University of Texas Press
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda's Cléo in the City
Author(s): Janice Mouton
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp. 3-16
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
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FromFeminine Masqueradeto FlIneuse:
Agnes Varda'sCleo in the City
by Janice Mouton
In Agnes Varda'sCl6o from 5 to 7 (1961), the protagonist'stransformationfrom
feminine masqueradetofladneuseoccurs as a result of her involvement with a city,
specifically Paris. Positing the possibility of afemale flanerie, this essay establishes
a connectionbetweenAgnes Vardaand the writers George Sandand VirginiaWoolf,
thereby showing how a woman walker-a flaneuse-lays claim to subjectivity.
Among the pleasures of viewing Cldofrom 5 to 7 (1961) are the scenic views of
Paris. As we see Clio walking through the city's "sensory streets,"' vital and dynamic with their mix of people, newsstands and bookstalls, trees and flowers, bicycles, cars, and buses, dogs and pigeons, shops and caf6s, our attention is focused
on the city as much as on the woman. Looking at how filmmaker Agnes Varda
looks at Paris, and looking at Clio learning to look, is an extraordinaryexperience
with regardto both city viewing and filmviewing.What makes Cl o's walk so fascinating is the transformationshe undergoes, brought about by her interaction with
the city during an afternoon of flanerie. The idea of transformationis first introduced by a tarot reader,whom Clio visits in the opening scene, when she is seeking assurancethat an illness she has will not prove fatal. The fortune teller cannot
give her this assurance;however, her prophecy that Clio will undergo a "profound
transformationof her being" becomes the focus of the film. Thus, Cl o, who initiallyis so self-involved and preoccupied with her fetishized image that she is blind
to her city surroundings, gradually learns to open her eyes and look and allows
what she sees to transformher.
"As Long as I'm Beautiful, I'm Alive." We become acquaintedwith Clio,
Varda's"clich6-woman"2or, as my title indicates, an example of feminine masquerade during the initial sequences of the film. The striking artificiality and
constructedness of Cl o's look-her blonde wig, meticulous makeup, fifties
"Maidenform"contour, and showy high heels-raise immediate questions about
why she presents herself in this manner. Who is she masquerading for? What is
behind the mask?What is Clio attempting to hide?
The emphaticallyfragmented style of the introductoryscene, with its repeated
close-ups of women's hands accompanied by disembodied women's voices, has an
unsettling effect, suggesting that there is more to Cl o's masquerade than simple
JaniceMoutonis an associateprofessorat LoyolaUniversity,
Chicago,whereshe teachesin
the Departmentof ModernLanguagesandLiteratureandin theWomen'sStudiesProgram.
HerarticleshaveappearedinJumpCut,Literature/Film
Quarterly,andFeministStudiesin
GermanLiteratureand Culture.
? 2001 by the Universityof TexasPress,P.O.Box 7819,Austin,TX78713-7819
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
3
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Figure 1. Cl6o (Corinne Marchand)dons the masquerade.CourtesyThe Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
acquiescence to stereotypical notions of femininity. The use of this fragmentary
style continues as Cl6o leaves the tarot reader's apartment, disturbing us even
further. As she descends the stairs to the entryway,we see-edited together in
jump cuts-multiple exposures of a single medium close-up of Cl6o moving from
the top to the bottom of the frame.
The marked emphasis on segmentation and repetition is compounded in the
following scene, in which Cl6o'simage is reflected in multiple ways in the entryway
mirrors.A fragmented and adorned object, she is a substitute for something that is
both there and not there. She becomes the woman she is not-a fantasy,a fetishized
object, someone to be looked at, reassuringrather than dangerous. Whether consciously constructed to conform to the demands of masculine desire, Cl6o's masquerade enables her to deceive and comfort herself that she is healthy and to deny
what she believes, given her symptoms and the prophecy of the fortune teller.
