Themes that have only been gestured to here warrant further investigation. These include the figure of the subaltern in Iranian women’s cinema, the use of the shaved head in circumnavigating modesty codes and the progression that many Iranian actresses have made from roles in front of the camera to those of activist, documentarian and fictional filmmaker. Indeed, the coalescing of filmmaking and activism has special relevance when examining the works of Iranian women filmmakers, despite the guarded and diplomatic manner in which they have to identify, or deflect, their political motivations. While the filmmakers studied in this thesis do not claim a particular platform or brand of politics, the manner in which they privilege the representation of women’s voices, as well as cultural silencing, does constitute a form of social action. A study of Iranian women’s cinema needs to acknowledge the risks and ingenuity of such filmmaking and the manner in which these cultural artefacts participate in a set of broader cultural and political discourses and debates. And while the future conditions of Iranian filmmaking under President Rouhani remain unknown, with both reform and continued constraint likely, Iranian women filmmakers will undoubtedly continue to produce films that attest to the dissenting, diverse and compelling voices of Iranian women both in and outside of the country. Film scholarship has its role to play in engaging and promoting such works, not merely as “cultural constructs” but also as “authorial imprints” that attest to the struggles and victories of Iranian directors and their subjects.

215 Bibliography:

Abu-Lughod, Lila 1998, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Woodstock: Princeton University Press.

Afary, Janet 1989, “On the Origins of Feminism in Early 20th Century Iran”, Journal of Women’s History, 1.2: 65-87.

--- 2005, “Civil Liberties and the Making of Iran’s First Constitution”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 22.2: 341-359.

--- 2009, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Agnew, Vijay 2005, Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ahmari, Sohrab 2012, “Can Iran be Saved?”, Commentary, 133.3: 11-15.

Aitken, Ian 2013, The Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia Of , Oxon: Routledge.

Amirahmadi, Hooshang 1990, Revolution and Economic Transition: The Iranian Experience, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Andrews, Nigel 2010, “It’s a Love-hate Relationship…” [Review], Financial Times, June 10: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/77276d20-73de-11df-87f5 00144feabdc0.html#axzz2KpPFMYjy

Anjum, Tanvir 2006, “Sufism History and its Relationship with Power”, Islamic Studies, 45.2: 221-268.

216 Appadurai, Arjun 1996, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Arjomand, Said Amir 2009, After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ashcroft, Bill 2010,“Transnation,” (eds) Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh, Re-routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium London: Routledge: 72-85.

Ashrafi, Afsaneh, Moghissi, Haideh 2002, “: Asylum Fatigue Overshadows Islamic Brotherhood”, Global Dialogue, 4.4 (Autumn): 89-99.

Aspden, Peter 2010, “Shirin Neshat’s Filmmaking Debut” [Review], Financial Times, 21 May: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/bb6826f2-645f-11df-8cba- 00144feab49a.html#axzz38LWw2A3r

Atakav, Elyem 2013, Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender, Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation, Abingdon: Routledge.

Badley, Linda, Palmer, Barton & Schneider, Steven Jay (eds) 2006, Traditions in World Cinema, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Bahati Kuumba, M 2003, “African Feminisms in Exile: Diasporan, Transnational and Transgressive”, Agenda, 58: 3 -11.

Bakhtiar, Laleh 1976, Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest, London: Thames & Hudson.

Bakhtin, M.M 1981, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. (ed) Michael Holquist, (trans) Caryl Emerson, Austin: University Press.

217 Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan 2005, “An interview with Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, co-director of Gilaneh”, World Socialist Website, 5 October: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/10/bani-o03.html

Barthes, Roland 1967, 1978, “Death of an Author”, (trans) Stephen Heath, Image, Music Text, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Battaglia, Debbora 1995, Rhetorics of Self-Making, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt 1997, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers”, (eds) Pnina Werbner & Tariq Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity, London: Zed Books: 47 – 58.

--- 2011, “Migration and Identities in the Globalised World”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 37.4: 425-435.

Bavandpour, Behnam 2002, Majmoo-eh Asar Forugh Farrokhzad Ash'ar, Nashr-e NIMA: Tehran.

Benyei, Tamas 1997, “Rereading Magical Realism”, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 3.1: 149 – 179.

Birla, Ritu 2010, “Postcolonial Studies: Now That’s History”, (ed) Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, New York: Columbia: 87-99.

Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. 1979, Film Art, New York: McGraw Hill.

Braidotti, Rosi 1994, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminism Theory, New York: Columbia University Press.

218 Bresheeth, Haim 2010, “Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men”, Third Text, 24.6: 754 – 758.

Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz, Rahimieh, Nasrin (eds) 2010, Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran, New York: I.B. Tauris.

Brown, William 2011, “‘Cease Fire’: Rethinking Iranian Cinema Through its Mainstream”, Third Text, 25.3 (May): 335–341.

de Bruijn, J.T.P 1997, Persian Sufi Poetry, Richmond: Curzon Press.

Bruzzi, Stella 2006, New Documentary, Abingdon: Routledge.

Burke, Sean, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.

Butler, Alison 2002, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, London: Wallflower Press.

Butler, Judith 1990, Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.

Capacchione, Lucia 1991, Recovery of Your Inner Child, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Caughie, John (ed) 2013, Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge.

Chapman, James 2003, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1985 to the Present, London: Reaktion.

Chaudhuri, Shohini, Howard Finn 2003, “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema”, (eds) Catherine Grant and Annette Kuhn, Screening World Cinema, London: Routledge: 163–182.

219 Chaudhuri, Shohini 2005, Contemporary World Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

--- 2006, Feminist Film Theorists, London: Routledge.

Cheu, Hoi 2010, Cinematic Howling: Women’s Films, Women’s Film Theory, Vancouver: UBC Press.

Christley, Jaime N 2002, “Chris Marker: Great Directors Series”, Sense of Cinema, 21: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/marker

Clift, Robert A 2011, Disrupting Reality: Doubt, Authority and the Documentary Performance, Ann Arbour: UMI Publishing.

