Poetic Cinema:

Trauma And Memory In Iranian Films

By

Proshot Kalami
B.A. (Tehran Azad University) 1992
M.A. (Tehran Azad University) 1994

Dissertation

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

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Comparative Literature

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Office of Graduate Studies

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of the

University pf California

Davis
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Approved:

_Dissertation Chair: Sheldon Lu__________________

_Juliana Schiesari_____________________________

_W.B. Worthen ______________________________

_Emma Wilson________________________________

Committee in Charge

2007

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 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iii-iv

Abstract v

I. Introduction: Post-1979 Revolution Iranian Cinema: Supportive Theory And History 1-22

II. Once Upon a Time, Cinema: the Traumatic Story of the Lover in Search of His
Aatiye/Future 23-53

III. The Old Dream and the New Awakening: the Disguise of Trauma and Sham
55- 88

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IV. The Shame of Being: An Iranian Survival Technique
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V. Trauma Times Two: Double Identity of Traumatic Memory 122-158

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VI. Conclusion / Afterward 160-164

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VII. Bibliography / Work Cited 165-172

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

All those who pursue higher education know that when we enter a PhD programme there

is a great challenge, a bitter sweet finale awaiting us. Nonetheless, with eagerness, at

times with great anxiety, and with, stress as a necessary ingredient, we pace our steps

through the foliage of critical discourse and the endless levels of academic progression.

I, like any other went through all those ups and down known to those burdened with the

weight of a PhD. To walk on that path one requires many helping hands, may lanterns to

lighten up dark corners, heart-giving hands that can reach out and support. I was blessed

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to have had a few of them always around me. The first, the best and most capable support
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came from and, indeed, in the form of Professor William B. Worthen, without whom I

would not have been able to see the finishing line. He became my mentor before I entered
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the Comparative Literature PhD program at UC Davis and remained one even after he

left UC Davis. But it was upon my arrival in the program that I found the one who taught
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me how to teach, how to adjust, and how to excel, the true mentor whose motherly care

has remained with me to this day. Professor Brenda Schildgen still cares to teach me

whenever there is an opportunity. There is another person, a true human being, a

generous soul, and a true scholar who gave me the best and most valuable feedback on

every draft I sent to her, on every panic e-mail I wrote to her—Professor Emma Wilson at

Cambridge University, who never was my direct tutor and did not belong to any US

institution. I first became aware of her through her writings. Finding her knowledge

extremely valuable, I sought her out and found her even more valuable as a human being.

I could not have gained the necessary theoretical perspective my writing needed had I not

iii
received her guidance all along the way. My ambition is to become a female scholar like

her, a true human being who cares, for whom a student’s work matters. I thank these

three mentors more than anyone else.

It is almost like a wish that the world and life should stop when one writes one’s

dissertation. The fact remains that it does not and, to the contrary, runs even faster at

times. In my case, the ‘trauma’ in the subject matter of the study spilled over its academic

confines and made its presence and force felt even in my surrounding world. I coped with

it as best as I could, and with help from well wishers was able to move on with the

writing. Time wore on, I wrote, I finished, and finally, I was able to submit the

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manuscript after three years of protracted labor. The whole process was made possible
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only with the stupendous and patient support I got from the circle of friends and family

who stood by me like pillars of unflagging strength. They gave me hope and heart every
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time the finishing line seemed to recede and blur on my horizon. My mother, my partner,

and my friends were the patient listeners of my loud thoughts, who tolerated many noisy
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late nights when I had to stay up to watch depressing films, reading my drafts in all their

incarnations, helping me with the writing, detecting holes that had given the slip to my

tired eyes. I have to also thank my colleagues and friends in Iran who helped me with

interviews, collecting DVDs, and preparing archive material that I could not have had

access to otherwise.

