Reading and watching Iran.

We are those simpler souls, who sought to steer clear of any sort of political fuss in this accursed corner of the planet. We eliminated every shred of ambition from our lives and instead of seeking solace in morphine or heroin, in acid, joints, gangs, bribes, theft, womanizing or any of a thousand other afflictions that may have afforded us comfort, we chose instead to turn to culture and art and cinema... What do Mullahs care about such things?

The wave that brought the Mullahs. Detail from a photo by Kevin Kelly.

The occasion of the letter signed "F. Parsa" is the arrest of Mahmoud Vakili, a "filmi," a "term and an occupation which must not exist anywhere in this world other than in this wasteland. He collected films on tape and on DVD, threw them in his shoulder bag and rented them to people." Porn, in all its varieties, as the writer points out, is freely available on nearly every corner of the city, but "films by Ford and Hawks and Von Sternberg and Griffith, as well as by Lynch, Jarmusch and Kusturica and Aronofsky and Almodovar and Von Trier" and on and on seem to have posed some sort of threat and, "Neither George Bush, nor Mohammad Khatami, neither the anti-war Europeans nor the 'innocent' Palestinians nor the Conservatives really give a damn about us. They all have their own agendas."

Desolate stuff. One wonders, or I should say, someone like me who knows so shamefully little about Iran wonders, how this totalitarian nightmare coexists side by side with a national cinema currently being hailed around the world? I'm not the first to wonder, of course. Reviewing Hamid Dabashi's Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future last year for the London Review of Books, Gilberto Perez wrote:

How can it be, people sometimes ask when I recommend an Iranian movie to them, that a country under an oppressive Islamic regime is producing such good cinema? One answer is that the Islamic regime has kept rapacious Hollywood out, thus giving the local talent a chance to develop. Dabashi's book helps us towards a better explanation. It sketches a history of Iranian cinema in the context of Iran's encounter with modernity.

And what follows in Perez's piece is a summation of that history too lengthy to quote here, and of course, with a heavy emphasis on Abbas Kiarostami, but what stands out is how very crucial poetry was in the birth of contemporary Iranian cinema in the 60s.

Photo by Abbas Kiarostami

Fascinating, but the outline of the origins of this cinema doesn't really answer the question. Stephen Nottingham comes closer in his "introduction to Iranian Cinema." What emerges is an image of authorities and artists working around each other, almost playing off each other in order to come up with something acceptable to both parties. Yes, there was a crackdown on imported films, which gave the artists a bit of breathing room. But not too much breathing room. As Nottingham writes, "Iranian film has a distinctive look and feel, in part because of censorship restrictions."

Recently, in the GreenCine discussion forums, a GCer was wondering why so many Iranian films "are mostly sad and involve little kids." Nottingham writes, "The trials of children enable social criticisms to be made without making forbidden or direct criticism of the Islamic regime." But we can't oversimplify, either. Variety critic Robert Koehler replied to a similar question on the Film-Philosophy list by pointing out that the assumption that most Iranian films are about children is a misconception brought about by the limited number of movies that get distributed outside Iran in the first place...

...not unlike the '60s distortion that all Swedish films were about characters in existential or psychological crisis (Bergman) or that all Italian movies were about the bored rich (Antonioni) or fat women (Fellini), or that all French films took place in cafes (Godard) or bed (Truffaut, Malle, etc.). Too often, a country's dominant image results from the export of just one or two artists abroad; in Iran's case, the actual breadth of subject matter is astonishing.

And now, we've come to another turning point. The Boston Globe editorializes, "History rarely flows in straight lines, seeming to prefer an unpredictable course of ebb and flow, so there is no way of knowing whether the dramatic street protests in Tehran since last Tuesday against Iran's clerical dictatorship presage an imminent fall of that regime." And if they do? Lives like F. Parsa's might become a lot easier.

At the same time, the opening up of Iran would surely mean a sudden influx of Hollywood fare and increased pressure on Iranian filmmakers to compete. It's a perverse irony what all would probably happen to Iranian cinema in the wake a big globalized embrace and somewhat reminiscent of Philip Roth's comments about central European literature flourishing behind the Iron Curtain, tackling issues of life and death while American literature wallowed in the burbs, or Lotte Eisner's assertion that German Expressionist cinema was so outstanding because the times were so hideous.

But assuming F. Parsa and Mahmoud Vakili are real human beings, I'll opt for their well-being over that of the movies'.



Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2003 7:16 AM