Cobbey, Rini, “Under the Skin of the City: Under the Surface of Contrasts”, (ed) Josef Gugler, Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cook, Pam, 1981, “The Point of Self-Expression in Avant-Garde Film”, (ed) John Caughie, Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge: 271-81.

Corner, John 2008, “Documentary Studies: Dimensions of Transition and Continuity” (eds) Thomas Austin & Wilma de Jong, Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives and Practices, Maidenhead: McGraw & Hill.

Corrigan, Timothy 2011, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cousins, Mark, McDonald, Kevin 2011, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, London: Faber and Faber.

220 Cowie, Elizabeth 1997, “The Spectacle of Reality and Documentary Film”, The Documentary Box, 10 (June): 46-61.

--- 2007, “Ways of Seeing: Documentary, Film and the Surreal of Reality”, (eds) Joram Brink & Michael Renov, Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, London: Wallflower Press.

--- 2011, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Crow, Barbara A 2000, Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, New York: New York University Press.

Cunningham, Hilary 2004, “Nations Rebound? Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe”, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11: 329 -350.

Dabashi, Hamid 1986, “The Poetics of Politics: Commitment in Modern ”, Iranian Studies, 18.2/4 (Spring/Autumn): 147-88.

--- 2001, Close-Up: Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, New York: Verso.

--- 2007, Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Odenton: Mage Publishers.

--- 2007a, Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker, London: I.B Tauris.

--- 2012, Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence and the Making of the Posthuman Body, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

--- 2013, “The Tragic Endings of Iranian Cinema”, Al Jazeera 21 March: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013320175739100357.html

221 Dadar, Taraneh 2012, “Melodrama in Post-Revolutionary Cinema”, (ed) Parviz Jahed, Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Bristol: Intellect: 142 – 168.

Daniel, Elton L. & Akbar Mahdi, Ali 2006, Culture and Customs of Iran, Westport: Greenwood Press.

Darznik, Jasmin 2010, “Forough Goes West: The Legacy of Forough Farrockhzad in Iranian Diasporic Art and Literature”, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6.1 (Winter): 103- 116.

Davaran, Fereshteh, Continuity in Iranian Identity: Resilience of a Cultural Heritage, Abington: Routledge.

Davis, Therese, Smaill, Belinda, White, Patricia (eds) 2014, “The Place of the Contemporary Female Director”, Camera Obscura, (85) 29.1.

Degroot, Joanna 2010, “Feminism is Another Language: Learning from ‘Feminist’ Histories of Iran and/or from Histories of Iranian Feminism since 1830”, Women: A Cultural Review, 21.3: 251- 265.

Derayeh, Minoo 2010, “Depictions of Women in Iranian Cinema, 1970s to Present”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 33.3: 151-300.

Dennison, Stephanie & Lim, Song Hwee Lim (eds) 2006, Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, New York: Wall Flower Press.

Denson, Roger G 2010, “Shirin Neshat: Artist of the Decade”, Huffington Post, 2 November: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/sherin-neshat-artist- of-t_b_802050.html

Derrida, Jacques 1971, “Signature, Event, Context”, (trans) Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

222

Doanne, Mary Ann, 1987, “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address”, (ed) Christine Gledhill, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London: British Film Institute: 283-298.

Donmez-Colin, Gonul 2004, Women, Islam and Cinema, London: Reaktion Book.

--- 2006, Cinemas of the Other, Bristol: Intellect.

--- (ed) 2007, The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, New York: Wallflower Press.

Doy, Gen 2005, Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture, London: I.B Tauris.

Dudley, Andrew 2000, “The Unauthorized Auteur Today”, (eds.) Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Film and Theory: An Anthology, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 20-32.

Durovicova, Natasa, & Newman, Kathleen E (eds) 2009, World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives, New York: Routledge.

Egan, Eric 2005, Films of Makhmalbaf: Cinema, Politics and Culture in Iran, Washington: Mage.

--- 2011, “Regime Critics Confront Censorship in Iranian Cinema”, (ed) Josef Guglar, Film in the Middle East and North Africa, Austin: University of Texas.

Eleftheriotis, Dimitris, 2012, “The Foreignness of Jules Dassin: Notes on Cosmopolitan Authorship”, Screen (Winter) 53.4: 339-358.

Elena, Alberto 2005, The Cinema of Kiarostami, (trans) Belinda Coombes. London:

223 Saqi Books.

El Guindi, Fadwa 1999, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, Oxford: Berg. Elling, Rasmus Christian 2013, Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Esfandairy, Shahab 2012, Iranian Cinema and Globalisation: National, Transnational and Islamic Dimensions, Bristol: Intellect.

Erfani, Farhang 2012, Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth, New York: Palgrave and MacMillan.

Ezra, Elizabeth & Rowden, Terry (eds) 2006, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge.

Fanni, Zohreh 2006, “Cities and Urbanization in Iran after the Islamic Revolution”, Cities, 23.6: 407 – 411.

Farahmand, Azedeh 2002, “Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim) for Iranian Cinema”, (ed) Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London and New York: I.B Tauris: 86 – 108.

--- 2010, “Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema”, (eds) Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover, Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 263 – 284.

Farrokhzad, Forugh 1955, Asir (Captive), Tehran: .

--- 1956, Divar (The Wall), Tehran: Amir Kabir.

---1958, Esyan (Rebellion), Tehran: Amir Kabir.

224

--- 1964, Tavallodi digar (Another Birth), Tehran: Amir Kabir.

--- 1974, Imam biyavarim be aghaz-e fasl-e sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season), Tehran: Morvarid.

--- 2010, Another Birth and Other Poems, (trans) Hasan Javadi, Susan Sallee. Washington: Mage.

Fassihi, Farnaz 2009, “Inside the Iranian Crackdown – When the Unrest Flared, the Ayatollah’s Enforces Took to the Streets of Tehran with Batons and Zeal”, Wall Street Journal, 11 July: A1.

