Screening Iran: The Cinema as National Forum

Richard Tapper is professor of anthropology with reference to the Middle East at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

During the 1990s, films from Iran were increasingly acclaimed at international festivals. The “New Iranian Cinema” became recognised not merely as a distinctive national cinema but as one of the most innovative and exciting in the world.

 

International media interest was doubtless aroused by two paradoxes: films of poetic and simple beauty were coming from a country reputed, since the 1978–9 revolution, to be a locus of religious fanaticism; and a successful film industry was emerging in conditions of political and cultural repression. These paradoxes are more apparent than real. Contemporary Iranian cinema has firm and deep roots, pre-dating the revolution, and is grounded in the rich and profound Iranian cultural traditions of drama, poetry and the visual arts that have survived many centuries of political and social change.

 

In this article I review the development of Iranian cinema before the revolution and efforts to create an Islamic cinema afterwards, then consider the reasons for the growing international success of the New Iranian Cinema. I examine some typical features of this cinema: the blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction, the focus on children and the constrained portrayal of women. In conclusion, I suggest that the success of the new cinema has provided Iranians with both a focus and a forum by which to reconsider their national and cultural identity.

Before the Revolution

Opinions differ as to whether Iranian cinema began in 1900 with the introduction of the first cinecamera by Mozafferoddin Shah’s photographer Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas-bashi, or in 1930 with the first Iranian fiction film, Ovanes Ohanians’s Abi and Rabi. Other films from the first half of the century, such as the first talkie, Ardeshir Irani’s The Lor Girl (1933), had a major public impact—in the cities at least—and have achieved mythical status. But interesting though the history of the early years is, nothing of distinction, nothing in the way of a “national cinema”, was produced until after the Second World War. For many years, the films shown publicly in Iran were mostly dubbed imports. Local productions were imitations of Indian, Egyptian and other foreign films, the most popular being what became known as the film farsi genre.

 

Unlike in some other countries, elements that constrain Iranian cinema today—such as its connection with politics, religion and national culture—were present from the beginning. Both government and religious authorities sought to control the images to be shown publicly. Religious leaders condemned cinema from the start as morally offensive and ethically corrupting. Formal censorship began in the 1920s, in the face of increasing imports of movies depicting women, the family, sex and dancing. Political criticism or social realism in locally produced films was unthinkable. By the 1950s and 1960s, it was commercial enterprise that determined film styles. While political censorship if anything increased, greater freedom was allowed in the area of sex, leading Ayatollah Khomeini and other religious figures to condemn cinema in the 1970s.

 

There were interesting developments in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in documentary making, by writers and film-makers such as Farrokh Gaffari, Forugh Farrokhzad and Ebrahim Golestan. But the year 1969 is generally agreed to mark the birth of the Iranian art cinema, with Daryush Mehrju’i’s prize-winning The Cow and Massoud Kimia’i’s Qeysar. For a brief period between 1969 and 1974, Iranian cinema—the first “New Iranian Cinema”, also called the “New Wave”—became known internationally. The enthusiastic reception of The Cow at festivals prefigured that of some post-revolutionary films.

 

Domestically, this art cinema was part of new Iranian movements in literature and politics, involving intellectuals and literary figures such as Kimia’i, Mehrju’i, Golestan, Farrokhzad, Bahram Beyza’i, Gholam-Hoseyn Sa‘edi and others. The new films introduced the notion of the director as auteur and the idea of cinema as an art like literature, poetry and theatre. Writers now wrote for the cinema. A combination of filming styles and choice and treatment of topics and locations—rural and tribal society, the urban poor—associated the new cinema with anti-government politics. The Cow, in particular, started a genre of allegorical protest film.

 

But it was not yet a “World Cinema”. And, as Roy Armes notes, “the films of the young directors had given Iran an international reputation, but they failed to reach a mass audience within their own country.”¹ The art films were appreciated only by a small, elite, local audience and foreign critics, and the Pahlavi regime stifled any cinematic protest more effectively by appropriation than by censorship. As Hamid Dabashi puts it, “the unfortunate state of the pre-revolutionary art was such that, in order to see the work of even Amir Naderi or Daryush Mehrju’i, two of the most progressive film-makers at the time, one had to sit next to the Pahlavi ruling elite.”²

 

The Pahlavi shahs of Iran, like the rulers of many twentieth-century nation-states, sought legitimacy in their country’s early history. They looked to pre-Islamic times, reviving and glorifying Iran’s earlier cultural and political heritage. Islam was depicted as backward. Tradition was rejected to pave the way for modernisation. The Pahlavis’ aggrandisement of their pre-Islamic precursors and of pre-Islamic Iranian cultural traditions was not well received by the population at large, few of whom shared the values being promoted. In particular, it antagonised the religious classes. The 1978–9 revolution was populist, with many different elements, but the clerics had the deepest popular roots, were the best organised and led, and emerged victorious as the rulers of an Islamic republic.