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ABSTRACT

My dissertation, Poetic Cinema: Trauma And Memory In Iranian Films, reads’ the works

of Iranian New Wave filmmakers—from post 1979 Islamic Revolution such as Forough

Farrokhzad, Masoud Kimiayi, Bahram Beyzaie, and Daryoush Mehrjoui, to directors who

either continued to work after the Revolution like Abbas Kiarostami, or those who

emerged as the new generation of filmmakers such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Tahmineh

Milani, and Bahman Ghobadi—as personal accounts of history via testimonial

representation. It grapples with the broader theoretical question—how to represent and

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negotiate the reality of those who have been victimised and traumatized. In this regard,
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the category of trauma becomes a socially generated phenomenon that often translates

itself, affecting each individual member of a society in accordance with social and
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historical factors. Trauma s a formative factor in Iranian poetry and Iranian cinema, and

its representation in different forms of remembrance occupies a focal space in the

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theoretical argument of my dissertation. The cinema of the post-1979 Revolution era in

Iran is interdependent on the history-specific political and cultural events—after the

reconstruction and erasure of a condemnable, unspeakable, shameful past. Reading

between histories, and taking personal narratives (both fictive and remembered) as

witness testimonials, my work examines how human beings—different backgrounds,

nationalities, and origins notwithstanding—concur, through social and personal

remembrances, in their experience of trauma in analogous ways. And why personal

narratives have become palimpsests of contemporary histories.

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 1

INTRODUCTION:

WHY INTRODUCTION: POST-1979 REVOLUTION IRANIAN CINEMA

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INTRODUCTION:

WHY INTRODUCTION: POST-1979 REVOLUTION IRANIAN CINEMA

I was done with the entirety of the dissertation awaiting comments from my committee

members when the book that I was long expecting to read finally arrived: Masters and

Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema by Hamid Dabashi.1 It was in November 2006 that I first

and last met Professor Dabashi—for a completely different project—when he mentioned

the book, and since then, I have been taming my impatient desire to read the book. I

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began reading the book on the plane during my trans-Atlantic journey when I realized
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that I have to change the introduction and the conclusion of my dissertation, entirely; a

beckoning, compelling call that I kept ignoring as much and as far as I could. There were
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two reasons justifying my hesitation and dalliance. Dabashi begins the introduction of his

book by addressing a young Iranian artist and her generation. In doing so, he remembers
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and reviews all that happened in the tolling years immediately following the Islamic

Revolution of 1979. That painful reminder did not leave me. The spectre of the past was

awakened and all that I had tried to forget returned to haunt back and hunt me down.

Dabashi’s words were resonating in the labyrinth of my memories: the long years of Fajr

Film Festivals, days and night that I, as a member of Yosuth Filmmakers Club (Film-

khane-ye Javan) had to stand in lines, sometimes overnight, desperately wanting to see

the recent works of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, or Amir Naderi, along with

1
Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2007
 3

Theo Angelopoulos,2 Sergei Parajanov,3 and of course Andrei Tarkovsky—who was

alive then.

It reminded me of the year I saw The Immigrant (aka Mohajer), one of the best

Iranian war-films by Ebrahim Hatamikia, who I only knew as a fundamentalist, a

filmmaker who makes propaganda films for the government. However, his Mohajer (aka

The Immigrant) in 1990 had moved me. I knew there and then that I must follow this

filmmaker closely. It was years later and when I was not living in Iran any more when I

heard about his philosophical and political transformation that found voice in Agence

Shishehi (aka The Glass Travel Agency) made in 1997. 1990 and 1991 were the best

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years of the Fajr Film festival, when we all knew that—after seeing Nobat-e Ashegi (aka
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Time for Love) and Shabhaye Zayandeh Rood (aka The Night of Zayandeh Rood), that

both of which were banned immediately—Makhmalbaf has now completely morphed

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into the butterfly we were awaiting, that he is no longer the Islamic Republic’s

propagandist filmmaker, that he has begun to question his values.

