Defying the Censors: a new wave of Iranian filmmakers are breaking boundaries with unflattering reflections on their homeland
While the USA still imposes sanctions on the importation of Iran 's vast oil reserves, it can't seem to get enough of an equally rich supply of Iranian cinema. Iranian films may not break box office records (Kandahar, the highest-grossing Iranian import, took only $1 million in the US ) but nonetheless they are highly esteemed and eagerly awaited. A new Abbas Kiarostami or Moshen Makhmalbaf movie is virtually guaranteed a heavy-weight distributor like Miramax and a privileged slot at Sundance or Toronto . In Chicago , there is even a yearly festival, now in its 14 th year, devoted exclusively to Iranian movies. And it's not just in the States: over the last decade or so Iranian films have been garnering the top prizes at Cannes and Venice with impressive regularity and have left critics and filmmakers the world-over worshipping with superlatives. (Kiarostami is often compared to Bergman and Kurosawa, no less.)
The irony is that many of the Iranian films that are lapped up in America and elsewhere have never even been seen inside Iran . Kiarostami's latest film, Ten (2002) and Jafar Panahi's The Circle (2000) are just two of the most recent films that, while being widely praised abroad, remain banned by the Iranian authorities. Although there is a strict code governing what can be shown on screen in Iran (men and women are not allowed to touch; women must be veiled at all times), neither film breaks the rules. Rather, these films are seen by the authorities as being subversive because at their centre is an implicit criticism of the status quo, and in particular of the suppression of women's rights.
The state took control of the film industry after the 1979 revolution with the aim of banishing western cultural influences and extolling the virtues of Islam. It is only in the past three or four years that certain Iranian filmmakers have sharply focussed on social and political issues affecting their country. In the eighties and nineties, post-revolutionary filmmakers like Kiarostami shunned controversial statements in favour of a characteristic brand of cine-poetic philosophy that has come to be synonymous with Iranian cinema. In those days, a Kiarostami film meant a rural setting, a child or a male protagonist and the languid, distant, wide-angled photography that is his signature. Though films like A Taste Of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) do touch on darker themes (suicide in the former, and the conflict between tradition and modernity in the latter), they do so in a gentle reflective fashion that is more rhapsodic than polemic.
With Ten , however, Kiarostami foregoes this style of filmmaking completely. Not only does his latest film have an urban setting (the streets of Tehran), the camerawork (now digital) is restricted to two close-up angles on the dashboard of a car, and, most importantly, the protagonist is now a female - and not a chador-wearing tradition-bound female either, but a modern independent woman, loosely veiled and sporting sunglasses, with plenty of non-conformist views to air. She berates the laws of her country that prohibit her from divorcing her abusive drug-addict husband; she deplores women's dependence on men ("We cling to everything"); and among the passengers in her car are a prostitute and a woman who quite impermissibly removes her scarf in public to reveal a shaved head. Moreover, the female protagonist is scorned and rebuked by her little boy whose precocious, sexist views are clearly those of the male-dominated society which he represents in microcosm.
Many earlier Iranian films feature children in order to get social comment past the censors. Children, being apolitical and effectively asexual, have an on-screen freedom that adults do not. So although the little girl in Panahi's delightful The White Balloon (1985) is admonished for watching the dervish snake-charmers (an exclusively male activity), the film in which she appears was not. The social comment about the place of women in society that is the same as that in Ten , but here it is sufficiently subtextual and embedded within the kid-movie genre for it not enrage the censors. It would be unthinkable for an Iranian film to show a grown woman freely partaking in a male pursuit of this kind without it raising issues that directly question the established place of women in Iranian society.
The Circle sets out to show precisely this transgression of accepted female boundaries. Like Ten it is an urban street-life study with gritty camerawork and female protagonists, and like Ten , it is banned. The women here have either recently been released from jail, or have escaped. Variously, they smoke in public, travel alone without ID, pawn their trinkets and prostitute themselves. One woman attempts to obtain an illicit abortion without the consent of the baby's father (who is dead) or that of her own father (who has disowned her). Another woman abandons her child in the street. At the root of these transgressions is the underlying crime of being an unattached woman with no man to own you, with no place in the male order of society. The vicious circle of the title is the road taken from imprisonment to the criminal margins of society to imprisonment again, the cycle exacerbated by the renunciation of these desperate women by their families and the authorities. To show this, however, in an Iranian cinema is deemed unacceptable.