 

The new regime, seen by many as oppressively puritanical and totalitarian, threatened the end of Iranian cinema:

 

Cinema theatres were burned down in the name of morality and cultural independence, the chain of production was completely disrupted by the exile of numerous directors, actors and producers, creativity was jeopardized by the uncertainty of what would be allowed or forbidden.³

 

But hostile domestic conditions had already drastically reduced the output of the New Wave. In the 1970s, the local audience for Iranian films had decreased in the face of wholesale imports from India and Hollywood. Local production declined for lack of financial support. Only film farsi continued to draw popular audiences and make money. Indeed, there is much agreement that Iranian cinema was nearly dead before the revolution. The cinema that re-emerged by the 1990s, in spite of government restrictions in the Islamic Republic, had to undergo remarkable transformations, paralleling wider changes in Iranian culture and society.

An Islamic Cinema

Before the revolution, the ulema (senior religious authorities) either rejected cinema or ignored it. All they could do to it, a new art form, was to apply their juristic (feqh) rules of what was forbidden and what was allowed (haram and halal) in the depiction of images. Generally, the religious classes disapproved. For some pious families, going to the cinema was tantamount to committing a sin: it was haram. But the Islamists recognised the usefulness of the media, and when the state became Islamic and subject to the rulings of the jurists, they could no longer ignore the cinema issue. They had two options: either to do away with it (as the Taliban later did in Afghanistan) or to Islamicise it. Realising its power, they decided to bring it under control and use it for proper political purposes. For Ayatollah Khomeini, cinema after the revolution became an ideological tool to combat Pahlavi culture: “Cinema is one of the manifestations of culture and it must be put to the service of man and his education.”⁴

 

In their early discourse, the revolutionaries defined themselves in opposition to the ancien régime. They sought to undo and rectify what they portrayed as non-Islamic elements in Iranian life; to establish a new Islamic political and economic base and popular legitimacy through a new constitution; and to reinvent culture, society, intellectual life, education and learning, “Islamising” and cleansing them of the pollution of Western and Pahlavi elements.

 

The new cultural policy brought new regulations: all forms of communications, media and arts were forced into the ideological straitjacket of feqh rules of halal and haram. The most powerful media—television and radio—were brought firmly under state control. The arts (including cinema), the press and publishing were made subject to the new Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

 

There was much debate on what “Islamic” art and cinema might mean. What would a new Islamic aesthetics amount to? Initially it was easier to focus on the negative (banning haram images and subjects, such as the portrayal of the body, especially women’s bodies, as part of the hejab system, the women’s Islamic dress code). But the revolution itself and then the war with Iraq (1980–8) suggested positive ways of promoting Islamic themes and images, and became subjects for major genres of art and cinema.

 

The immediate post-revolutionary years, 1980–2, were a period of uncertainty for Iranian film-makers. Problems included

 

financial damage that the industry suffered during the revolution, lack of government interest in cinema during the transitional period, a vacuum of centralized authority, antagonistic competition between various factions over cinema, lack of an appropriate cinematic model, heavy competition from imports, a drastic deterioration in the public image of the industry as a whole, the haphazard application of censorship, and the flight of many film professionals into exile.⁵

 

After 1982, “political consolidation entailed direct control of the mass media and the film industry. However, the transformation of cinema from the Pahlavi to the Islamic involved a major cultural and ideological shift, which could not take place unidirectionally, monolithically, or rapidly.”⁶

 

New institutions assisted in the process. The Farabi Cinema Foundation was created in 1983, while the Mostazafan Foundation and the Jihad (later Ministry) of Reconstruction had important roles in film production and in the media generally. By 1984, film production was once more being encouraged. War subjects and the promotion of anti-Pahlavi, Islamic values featured heavily in the new films. Women were portrayed, but in a restricted range of roles and situations, the limits set by government regulation and self-censorship on the part of directors.