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I remembered how many times the festival queues were dispersed—quite

unsuccessfully though—by the Islamic committee guards. Our attending the festivals and

wanting to see the controversial films of the eccentric filmmakers were effectively acts of

revolt, beyond plain, curious desire to see good art. Dabashi talks about it in his book, a

reminder that for me worked like revisiting an old wound. The field of Iranian cinema,

the films and the future of their makers were turgid with tortuous developments. Soon

after the release of Amir Naderi’s Davandeh (aka The Runner) in 1989, for example, we

heard that he had left Iran. Soon after, Sussan Taslimi, the amazing actrss who played Nai

2
Greek filmmaker.
3
Armenian-Russian filmmaker.
 4

in Bashu (Bahram Beizai’s masterpiece of 1989) left for Europe to settle in Sweden.

Makhmalbaf was not keen on shooting his films in Iran; in fact, since 1996, he has barely

shot any film in Iran. Writers and poets one by one left. Many who did not leave,

‘disappeared’—there were more than twenty writers, journalists and intellectuals who

disappeared in a span of 4 years. All found mysteriously dead—or, apparently, killed by

their own hands. Reading the introduction of Dabashi’s book was equally painful and

revealing. I always knew that aesthetic value of Iranian cinema was not the only

important factor that I needed to talk about. The crucial constituent of my study was in

fact to investigate the reason behind its success, and the reason behind why the world is

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looking at this cinema, as a larger and more important question. That had always
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occupied my mind. It needed Hamid Dabashi and his awakening introduction to make me

realize that I had been asking the right question: a junior’s salute to a senior veteran of
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the filed.

It was, perhaps, the painful rehashing of my personal memory, the trauma of those
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terrorising years that forced me leave my homeland, the trauma of acknowledging my

own state of homeless-ness, or perhaps an aggregate of all these elements together, that

made me put my courage together and kindle a wistful desire to rewrite a new

introduction and conclusion to my dissertation. Of course, what Hamid Dabashi was

explaining in the introduction of his book supported my methodology and perspective.

Early on in the Introduction, Dabashi explains eloquently,

[T]he point is that the Iranian cinema you now witness is in dire need of a reading
beyond its immediate success and distance memory… and central to Iranian
cinema is its creative constitution of a subject with an active historical agency, in
defiance of its moral and normative colonization at the hands of European
modernity. The historical and inevitable failure of a head-on ideological collision
with colonial modernity could not but have strengthened and ossified the de-
 5

subjected colonial. The creative constitution of the postcolonial subject… that

constructs its aesthetics from the political launching pad of the colonial corner of
modernity is neither in awe of the European Enlightenment nor indeed does it
corroborate it by opposing it politically.4

A few lines later, he endorses my second most important argument about the

strong link between Farsi poetry and Iranian cinematic language when he writes: “This

link between Iranian cinema and modern Persian poetry and fiction is critical.”5 He then

goes on to talk about the importance of Forough Farrokhzad and her role both as a poet

and a filmmaker. Later on, he ends the first chapter of his book, which is dedicated to

Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry and her film The House is Black, with the following:

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The House is Black in the missing link… 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 poetic imagination had to offer,
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and as fate would have it, she was also critically important in the rise of Iranian
cinema. She touched Iranian cinema with as very specific mode of realism, ad
poetic realism.6
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Had I had the book during the process of writing my first chapter as well as the specific

chapter in which I discuss the importance of Forough Farrokhzad and her work, I would
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have used his argument extensively to support my ideas on: (1) the link between Farsi

poetry and the poetic language of Iranian cinema; and (2) the role of modernism,

introduction of the modernity project (an Orientalist, and thereby an evincing of colonial

modus vivendi) by the West to Iran, as well as the phenomenon it became later on its

Iranian ground. This particular way of looking at the modernism/modernity project, as I

have extensively explained in the first chapter, for example, puts the whole concept of

modern art at large and its relation to Iranian modern art on a completely different level.

Understanding the colonial aim behind such scheme, the drift modernism took in Iran,

4
Page 31.
5
Page 32.
6
Page 68.
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and its role in shaping the twentieth century art/visual art/ literature of Iran is of

fundamental importance. And I hope I have clearly stated that in no uncertain terms.