Feder, Ellen K, Zakin, Emily 1997, Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, New York: Routledge.

Fisher, Linda 2010, “Feminist Phenomenological Voices”, Continental Philosophy Review 43.1: 83-95.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 1997, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonising the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Foucault, Michel 1970, The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books.

---1986, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, 16 (Spring), 22-27.

---1998, “What is an Author?” Essential Works of Foucault: 1954 – 1984, (ed) James D. Faubion, New York: The New Press. 205-222.

225

Frisch, Michael (ed) 1990, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Frow, John 2013, Genre, Abington: Routledge.

Gerami, Shahin 2003, “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men Conceptualizing Masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran”, Men and Masculinities (January) 5: 257-274.

Gerstner, David A., Staiger, Janet (eds) 2013, Authorship and Film, New York: Routledge.

Ghazian, Hossein 2002, “The Crisis in the Iranian Film Industry and the Role of Government”, Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London: I.B Tauris: 77-86

Ghorbankarami, Maryam, 2010, “A Timeless Visual Essay”, (eds) Nasrin Rahimieh, Dominic Brookshaw, Forough Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of the New Persian Poetry. London: I.B Tauris: 137 – 148.

Giles, Judy 2002, “Narratives of Gender, Class, and Modernity in Women's Memories of Mid‐Twentieth Century Britain”, Signs 28.1 (Autumn): 21-41

Gledhill, Chrstine (ed) 1987, Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London: British Film Institute.

Glitre, Kathrina 2013, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of Union, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Golmakani, Houshang 1989, “New Times, New Prescriptions, Cinemaya, 4 (Summer): 22-29.

226 Golkar, Saeid 2010, “The Reign of Hard-line Students in Iran's Universities”, Middle East Quarterly, 17.3 (Summer): 21-29.

Gow, Christopher 2011, From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places in Between: Reframing Post-Revolutionary Cinema. London: I.B Tauris.

Grant, C.A. and Kuhn, Annette (eds) 2006, Screening World Cinemas, New York: Routledge.

Grant, Barry Keith 2008, Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Grewel, Inderpal, Kaplan, Caren 1994, Scattered Hegemonies, Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.

Haeri, Shahla 1989, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’I Iran. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Hafez, Khwaja Shams-ud-Dīin Muhammad 2006, The Poems of Hafez (trans) Reza Orboubadian Bethesda: IBEX Publishers.

Haghighi, Ali Reza 2002, “Politics and Cinema in Post-revolutionary Iran: An Uneasy Relationship”, (ed) Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity. London: I.B Tauris: 109-117.

Hake, Sabine, Mennel, Barbara 2012, Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium, New York: Berghahn Books.

Hamedani, J., & Muhammad Safeer, A 2012, “Conflict of Modernity and Tradition in Twentieth Century Persian Poetry”, Language in India, 12.8 (August): 145-159.

227 Haraway, Donna 1988, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminism Studies, 14.3 (Autumn): 575-599.

Hardy, Ernest 2010, “Women Without Men” [Review], The Village Voice; May 18, 2010: 44.

Hart, Stephen M 2004, “Cultural Hybridity, Magical Realism and the Language of Magic in Paulo Coehlho’s The Alchemist”, Romance Quarterly, 51.4 (Fall: 2004): 304 – 312.

Haywood, Susan 2000, “Framing National Cinemas”, (eds) Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge: 88 – 102.

Hendricks, Christina, Oliver, Kelly 1999, Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy and Language. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hibberd, Sarah 2013, Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, Farhnam: Ashgate Publishing.

Higson, Andrew 1989, “The Concepts of National Cinema”, Screen, 30.3: 36-46.

--- 2000, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”, (eds) Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, Cinema and Nation London; New York: Routledge, 63-70.

Hill, John & Gibson, Pamela Church (eds) 2000, World Cinema: Critical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hillauer, Rebecca (ed), 2004, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Hillmann, Michael C. 1982, “The Modernist Trend in Persian Literature and its Social

228 Impact”, Iranian Studies, 15.1/4: 7-29.

--- 1987, A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrockhzad and Her Poetry, Waldorf: Mage Publishers.

Hjort, Mette, MacKenzie, Scott (eds) 2000, Cinema & Nation. London; New York: Routledge.

Holden, Stephen 2010, “In 1953, Sisterhood Sought During a Coup” [Review], New York Times, 13 May: C8.

Hollinger, Karen 1992, “Listening to the Female Voice in the Woman's Film”, Film Criticism, 16.3: 34 – 52. hooks, bell 1981, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Cambridge: South End Press.

Horton, Andrew 1991, Comedy/Cinema/Theory, California: University of California Press.

Hume, R.D 1972, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 31.1: 87 -100.

Husic, Geoff 2011, “Romani Language: Cataloguing Ramifications for a Language in the Process of Standardisation”, Slavic & East European Information Resources, 12: 37–51.

Hughes, Peter 2012, “Blogging Identity.com”, (ed) Alisa Lebow, The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, New York: Wallflower Press: 235- 249.

Irigaray, Luce 1977, 1985, This Sex Which Is Not One, (trans) Catherine Porter, New York: Cornell University Press.

229 --- 1984, The Ethics of Sexual Difference, (trans) Caroline Burke & Gillian C. Gill, London: Continuum.

Issari, Mohammad Ali 1989, Cinema in Iran, 1900- 1979, London: Scarecrow Press.

Jahed, Parviz (ed) 2012, Directory of World Cinema: Iran. Bristol: Intellect.

--- 2012a, “Film Farsi as the Mainstream Cinema”, (ed) Parviz Jahed, Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Bristol: Intellect: 67-83.

Jameson, Fredic 1986, “On in Film”, Critical Inquiry, 12.2 (Winter): 301 – 325.