 

How far did the revolution mark a break from pre-revolutionary cinema? Hamid Naficy focuses on differences, but other writers stress continuities, pointing to the many accomplished directors who made films both before and after the revolution, to the abiding connection of cinema with politics, and to the continuation of censorship in various forms. The main difference was the public’s reduced exposure to Hollywood films after the revolution.

Success Abroad

By the mid-1980s, the failure to establish an Islamic ideological cinema was evident. As in Iranian society, so in the world of Iranian cinema, there was a gradual stretching of the limits imposed by the jurists, and a further redefining and reinventing of culture. As far as the arts were concerned, some Muslim militants and radicals who had won the earlier battle with the secularists now became moderates and liberals themselves. They were the so-called left, who formulated cultural policies in the 1980s. Key players included Mohammad Khatami, minister of culture and Islamic guidance in 1982, who, with a team of Muslim intellectuals, laid the foundation for an independent press and a new, national cinema.

 

The Farabi Foundation soon realised that it was best to let the film-makers choose their own themes. Pre-revolutionary directors such as Mehrju’i, Beyza’i, Kimia’i and Abbas Kiarostami resumed interrupted careers. Prominent newcomers included women directors. Gradually, a period of recovery and qualitative growth began, and films such as Mehrju’i’s The Tenants (1986) and Beyza’i’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (1988) attracted international attention to the Iranian cinema once more. Farabi promoted this, inviting important foreign critics and film-makers to the seventh Fajr Film Festival in 1989. The next year saw a breakthrough with the success of Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? at Locarno.

 

Meanwhile inside Iran, after the end of the war in 1988 and Khomeini’s death in 1989, cinema became a focus for ideological and political dispute. Official attitudes and conditions changed. Morality codes were relaxed in 1988. From 1989 to 1993, scripts no longer needed official approval. Strict censorship continued, but a process of cultural negotiation and accommodation resulted in a lively cinema and cinema culture.

 

Political skirmishes reached a peak at the Fajr Festival of 1991, leading to Khatami’s resignation and a new period of uncertainty. The rightist government of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani banned many high-quality films and accused internal opponents of supporting a Western cultural invasion. But the change of policy was too late and backfired. It politicised the film-makers and forced them to take positions. During the 1997 presidential elections, in which Khatami was a surprise candidate, the artistic community, including prominent film-makers, became actively involved in politics for the first time. Those producing art films and progressive cinema openly supported Khatami. His campaign commercial was made by Seyfollah Dad, who later became deputy for cinema affairs under Ataollah Mohajerani, the new minister of culture and Islamic guidance. Interviews with Mohsen Makhmalbaf played an important part in Khatami’s campaign (Khatami had sided with Makhmalbaf in the controversy over the latter’s film, A Time to Love, at the 1991 Fajr Festival). Khatami’s supporters delayed resorting to these interviews in order to increase their impact in the last days of the campaign. With Khatami’s emphatic victory in the 1997 elections, a new phase in Iranian cinema began. Many long-suppressed films were screened, and new films such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady (1998) and Tahmineh Milani’s Two Women (1999) addressed issues that had been taboo.

 

With the phenomenal success—and festival exposure—in the late 1990s of new films by established masters such as Kiarostami, Mehrju’i and Makhmalbaf, as well as newcomers such as Majid Majidi, Abolfazl Jalili, Samira Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi and Bahman Ghobadi, the international progress of Iranian cinema seemed unstoppable. No respectable festival could be without at least one film from Iran. Seasons of Iranian movies multiplied. In summer 1999, Britain’s National Film Theatre staged the largest season so far (and the third in London that year), screening some sixty Iranian films, both pre- and post-revolutionary, over two months. The same year, Chicago had its tenth annual festival, and there were seasons devoted to Iranian films, or particular directors, elsewhere in the United States, France, Canada and other countries.

 

Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf are undoubtedly the best-known Iranian directors internationally: a straw count of recent English-language books and articles on Iranian directors showed thirty-one devoted to the former, and twenty to the latter (whose daughter Samira is catching up with thirteen). Their styles and personalities contrast, even if the contrast has sometimes been exaggerated. Thus, Kiarostami is commonly portrayed as a detached intellectual, a maker of films with little popular appeal but which are adored by the film world for their high art, deceptive simplicity and restrained politics. Mohsen Makhmalbaf is seen as being more political, more direct and more involved emotionally with his films and their subjects. His personal trajectory since before the revolution—as described in many of his films—echoes that of many Iranians. And he has angrily and actively confronted censorship, for example by filming and co-producing abroad. The Makhmalbaf “family firm”, with the latest international successes of Samira and her aunt and stepmother Marzieh Meshkini, has been a gift to the media.

