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Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Negar Mottahedeh
Negar Mottahedeh*
Affiliation:
Program of Literature, Duke University
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Abstract

This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that Khomeini's aim was to produce a transformed and Shi'ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of film technologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , September 2009 , pp. 529 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2009

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Footnotes

This is a revised version of the paper presented to the conference “Iran and Iranian Studies in the Twentieth Century” to mark the fortieth anniversary of Iranian Studies held at the University of Toronto, October 2007.

References

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2 al-Din Shah Qajar, Muzaffar, Safarnameh-ye Mobarakeh-ye Muzzafer-Din Shah Beh Farang. Transcribed by Mehdi Khan Kashani, Mirza. 2nd ed. (Tehran: Ketab-e Foruzan, [1982] 1361): 160.Google Scholar

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5 In the ta'ziyeh, the elci farangi, corroborates the moral and ethical superiority of Iranian Shi'ism over Sunni aggression. The foreigner's certain conversion at the end of the ta'ziyeh concurrently establishes the potency of Shi'ite Islam against Western political and industrial power.

6 Khomeini, Ruhollah, Imam Khomeini's Last Will and Testament. (Washington, 1989): p. 47.Google Scholar

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8 Benjamin's influential “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproducibility” is here referred to as the Artwork essay. In the Artwork essay and in the essay on photography first published in 1931, Benjamin compares the possibilities opened up by the camera visually to the unearthing of unconscious impulses by psychoanalysis. Benjamin, Walter, “A Small History of Photography,” One Way Street and Other Writings (London, 1979): 243.Google Scholar

9 In the second version of the Artwork essay (1936), Benjamin suggests that film could become “the most important subject matter, at present, for the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics.” Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott. (Cambridge: 1936):, 120.Google Scholar

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11 Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is probably the best known of the early feminist “gaze theorists”. Writing in 1973, Laura Mulvey argued that sexual difference constructs the gaze of classical narrative cinema configuring both its temporal and its spatial geography, its objects and its spectating subjects. “Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire” (1989, 25). Bringing Marxist and psychoanalytic theories in conversation with current structuralist and semiotic theories of culture and cinema, Mulvey noted that the look in dominant cinema is sexualized and is as such both voyeuristic and fetishistic. Associated with masculine tendencies, scopophilic modes of seeing are inscribed in the film fiction, effectively constructing the heterosexual male as classical narrative film's addressee, its voyeuristic spectator. Focusing on the nature of the female as spectacle, she wrote: “Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the ways she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself” (1989, 25).

Mulvey's best know article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in the influential British film theory journal, Screen, in 1975 was admittedly a polemic, a problematic, and a provocation that produced an infinite array of interdisciplinary discussions that continued into the 1980s and 1990s, giving shape to what is now referred to as “gaze theory,” but also to theories concerned with feminist film and avant-garde film practice, to questions of narrative continuity and suture, to the problem of sound and codes of editing, to reception theory, to accounts of spectatorship and subject formation, to phenomenological approaches to cinema that addressed the participation of the body and its other senses in experiencing films, to gay and lesbian studies of film, to studies of the star system, to porn studies, to questions of masochism and the screen, of masquerade, femininity and masculinity in encounters with visual representations. A whole discipline emerged as a result of Mulvey's intervention.

Mulvey's early critical work established that voyeurism is inscribed in classical modes of spectatorship. It simultaneously established an oeuvre that invited a new kind of spectatorship to take shape, one curious and driven by a “desire to decipher the puzzles and riddles” on screen. Laura Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with Peter Wollen six films between 1974 and 1983. “The most influential of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Riddles of the Sphinx made in 1977, presented avant-garde film as a space in which female experience could be expressed.” The film was a “remarkable formalistic innovation [a negative aesthetics], notably structured around 360-degree pans that spoke to the film's content, and described a mother's search for identity.” Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/566978/index.html. Accessed July 6, 2008.

12 For melodrama is fundamentally “the norm, rather than the exception of American cinema,” as Linda Williams incisively puts it: “popular American cinema is still, mutatis mutandis, melodrama”. Williams, Linda, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson, Princeton, 2001): 26, 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Khomeini, Ruhollah, Islam and Revolution: 264.Google Scholar

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15 On the issue of the spectator's absorption in film fiction in contemporary Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, see Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: 110–111).

16 Hansen, Miriam, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizon,” Film Quarterly, 54, no. 1 (fall 2000): 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Hansen, Miriam, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, 6, no. 2 (1999): 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizon”: 11.

19 Hansen, Miriam, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 6 no. 2 (1999): 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Abi va Rabi, dir. by Avanes Ohanian (1930).

21 This comedic mode continued into the early 1910s in the US and France. But in looking at the case of Iran, it is important to note that this type of slapstick was being produced (in Iran) 20 years after the standard film historical narrative says this kind of comedy had ended.

22 Ettela'at, 31 January 1933.

23 As Laura Mulvey suggests with regards to the show girls in Hollywood films, “The device of the show-girl allows the two looks (that of the spectator and the male character on screen) to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative; the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no man's land outside its own time and space.” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989): 40.Google Scholar

24 Naficy, Hamid, “Iran,” The International Movie Industry, (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2000): 103.Google Scholar

25 Ibid.

26 Cheshire, Godfrey, “Abbas Kiarostami: Seeking a Home,” Projections 8: Filmmakers on Filmmaking (London, 1998): 277.Google Scholar

27 The word yek sareh, which could be translated as “head on,” refers to a “seriality” in viewing practice. The word developed as a result of a tendency amongst Iranian film audiences to arrive late to film screenings. They would purchase their tickets and walk into the cinema mid-screening. They would watch the film all the way through, and then stay to watch the beginning of the film at the next showing. Audiences for multiple films and multiple screenings paid only a one-time entrance fee. One could also, then, translate yek sareh as “one way.” Shahri, Jafar, Tehran-e Ghadeem, Vol 1 (Tehran, 1997–98): 286.Google Scholar

28 Ruhollah Khomeini, “Address to the Group of Women Members of the 10th of Favardin Charity Foundation of Qom. (16 March 1981), Highlights of Imam Khomeini's Speeches November 5, 1980-April 28, 1981, Trans., Pars New Agency (Albany, CA, 1980–81): 57.Google Scholar

29 Ibid.

30 Hansen, Miriam, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, 6, no. 2 (1999): 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Naficy, Hamid, “Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema,” In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-revolutionary Iran (Syracuse, 1994): 132.Google Scholar

32 Khomeini, Ruhollah, “Speech Given to Representatives of the World Liberation Movements (10 January), Selected Messages and Speeches of Imam Khomeini (Tehran, 1980), 91–92.Google Scholar

33 Khomeini, Ruhollah, Islam and Revolution: 410.Google Scholar

34 In an address to “visiting clergy” Khomeini himself emphasizes this link between the ta'ziyeh as a Muharram mourning play and “revival.” Here he suggests that these ceremonies were used not to “cause weeping” but as a weapon in the political struggle against the Pahlavi's. “With divine insight our religious leaders aimed at consolidating the Moslem world … to revive and uplift…” Khomeini, Ruhollah, “Address to Visiting Clergy,” Highlights of Imam Khomeini's Speeches: 4.Google Scholar

35 Kiarostami, in an interview with Miguel Mora, “Las películas buenas son las que se pueden ver 25 veces,” quoted in Elena, Alberto, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Coombes, Belinda (London, 2005): 44.Google Scholar