Iranian cinema, as it is known to the world today, is an example of a successful

member of the ‘world cinema’ category to the West. It is now held in high esteem as a

national cinema that is artistically articulate, sophisticated, transcultural and global in its

language. However, the crux of my argument throughout the four chapters of my

dissertation is that this success goes back to the years that Iranian cinema was not a

household name and did not hold an impressive position in the international film arena.

To embark on the project of writing about Iranian cinema, in general—which in turn

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requires the analysis of the role and function of ‘trauma’ and ‘memory’ in Iranian cinema
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in particular—required me to ask a number of questions, all urgently fundamental to me

in order to clarify the picture for the reader, about the aesthetic nature of Iranian artistic
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expression in relation to its history, literature, and visual art, in hopes of investigating and

thus finding possible answer(s) for them. The first obstacle on my way was how to
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introduce the culture and the history behind this newly re-discovered cinema.

Investigating Iranian modern history became a quest in addressing why I need to provide

a historical conspectus, a general background of Iran as a nation, and its recent socio-

political condition in relation to induced modernity by western colonial forces moving

their pawns in the political chessboard of the Middle East. That thread of thinking, in

turn, took me to approach the national memory of Iran, as a nation and its formative

agents that went into the construction of the modern Iranian artists’ psyche as such, and

the Iranian filmmaker in particular. Consequently, it became necessary to lay down a

historical survey of the continued presence of various forms of dictatorial regimes that
 7

have ruled over Iran, be it in the form of monarchical dynasties or the recent theocratic

totalitarian establishment.

As it is apparent from the way the first chapter moves, I chose a perspective to

look at Iranian cinema as it stands in today’s cinematic arena that emphasises the

importance of establishing the historical background of the advent of modernity, with it

cinema, and the way in, and the means by which the Iranian artist responded to it.

Because I strongly believe that the way modernity was introduced and later on

established in the country are among the most important clues to find an answer to the

fundamental questions of why Iranian cinema became what it is today, why is the world

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looking at it now (more than before), and finally, how has it managed to hold the world’s
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attention at this level? These questions, then, led to creation of the present format of the

dissertation—four main chapters, of which the first two are more subjective than the
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others.

The first two chapters are dedicated to the general historical and thematic
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background, the link between Farsi literature and Iranian cinema, while the final two are

more detailed-oriented, depending on various case studies. The third and fourth chapters

are more in-depth and analytical studies of individual cases of Iranian cinema based on

exploration of its poetic elements, deep investigations of the strategic need for poetic

aesthetics for this cinema to thrive under political duress, and the role of literature in

shaping the psyche of the Iranian filmmakers—who themselves are individual and

individuated Iranian citizens subjected to the same trauma Iran as a nation experiences,

while being subjected to their national history.

 8

In the first chapter, “Once Upon a Time, Cinema: the Traumatic Story of the

Lover in Search of His Aatiye/Future,” the effort is to look at the advent of cinema in

Iran, the earliest film facilities and film productions, followed by a look at the first wave

of art films and the filmmakers of the 1960s who eventually became the pioneers of what

we know now as modern Iranian cinema. The purpose of such a general survey is indeed

to provide a relatively thorough sense of the breadth of Iran’s cinematic output and its

evolution into an layered form of aesthetic expression. Henceforth, history and archival

reports dominate the rest of the first and most of the second chapter. There are, of course,

lengthy discussions about the modernity project in Iran, the introduction of modernism,

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couched as it was within the discourse of colonialism, to Iran and the Iranian Royal court,
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and the nuanced and complex turn the modernity project later on took to arrive at a

completely unique definition of modernism. My belief is that this identified development

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of an “Iranian” modernism holds a great deal of importance; first, in recognizing, then

acknowledging, and finally analyzing the aesthetic structure of Iranian cinema for reasons
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that are explained fully in the first chapter. Scavenging through the archives and

rehashing memoirs of the pioneers of the cinema industry in Iran, as well as the recent

history of Iran and formation of the modern Iran was mainly done to prepare the

unfamiliar reader for a deeper and more theoretical reading of the workings of trauma in

Iranian modern literature and cinema that the third and fourth chapters, respectively,

provide.