Crisis at Home

Observers have suggested that Iranian cinema could not survive without its international market. Not surprisingly, French cineastes, traditionally hostile to Hollywood, have been foremost in welcoming Iranian cinema. Those sceptical of the international success of Iranian cinema see economic and political rather than artistic reasons for it, arguing that government promotion of Iranian films abroad was strongly motivated by the promise of new external investment, especially by French production companies. For although the Iranian film industry reached unprecedented production levels during the 1990s, it has experienced a severe financial crisis. Many internationally reputed films have failed on the home market. Just as before the revolution, the public still does not go to watch Iranian movies but prefers foreign films, despite the restrictions placed on these. Hossein Ghazian suggests that state aid disrupts the supply–demand relationship. “Ironically, this aid itself has aggravated the crisis, since it has come accompanied by ideological and political interference and a failure to appreciate the changes in the social structure of Iran in the past two decades.” The government supports films that the public does not want to see. If it fails to recognise public demand by relaxing its controls, “the eventual collapse of the Iranian film industry is a serious possibility.”⁷

 

The relationship of the Iranian government to its film industry—a combination of censorship and promotion—has certainly been complex in both its motivations and its effects, and has been interpreted in different ways. Agnès Devictor suggests that government policy has been mainly ideological, rather than economic or artistic, and that the government has used classical tools of intervention, not unlike those of some Western democratic regimes. She draws parallels with the United States, France and even the former Soviet Union, though there were of course structural, ideological and motivational differences in each case.⁸

 

Many observers focus on the effects of censorship and the selective promotion of directors and subjects. Are these forms of control positive or negative? Do they stifle or promote creativity? Censorship on the one hand forces film-makers to avoid political and social criticism, except through allegory and symbol. On the other, it produces, or approves, films that function as propaganda for the new official image of the country after the end of the Iraq war: Iran as rural, peaceful, poetic and childlike. Cinema becomes “a promising means through which to renegotiate the imagery of the nation, and gradually to reclaim a place for the country within the global economy in the name of art.”⁹

Representation and Reality

Many Iranian directors of the 1980s and 1990s cut their teeth on documentary, and notable examples were produced well before the revolution by Golestan, Mehrju’i, Naser Taghva’i, Kamran Shirdel, Ebrahim Mokhtari and others. Similarly, the questioning of what the camera reveals, and the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction—prominent features of much recent Iranian cinema—were prefigured in pre-revolutionary films such as Shirdel’s The Night it Rained (1967).

 

Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s account of how she and Kim Longinotto persuaded the Iranian authorities to let them make the documentary Divorce Iranian Style (1998) throws light on the modus operandi of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, both before and after Ataollah Mohajerani’s appointment as minister in 1997.¹⁰ Mir-Hosseini describes the process as a series of negotiations over meaning, identity and reality, exposing the radically different expectations—among Iranian authorities, film-makers and audiences—of the nature and purpose of documentary. For example, whose reality should be represented? And how is Iran to be presented to the world in film, be it documentary or fiction? A young documentary maker articulated the common view: “The main problem with Iranian films that get to festivals abroad is that they are all about people’s misery, about poverty and backwardness.” Many others encountered by Mir-Hosseini and Longinotto considered documentary to be justified only by either pedagogic or political aims; it should be scripted, “objective” and with an authoritative commentary. They were reluctant to accept unscripted, “observational” or “participatory” documentary, in which stories present themselves to the camera and develop during filming, and reveal the engagement of people behind and in front of camera.

 

Several Iranian directors of fiction films play poetically with the “reality” of their art, whether by filming the making of the film (Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Salam Sinema, Kiarostami in The Taste of Cherry); or by filming “true” stories (Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Moment of Innocence, Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple); or by using documentary conventions, minimal scripting, real people (not actors) and real, often colourful locations.