Johnson, Claire 1975, The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

Johnson, Sheila 1999, “Quietly Ruling the Roost: Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf”, Sight and Sound, 9.1 (January): 18-24.

Juhasz, Alexandra 2003, “No Women is an Object: Realizing the Feminist Collaborative Video”, Camera Obscura, (54)18.3: 70-79.

Kael, Pauline 1963, “ Circles and Squares”, Film Quarterly, 16.3 (Spring): 12-26.

Kaplan, E. Ann 1983, “Silence as Female Resistance in Marguerite Duras’s ‘Nathalie Granger”’, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, New York and London: Methuen: 91 -103.

--- 2004, “Global Feminisms and the State of Feminist Film Theory” Signs, 1.30: 1236 - 1248.

230 Kandiyoti, Deniz 1996, Gendering the Middle East, London: I.B Tauris.

Kar, Mehrangiz 2003, “The Invasion of the Private Sphere in Iran”, Social Research, 70.3 (Fall): 829 – 836.

Karii, Palema 2013, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era, Abington: Routledge.

Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad 1997, Remembering the Flight, Tehran: Nik Publishers.

--- 2001, “Speaking to the Jasmine, a Scythe in Hand: A Selection of Modern Persian Poetry”, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 25.1/2: 211-230.

Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh 2000, Frontier : Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946. London: I.B Tauris.

--- 2005, “Patriotic Womanhood: The Culture of Feminism in Modern Iran, 1900-1941, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 32.1 (May): 29 – 46.

Keddie, Nikki, R. & Matthee, Rudolf R 2003, Iran and the Surrounding World, Washington: University of Washing Press.

Kerr, Sarah 2010, “Iran’s Hidden Turmoil: Shrin Neshat’s ‘Women Without Men’” [Review], New York Review of Books, 14 May: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/may/14/women-without-men/

Khaleeli, Homa 2010, “Shirin Neshat: A Long Way From Home” [Review], The Guardian, (Sunday 13 June): 22.

Khosro-Shahi, Jalal 2000, Edaye Dein beh Forugh Farrokhzad, Tehran: Entesharat Negah.

231

Kia, Mana 2005, “Negotiating Women’s Rights: Activism, Class and Modernization in ”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25.1: 227-244.

Kian, Azadeh 2013, “Social and Cultural Change and the Women’s Rights Movement in Iran”, (eds) Annabelle Sreberny & Massoumeh Torfeh, Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic. London: I.B Tauris: 43- 58.

Kian-Thiebaut, Azadeh 2008, “From Motherhood to Equal Rights: The Weakening of Patriarchal Order”, (eds) Homa Katouzian & Hossein Shahidi, Iran in the 21st Century: Politics, Economics & Conflict. Oxon: Routledge: 86-99.

Kinser, Amber E 2003, “Multi-voiced Feminism is Messy and Vibrant”, Women and Language 26.1, (Spring): 110- 115.

Knight, Julia 1992, Women and the , London: Verso.

Kristeva, Julia 1991, Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University Press.

---2000, “Bulgaria, My Suffering”, Crisis of the European Subject, New York: The Other Press.

Krutnik, Frank, Neale, Steve 2006, Popular Film and Television Comedy, London: Routledge.

Kuhn, Annette, 1982, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and the Cinema London: Routledge.

Lahiji, Shahla 2002, “Chaste Dolls and Unchaste Dolls in Iranian Cinema since 1979”, (ed) Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London: I.B Tauris, 2002: 215-226.

232

Laing, Heather 2007, The Gendered Score: Music in the 1940s Melodramas and the Woman’s Film Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Langford, Michelle 2007, “Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman’”, Camera Obscura, 22. 1/64: 1 – 41.

--- 2010, “Practical Melodrama: From Recognition to Action in Tahmineh Milani’s ‘Fereshteh’ Trilogy”, Screen, 51.4 (Winter): 341 – 364.

--- 2012a, “Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Contemporary Iranian War Cinema”, Screening the Past, 35: http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/12/tending- the-wounds-of-the-nation-gender-in-contemporary-iranian-war-cinema/

--- 2012b, “Mainline”, (ed) Parviz Jahed, Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Intellect, Bristol: 165 – 166.

--- 2012c, “Blackboards”, (ed) Parviz Jahed, Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Intellect, Bristol: 269 - 271

--- 2012d, “A Time for Drunken Horses”, Parviz Jahed, Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Intellect, Bristol: 271 - 273 de Lauretis, Teresa, 1985, “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory”, New German Critique, 34 (Winter): 154-175.

--- 1987, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana Press.

--- 1990, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness”, Feminist Studies, 16.1 (Spring): 115-50.

233 Lawrence, Amy 1991, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lesage, Julia 1984, “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics”, (ed) Thomas Warne, Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, New York: Scarecrow Press: 224-240.

Lipkin, Steven 2002, Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mahdi, Ali Akbar 2004, “The Iranian Women’s Movement: A Century Long Struggle”, The Muslim World, 94.4: 427 – 448.

Martin, Alison 2000, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine, London: Maney Publishing.

Martin, Florence 2011, Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Martin-Marquez, Susan 1999, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Matras, Yaron 2005, “The Role of Language in Mystifying and Demystifying Gypsy Language”, (eds) Nicholas Saul & Susan Tebbutt, The Role of the Romanies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Mayne, Judith, 1990, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana Press.

Mazierska, Ewa & Ostrowska, Elzbieta 2006, Women in Polish Cinema. New York: Berghahn.

234

Mazue, Krystyna 2004, Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens & John Ashbury, Routledge: New York.

McCabe, Susan 2005, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McLaren, Margaret A 2012, Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Meisami, Julie Scott 1979, “Allegorical Techniques in the Ghazals of Hafez”, Edebiyat, 4:1- 40.

Milani, Farzaneh 1986, “Love and Sexuality in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad: A Reconsideration”, Iranian Studies, 15.1/4: 117 – 128.