Henceforth, I found Derrida’s approach to “archive” most appropriate in my

endeavor to unpack the discursive field of Iranian cinema and the role of trauma. In

particular, I have found Derrida’s notions on the workings of the death drive and archive
 9

fever that he talks about at both the levels of the social as well as the individual. In this

regard, I found usefulness in following Derrida’s position against Freud’s concept of the

archive; the “unspoken archive” does operate against its own death and that eventually

became the nucleus of my argument. I argued that, as a result, we will have a narration

of that which is the past; if not an exact narration of that which has been in the archives

or archived, but at the very least “informed” by the archive in the most layered ways. I

tried to show that this analogy allows us to measure the neural spine of Iran’s cinematic

aesthetic.

The second chapter, which I have called “The Old Dream and the New

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Awakening: the Disguise of Trauma and Shame in the Epic Poem of Iranian Cinema,”
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focuses mainly on the category of films that are most known to the west by a numeric

consideration of how many prestigious international festival felicitations they have been
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accorded. However, this chapter avoids creating a “case-study” structure to analyze such

(suspect) “successes.” Instead, I have tried to look at the global presence of Iranian films
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for the political, social and aesthetic importance they bear both within and outside Iran,

trying to unravel the anxieties and subtexts they bespeak multivocally and how (and

what) they render visible. Directly related to such visibility, I also discuss the important

roles that state funded agencies have played in putting Iran’s name on the map for their

own reasons that are not always purely aesthetically driven.

In order to understand the aesthetic values of Iranian cinema—that attracts the

global viewer as well as the familiar domestic people, the denominated common member

of audience—I looked at specific motifs such as the documentary-like quality of most

Iranian films and the crude attitudes they often evince towards portraying the reality of
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life. Telling the truth, with all the accoutrements and trappings of the aesthetic of

“realism,” is probably the most dominant theme in Iranian films. This characteristic,

though never at the expense of poetry that is sacrificed, from Daryush Mehrjui’s The Cow

and Forough Farrokhzad’sThe House is Black to almost all Kiarostami’s films (pre- and

post- 1979 Islamic Revolution), to the post- 1979 Islamic Revolution films such as

Makhmalbaf’s A Time For Love (1980), Silence (1997), Hello Cinema (1995), Gabbeh

(1996), and Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (2000), to name a few, has ever present in Iranian

art cinema. What all these filmmakers share is a certain truthfulness of vision, a candid

honesty with which their cameras face their subjects. However, some choose to be more

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documentary-like, while others tend to narrate their own creative poems, both drawing
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fuel from a starkness of the “real.” In this vast ocean of lyrical images and poetic

expression, some remain with just beautiful imagery—like Children of Heaven (Majid
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Majidi, 1997) and Colour of Paradise (Majid Majidi, 1999)—that do not add much value

to the aesthetic body of Iranian films, but nonetheless are extremely useful for the Islamic
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Republic in being able manipulate, create, and maintain its ‘benevolent’ international

image, as if they were saying, “This is a regime that can and will allow films like these to

be made; therefore, what you (the Western audience) think of us is wrong.”

I must add once more that had Dabashi’s brilliant book been published when I was

writing Chapter Two, I could have taken advantage of the most accurate and fascinating

account he gives of the poetic link between Iran’s cinema and Farsi poetry/literature. This

is a view that Aghdashloo—although his articulation came a couple of decades earlier—

and Dabashi, in their own specific and particular ways, share. Both Dabashi and

Aghdashloo look at the generation of the artists who embarked on their careers and
 11

artistic search after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and both, although from different

points of view, arrive at the same conclusion that there is vitality in the arts of this

generation that is unique unto itself. I have tried to embrace this position in the second

chapter in order to develop it further in the third, especially to enable the specific case

studies I undertake on Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Ebrahim Hatamikia. These two

filmmakers, in their corpus, are the most significant exemplary figures, artists who

evolved from being revolutionary artists partisan with the Islamic Revolution into critics

of the regime and its fundamental(ist) ideology.