 

Choice of location raises issues of representation—of positive and negative images. Location is constrained by numerous factors, among them budgetary considerations and filming styles, international demand for certain “documentary” depictions of real locations in Iran (urban backstreets and beautiful rural scenery, but exotic images in particular), Iranian notions of privacy, the demands of the plot, and a film-maker’s own relationship to a place, which may become the “star” of the film. Locations outside Iran have distinct meanings; indeed, dis-location (journeys, searches, homelessness, exile) is a major theme in Iranian movies. As Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa notes, “there has been much debate among Iranian audiences abroad about what constitutes a true, authentic, undistorted representation or image of the homeland, Iran, and what should be shown in films ... in order to avoid a ‘negative image’ of Iranian culture.”¹¹ Different audiences look for, and see, different meanings in the locations. Foreigners see the exotic (mystery and misery), while Iranians abroad look for the familiar, the colourful homeland that they have constructed.

‘Dolls and Surrogates’

The treatment of women and children in Iranian films has drawn special attention for good but opposing reasons, both related to censorship. Women—veiled, commonly exoticised and subject to tight constraints on their behaviour—have suffered restrictions both before and behind the camera, while boys and girls appear both as surrogate adults and in remarkably realistic roles of their own.

 

Shahla Lahiji, pointing to the Iranian tradition of powerful and independent women in history, art and literature, maintains that “from its infancy, our cinema has treated women with great injustice and has been responsible, more than any other medium, for distorting the image of the Iranian woman, for creating a caricature of her real self”. The pre-revolutionary film farsi genre, in which song and dance and semi-naked female stars appealed to the fantasies of sexually deprived young men, profited from “neglecting, even damaging the social status of women ... ‘Unchaste dolls’ came to dominate the silver screen as the sole cinematic representation of Iranian women”. But the intellectual and progressive film-makers of the time were no better. In films such as Qeysar, they, “by an insidious piece of cultural fraud, threw women off the cabaret stage and into the attic”. The increasing numbers of women who had emerged into society, in education, the professions and politics, were nowhere to be seen in these pre-revolutionary films, which allowed women only traditional domestic roles as “chaste dolls”—“as a sign of opposition to values promoted by the ruling regime”.¹²

 

Post-revolutionary cinema and television, at first, only confirmed the “chaste doll” image. Again, there were no real women, working in offices or factories, thinking, deciding and opposing their husband’s will.

 

In the film sector, as in many other areas, all the sins committed by the fallen regime, as well as the output of vulgar film-makers, were put on women’s shoulders, ignoring the fact that women themselves had been the main victims. Women were now to pay the penalty by being banished altogether to the kitchen.¹³

 

War films polarised women as goodies or baddies, glorifying the ecstatic mothers of martyrs and denigrating a number of treacherous or difficult types. After the war, however, some good films appeared, for example Beyza’i’s Bashu and Perhaps Another Time (1988). At the same time women, who had suffered and contributed much on the home front, made their voices heard. “The way women film-makers chose to object to the unrealistic image of women in Iranian cinema was by making films themselves.” Male directors had to follow their lead in the portrayal of women.

 

Today, Iranian films have not only risen to the level of international acceptance, they have also adopted a different approach, and let me say, an attitude to women that is far more progressive than what existed before the revolution ... The Iranian film industry, having ignored women’s lives for almost fifty years, is purging itself of the notions of chaste and unchaste dolls in order to paint a real and realistic portrait of women and their presence.¹⁴

 

The cinematic treatment of women in Iran was an index of social and political constructions of gender from the beginning, but even more so after 1979. Children—a somewhat different index—have had a special place in Iranian cinema since the 1960s, when directors such as Kiarostami and Beyza’i learned their trade with children’s films. Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema is particularly associated internationally with the depiction of children. As Hamid Reza Sadr puts it, children have been burdened with portraying to outsiders a different, more poetic image of demonised Iranians, while for domestic audiences they allow directors to feature banned song-and-dance routines, to depict unshowable adult behaviour and emotions and to allegorise. The charm of the classic prize-winning films is that they are “concerned with realism or social problems and based on children’s dilemmas”. And, one might add, the actors are both engaging as individuals and non-professional. As in European New Wave and neo-realist movies, there are no Hollywood-style child stars. And there is no sex—children are sexually innocent. Initially, the central characters were boys (Beyza’i’s Bashu, Naderi’s The Runner), but increasingly by the 1990s they were girls.¹⁵

