The Politics of Iranian Cinema

Film and Society in the Islamic Republic

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415455374
• eBook ISBN: 9781135283094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

Iran has undergone considerable social upheaval since the revolution and this has been reflected in its cinema. Drawing on first-hand interviews and detailed ethnographic research, this book explores how cinema is engaged in the dynamics of social change in contemporary Iran. The author not only discusses the practices of regulation and reception of films from major award winning directors but also important mainstream filmmakers such as Hatamikia and Tabizi.

Contributing to ethnographic accounts of Iranian governance in the field of culture, the book reveals the complex behind-the-scenes negotiations between filmmakers and the authorities which constitute a major part of the workings of film censorship. The author traces the relationship of Iranian cinema to recent social/political movements in Iran, namely reformism and women's movement, and shows how international acclaim has been instrumental in filmmakers' engagement with matters of political importance in Iran.

This book will be a valuable tool for courses on film and media studies, and will provide a significant insight into Iranian cultural politics for students of cultural studies and anthropology, Middle Eastern and Iranian studies.

1
Introduction

On 28 October 2003, after the screening of Deep Breath (2003) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, Parviz Shahbazi, the director of the film, appeared on the stage for a Q and A session with the audience who had packed the hall. Responding to a question, the director claimed that if Iraq had a cinema like Iran, it would not have been invaded. This was an extraordinary claim to make, to say the least. Just over six months after the US-led invasion, the situation in Iraq had not yet got out of control and a follow-up attack on Iran, which was the next in line in the ‘axis of evil’, was therefore not out of the question. The filmmaker’s optimism was perhaps built on the idea that Iranian films had humanized the Iranian people to the West. Therefore they would not be seen as the ‘other’ whose country the USA or the UK would invade. He was perhaps assuming that there would be resistance to the idea of war on Iran at least by the general public in the West. Obviously, he was unaware of the small size of foreign film audiences in the West. In addition, the fact that Tony Blair took Britain to the Iraq war in spite of massive public opposition was lost on the director who only visited the West occasionally. Whatever the filmmaker’s logic, what is most significant about his extraordinary assertion is the close connection that he assumed between cinema and politics. He seemed to take it for granted that films could have great political impact. While it would be surprising to assume such a close link between cinema and politics in most places, in Iran it is not strange.

Politics in Iran has been effectively inseparable from culture in its recent history. In February 1979 at the height of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, in his first speech in Iran upon return from exile, talked about cinema’s capacity to impact society (Algar 1981: 258). Ever since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, handling of cinema has been a grave political matter. In 1979, 1991 and 1998, three different ministers of Culture and Islamic Guidance – namely Mo‘adikhah, Khatami and Mohajerani – were strongly attacked because of matters that included their handling of cinema. Mo‘adikhah resigned over a film and Mohajerani was impeached. That a government minister could lose his post because of a single film demonstrates the gravity of cinema in Iran.

The 1978–79 Iranian revolution and its aftermath have had a profound effect on the shifting boundaries of what is considered ‘political’ in Iran and this too has been strongly manifested in Iranian cinema. Following the Iranian revolution, as part of its Islamization policy, the regime sought to control all aspects of culture, not least cinema, so as to ensure that it served the purposes of the ruling establishment. Hence, the regime politicized culture, and cinema in particular. Politicization of Iranian cinema has had much to do with the context of upheaval which over a 30-year period has seen a revolution (1978–79), a war (1980–88) and a strong reformist movement (since 1997).

Less than a decade after the war Iran was in the grip of another transformative socio-political movement which came to be known as reformism. What began with the candidacy of Mohammad Khatami for presidency in 1997 evolved into a sweeping popular movement with high hopes for democratization, civil society and rule of law. Almost in tandem, the women’s movement made its presence felt in the 1990s, engaging in vocal criticism in the post-1997 period. The challenge that the reformist movement posed led to a severe backlash from the conservative establishment which frustrated the materialization of the movement’s demands. For over seven years after Khatami’s election as president, reformist-conservative confrontation dominated national politics.

The revolution, the war and the reformist movement have all been phases of the period of upheaval that Iran has been going through in the last 30 years. This book uses cinema as a prism to look at Iran in this context and in particular to examine its cultural politics. Concentrating on how Iranian cinema has been embroiled in political discussion, this book explores the processes of film reception and examines the role which Iranian cinema has played at this time of ideological rupture. The main areas in focus are state control mechanisms and policies, political films, and the impact of the recent international acclaim of Iranian films on the politics of cinema in Iran.