In an attempt to bring Iranian filmmakers closer to their counterparts from various

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other cultures and nations I also tried to make a comparative, yet somewhat general, case.
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I put the motif of “artistic response to trauma” as the basis for this comparison in order to

arrive at a certain end. Such a conclusion—an evidenced reaction to pressure,

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censorship, and traumatic events (in the tune of what is evinced in the art cinema of

Iran)—can be, and is, similarly shared by artists of various backgrounds. Simply stated, I
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have attempted to make the argument of my thesis more accessible by means of

resemblances and commonalities and, thus, perhaps globally more conceivable.

The Cow and The House is Black, both made in the 60s, added up to form the

reason why I decided to start with “festival winning” films of that era. Considering that

the 60s was marked by a few astonishing works by Iranian filmmakers, I also tried to

look at Iran of that decade and investigate the reaction of these artists to their changing

environment and the socio-political climate of their time. “Modernization” was a

subject—a political device in manipulative machinations of colonialization—that never

seized to haunt my conscience throughout my research whenever I undertook to analyze

 12

the artistic reaction of Iranian intellectuals (in literature as well as visual art) to their

environs. That alone could perhaps justify much of multifarious discussions I have on the

modernity project in Iran and the interpretation of the “modern” in its Iranian texture. As

it happens, in Iran literature has always been the pioneering catalyst of revolt and change,

and poetry in particular. The revolt and the reaction against/towards the political

machinations of Shah’s government was first and foremost expressed in Farsi poetry a

decade or two earlier than any movement began to crawl up in the field of visual art.

Taking my cue there, I tried to look at the nature of the modern poetry of the 40s, 50s and

60s in Iran, as an important and decisive factor in the formation of the modern Iranian

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aesthetic psyche, in order—though much later in the chapter—to establish the undeniable
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link between Farsi poetry and Iranian cinema. In this comparison, one factor that is

foregrounded is the role played by the literary conceit of “telling the truth” in the Farsi
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novel, poetry, and cinema; across the board this is a linking leitmotif in Iranian cinema as

well as Farsi literature. The lack of truthfulness in the actions of Iran’s government—be it
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the Pahlavi monarchy or the Islamic Republic—has created this immense craving for

“truth” among the Iranian artists. My effort in this portion of Chapter Two has been

focused on showing that wherever this quality was dominant in any work of art, it had

tried and pushed the limits of the tolerance of the establishment. The intolerance

invariably has turned into further implementing of censorship and repression. So the

Iranian filmmakers, inheritors of the New Wave filmmakers of the 60s, and the

courageous poetry of Farrokhzad, Nima, and Shamloo, progeny of the bitter yet honest

prose of Hedayat, enriched by a lengthy and rich heritage of symbolic and mystic poetry

of the 12th and 13th centuries, embarked on telling their own reel stories, determined to
 13

survive. That, I have argued—extensively, by bringing in many examples—forms the

basis of the crude, breathtaking, and truthful images one can invariably always witness in

Iranian films made by artists who dream in Farsi, a Farsi that is, following their

undertaking, understood by the world.

I decided to end Chapter Two with one of the most important factor in Iranian

cinema and modern poetry; Forough Farrokhzad’s poetic documentary The House Is

Black and her undeniable formative presence in the larger picture of Iranian modern art as

a poet, a free woman, and a filmmaker who picked up the beacon from where Hedayat

and Nima left, and further established the concept of the sublime in Iranian poetry and

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cinema. My reading of the sublime is in line with what Jean-Francois Lyotard in his
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Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime explains while reflecting on what for the first time

Emmanuel Kant introduced to aesthetics. Kant in Critique of the Power if Judgment

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argues that our sensibility is incapable of coping with immense emotional experience.

But human reason can take in the infinite. The body may be crushed but our reason need
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not be. Lyotard uses that to explain why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well

as pain (please see page 62).