Cl6o's consciousness is split into her knowing self and her denying self, corresponding, respectively, to her interior self, where the illness is a reality, and her
external self, whose beauty masks the illness. As Cl6o speaks to herself in the mirror, she is doubly fragmented. The flesh-and-blood Cl6o speaks to her mirrorimage Cl6o, her denying self to her knowing self: "Being ugly,that'swhat death is. As
long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive."3
4
Cinema Journal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
In her book Female Perversions,psychoanalystLouise Kaplanwrites that "perversion is a mental strategythat uses one or another social stereotype of masculinity or femininityin a way that deceives the onlookeraboutthe unconsciousmeanings
of the behaviors she or he is observing."4 C16o'sattempt to deceive herself as well
as others by turning herself into a fetish is an unmistakableinstance of the problem as Kaplandefines it: women perform impersonations of femininity (i.e., they
fetishize themselves) as a strategy to disguise desires that are forbidden them by
the social order of gender stereotypes. In Cl6o's case, this impersonation enables
her to deny responsibility both for her exterior self, which is an impersonation,
and for her interior self, as the location of her illness.
In a much earlier (1929) study of the feminine masquerade,Joan Riviere analyzed what she termed the "masqueradeof womanliness."She examined the cases
of several women who assumed and wore their womanliness as masks. Riviere
makes clear that there is no difference between genuine womanliness and masquerade: "They are the same thing."5MaryAnn Doane rephrases the idea in her
widely read "Film and the Masquerade,""Masquerade... constitutes an acknowledgment that it is femininity itself which is constructed as mask-as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity."6
This brings us to the central focus of Varda'sfilm: Cl6o's move from a position
of masquerade and nonidentity to subjectivity.Whether Cl o adopts this masquerade because she is a performer by profession and feels that she is thus pleasing her audience, or whether she does it for the benefit of her some-time lover,
Jos6, or, finally,whether Varda'scinema has created this fetishized image of woman
in order to deconstruct it as the film progresses, Cl6o'slook reflects Riviere'sthesis
that femininity is itself a masquerade.
The nonidentity that masquerade disguises is depicted throughout the first
part of the film, during which images of Cl6o's body as fragmented abound. A
series of these images culminate in a powerful shot of a mirrorshard that reflects
a single gazing eye. Furthermore, Cl6o makes pointed verbal references to the
notion of the disunifiedbody.For one example,she confesses to her friend Doroth e
that she is glad that her illness-a stomach ailment-is "outof sight,"accentuating
the existence of the interior/exteriorsplit. Another time, when Cl o removes her
wig, she says that she wishes she could tear off her head as well. Paradoxically,
Cl o is caught between a fear of death and a death wish.
In addition to her fear of death, Cleo is consumed by a fear of mutilation (including a fear of surgery)and horrifiedat the thought of her perfect fetishized body
being desecrated.When she looks in a caf6 mirror,for instance, and its seam bisects
her face, she franticallyaltersher positionto restoreher wholeness. Later,she watches
a street performerwhose stunt consists of thrustinga saber through an opening in
his arm;her expressionof extreme horrorrevealsher vulnerabilitywhen confronted
with any form of desecration.Her intact, fetishized beauty-her feminine masquerade-assures her that she is healthy and alive and wardsoff her anxietyabout being
fragmented and mutilated and her dread of annihilationand nothingness.
Cleo seeks to fend off her anxiety and despair by escaping into a world of
beautiful objects, where fetishized commodities can substitute for feelings and
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
5
persons. In the hat shop scene, for example, Cl6o creates a spectacle for Angele,
her companion/maid, for the saleswoman, and for herself as she tries on hats bedecked with feathers, fur, sequins, and veils, reflected on mirrorsurfaces and displayed through plate-glass windows. Assuring herself that "everythingsuits me,"
she purchases a fur hat as if she could assuage her fears and meet her needs with
such a maladjustedsubstitution. But this example of commodity fetishism in the
Marxist sense tells only half the story. The objects Cl6o desires also adorn her
body, transformingher into a fetishized object. Here fetishism and feminine masquerade converge.
Vardamakes an explicit visual reference to Cleo's masquerade during her cab
ride from the hat shop to her apartment.After several shots of Parisiancityscape,
we suddenly pass two art galleries whose windows display African tribal masks.
