ABSTRACT
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s recognition of the gradual evolution of his early absolutist claims to his later celebration of multiplicity is a key to understanding the vitality and epistemological complexity of contemporary Iranian cinema. The recent films of Abbas Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui, Bahman Farmanara, Bahram Beizai, Tahmineh Milani, Rakhsan Bani Etemad, and Jafar Panahi, among others, reconceptualize cinema as a new site of contestation between meanings and truths, and between power and knowledge. Kiarostami increasingly refuses the omniscient power of the director as a gesture toward resisting the authority of authorship.3 Dariush Mehrjui upsets the order of patriarchal certainties in Hamoun where the absurd scholar-philosopher-husband writing a treatise on love and faith cannot understand his wife or why she wants a divorce. Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden-Half punctures the traditional expectations and knowledge that a husband has of a wife, and by extension, the postrevolutionary nation of its past history. Rakhshan Bani Etemad’s May Lady questions discrepancies between versions of “the ideal mother” in life and art. And Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence screens his own life to question the pastness of his past and that of the nation. Even as Makhmalbaf insists on the need to rethink our relation to the past and to each other, modern cinema in Iran is rethinking the relation between image and social reality, between knowledge,
representation, and reality, between reality as something known and something unknown. In its resistance to realistic representation, in its dialectical reading of the relation between cinematic art and reality, it transforms its audience’s relation to reality, and therefore compels an alternative way of seeing and thinking – and that’s where its revolutionary potential lies. Like Adorno, Benjamin, and others in the Frankfurt School, the Iranian art filmmakers I most appreciate are those who know and work from and illuminate the human condition of alienation, failure, and loss. The Frankfurt School, recognizing the problematic structures of feeling and knowing inscribed in language, thought of the visual as a possible liberation from what Fredric Jameson (1975) aptly called “the prisonhouse of language.” So do our filmmakers in their current state of censorship and emergency.