Undeterred by the prohibition of these films and inspired by their immense sophistication and daring, Iranian filmmakers continue to explore these and other controversial issues. Moshen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar (2001) is a rare depiction of pre-9/11 Afghanistan under Taliban rule. A westernised woman journeys back to her homeland after many years to find her sister. She discovers an Afghanistan in the grip of a punishingly backwards regime, a country where women are wholly concealed under the burqa, where no contact whatsoever is permissible between unmarried couples (not even a doctor examining his patient), where young boys are brainwashed in fundamentalist Islam and taught to load a Kalishnikov. In At Five In The Afternoon (2003), Samira Makhmalbaf, Moshen's daughter, revisits Afghanistan post-Taliban to find that women are now allowed to study and to work, but that there is nothing for them to study or to work for. A girl dreams of becoming President of the Republic in a country where the newly-acquired freedom of women is seen as blasphemous, where the scriptures decree that "if you are afraid of women who oppose you and refuse to obey you, lecture them and do not go to their beds, punish them". The Iranian censors are content that these films are set outside Iran and consequently the Makhmalbafs are able to depict the effects of a regime much less liberal than the one in Iran , with much greater freedom than they could in Iran . And yet in essence, the social and political issues are the same: the girls trapped on the outskirts of Tehran society are in essence sisters of the girls trapped in the void left by the departed Taliban.
It seems that young Iranian filmmakers today, far from pandering to the censors, are prepared to push the boundaries of their national cinema even further. A glance at the schedule for Tehran 's 22 nd Fajr Film Festival (www.fajrfilmfest) shows that the next generation of cineastes are probing the margins and shadows of Iranian society more openly than ever. This year's entries include films about delinquency, drug addiction, abusive husbands, capital punishment and the illegal timber trade. Every other story centres around a character who has just been released from prison. In one film a female character chain smokes and repeatedly injects herself. In another, even the US invasion of Iraq gets a controversial mention: "The war in Iraq will be over in a week. Maybe then they'll come and rescue us". Whether this remark, which appears to suggest that some people in Iran would prefer an American-style democracy, should be taken at all seriously is doubtful. It may be the case that the average Iranian prefers the latest American import to the slow-moving uncompromising Iranian art house offerings. (It is not surprising to learn that Kill Bill and Terminator 3 are on release in Tehran.) What is clear, though, is that the days of the elegiac pastoral films of the eighties and nineties are over.
Whether or not these films get a permit inside Iran should of course be no indicator as to the achievement of the filmmaker. Films like Ten and The Circle are awesome films whose humanity speaks in any language to any person, male or female. Their perceived controversy should not detract from the fact that these are magnificent works, which, although depart from the iconic style that made the world take note of Iranian cinema, are nonetheless in the same tradition. In many ways the driver and passengers in Ten are natural successors to all those front-seat conversationalists who populate the Kiarostami canon. And the girls searching for a way out of their cyclic hell in The Circle are maybe grown-up versions of the little girl searching for her 200 toman note in The White Balloon . All these films are essential viewing - not just for their insight into day-to-day life in Iran - but because they are outstanding films in their own right. The incredibly real and affecting performances of non-professionals (which routinely outclass the pros at their own game), the slow-moving and elliptical storytelling style unique to these movies, and above all, the beguiling visual poetry that evokes so much with so little - these will all linger in your memory long after the Farsi has stopped rolling.
It remains to be seen whether the new batch of young Iranian filmmakers will achieve the lasting, worldwide success of their predecessors. Samira Makhbalmaf is certainly a sophisticated and mature artist in her own right, carrying on her father's tradition of filmmaking sans frontières. She too has inherited that lingering poetic visual language that speaks so movingly of the human condition, transcends international boundaries and makes Iranian cinema truly a world cinema.
Simon Gray
© Close-Up Film Magazine
|
