NY Times: Iran’s Tensions, Foreshadowed in Its Cinema

A scene from A Taste of Cherry, the movie of Abbas Kiarostami

A. O. Scott has this article in today's NY Times:

From the early 1990s until the middle of this decade, the work of Iranian filmmakers caught the attention of critics, cinephiles and festival juries around the globe as Iran’s historically rich movie culture, largely dormant during the Islamic revolution and the long war with Iraq, entered a remarkable period of rejuvenation. Two directors in particular, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, earned worldwide renown for their elusive, self-reflexive and lyrical films about Iranian life.

Mr. Kiarostami’s trio of films about the provincial town of Koker before and after a devastating earthquake — Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), Life and Nothing More (1991) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) — are at once richly philosophical meditations on memory, experience and the nature of cinema, and works of social exploration in the neo-realist tradition.

Mr. Makhmalbaf’s films are, in their own way, both highly self-conscious about their formal status as narrative artifacts and committed to investigating some of the thornier realities of Iranian life. In the current context, his 1996 film A Moment of Innocence may be especially relevant, since it is a multilayered dramatic essay on militancy and reconciliation, exploring the consequences of a violent incident from Mr. Makhmalbaf’s revolutionary youth.

Marjam Mohamadamini in A Moment of Innocence, the movie of Mohsen Makhmalbaf

(Not coincidentally, Mr. Makhmalbaf is now one of the principal spokesmen for Mir Hussein Moussavi, the former prime minister and presidential candidate whose officially declared and widely doubted defeat in elections last week galvanized the current protests.)

The range of themes these filmmakers and their colleagues were able to explore, and the kinds of images they could use, were limited by a strict but not entirely inflexible system of censorship. Political issues were dealt with indirectly, and even greater circumspection was necessary in addressing anything related to sexuality or the lives of women. These restrictions resulted in a series of remarkable films about children and also — because of taboos on how men and women could be shown interacting indoors — in a cinematography of open-air natural landscapes and vividly evoked urban neighborhoods.

The flowering of Iranian cinema in the 1990s was itself evidence of a cultural and political thaw, a tentative premonition of the current demand for change. As minister of culture and Islamic guidance from 1989 to 1992, Mohammed Khatami encouraged the expansion of film production, and his election to the presidency in 1997 (in an unexpected landslide) came less than a week after Mr. Kiarostami shared the Palme d’Or in Cannes for Taste of Cherry.

As nearly contemporaneous news events — and in retrospect today — those two victories symbolized the possibility of a relatively liberal and cosmopolitan Iran, or at least the partial ascendance of more outward-looking and conciliatory forces within Iranian society. The reality turned out to be much more ambiguous, as Mr. Khatami’s tenure in office was marked more by the frustration of reformist aspirations than by their fulfillment.

But in the eight years between his election and that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian cinema, with and without official sanction, continued to fructify. Younger filmmakers like Jafar Panahi, a protégé of Mr. Kiarostami’s, and Mr. Makhmalbaf’s daughter Samira came to prominence with work that was often more directly critical of Iranian social conditions than that of their precursors. The emphasis shifted from the countryside to the city, from children to women, war veterans, refugees and the poor, and formal self-consciousness was balanced by an increasingly uncompromising sense of realism.

No national cinema is easily summarized, and movies are always an imperfect window on the world. But to watch, say, The Apple (1998), Ms. Makhmalbaf’s first film; The Circle (2000), Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006) by Mr. Panahi; the more tenderly sentimental films of Majid Majidi (including The Color of Paradise and Baran); and Bahman Ghobadi’s tough, poetic films about Kurdistan — and this is a very partial list — is to encounter images and stories that add depth and meaning to the raw videos and tweets of recent weeks. You see class divisions, the cruelty of the state, the oppression of women and their ways of resisting it, traditions of generosity and hospitality, and above all a passion for argument.

A typical Iranian film can feel like one long series of family quarrels — a clatter of competing opinions and interests that is at once contentious and courteous, violent and fraternal, but that never seems to end. Democracy can feel that way, too, and in that respect the Iranian cinema of recent years offers a foreshadowing of what is happening now, beyond the screen.


(Iranian Film and Poetry)