With their prominent eyes and mouths (one in particularwith abundantstrawlike
hair is shown in close-up), these striking masks are also fetishes. Once, in their
originalcontext, they represented elements in a belief system; now, like Cleo, they
are simply objects on display-beautiful but devoid of a life or meaning on their
own. Clo, not yet having begun her process of transformation,does not see the
masks. Varda,however, like the tarot reader, foretells the future.
Once Clio returns home, we see that the domestic space she inhabits replicates and complements her masquerade of femininity. The tall, blonde, beautifully turned-out Clo is very much at home in her high-ceilinged, bright, beautiful
white room. Her image, conspicuously fashioned to attractthe desiring gaze of her
male audience, is reflected in one mirror after another as she moves about the
room-allowing her form to play over the framed surfaces-shiny, empty, and
waiting. Clo, who in many ways is a child, a kitten, and a toy, finds her maid
pampering and infantilizingher counterparts,playingwith Cleo's cute, cuddly kittens. Cleo, the fetishized woman, in feathers and furs, wig, and jewels, is one with
the room, which likewise is bedecked in fur and jewels, flowers, and ornate decorative objects. Not only is the room presented as a mirrorimage of Clo, but both
the room and the bed provide stage space for Cl o's performance of her invented
persona with Jos6, her would-be lover; the musicians with whom she sings; the
ever-admiringAngele, representing her audience; and of course, Cl6o herselfher own best audience.7
At the precise moment of her epiphany,as Cl6o sings the Cri d'Amour,identifying with the song's lyrics and seeing herself as "alone, ugly, and pale," both
camera and music move in boldly and dramatically.The scene continues outside
the room, visuallyand audiblyburstingout of the space identified with the fantasy
woman who lives within it."At this moment of insight, when Clo recognizes that
her femininity is indeed a masquerade, she literally propels herself out of herself-out of the false identity she has constructed and out of the room designed to
reflect that identity-into a new world where her transformationbegins.
Flaneuristic Forebears: George Sand and VirginiaWoolf. Whenthe camera returns to the room, it focuses on a different Clio. She signals this difference
visually by tearing off her wig and feathered robe and donning a simple black
6
CinemaJournal
n40,
No. 2, Winter 2001
dress. When she enters the street, her expression tells us she refuses to engage in
the masquerade of feminine spectacle and is taking on a new role of participantobserver in the city.
Cleo embarks on a journey-by foot, in the city streets-during the course of
which she takes on an identity so rare for women in Western culture that its feminine form, "flaneuse," is rarely mentioned. An earlier incarnation was George Sand,
who in 1831 made her way through Paris streets taking pleasure in the sights and
in her freedom, but, as we know, she had to do this dressed as a man. Sand writes:
I had a "sentrybox redingote"made for myself out of thick gray cloth, pants and vest to
match. With a grayhat and wide wool tie, I was a perfect first-yearstudent. I cannot tell
you the pleasure my boots gave me: I would gladly have slept in them.... With those
little iron-shod heels, I was secure on the sidewalk.I flew from one end of Paris to the
other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world.... No one paid attention to me,
and no one guessed at my disguise.... No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one
found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.9
Janet Wolff says about this passage that the "disguise made the life of the flaneur
available to her; as [Sand] knew very well, she could not adopt the non-existent
role of a flineuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city."'0
Another forebear of the flaneuse is the narrator of Virginia Woolf's essay "Street
Haunting," rambles through London's streets with the eye and mind of the true
flineuse. She is forced to stop just short of claiming full possession of that designation, however, since in 1927 a woman still needed an excuse for walking the streets
alone. She could go for a stroll as long as she had a ready justification: "Really I
must buy a pencil.""' Thus, purchasing a lead pencil became her pretext.
Walter Benjamin's flineur, who "goes botanizing on the asphalt," comes immediately to mind as we read Woolf's account of street rambling."2 That fellow,
who though seemingly indolent is actually watchful, lets everything pass in review.
