Iranian Cinema

“Symbols and codes play a significant role in the way Iranian films express their ideas. Give examples of how some of these symbols are utilized throughout the movies.”
Throughout our course on contemporary Iranian cinema we have discussed the significance symbol, code and metaphor play in composing these films. We have discussed how the symbols provide the stylistic milieu many contemporary Iran-based filmmakers are forced to employ under restrictive guidelines set forth by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. Thus, we have defined and described these symbols as encompassing a variety of forms including protest, analogy, and thematic issues related to ethnicity, gender and cross-cultural engagement. The symbols, codes and metaphors provide nuance to subjects and personalities involved in the films’ narratives, and assist in opening aspects stifled by prohibiting laws. Thus, even the narratives of the films acts as facilitator (or narrators) of the ideas the directors endeavor to illuminate. Once the importance of symbol in Iranian film is acknowledged there are gluts of possible avenues to traverse for further discussion.
In my previous paper I added a cautionary paragraph explaining that symbol, code and metaphor in Iranian cinema, like in innumerous other forms, bares a specific cultural and political perspective that informs the narratives that directors create. Thus a cursory understanding of Persian political, religious and cultural heritage (essentially its intellectual history) will provide the needed context from which those unfamiliar should engage. In my last paper I emphasized this point in detail, but I would like to retract how I framed it. Because of the plethora of Orientalist writing and scholarship and its influence in the United States, it becomes easier to categorize Iran, and in our case Iranian art forms, as something entirely different from our own history or historical expression. Claiming that Iranian and American intellectual histories initiate and develop from vastly different corpuses. Salam Cinema as well as The Hidden Half reveals that pop culture and pop politics have reverberations throughout many societies in the world, and inform what those societies produce and what discourses are predominant. What contrasts, therefore, are not the cultural products (discourses) themselves, but the perspectives held by individuals in relation to “other” cultures. I do not hope to present a case on how Iranian and American intellectual history is the same because it is not. However, I do hope to reorient my previous assertion, which posited how different these histories are in relation to each other, and acknowledge the numerous similarities that additionally exist.
Lastly, after noticing the uses of symbolism and their contextual impetuses, I should also like to discuss the importance of symbolism as an artistic instrument of the artists, especially the director. There are a variety of compelling reasons to notice symbols and codes in film; especially for reasons related to establishing the didactic quality of the film’s narrative. Symbolism and codes are artistic techniques that a capture a reality or a “truth” of a subject matter for artistic or political motives.
One of the most unforgettable uses of symbol in the films from the second half of our course happened in Tamineh Milani’s film The Hidden Half where she repeats the same (contemporarily composed) classical Iranian music whenever the main character interacts with her young lover Javid. The obvious symbolism of the music illustrates the romantic relationship between the two, although Milani is not able to (or does not choose to) include a scene confirming this relationship. In our previous film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady, we also see this socially forbidden subject matter of (heterosexual) sexual relations outside marriage engaged. In our course readings on Milani’s film, we hear from Rosemarie Scullian in her work entitled Feminizing National Memory, where she succinctly explains Milani’s most obvious and dominant theme, “The Hidden Half [takes] up the taboo subject matter: the violent internal repression to which leftist, liberal and secular nationalist forces were subjected by religious entities during and following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.” The Hidden Half opens with a government official interviewing a faceless (symbolically the women is entirely covered by a black chador so that the audience is unable to see even her face reminding me of the passage used in class from Nacficy’s Veiled Voices and Vision explaining, “Veiling is the armature of modesty.” ) woman who we are led to believe is being held as a political prisoner, explains to the government official, how she came to be on death row. At the end of the film we are made to realize that this faceless woman is not, but could have been, the film’s main character, Fereshteh. Fereshteh, who becomes a docile, middle class, Iranian housewife, as well as this woman, symbolize the contrasting fates of many leftist revolutionaries in post-’79 Iran. Scullion explains Milani’s possible motivations, “The Hidden Half, [steps] into the wholly uncharted terrain of writing a cinematic history and forming a counter-cultural national memory of the political repression that had enabled the consolidation of the clerical regime’s autocratic powers in the years immediately following the Islamic Revolution.”