The third chapter, however, is mainly focused on the post-Islamic Revolution

plans the state had for cinema in order to problematize the relationship the state has with

art and culture in Iran. The foundations of these two institutions—state and art—are in

constant contradiction and conflict within the framework of religion and tradition. Such

clash of ideology, naturally, leads the two towards a problematic, yet interesting

relationship. In showing the nature of this conflict, I conducted considerable archival

research to compile published data by various government agencies that oversee artistic
 14

affairs and cinema productions, as well as institutions that control the export,

international release of Iranian films, and producing domestic festivals. The reason

behind the choice of such a strategy in Chapter Three was on the one hand, indeed, to

understand how the government uses (and, concurrently, abuses) cinema as an

ambassador to the world from one hand. And how the same agencies, on the other hand,

repress, control and censor filmmakers in order to establish and maintain their supremacy

and control. However, through my archival research I realized that this cannot and is not

the only problematic factor in deciding the fate of films made by Iranian filmmakers.

There was a tense and heated debate present in most of the publications I surveyed.

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Majority of the films that were successful abroad, filmmakers who were treated
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respectfully abroad, and the institutions that supported them were looked upon with

suspicion, malice and anger by a whole range of people and agencies, not merely the
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direct representatives of the regime. This sentient sentiment was quite apparent in the

tone of most of the authorities, actors, script-writers, and/or directors I interviewed during
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my fieldwork in Iran. Making sense of such complex behaviour, the complex mindset it

both revealed and hid, was not an easy task. I realized that analyzing any of the films I

thought of would be superficial and half-empty unless I was able to understand the

precise nature of their artistic fate: the price tags hanging from these “winning the world”

package, while at the same time creating domestic resentment across the board.

By late 1980s the Islamic government that successfully managed to destroy their

image around the world, knew too well that a very different message had to go out to the

world beyond the borders of Iran, or else…. The international arena needed to “know”

that it is the 1979 Islamic Revolution that had liberated Iranian cinema. Hence, the
 15

foundation of Fajr Film Festival, The Young Iranian Film Institute (aka Cinema-ye

Javan), and Farabi Cinema Foundation (aka Bonyad Cinema Farabi). That was how seven

years after the Islamic Revolution and six years after the formation of the Islamic

Republic, in1987, Iran sent a film to the Berlin film festival, The Frosty Roads (aka

Jadehay Sard) made in 1985 by Masoud Jafari Jozani. This is when the government

made a more or less explicit attempt to claim that Iranian cinema was actually born after

the 1979 Revolution, thus disregarding the New Wave filmmakers’ heritage. I found one

argument relatively absent in almost all my archival research, and that was the fact that

many successful films that were being made after 1979 Revolution were actually

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miniature offspring of the magnificent works by Shahid Saless, Masoud Kimiaie, and
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Bahram Beizai, to name a few, until I met Nader Takmil Homayoun and saw his recent

documentary, Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution. His work, which strongly supported

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my archival research and thesis, contained many interviews with artists, film critics, and

authorities. In those interviews also I found the same result that had led me to think in
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terms of the traumatic effect such an oppressive atmosphere could have on filmmaking.

As Iranian subjects, these filmmakers had to endure many burdens: the

responsibility an artist feels in articulating the truth the way s/he experiences it, the

struggle s/he has to face with the suppressive regime and censorship, the resentment

his/her international success invariably causes in the domestic scene, and the challenge of

communicating with the world and telling the untold. That alone, although it made my

job more complicated, rendered an interesting twist to the way I could look at each

filmmaker and the body of individual works each one of them had by their name. This is

a curious, if not completely unfathomable, phenomenon. Filmmakers in both regimes

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were—and still are—destined to struggle to make their voices heard and identities

proclaimed. That state of social and political mêlée with a conflicted identity and struggle

with the freedom of artistic voice lasted more than 40 years, and continues till date to

inform Iranian cinema. One can argue that perhaps it was that never-ending struggle,

insecurity, and the constant presence of trauma that made it important and urgent for the

Iranian filmmakers to look for new ways of cinematic expression, causing an outburst of

innovation and soulful expressivity. To maintain one of the most important themes of my

argument—poetic expression—I argue in Chapter Three that as Iranian poets learnt how

to thrive under oppressive regimes and took refuge in the layered language of metaphor,

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Iranian filmmakers, too, have over time acquired particular modes of narrating their tales
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in ways that can survive the sharp blades of governmental censorship, as well as steer

clear off religious sensitivities. To analyze their modes of survival I borrowed once more
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from Derrida, this time his argument of the “drive of the archive” against “death drive”

that actually resurrects the specter of the past and allows the past to speak in various
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modes, and retell the trauma in variations and colours different from the actual traumatic

past.