For Woolf's flineuse, there is a seeming discrepancy between appearance and
reality, between seeing and knowing. In "Street Haunting" as well as in her essay
on the cinema,'3 Virginia Woolf is particularly interested in the relation between
the eye, which glides smoothly over the surface and "licks it all up instantly,"'4 and
the brain, which "resting, pausing, perhaps sleeps as the eye looks."'5 Yet, when
the eye "wants help" and calls, "You are needed,"'16 the brain is ready. In fact, it is
"in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves,"" so that, lost in thought, the
flineuse fails to see what was before her eyes. Soon, however, the eye and the
mind function in perfect harmony, taking in images and reflecting on them, both
observing a world and imagining a world. Woolf writes:
Passing,glimpsing,everythingseems accidentallybut miraculouslysprinkledwith beauty,
as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctuallyand prosaicallyupon the
shores of OxfordStreet had this night cast up nothing but treasure.With no thought of
buying,the eye is sportiveand generous;it creates;it adorns;it enhances. Standingout in
the street, one may build up all the chambersof an imaginaryhouse and furnishthem at
one's will with sofa, table, carpet.... But, having built and furnished the house, one is
happilyunder no obligationto possess it; one can dismantleit in the twinklingof an eye.'8
Cinema Journal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
7
As will be discussed in detail below, Varda,in her writing and throughout Cldo
from 5 to 7, thematizes the essential connection between looking and knowing as
it applies both to flanerie and to film spectatorship.
Yet despite these illustriouspredecessors, the notion of the flaneuse remains
questionable to this day.Aimless strolling, "streetwalking"per se, still conjures up
connotations of prostitution, although it fits the definition of flanerie precisely. It
is carried out on foot (not in a motor car)'9on a city sidewalk (not in a shopping
mall, a safe, predictable environment where the would-be flaneuse finds no risk,
no challenge, no adventure-and no possibilityof transformation);it proceeds at a
leisurely pace (though not necessarily in the company of a pet turtle, reputedly the
custom of the nineteenth-century Parisianflaneur,who took a turtle strollingwith
him in the arcades, allowing the animal to set the pace); it is aimless (not motivated towarda goal, as in shopping-except perhaps for a lead pencil)20; it involves
looking (not "auralflanerie" as in station switching on the radio dial),2"and the
walker strolls alone. When all these qualities are present, the rambling, streethaunting flaneur/flaneuseis in a position to experience the shock (Benjamin), the
distraction (Kracauer),"and the adventure (Woolf) of the life of the city and to
process it in the mind as Denkbilder (thought images).23
Remarkably,Clo is in this positionwhen, propelled by the shock of self-knowledge that overwhelms her while singing the Cri d'Amour, she leaves her narrow,
self-mirroring room for the open, inviting street. The changes she makes in her
appearanceare significant. George Sand assumed the disguise of a man to become
a flaneur, Cleo removes the disguise of a spectacle woman to become a woman
walker. In both cases, the purpose is the same: to look without being looked at.
That Clo has "nothought of buying"(Woolf) is also crucial to her transformation.
She no longer needs the "fix"of the earlier hat-shoppingscene, or of the fetishized
identity that she is now in the process of shedding.
The life of the street-its risks, surprises, and endless variety-carries with it
the transformativeforce. Thus, the woman shopper can never be identified with
the authentic flaneuse, or the shopping mall with the street. In her provocative
book Window Shopping, Anne Friedberg attempts to do just this, going so far as
to elevate shopping to the realm of "philosophicalspeculation"by claiming that to
"shop is to muse in the contemplative mode, an activity that combines diversion,
self-gratification,expertise, and physical activity."24
Although she insightfullycharacterizes the bag lady and the street person with a shopping cart as "direparod[ies]
of a consumer culture gone awry,"25
Friedberg seems not to recognize commodity
fetishism as the far more dangerousand pervasiveperversionassociatedwith shopping in modern society. Because Vardadoes recognize this, Cleo as fetish woman
goes shopping while Cleo as flaneuse haunts the streets.