--- 1992, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press

--- 2002. “On Walls, Veils, and Silences: Writing Lives in Iran”, The Southern Review, 38: 623 - 624.

Miller, Frederic P., Vandome, Agnes N. & McBrewster, J 2009, Abbas Kiarostami, Beau Bassin: Alphascript Publishing.

Minh-ha, Trinh.T 1994, “Other Than Myself/My Other Self”, (ed.) George Robertson, Travelers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, London: Routledge: 9-26.

--- 2004, “Outside In Inside Out”, (eds) Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, Karen J. Shepherdson, Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Volume 3,London: Routlegde: 375-385.

235

Mirbakhtyar, Shahla, Iranian Cinema and the Islamic Revolution, London: McFarland, 2006.

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 2000, Marriage on Trial, London: I.B Tauris.

--- 2002, “Negotiating the Politics of Gender in Iran: An Ethnography of a Documentary”, (ed) Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London and New York: I.B Tauris: 167-199.

--- 2004, “Sexuality, Rights and Islam: Competing Gender Discourse in Post-Revolutionary Iran”, Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic, (eds) Lois Beck, Guity Neshat, Champaign: University of Illonois: 204 – 240.

--- 2007, “When a Woman’s Hurt Becomes an Injury: ‘Hardship’ as Grounds for Divorce in Iran”, HAWWA, 5.1: 111 – 126.

Mirsepassi, Ali 2010, Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture and Political Change, New York: New York University Press.

Moi, Toril, 1985, “Power, Sex and Subjectivity: Feminist Reflections on Foucault”, Paragraph, 5: 95-105.

Mohammadi, Ali and Egan, Eric 2001, “Cinema and Iran: Culture and Politics in the Islamic Republic”, Asian Cinema, 12:1 (Spring): 14-28.

Molavi, Afshin 2010, The Soul of Iran: A Nation’s Struggle for Freedom, New York: Norton Paperback.

Momayesi, Nassar 2000, “Iran’s Struggle for Democracy”, International Journal on World Peace, 17.4, (December): 41 – 70.

236

Moore, Lindsey 2005, “Women in a Widening Frame: Cross Cultural Projection, Spectatorship, and Iranian Cinema”, Camera Obscura, 20.2 (59): 1-33.

--- 2008, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film, Abingdon: Routledge.

Morris, Rosalind C 2010, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, New York: Columbia University Press.

Moruzzi, Norma Claire 2001, “Women in Iran: Notes on Film and from the Field”, Feminist Studies, 27.1 (Spring): 89 - 100.

Motlagh, Amy 2012, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism and Reform in Modern Iran, Redwood: Stanford University Press.

Mottahedah, Negar 2005, “Life is Colour: Towards a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh”, Signs, 30.1: 1430 – 1424.

--- 2008, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press.

Moussavi, Granaz 2008, Pa serahneh ta sobh (Barefoot Til Morning) Tehran: Sali Publishers.

--- 2011, “My Tehran for Sale: A Reflection on the Aesthetics of Iranian Poetic Cinema” [Dissertation], Sydney: University of Western Sydney.

--- 2013, “‘My Tehran for Sale’: A Coproduction with Poetry at Stake”, (ed) Sukhmani Khorana, Crossover Cinema: Cross Cultural Film from Production to Reception New York: Routledge: 14-26.

237

Mulvey, Laura, 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 16.3: 6-18

--- 1989, “Feminism, Film and Avant-Garde”, Visual and Other Pleasures, London: MacMillan: 111-126.

--- 2004, “Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Theory of the 1970s”, Signs, 30.1: 1286 – 1292.

Nabavi, Negin 1999, “The Changing Concept of the ‘Intellectual’ in Iran of the 1960s”, Iranian Studies, 32.3 (Summer): 333 – 350.

Naficy, Hamid 1981, “Cinema as a Political Instrument”, (eds) Michael E. Bonnie & Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, Albany: State University of New York Press: 341 – 360.

--- 1991, “Women and the Semiotics of Veiling and Vision in Cinema” The American Journal of Semiotics, 8.1/2: 47-64.

--- 1993, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

--- 1994, “Veiled Vision/Powerful Presence: Women in Post Revolutionary Iranian Cinema”, (eds) Mahnez Afkhami & Erika Friedl, The Eye of the Storm, London: I.B Tauris: 131 – 150.

--- 2000, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films”, Social Research, 67.2: 559 - 562.

--- 2001, An Accented Cinema, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

238 --- 2002a. “Cinema Exchange Relations: Iran and the West”, (eds) Nikki R. Keddie and Ruddi Matthel, Iran and the Surrounding World, Washington: Washington Press: 254-277.

--- 2002b, “Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update”, (ed) Richard Tapper, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity. London: I.B Tauris: 26-66.

--- 2011a, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897 – 1941, Durham: Duke University Press.

--- 2011b, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941 - 1978, Durham: Duke University Press.

--- 2012a, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1979 – 1984, Durham: Duke University Press.

--- 2012b, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984 – 2010, Durham: Duke University Press.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh 1993. “Veiled Discourse-Unveiled Bodies”, Feminist Studies, 3: 487- 518.

--- 2005, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, Berkley: University of California Press.

Navab, Aphrodite Desiree 2007, “Unsaying Life Stories: The Self-Representational Art of Shirin Neshat and Ghazal”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 41. 2 (Summer): 39-66.

Neale Steve 1980, Genre, London: British Film Institute.

239 --- 2000, Genre and Hollywood, New York: Routledge.

Neshat, Shirin 2004, “Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Shirin Neshat”, [Interview by Scot MacDonald], Feminist Studies, 30.3, (Fall): 620 – 659.

--- 2010a, “Ladies Room: Shirin Neshat”, [Interview by Christine Estima], Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, 48 (October): 14.

---2010b, “Interview with Shirin Neshat”, [Interview by Ailsa Ferria]”, Artificial Eye, Audio Visual Recording.