Pursuing a number of aims and objectives, this book explores cinema as a situated social/political practice rather than seeking to fix the meaning of films. Looking at the negotiations of power and meaning at the level of filmmaking, it seeks to demystify the relationship between filmmakers and state control, which have so far been treated as a binary opposition. Furthermore, recognizing these negotiations as part of the work of accounting for ‘reception’, the book contributes to reception studies. Currently reception studies only consider the cinema and video audiences as their subject of study. However, both in the West and in Iran, films go through various stages of being ‘seen’ as scripts, rushes and later as completed films before they are ever released. Drawing on illustrative examples from Iranian cinema, this book argues that the problematic of reception starts much earlier, before the above audiences see the film.

At the level of cinema audiences, the book examines the assumptions and strategies that Iranians use to engage with political films and the pleasures they derive from them. It looks at local/national reactions to the international prominence of Iranian films to explore the ramifications of such global processes in relation to Iranian cinema.

This book is an exploration of the relationship between the cinema and its social/political context. Therefore, unlike much research so far about Iranian cinema, which has focused on ‘art films’ or festival films, this book does not exclude films that are not recognized as such. Furthermore, there are only few published accounts that have placed Iranian cinema in the context of film reception in Iran. A number of films that have critically engaged with political issues such as social justice, the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq war, the place of the clergy in Iranian society, as well as women’s issues, are discussed at some length. These films are commonly referred to in Iran as film-e ejtema‘i or ‘social films’.

Finally, this book is not just about Iranian films from the perspectives of film and media studies. It is also about Iran in general and its political culture specifically. It aims to contribute to ethnographic accounts of Iranian governance in the field of culture, of social and cultural critique, of women’s voices against patriarchy, and of transnational cultural politics from domestic perspectives.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of media research in general and how it relates to the present inquiry. It then presents the questions that are explored in the book. Next, it focuses on the theoretical framework of the research upon which the book is based. Finally, it summarizes the other chapters. This book is based on doctoral research completed in 2006 in the newly established Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Fieldwork was conducted in Iran in 2003 and 2004.

An overview of media research

Since my exploration of Iranian cinema is on a new terrain, I have engaged with a range of theoretical and methodological approaches which have been employed in social research on the media in order to map out my own approach. The early model, which become known as ‘hypodermic’ in hindsight, was generated by the Frankfurt School. The theorists conceptualized the media effects on the basis of their knowledge of the complicity of the media with Nazism in Germany. In this model, as opposed to the all-knowing elite, the ‘masses’ were imagined as an atomized and homogenized group of alienated individuals who were without traditional bonds of locality and were hence left at the mercy of industrialism. The pessimism that intellectuals of the Frankfurt School felt at the time was reflected in their gloomy predictions about ‘mass society’ and ‘mass culture’. Therefore, they maintained that messages of the media were ‘injected’ into the uncritical masses and thus ensured the dominance of the ruling class. At around the time of WWII, when members of Frankfurt School went into exile in the USA, they predicted the rise of totalitarianism under the influence of the ‘culture industry’ in the USA, the main proponent of which was Hollywood in its heyday. The philosophical position of the school was not, however, based on empirical research on the production or consumption of media texts.¹

The theoretical assumptions of the Frankfurt School came under attack in the post-war period. Merton (1946), who worked on war propaganda, argued that the negative effects of media messages were assumed or inferred because little attempt had been made to study the ‘actual effects’ of such communication. Katz (1959) maintained that individuals who did not have any ‘use’ for media messages would not ‘choose’ to accept them. He stated, the ‘approach assumes that people’s values, their interests … associations … social roles, are pre-ponent, and that people selectively fashion what they see and hear’ (Katz 1959 in Morley and Brunsdon 1999: 119). Thus, instead of the negative effects assumed by the Frankfurt School, this post-war American approach described media as having a benign role in society, capable of fulfilling a diversity of uses and gratifications as instruments of democratization in society (Counihan 1972: 43).

