by INTERFILM member Heike Kühn

During the 19th century the European vision of the so called Orient was idealized. German poet Goethe praised the Orient for its delicate and romantic poetry; German philosopher Schlegel believed that a combination of the oriental soul, Greek-Roman awareness of measure and form, not to forget, German morality, would supply universe with the utmost expression of perfection. History recalls how great the fall can be.

After 9/11 we tend to demonize anything Islamic or Arabian. We look rather for the projections of our fear, our anger, our revolt against terrorism, the oppression of freedom and violence against women. To understand what is going on, we could profit from their cinema projections, especially in the many folded ways of Iranian cinema to undermine  Iranian censorship.

In 1996, filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf had an irresistible idea: The story of his film Gabbeh is told by a yearning young woman weaving a carpet, a traditional Gabbeh. The pattern of  the Gabbeh is the pattern of her unsatisfied love life: rich in colours, the carpet can be read as a love letter and sigh for the beloved who in the end robs the young woman to marry her against the will of her father. Happy ending with a fond kiss? No way. When finally we see the  former lovers together, they are 80 years old, nagging on each other without teeth, weaving a carpet to glorify the time of youth and forbidden desire. A folkloristic tradition, meeting Becket's absurd theatre.

The comic relief of irony meanwhile should not colour up the dark side of dictatorship. Yet out of this murkiness we witness filmmakers fighting back against fundamentalism by claiming Islam for themselves: not the Islam of terror, but of civil rights, spiritual wisdom as in Sufi tradition or beauty as immortalized in 1001 nights.

One of these strategies to overcome censorship was called docufiction.

The most striking example is Kiarostami’s trilogy about an earthquake that took place in 1987. The disaster was almost kept secret by Iranian mass media to neglect the consequences of a corrupt bureaucracy busy denying the catastrophe. Kiarostami asked people who had rescued nothing but their lives, to play themselves. He changed names and habits and created a subtle imitation of life. The schizophrenic situation of playing oneself but not being allowed to be oneself, was understood at once by his Iranian audience.

The split personality thus guaranteed a certain freedom of speech. It was supported by another common strategy of Iranian filmmakers during the eighties and nineties. Often their  protagonists were children, living seismographs of a society that is facing a lot more convulsions than those coming from earthquakes.

A highly praised film that allows a child to speak the truth and grown-ups to understand the message, was made by Jafar Panahi and released in 1996. In The White Balloon we follow a little girl exploring Teheran with innocent eyes. The girl’s attention is captured by a magician conjuring a snake. Of course it’s a guilty pleasure. The girl is taken away by her mother and patronized: “This is not good for you”, the mother preaches. For the rest of the film the smart girl is repeating one sentence: “I need to see what is not good for me.”

I learned that this line gained fame in Teheran. Yet Jafar Panahi, born in 1960, was not convinced by the melancholic and metaphorical film language Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf created.

Although we in the West were enchanted: we adored these metaphors as part of Persian poetry, so rich, so clandestine - a festival for imagery decoders. A turtle, creeping over gravestones in Kiarostamis film The Wind Will Carry Us, was not a contribution to Iranian wild life but a powerful symbol of eternity and ever lasting change that can’t be fooled by the hopefully shorter era of Islamic fundamentalism. How we loved this emblematic cinema language!  

In 2000 Jafar Panahi won the golden Lion of Venice by screening a film he had smuggled out of Iran, certainly without asking permission. It was a scandal in Iran and a revelation in the west. Banned in Iran till today The Circle describes a vicious circle of female oppression. Sophisticated in terms of aesthetics and straightforward in its political message the film starts with the birth of a girl, accused as end of all hope.

The sad and bitter round dance of humiliation leads from one woman to the other, every one of them embodying a certain aspect of female suffering. Arezou, Pari and Nargess get to know each other in prison, accused of prostitution or disobedience. From a western point of view, they are as innocent as Christmas snow. Jafar Panahi was inspired by a newspaper article reporting that a woman committed suicide after killing her two little daughters. The article never illuminated the background. The Circle provides a lot of reasons to die by despair in Iran but also strikes back by presenting the self-conscious whore Mojgane. She is the only woman daring to look into men’s eyes. She is far too disillusioned not to see through the game of wretched and double-faced male morality. All the heroines end up again in prison. Panahi’s grown-up protagonists don’t need to watch snake incantations any longer or demand to see what is not good for them. They know by heart what is not good for them. The translation of Arezou, by the way, is hope. Pari means angel and Solmaz, the name of the woman giving birth to an unwanted girl means: the one who is living eternally.

The Circle established an enlightenment in the tradition of Western neo-realism. Thus, the film resembles the 2002 produced film I am Taraneh, 15. Filmmaker Rassul Sadr-Ameli said that his film deliberately refrains from delicate symbols. The story of the 15 years old girl Taraneh who is impregnated by an imposturous pseudo-husband is told in a very plain and simple way. But simplicity can be a also a miracle: It is not simple at all how the girl fights back and claims the name of the unfaithful father for her child.

Showing abandoned women, hateful men, spoiled little boy-princes, in short a lack of communication and compassion, became the new Iranian film art; and no one did this more radical than the master of parables, Abbas Kiarostami. About his film Ten he even said that it was rather realized than made. In Ten we learned something about the daily life in Teheran, the traffic jam, people who fight for a parking space, families falling apart. The imagery is minimalist, existential and mirrored the urge of reforming both: society and the visions of society.
 
But as we see in the work of Shirin Neshat, both ways, the metaphoric language and the neo-realistic style coexist – demanding more crucial than ever to regain dignity by discovering the loss of civil rights and civil courage.

This text was presented by the author at the occasion of the ecumenical panel at the 66th Mostra del cinema in Venice 2009 on "Stories of Human Dignity in Film: Focus on Iranian Cinema".