Chandrahas Choudhury: Hitchcock in Hijab

Hitchcock In Hijab
by Chandrahas Choudhury
Tehelka: The People's Paper

You know nothing of contemporary world cinema if you don’t know your Iranian New Wave. It is the new cinema hotspot. But what makes it so livewire? As a fascinating all-women Iranian delegation shows its work at the Asian Film Festival in Mumbai, Chandrahas Choudhury brings Iranian cinema up close

Wherever she goes in the world, the Iranian filmmaker Pouran Derakhshandeh finds herself being asked less about her films, more about what it is to be a woman filmmaker in Iran, and most about how it is that the world has seen such a surge of remarkable films from her country over the last decade, turning Iran from a backwater of the film world to one of its hotspots. As fans of world cinema were once expected to have seen the works of Truffaut, Bergman, Kurosawa, or Ray, so the modern-day filmgoer hasn’t seen anything if he or she is still to make an acquaintance with filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his daughter Samira, Dariush Mehrjui, and Jafar Panahi — most prominent among the Iranian New Wave.

The phenomenon of Iranian cinema becoming one of the most celebrated, Golden Lion-ed and Bear-ed film cultures of the world is an intriguing one. Filmmakers in Iran work in conditions one would hardly consider suitable for high cinematic achievement — under an Islamic regime that is deeply suspicious of the power of cinema to influence and corrupt. Since 1979, the Ministry of Culture rules do not allow a man and a woman to touch on screen unless they are playing a married couple. Women must wear the hijab and cover their hair not only in public, as they must even in real life, but also in domestic scenes — since the viewer watching them is a stranger. A film on something as simple as romantic love is fraught with all kinds of difficulties. Also, anything that verges on blasphemy is out, as is any criticism of the present government, or the Revolution of 1979 under Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2001, Tahmineh Milani was briefly jailed for making The Hidden Half , a controversial film that harked back to the Revolution.

Yet, restrictions can sometimes vitalise art, forcing its practitioners to think creatively and rely more on symbolism, indirection and suggestion — to create a cinema in which the viewer is not fed meanings but rather himself completes the meaning. Over the last decade, and especially since 1997, when the more tolerant government of Mohammad Khatami came to power, Iranian cinema has gained a reputation for being the most distinctive national cinema in the world, that depends heavily on dialogue but works as much with silences, a meditative, slow-moving cinema with long takes often lasting one or two minutes, instead of the rapid cuts and flashy camerawork that have become the style of our mtv age. Above all, a cinema intensely attentive to character, to observing human beings at work — human beings big and small. It is worth noting how many sensitive films about children’s lives have come out of Iran, from Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s Home? to Panahi’s White Balloon and Majidi’s The Colour of Paradise.

Derakhshandeh, the first woman in Iran to make a film after the revolution of 1979, was in India last week as the leader of an unusual four-member delegation of Iranian women (who’s work was being screened at the week-long Asian Film Festival of Mumbai) and made it a point to stress how the official strictures also had their payoffs. “Sex and violence, the main ingredients of western films, have been omitted from Iranian cinema,” she asserted. “Women in many western films are just commodities, but in Iranian films they are given the respect they deserve.” In an essay she handed out to journalists, she extended her critique of Hollywood, asking why it was that Iranian films were being ever more widely seen and praised around the world. “[This is] a time when Hollywood is exerting a stranglehold all over the world, not only with its own studio films but through those many films made elsewhere which imitate Hollywood. Iranian cinema offers us an alternative more to do with real ideas and emotions, important social, moral and philosophical issues, and which is not obsessed with stars, special effects, sensationalism and silly escapist stories. That’s why!”

A feature of the Iranian New Wave that received particular attention at the Asian Film Festival was the number of women directors now in Iran (more, in my estimate, than the number in Bollywood). Surprising when one considers the highly traditional and patriarchal nature of Iranian society. At the festival the variety and quality of this work were readily apparent. Derakhshandeh’s entry at the festival, Candle in the Wind (2003), was a somewhat too earnest tale about an aimless youth who takes to drugs, but the others more than made up for it. On the one hand there was Mother (2000), a short film by Leila Mirhadi that depicts a boy slowly coming to understand the world of his blind mother (superbly played by one of Iran’s leading actresses, Roya Nonahali), and featuring an astonishing last shot of the boy looking up at a first-floor window where his mother stands looking (if that is the word) directly down at him. Offering a total contrast was Shokaran, or Hemlock (2000), touted as an Iranian Fatal Attraction. Based on a script by Minoo Farshchi, it told the story of an affair between Mahmoud, a businessman with a doting family, and Sima, a beautiful nurse aware of her power over people. Expertly paced, and cleverly building up the film’s mood of uncertainty and suspense through skilful editing and camerawork, Shokaran derived a paradoxical power from the rules under which Iranian cinema works: two people have an affair, yet we never see them touch on screen. Very different again was Tahmineh Milani’s Two Women (1999), a scathing broadside against the patriarchal oppressions of Iranian society delivered simply through one story.

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