Nichols, Bill 1991, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

--- 2001, Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

--- 2008, “The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary”, (eds) Thomas Austin & Wilma de Jong, Rethinking Documentary: New Perspective and New Practices, Maidenhead: McGraw University Press: 13- 28.

Osanloo, Azroo 2009, The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Over, William 2001, “Iranian Cinema: Life Spans and Social Movements”, Passages 3.2, (September): 228-251.

Pak-Shiraz, Nacim 2011, Sh’I Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film, London: I. B Tauris.

Papas, Alexandre 2006, “Towards a New History of Sufism: The Turkish Case”, History of Religions, 46.1 (August): 81 -90.

240

Pardo, Eldad J. 2004, “Iranian Cinema, 1968-1978: Female Characters and Social Dilemmas on the Eve of Revolution”, Middle Eastern Studies, 40.3 (May): 29-54.

Parsipur, Shahrnush 1989, Women Without Men, (trans) Kamran Talattof, Jocelyn Sharlet, Feminist Press: New York.

Pollitt, Katha 1995, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, London: Vintage

Powell, Ryan 2008, “Understanding the Stigmatization of Gypsies: Power and the Dialectics of (Dis) identification”, Housing, Theory and Society, 25.2: 87–109.

Povey, Tara, Rostami-Povey, Elaheh (eds) 2013, Women, Power and Politics in 21st Century Iran, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Pryluck, Calvin 1976, “Ultimately We are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking”, Journal of the University Film Association, 28.1: 21-29.

--- 2005, “Ultimately We are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking”, (eds) Alan Rosenthal & John Corner, New Challenges for Documentary: 2nd Edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press: 194-208.

Rahimieh, Nasrin, 2003, “Overcoming the Orientalist Legacy of Iranian Modernity: Women’s post-Revolutionary Film and Literary Production”, Thamyris 10: 147-163.

--- 2009, “Divorce Seen through Women’s Cinematic Lens”, Iranian Studies, 42.1 (February): 97 – 112.

241 --- 2010, “Capturing the Abject of the Nation in ‘The House is Black’”, (eds) Rahimieh, Nasrin, Brookshaw, Dominic, Forough Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of the New Persian Poetry. London: I.B Tauris: 125- 136.

Rahimieh, Nasrin, Brookshaw, Dominic (eds) 2010, Forough Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of the New Persian Poetry. London: I.B Tauris.

Rapping, Elayne 1997, “The Movie of the Week: Law, Narrativity and Gender on Prime Time”, (eds) Martha A. Fineman, Martha T. McClusky, Feminism, Media and the Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 91-99.

Rascaroli, Laura 2009, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, New York: Wallflower Press.

Reading, Anna 2011, “Digital Media, Global Memory: Developing an Epistemology for the Globital”, (eds) O. Meyers, M. Neiger, E. Zandberg, On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Relf, Jan 1991, “Women in Retreat: the Politics of Separatism in Women's Literary Utopias”, Utopian Studies, 2.1/2: 131-146.

Renov, Michael 2004, The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ridgeon, Lloyd 2000, Makhmalbaf's Broken Mirror: The Socio-Political Significance of Modern Iranian, Durham: University of Durham.

Romney, Jonathon 2010, “Women Without Men” [Review], The Independent, June 13: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/women-without-

242 men-shirin-neshat-99-mins-15-1998840.htm

Rosenbaum, Jonathon 2005, “Radical Humanism and the Co-Existence of Film and Poetry in ‘The House is Black’”, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 260-265.

Roudometof, Victor 2007, Collective Memory and Cultural Politics, Illinois: Northern Illinois University.

Ruehsen, Moyara deMoraes 1993, “Operation 'Ajax' Revisited: Iran, 1953”, Middle Eastern Studies, 29. 3 (July): 467-486.

Ryan, Michael 1988, “Discourse, Psychoanalysis, Ideology”, (eds) Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 477- 486.

Saadi-Nejad, Manya 2009, “Mythological Themes in Iranian Culture and Art: Traditional and Contemporary Perspectives”, Iranian Studies, 42.2. (April): 231 -246.

Sadr, Hamid Reza 2006, Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London: I.B Tauris.

Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz & Rosenbaum, Jonathan 2003, Abbas Kiarostami, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Saljoughi, Sara 2012, “Seeing, Iranian Style: Women and Collective Vision in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Shirin’”, Iranian Studies, 45.4 (July): 519 – 535.

Sakr, Naomi (ed) 2004, Women and Media in the Middle East: Power Through Self- Expression, New York: I.B Tauris.

243 Sanders, Willemien 2010, “Documentary Filmmaking and Ethics: Concepts, Responsibilities and the Need for Empirical Research”, Mass Communication and Society, 13.5: 528-553.

Sani, Mahmoud Reza 2013, Men at Work: Lessons from Abbas Kiarostami. Mhughes Digital Press.

Santaolalla, Isabel, 1998, "Bodyscapes of Silence: The Figure of the Mute Woman in the Cinema", Journal of Gender Studies, 7.2: 53-61.

Sayad, Celilia 2013, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in Cinema, New York: IB Tauris.

Schatz, Thomas 1981, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System. Sydney: McGraw-Hill.

--- 1991, “Film Genre and the Genre Film”, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 691 – 702.

Scullion, Rosemarie 2006, “Feminizing National Memory: Mossadegh, Milani and ‘The Hidden Half’”, South Central Review, 23.3 (Summer): 1-11.

Sedghi, Hamideh 1996, “Women, the State and Development: Appraising Secular and Religious Gender Politics in Iran”, (eds) Jennifer Turpin, Lois Ann Lorentzen, The Gendered New World Order: Militarism, Development, and the Environment. Oxon: Routledge.

--- 2007, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, Reveiling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Shahidian, Hammed, Women In Iran: Emerging Voices in the Women’s Movement.

244 Westport: Greenwood Press.

Shamisa, Sirous 1993, Negahi beh Forugh, Tehran.