What the two “opposing” women also represent, as I mentioned earlier, are the incredibly contrasting fates of two remarkably alike women. What contrasts, from the vantage point of the government official (whom, I should mention is middle-age Fereshteh’s husband) is what each of these women politically symbolize. The contrast of the two women’s political roles, appear to be an issue Milani is hoping to address through the film’s narrative. What I mean is that the faceless women gets disembodied precisely because of her actions towards societal embodiment. While middle age Fereshteh and her life, even in its more intimate details, are revealed to the audience because she “compromises” herself to the societal norms of what a women should symbolize – as I stated, a politically apathetic yet familialy devoted wife and mother. Thus, the film’s title, The Hidden Half, appears to symbolize both what lies behind Fereshteh’s disembodiment as well as the collective amnesia surrounding who and what was involved in Iran’s “Islamic” Revolution.
The last aspect of Milani’s film that I will mention, since room is growing short, relates to the third frame I set out to notice in my introduction relating to how cross-cultural similarities. While I acknowledge with great humility the exceptionally difficult political position of women under Iran’s oppressive, gendered structure, and simultaneously encourage art forms that engage, through creative mediums, social discourses that hope to transform legislative and social prohibitions I believe “Western” obsession with this reality fuel further myopia. What I mean is that there is a tendency in the West to view and unfairly judge Iran exclusively through its less attractive social ills while forgetting that the “West” has experienced (and continues to) very similar histories of oppression both of women and others. In this sense, the state-sponsored political oppression of women should not be exceptional, yet the “West’s” interest and intense focus on women’s issues in Iran remains dominant. The Hidden Half thus uses several different symbols (and metaphors) to engage different themes related to women’s issues, historical memory, values (traditional, conservative and conventional), self-reflection, and cultural criticism.
The second film I would like to look at is Saman Moghadam’s Maxx. Maxx is a satirical political musical about cultural activists who invite Iranian scholars and artists living outside Iran to perform in a festival in hopes that they will attract ex-pats back to Iran. In a comedic turn of events Maxx, an Iranian-American musical performer (rapper) from an unknown nightclub in East Los Angeles receives an invitation to play his music before some of Iran’s most distinguished elite. Much of the remainder of the movie surrounds instances where Maxx commits social offenses while his hosts look on in horror.
Maxx engages many cultural and social issues that are of contemporary significance, and does so through highly satirical scenes. Satire is itself a form of symbolism, and Maxx is a brilliant example of the use of satire to reveal underlying issues. Some of the issues Moghadam explores relate to Iranian social mores pertaining to custom and comportment, the “brain-drain” phenomena, issues relating to censorship especially in the media, and cross-cultural issues especially relating to the “negative American influence” on popular music in Iran. Maxx is portrayed as an unintelligent, socially inept character that, in the end, is the only one of the main characters able to solve some of problematic relationships in the film. Additionally, those Iranian officials who had at the outset of the film where both angered and mortified by Maxx’s behavior grow to deeply appreciate his deep aptitude for human relationship.
As I mentioned above there are a plethora of symbols in this film, and especially exemplified by the role of many of the characters. Maxx, as I stated, symbolizes the Iranian-American Diaspora, Ms. Ghohari symbolizes both the political situation of Iranian women as well as the political establishment (as does her governmental supervisor), Ms. Ghohari’s son represents the teeming population of Persian young people disturbed with some of Iran’s prohibitive social laws, others represent the conservative religious classes and/or the frustrated intellectual elite. All of which serve to describe many contemporary issues surrounding Iran’s political and class situation, as well as its relationship with its Iranian-American counterparts. There is a heavy emphasis on the use of language, especially plays on words. I imagine this emphasis exemplifies many political realities, and is both a technique Moghadam employs as well as symbol. The relationship of symbolic language in Iranian film making, especially when attempting to convey issues generally forbidden, has many reverberations. Surely artists in other mediums including print mediums in Iran could relate to this symbolism.
Thus, symbolism enjoys an imperative and permeating place in Iranian films, especially in the post-Revolutionary period. The symbols are often emblematic of political, religious and cultural dialogues that are not overtly allowed in the public sphere. The symbols engage real contexts and real persons, often blurring the lens of objective reality, critiquing artistic norms in film or adding beauty to difficult or hopeless situations. Most importantly symbolism animates Iranian film in ways that would not be possible under current legislation, offering room and solace from the suffering of creativity and daring to realize the furthest spheres of imagination.