I realize that at this point in Chapter Three, and after analyzing, problematizing,

clarifying many historic, social and political decisive factors, I can with relative ease—

and less fear of being misread or misunderstood—look at individual films and study them

closely. By looking closely at some of the more internationally successful examples, I

attempted now to explore questions such as: what psychological reason might there be

behind the masking of the self and what these filmmakers, as state-sponsored

representatives of the nation, are denying? While, on the one hand, there are these state-
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blessed filmmakers ruling international roosts, on the other, there are other Iranian auteur

filmmakers who do not necessarily keep international film festival markets or foreign

viewers in mind, let alone have them at their disposal. It was by speculating on this

problem that I discovered a sense of void, an absence in some of the most successful

examples of Iranian cinema. The apparent void in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, or the

absence of “life” in the life of every character in Panahi’s Circle, the absence of love as

the main source of the conflict in most of Makhmalbaf’s films, and the void in humanity,

kindness, and warmth for the Kurds who live in the cinematic world of A Time for

Drunken Horses. This aesthetic void, like a cloak that covers the entirety of these soles,

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was made from the same fabric that Farrokhzad started to weave some 30 years back in
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her black house. The void was apparent and too much to carry, but needed nonetheless to

be testified for. And testify they did in their films in the form of narratives that spoke
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louder than any testimony before the authority of the world that watches their works. The

problematic complexity and the inherent incongruity of the Iranian situation is that this
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same testimony, despite the “truth” it bespoke, inadvertently brought fame and

recognition for the same tyrannical government who was the perpetrator of many of the

traumatizing problems informing the films. This, unsurprisingly, gave birth to the title of

Chapter Three: “The Shame of Being: an Iranian Survival Technique.”

Finally, in the fourth chapter I tried to investigate and explore how (much of) the

political and ideological conflicts of Iran, as a nation, have been translated into the

cinematic depiction of individual and domestic spaces. And how it may have been a

formative factor in shaping the internal anatomy of Iranian cinema. I have also explored

how Iranian cinema treats personal memory and family structure within the framework of
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national identity under supervision of the Islamic Republic. Within the defining factors of

that frame structure, I consciously choose examples that would allow me to talk about

gender definition, masculinity, and nationalism, in the larger narrative of identity crisis.

In this regard, I foregrounded a particular space that problematizes many of the above

mentioned factors all at once. One of the most problematic spaces in Iranian cinema is the

domestic and family sphere. Understanding the portrayal of family structures and

domestic environments is arguably the best way to gain access to the dynamics of a

society’s internal operation. Along with the natural notion of sanctity and safety of a

family, one can make sense of the social structure, hierarchies, and gender roles that

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shape the larger community or a nation. According to Islamic law, no man should touch a
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woman if they are not connected either by parental blood or matrimony—sister or

brother, mother and son, father and daughter—therefore in the world of cinema, where
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the relations of the characters cannot be fully represented by the actors portrayal of a

family, cannot but turn into a “lie.” Consequently, a husband, in the world of the film,
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cannot see the uncovered hair of his wife, nor can he touch her under any circumstances.

Majority of Iranian filmmakers choose to follow the lie. However, some cannot. I tried to

look at different films by various filmmakers to see how each of them treated this

problematic space, since many try to use poetic language, allegory, and metaphor to turn

the problem into a speaking solution. This issue of getting (or not getting) to portray the

truth about social space gets more poignant when it comes to one of the most problematic

areas in Iranian cinema—the treatment of the female. While looking at films that dared to

problematize the “female” presence, I tried to look at the role model of Forough

Farrokhzad: the woman who achieved agency in her own poetry of and rendered a multi-