Sheibani, Khatereh 2006, “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry”, Iranian Studies 39.4 (December): 509-537.

Shohat, Ella 2001, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.

--- 2006, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press.

Shooter, Natalie 2013, “‘I am Nasrine’ Director: The British Public Has Been Hijacked”, The Guardian, 9 February: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/08/i-am-nasrine-tina-gharavi-interview

Siletz, Ari 2006, “Cease Fire [Review]”, Online: http://arisiletz.blogspot.com.au/2006/07/ceasefire.html

Silverman, Kaja 1988, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Simpkins, Scott 1988, “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism”, Twentieth Century Literature, 34.2 (Summer): 140 – 154.

Singer, Ben 2013, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, New York: Columbia University Press.

Smaill, Belinda 2012, “Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary”, Screening the Past, 34:

245 http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/08/cinema-against-the-age-feminism-and- contemporary-documentary/

Smaill, Belinda 2014, “The Male Sojourner, the Female Director and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier”, Camera Obscura,29.1 (85): 5-31

Smith, Tracey 1997, “Recognizing Difference: The Romani ‘Gypsy’ Child Socialisation and Education Process, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18.2: 243-257.

Sohrabi, Naghmeh, “To Be Heard: Of Hope and Despair in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s ‘Our Times’”, The Iranian, January 23: http://iranian.com/NaghmehSohrabi/2002/January/Film/index.html

Speer, Annika C 2013, “The Feminist Potential of Docudrama: Destabilizing the Primacy of Primary Sources through Paula Kamen's Jane Author”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 34. 3: 1-26

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1988, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, (eds) C. Nelson & L. Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Basingstoke: MacMillan: 66- 111.

--- 1999, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Point, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

--- 2008, Other Asias, Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

--- 2010, “Can the Subaltern Speak? (Revised Edition)”, (ed) Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, New York: Columbia: 21- 80.

246 Stewart, Michael 2014, Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Strossen, Nadine 1995, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall & IBD.

Sullivan, Zohreh T 2000, Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Tahami, Reza 1994, “Iranian Women Make Films”, Film International, Quarterly, 2.3 (Summer): 4 -13.

Taheri, Jaleh 2011, “Areas of Iranian Women’s Voice and Influence”, (eds) Roksana Bahramitash, Eric Hooglund, Gender in Contemporary Iran: Pushing the Boundaries, Abington: Routledge.

Talatoff, Kamran 2010, “Personal Rebellion and Social Revolt in the Works of Forugh Farrokhzad: Challenging Assumptions”, (eds) Dominic Brookshaw, Nasrin Rahimieh, Forugh Farrockhzad, Poet of Modern Iran, New York: I.B. Tauris: 83-100.

--- 2011, Modernity, Sexuality and Ideology in Iran, New York: Syracuse Press.

Tapper, Richard (ed) 2002, The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity. New York: I.B Tauris.

Taylor, Dianna, Vintages, Karen (eds) 2004, Foucault and the Final Feminism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Thomas, Deborah 2000, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy and Romance, Dumfrieshire: Cameron & Hollis.

247 Tober, Dianne 2007, “‘My Body Is Broken Like My Country’: Identity, Nation, and Repatriation among Afghan Refugees in Iran”, Iranian Studies, 40. 2 (April): 263 – 285.

Vatali, Valentina & Willemen, Paul (eds) 2006, Theorising National Cinema, London: BFI Publishing.

Wagner, Roi 2012, “Silence as Resistance Before the Subject, or Could the Subaltern Remain Silent?”, Theory, Culture, Society, 29.6: 99 – 124.

Waldman, Diane & Walker, Janet 1999, Feminism and Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Ward, Paul 2013, Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: Wallpaper Press.

--- 2008, “Drama-Documentary; Ethics and Notions of Performance: The Flight 93 Films”, (eds) Thomas Austin, Wilma de Jong, Rethinking Documentary: New Perspective and New Practices, Maidenhead: McGraw University Press: 191-204.

Warne, Andrew 2013, “Psychoanalysing Iran: Kennedy’s Iran Taskforce and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961-3”, The International History Review, 35.2: 396- 422.

Wexman, Virginia Wright 2003, Film and Authorship, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Whatley, Sheri 2003, “Women Film Directors: A Clever Activism”, Off Our Backs 33.3/4 (March- April): 30 -32.

Whitford, Margaret 1991, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge.

248 Williams, Alan (ed) 2002, Film and Nationalism, London: Rutgers University Press.

Williams, Linda 1991, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess”, Film Quarterly, 44.4 (Summer): 2-13.

--- 1998, “Melodrama Revised”, (ed) Nick Browne, Reconfiguring American Film Genres, Berkeley: University of California Press: 42-88.

Winston, Brian 2000, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, London: British Film Institute.

Woodhead, Leslie 2005, “Dramatised Documentary”, (eds) Alan Rosenthal, John Corner, New Challenges for Documentary: 2nd Edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Woodmansee, Martha, Jaszi, Peter 1994, The Constriction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, Durham: Duke University Press.

Yervasi, Carina 2008, “‘Ouaga Saga’, Magical Realism and Postcolonial Politics”, Research in African Literatures, 39.4 (Winter): 40 – 57.

Zarrinkoob, Abdol-Hosein 1970, “Persian Sufism in its Historical Perspective”, Iranian Studies, 3.3/4 (Summer-Autumn): 139 -220.

Zarrinkub, Hamid (ed) 1996, Forugh Farrokhzad: Javdaneh zistan dar owl Mandan, Tehran: Behruz Jalali.

Zarzosa, Agustin 2013, Reconfiguring Melodrama in Film and Television, Lanham: Lexington Books.

Zeydabadi-Nejad, Saeed 2009, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic, Oxon: Routledge.

249 Filmography

11 September, “God, Construction and Destruction” 2002, Samira Makhmalbaf (DVD). USA: Empire Pictures.

All Hell Let Loose (Hus i helvete) 2002, Susan Taslimi (FILM). Sweden: Film i Vast.

