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Iranian War Cinema: Between Reality and Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michaël Abecassis
Michaël Abecassis*
Affiliation:
Wadham College, the University of Oxford in the UK
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Abstract

The fascination for the Western world with Iranian cinema lies primarily with the fable-like developments of its stories which often plunge us into a world of exoticism and lured us with its singularity. Iranian war cinema born during the war between Iran and Iraq is not as well distributed in Europe and films with English subtitles are difficult to get hold of. Whether it is interpreted as an anthropological document which opens a dialogue between the protagonist and the spectators, the “I” and the other, Iranian war cinema by Tabrizi, Sinayi, Hatamikia and Ghobadi, among many others, can be seen as a spiritual voyage where the soul hovers between absence and presence. In the wake of war cinema in general, one can draw parallels with mythology, the Judeo-Christian tradition, literature and art. Its function is not only didactic but cathartic, and the particularity of Iranian war cinema like no other is that it participates in the mourning process of a whole nation fighting against its own ghosts and in search of its identity. This article attempts to decipher the myths hidden behind the images presented by Iranian war cinema, paradoxically interweaving the traumatic with the aesthetic.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3: Beyond the Iranian Frame: From Visual Representation to Socio-Political Drama , May 2011 , pp. 387 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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References

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2 The film uses the metaphor of the cherry to refer to real life's pleasures, the taste of which outweighs pain and grief.

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5 The shooting of the film started after years of research and gestation: “I had eight years of research (going to prisons and interviewing those who had killed their sisters or cousins to save their so-called honour.” Michaël Abecassis, “An Interview with Iranian Film Director Khosrow Sinai,” Bright Lights Film Journal (2009), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/64/64sinaiiv.html. To be published in Language and War Symbols in the Films of Hatamikia (London and New York).

6 Quoted in Piault, Marc-Henri, Anthropologie et cinéma (Paris, 2000), 174Google Scholar.

7 Sadegh Hedayat (1903–51) is one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth century in the Iranian literary canon. His work, at once evocative, mysterious and disturbing, depicts a world of nightmares and dreams which is haunted by suicide.

8 The shadow image recurrent in Sinai's film brings to mind Hedayat's Blind Owl and Buried Alive. The shadow lingering in the story atmosphere is an extension and crystallization of the poet's “I,” rather like Maupassant's Horla, and the film is a dialogue with his inner self. For a full analysis of Hedayat's symbols see Mansur Khaksar's enlightening article in: http://www.iran-bulletin.org/IBMEF_1.../sadegh_hedayat.doc.

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11 Jacob's dream has been represented many times in painting. Rembrandt's Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1660) depicts the encounter between the human and the unreal. Unlike most mythological and biblical figures that were punished by God's wrath for having caught a glimpse of the sacred (Orpheus casting a glance towards Eurydice; Actaeon seeing Diana bathing; Lot's wife looking back towards Sodom and Gomorra), Jacob will remain unscathed. Sinai's Talking with a Shadow nurtures a dream-like atmosphere throughout.

12 This is also certainly a reference to Sadeq Hedayat's collection of short stories Three Drops of Blood.

13 In a letter to Paul Demeny on 15 May 1871, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, questioning his own identity, exclaims the contradictory “Je est un autre” (I is another).

14 Jean-Luc Godard also sees in Rouch's Moi un Noir (1958) a reference to Rimbaud: “En résumé, en appelant son film Moi, un Noir, Jean Rouch qui est un Blanc tout comme Rimbaud, déclare, lui aussi que Je est un autre. Son film, par conséquent, nous offre le Sésame-ouvre-toi de la poésie” (to summarize, by calling his film Me a Black, Jean Rouch, who is white like Rimbaud, also declares I is another. Therefore his film acts as a poetic open sesame) (our translation): Jean-Luc Godard, “Étonnant : Rouch, Jean Moi, un noir,” in Godard par Godard, ed. Bergala, Alain (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.

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17 Quoted in Piault, Anthropologie, 136 (our translation).

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19 Piault, Anthropologie, 57 (our translation).

20 Sinai recalls in his interview his attachment to music: “In 1958, I went to Vienna to study architecture and music composition. For four years I studied architecture at the technical university, and at the same time three years of music composition at the academy for music and dramatic arts in Vienna,” and stresses the importance of this component in his film in which “storytelling is not enough; a film should be a balanced work between the dramatic arts and the fine arts” (Abecassis, “Interview”).

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