ABSTRACT
Jafar Panahi's cinema is by far the most ostensibly political among his contemporaries—but his politics are far more formal than thematic: a creative combination of actual, virtual, and parabolic realisms, working, in Panahi's case, through a subsumed violence, spatially alienated, and operative through a gathering of transfigurative personae. This chapter argues that Panahi's cinema, already the culmination of the best in Iranian cinema that has come before it, operates in a semiotic domain where signs have all been liberated from their enforced signification. His visual language has been effectively liberated from its own (tyrannical) symbolic orders and feeds on the rich reservoir of its own (emancipatory) imaginary citations. In Panahi's cinema, as the summation of more than half a century of systematic visual reflection on the nature of reality, red is red is red, as in a rose is a rose is a rose.