At Five O’clock in the Afternoon (Panj- e asr) 2003, Samira Makhmalbaf (FILM). Makhmalbaf Film House: Afghanistan.

Blackboards (Takhteh-Siah) 2000, Samira Makhmalbaf (FILM). Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

The Blue Veiled (Rusari Abi) 1995, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (FILM). Iran: Farabi Cinema Foundation.

The Brick and the Mirror (Khesht va Ayeneh) 1965, (FILM) Ebrahim Golestan. Iran: Golestan Film Workshop.

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Buda az sharm foru rikht) 2007, Hana Makhmalbaf (FILM). Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

Ceasefire (Atash bas) 2006, Tahmineh Milani, USA: IR Movies.

Children of Divorce (Bacheha-ye talagh) 1989, Tahmineh Milani, (FILM) Iran: Khane Film-e.

Circumstance 2011, Maryam Keshavarz (DVD) USA: Lions Gate.

The Cyclist (Bicycle-ran) 1988 (DVD) USA: Image Entertainment.

250 The Cow (Gav) 1969, Dariush Mehrjui (FILM). Iran: Ministry of Culture.

The Day My Aunt was Ill (Rouzi keh khalam mariz bood) 1997, Hana Makhmalbaf. (FILM). Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

The Day I Became a Woman (Roozi ke zan shodam) 2000, Marzieh Meshkini (FILM). Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

Divorce Iranian Style 1998, Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini (FILM). USA: Twentieth Century Vixen.

Facing Mirrors (Ayneha-ye Rooberoo) 2012, Negar Azarbeyjani (DVD). Germany: Homescreen.

The Fifth Reaction (Vakonesh-e Panjom) 2005 Tahmineh Milani (DVD). USA: IR MOVIES.

A Fire (Yek Atash) 1958 -1961, Ebrahim Golestan (FILM). Iran: Golestan Film Workshop.

The Hidden Half (Nimeh-ye Penhan) 2001, Tahmineh Milani (DVD). USA: IR Movies.

The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast) 1962, Forugh Farrokhzad (DVD). USA: Facets Video.

How Samira Made ‘Blackboards’ (Samira chegoneh ‘Takhte Siah’ ra Sakht’) 2000, Maysam Makhmalbaf (FILM) Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

I am Nasrine 2013, Tina Gharavi (FILM). UK: Bridge and Tunnel Productions.

Kandahar 2001, Mohsen Makmalbaf (FILM). Afghanistan: Makhmalbaf Film House.

251 Lead (Sorb) 1988, Masoud Kimiai (FILM) Iran: Kargah Azad Film.

The Legend of the Sigh (Afsaneh-ye ah) 1991, Tahmineh Milani (VHS). USA: Facets Video.

Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie) 1957, Chris Marker (FILM). France: Argos Films.

Love and Death (Eshgh va marg) 1990, Mohammad Reza Alami (FILM). Iran.

Marjan 1956, Shahla Riahi (FILM). Iran: Arya Film.

Maryam and Mani (Maryam va Mani) 1979. Kobra Saeedi. Iran: Arya Film.

The May Lady (Banoo-ye ordibehesht) 1998, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (DVD). USA: IR Movies.

A Moment of Innocence (Nun-o goldoon) 1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (FILM), Iran: Makhmalbaf Film House.

Two Legged Horse (Asbe du-pa) 2008, Samira Makhmalbaf (FILM). Afghanistan: Makhmalbaf Film House.

My Tehran for Sale, 2009, Granaz Moussavi (DVD). Australia: Cyan Films.

Nargess (1992), Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (FILM). Iran: Arman Film.

Nathalie Granger 1972, Marguerite Duras (FILM). France: Moullet et Cie.

Nightsongs 1984, Marva Nabili, (VIDEO). USA: World Artists Home Video.

252 Off Limits (Kharej az mahdude) 1987, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (FILM). Iran: Mostazafan.

Our Times (Ruzegar-e ma) 2002, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (DVD). USA: Facets Video.

Payback (Tasviyeh hesab) 2007, Tahmineh Milani (FILM). Iran: Nima Pictures.

Persepolis 2007, Marjane Satrapi (FILM). France: 2.4.7 Films.

The Sealed Soil (Khak-e sar be mohr) 1977, Marva Nabili (VIDEO). USA: World Artists Home Video.

Shirin 2008, Abbas Kiarostami (DVD). USA: Cinema Guild.

Sib (Apple) 1998, Samira Makhmalbaf (DVD). USA: IRMOVIES.

The Silence (Sokut) 1998, Mohsen Makhmalbaf 1998 (DVD). USA: Image Entertainment.

Sorry, Wrong Number 1948, Anatole Litvak (FILM). USA: Hal Wallis Productions.

Superstar 2009, Tahmineh MIlani (FILM). Iran: Nima Pictures.

Sunless (Sans Soleil) 1983, Chris Marker (FILM). France: Argos Films.

Ten (Dah) 2002, Abbas Kiarostami (DVD). USA: Zeigeist Films.

Two Women (Do Zan) 1998, Tahmineh Milani (DVD). USA: IR Movies.

Water and Heat (Ab va Garma) 1961, Ebrahim Golestan. (FILM). Iran: Golestan Film Workshop.

253

What Else is New?( Digeh che khabar?) 1992, Tahmineh Milani (FILM). Iran: Farabi Cinema Foundation.

Women’s Prison (Zendan-e zanan) 2002, Manijeh Hekmat (FILM) Iran: Bamdad Film

Women Without Men(Zanan bedune mardan) 2009, Shirin Neshat (DVD). USA: Artificial Eye.

Under the Skin of the City (Zir-e poost-e shahr) 2005, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (DVD) USA: Fox Lorber Films.

Unwanted Woman (Zan-e Ziadi) 2005, Tahmineh Milani (DVD). USA: IR Movies.

254