Debating Identity

Bashu, the Little Stranger has been much cited in different contexts. Lahiji identifies it as an exception to her dismal story of unreal depictions of women. As Nasrin Rahimieh shows, Bashu is also about representations of national identity and ethnic difference. The central characters are Bashu, who is a young Arabic-speaking boy from the south, and his adoptive mother, Na’i, a Gilaki-speaker from the north. Rahimieh analyses the film as a conjoint critique of Persian ethnocentrism and patriarchy. On the one hand, “it raises questions about the assumption that Iranian identity is inextricably tied to the dominant language of the nation, Persian.” On the other, “the contradictory and ambivalent discourse of nationalism [that] Bashu lays bare also brings to light the problematic position occupied by women in the ‘imagined community’ that makes up Iran.”¹⁶

 

Na’i and Bashu both start ethnocentrically, but she engineers his acceptance into her family, and he then demonstrates his own authority by using Persian with her husband. Without Persian, she ultimately loses authority to the two males. In an ironic ending, “Bashu succeeds in its critique of Persian nationalism through the agency of a woman whose final re-submission to the patriarchal family replicates the patterns of subordination the film lays bare in the discourse of nationalism.” Rahimieh concludes that what the film communicates to Iranian audiences is

 

a need to rethink the space assigned to the marginalized and the minorities. The comfortable and easily identifiable expressions and idioms that situate us within language, the film points out, also have the power to define and limit us. The Iranian viewer is subjected to the very linguistic alienation from which Bashu and Na’i suffer.¹⁷

 

The main elements of Iranian national identity (iraniyat) and the dialectic between them have been much discussed recently: Iran as homeland and Persian as the dominant language and culture; modernity, Western or otherwise; and Shi’ite Islam. The question is complicated today by the existence of a varied and articulate Iranian diaspora, which interacts with many different host cultures and versions of modernity, and is now into its second and third generations, with hybrid/hyphenated identities and differing ancestral linguistic and religious roots in Iran. Extreme versions of all three original elements (Iranian nationalism/Persian chauvinism; Western top-down modernisation; Islamic fundamentalism) were tried in the twentieth century, and failed. There is now a widely perceived imperative to negotiate an acceptable balance for the new millennium. A strong movement, with mass support among women and youth in Iran, has developed which rejects the traditional politics of monopolisation of power, control, secrecy and violence and favours democracy, transparency and political, religious and ethnic pluralism.

 

Cinema has become a major focus and arena for these discussions and debates, whose root concern is the nature of Iranian culture and identity. The distinctive forms and achievements of Iranian cinema, owing little to Hollywood or Western models, have shown that, culturally at least, the fear of a “Western invasion” can be dismissed as a chimera. Cultures always borrow from each other, then appropriate what is borrowed and transform it into their own style. Iranian cinema has much to teach the world about poetry, children, emotion and class. But what do audiences see—and want to see?

 

Audiences and critics have predictable (if contradictory) expectations of international cinema. They look for an appealing aesthetic; professional filming and editing; a focus on universal human themes such as family relationships, loss and search, survival; a “documentary” portrayal of a little-visited country; and images that contradict media stereotypes of a given people (for example, Iranians as anti-Western, irrational, terrorist). Alternatively, they might expect a lively, country-specific social and political critique, confirming stereotypes created in Hollywood productions such as Not Without My Daughter (Brian Gilbert, 1991).

 

In terms of style and content, Iranian movies have drawn international attention by their neo-realism and reflexivity, their focus on children and their difficulties with the portrayal of women. In an age of ever-escalating Hollywood blockbusters, part of their attraction (like that of much “Third World” cinema) comes from shoestring budgets and the use of amateur actors. Many successful films have had strikingly simple, local, small-scale themes, which have been variously read as totally apolitical or as highly ambiguous and open to interpretation as being politically and socially critical.

 

Given such contradictory expectations and interpretations, manifested in any number of film reviews in both the popular and intellectual press, it is not surprising if Iranians abroad themselves show confused reactions to and understandings of foreign audience responses to cinematic images of their country. The mixed—and often heated—responses of Iranians abroad to the new Iranian cinema (and other aspects of Iranian culture and politics as viewed in the West) reflect not merely their different politics, but different assumptions about what foreign viewers look for, and see, in these films. Diaspora Iranians often claim that films shown abroad distort the reality of Iranian society and hide the strict censorship that operates in Iran. They variously expect that films about Iran, even if supposedly fictional, should be politically and socially critical; that they should give information about Iranian culture and society, as if they were documentaries; and that, whether fictional or factual, they should be “positive”, i.e., propaganda for a particular construction of Iranian culture and social reality. They question the films that are actually made: what was the motivation of the censors in allowing them? It may be argued that many such reactions misread foreigners’ interpretations of Iranian cinema, misunderstand the aims and objectives of the film-makers and betray a one‑sided view of Iranian culture and society. The film-makers can’t win: if they show prosperous middle-class life, they are criticised for being too optimistic; if they focus on poor, rural people, they are ignoring the great civilisation of Iran; and if they idealise peasants, they are accused of hiding the realities of oppression.