Attention to what people do with the media later re-emerged in the British ‘uses and gratification’ approach. This was a welcome change from the earlier paradigm of passive audiences upon whom the media had negative effects. Although this approach signalled the return of the agency of the audience, at the same time it had its own inherent problems. First, media messages were presumed to be open to multiple readings, potentially as many as there were audience members. As Hall (1973 in Morley 1980a) argued, ‘polysemy must not be confused with pluralism’. Thus, although texts have multiple meanings, which are not equal among themselves, Hall rejected the over-optimistic arguments for the freedom of the audience to make meaning. Second, the ‘uses and gratifications’ model, like the ‘mass society’ model before it, imagined audiences as atomized individuals with psychological needs which were to be gratified. This psychological focus came at the expense of social and historical factors, which had been ignored (Morley and Brunsdon 1999: 127).

In a break with what had been done before, Hall’s ground-breaking theoretical approach paved the way for new approaches to the study of audiences. In his key article entitled ‘Encoding/Decoding’, Hall put the emphasis on ‘audience interpretations’ of media texts (Hall 1980). Accordingly, audiences ‘decode’ media messages from three distinct positions. First, they could accept the ‘preferred meaning’ of a media text as intended by its producers. Second, they could negotiate the meaning of the text, accepting certain elements while rejecting others. Third, they could adopt an ‘oppositional reading’ of the text, rejecting what the producers intended.

Although the model has since been criticized for a number of reasons (Morley 1980b: 172; Hall 1989: 273, Staiger 2000: 31–32), at the time it paved the way for empirical research on audiences by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon who carried out their seminal ethnographic research on the reception of the TV programme Nationwide (Brunsdon and Morley 1978; Morley 1980a). In what has been termed the ethnographic turn, numerous other ethnographic inquiries have been carried out in cultural studies generally, focused on TV audiences.

Within film studies, ethnography has generally been a marginal pursuit while research on film texts has dominated. This is because, in film theory, ‘spectators’ have commonly been taken to be inscribed in the film text. As Jenkins explains:

Film theory’s abstract generalizations about spectatorship often depend upon essentialized assumptions about ‘archetypal’ exhibition practices; theorists compare the experience of watching a movie in a darkened theatre to a dream state, or contrast the focused gaze of the film-goer with the distracted gaze of the television viewer.

(Jenkins 2000: 172)

Bennett (1983) has criticized this approach suggesting that a large gap remains between such an imagined spectator and the real readers of the media texts, who are subject to a particular history and live in social formations. The conditions of watching films are also socially and culturally contingent. For example, in Iran neither is the cinema totally dark nor do people watch films in silence. Since the 1980s, under the influence of cultural studies, audience studies have begun to appear in film studies as well.

In film studies, while ‘in the 1970s theory psychoanalysed the pleasures of the cinematic situation … the 1980s and 1990s analysts became more interested in socially differentiated forms of spectatorship’ (Stam 2000: 229). Researchers such as Dyer (1986), Walkerdine (1999), Bobo (1988, 1995) and Stacey (1994, 1999) have researched audience responses to Hollywood films and their stars. Nevertheless, such research on cinema reception is rare and in general limited to Western contexts.² As regards Iranian cinema, while no publication has been dedicated solely to ethnographic research on the subject, some have included ethnographic observations and interviews.

Having considered the above approaches to the study of the media, I did not find any which would be directly adaptable to my research project. Film studies research on audiences is mainly focused on Western audience perceptions of Hollywood stars and hence is far removed from the reception of Iranian films in Iran. The media studies approaches discussed earlier, in spite of the welcome turn to ethnography, are generally based on rather static models of communication of meaning from production to reception. In the case of Iranian cinema the construction of meaning is a dynamic process involving the censors, the filmmakers, and audiences in the post-revolutionary context. Hence, taking on elements of the above studies, I have devised my own approach, the theoretical underpinnings of which I discuss later.

Areas of inquiry

Iranian cinema has been a significant social/political institution, which has caused much debate within the country. In order to explore the role of cinema in Iran, I began with interrelated questions about: the significance of the institution of cinema in contemporary Iran, the negotiation of meaning in the processes of film regulation and reception, and finally the implications of the international prominence of Iranian cinema in discourses of Iranian identity.

As mentioned earlier, three ministers of Culture and Islamic Guidance have been strongly criticized in relation to their handling of cinema in the post-revolution period. One of these ministers had to resign in direct relation to a film and another was impeached (see Chapter 2). My aim has been to study how cinema is implicated in the contempo...

Table of contents

• Iranian Studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Tables
• Illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 State control of Iranian cinema
• 3 ‘Social films’
• 4 ‘Women’s films’
• 5 Transnational circulation and national perceptions
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index