 

Meanwhile, the Iranian government (while avoiding the issue of censorship) claims that the films it allows to be made and exported are indeed about reality. Unfortunately for governments, international audiences are uninterested in officially promoted culture. Naficy says, with justification, that the Iranian government has not benefited politically from the renewed international success of Iranian cinema, a key reason being that

 

Iranian exiles, international audiences, and the film-reviewing establishments abroad were sophisticated enough to understand the constricted political contexts in which the films were produced. Unlike some exiles who focused on the political issues and on governmental machinations and manipulations, these viewers and reviewers tended to highlight the initiative and skilfulness of the film-makers.¹⁸

 

Published interviews with well-known film-makers throw considerable light on their motivations and the conditions in which they work. Kiarostami’s films, for example, are widely interpreted both as social critique and as comments on central human problems. There is a contradiction here somewhere, but a (re)solution may be found by listening to what Kiarostami says himself about his films. He has claimed that without “restrictions” (his word for censorship) he would probably have made the same films. He has also been much quoted to the effect that the “restrictions” have actually encouraged creativity in the cinema—like Makhmalbaf, he has identified the banning of Hollywood films as a spur. (In spring 2000, however, he did attack the silencing of the reformist press.)¹⁹

 

Not least of the achievements of Iranian cinema, we may conclude, is that it provides both a social critique and a forum for discussion between Iranians inside and outside the country. The international success of Iranian cinema has been for many in the diaspora a source of renewed pride in their culture and heritage. It also serves as a channel for reconciliation between Iranians of different persuasions at home and abroad. It has become an important medium—through viewing and debate—for renegotiating Iranian cultural identity.

 

 

Endnotes

1. Roy Armes, Third World Film-Making and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 192.

 

2. Hamid Dabashi, “Dead Certainties: The Early Makhmalbaf”, in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, forthcoming).

 

3. Agnès Devictor, “Classical Tools, Original Goals: Cinema and Public Policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979–97)”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

4. Quoted by Armes, Third World Film-Making, p. 189.

 

5. Hamid Naficy, “Islamizing Film Culture—a Post-Khatami Update”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

6. Ibid.

 

7. Hossein Ghazian, “The Crisis in the Iranian Film Industry and the Role of Government”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

8. Devictor, “Classical Tools, Original Goals”.

 

9. Azadeh Farahmand, “Perspectives on the Recent (International Acclaim of) Iranian Cinema”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

10. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Negotiating the Politics of Gender in Iran: An Ethnography of a Documentary”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

11. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, “Location and Cultural Identity in Iranian Films”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

12. Shahla Lahiji, “Chaste Dolls Succeed Non-Chaste Ones: Women in Iranian Cinema since 1979”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper.

 

13. Ibid.

 

14. Ibid.

 

15. Hamid Reza Sadr, “Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper. See also Jamsheed Akrami, “The Childhood of the Dispossessed: Images of Children in Iranian Films” [www.webmemo.com/iran/articleview_1.cfm].

 

16. Nasrin Rahimieh, “Marking Gender and Difference in the Myth of the Nation: Bashu, a Post-Revolutionary Iranian Film”, in The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Tapper. See also her “Framing Iran: A Contrapuntal Analysis of Two Cinematic Representations of Post-Revolutionary Iran”, Edebiyat 9 (1998), pp. 249–75.

 

17. Ibid.

 

18. Naficy, “Islamizing Film Culture”. See also his The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

 

19. Interviews with Kiarostami include David Walsh, “Human Beings and Their Problems Are the Most Important Raw Material for Any Film” [www.wsws.org/arts/1994/oct1994/kiar.shtml]; and Patrick Z. McGavin, “Kiarostami Will Carry Us: The Iranian Master Gives Hope” [www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Kiarostam_Abbas_000801.html].