One way of thinkingabout Cleo's process of transformationis to chart it on a
trajectoryfrom fear to curiosity.When the spectacle woman, who has alwaysbeen
only looked at, claims the right to look for herself, she experiences a form of transgression.This is hardlysurprisinggiven our mythsof origin,which teach that female
curiosity-the desire to look and to know-is transgressiveand dangerous.We have
only to recall the figures of Eve, Pandora,or Bluebeard'swives, all alluded to by
8
CinemaJournal40o, No. 2, Winter 2001
to recognizehow this ingrainedpatternof
LauraMulveyin her essay"Pandora,"
Howtabooshas markedthe desiresandanxietiesof womenin Westernsociety.26
look
know-she
curious-to
desire
to
and
to
must
before
can
to
be
ever,
begin
Clio
overcomefearandmustercourage.
Beyondthe connectionbetweenlookingandknowing,thereis the important
relationshipbetweenthe one wholooksandwhatis seen andknown.As Raymond
Williamswritesin TheCountryand the City,
is notonlya function
of objects-ofwhatis thereto be known.It is
Whatis knowable
ofsubjects,
ofobservers-ofwhatisdesiredandwhatneedstobeknown.
alsoafunction
it is the
Andwhatwe havethento see...isnotonlythe realityof the...community;
whichis partof thecommunity
observer's
beingknown."
position
sortof constellation,she
Clio has all of Parisbeforeher,and,in a figure/ground
and
to
Paris.
Whereas
earlier
she
was
self-absorbed
unaware,now,as she
belongs
looks,muses,andrespondsto the city,she becomesbothan observerof the crowd
of herbeing"unfoldsbeforeus.
anda partof it. Thus,the "profound
transformation
A WomanWalkerin the City.Oneof the strengthsandbeautiesof AgnesVarda's
filmmakingis that she selects her city locationswith great care and precision. The
all of her filmswhethertheywere shot on her
use of specificlocalescharacterizes
own Paris street, the rue Daguerre in the fourteenth arrondissement(Daguerreo-
types,1975);in the streetsandstudiosof late-1960sHollywood(Lion'sLove,1969);
or during a harshlybeautiful winter in the Languedoc (Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond,
1985). In this regard,her oeuvre is distinct from the mass of contemporarymovies
whose cine-city settings displaya "ubiquitousplacelessness.""28In Cldofrom 5 to 7,
each of Varda'sParis locations expresses a rich character of its own and invites
flinerie:theruede Rivoli,thebusyshoppingstreet;therueHuyghensinCleo'sneighwhereallof Parispasses
borhood;thecaf6le D6me,ontheboulevardMontparnasse,
mix
and
the
with
its
of
and
Montsouris,
by;
people
refreshingnaturalspace.
Pare
As objectof the gaze,Cleo maybe unpracticedin the artof looking,but she
suffersneitherfroma misconceivedsense of autonomynorthe delusionthather
standpointas subjectis the centerof the world,as in Sartre'ssense of a "subject
residingat the still pointof the turningworld,masterof its prospects,sovereign
surveyorof the scene."29In becominga flaneuse,Clio does not assumethe power
of a gazingsubjectentrappinga differentotheras object.Rather,she breaksout of
thisstructure.Thecitystreetthusbecomesa newstructuring
presencethatenables
herandthosearoundherto participatein analternativemodelof spectatorship
not
definedby a strictsubject/object
As
she
and
becomes
a
dichotomy. flaneuse, joins
in
of
the
world
which
she
and
observes.
To
on
rambles
the
words
of
part
play
NormanBryson,"the[flaneuse]cannotbe saidto enjoyindependentself-existence,"
since"thegroundof [her]beingis the existenceof everythingelse."30
SinceCleohasalwaysexperiencedherselfas fragmented,she is not shockedto
findthatthe cityalsoconsistsof fragments.Herprocessof transformation
is echoed
the
relentless
There
is
no
or
wholeness
to
be
by city's
permanence
variety.
sought,no
expectationfor the woman or for the city of arrivingat a fixed identity.
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
9
That the city forms personalityis anythingbut a new idea. Aristotle expressed
it most succinctly by claiming, "Outside the polis no one is truly human," and
Bertolt Brecht once said, "EinMann ist kein Mann"(One man is not a man). In his
classic text The City in History, Lewis Mumford demonstrates that personality
first emerged in the city3";before the development of the city, in the fourth millennium B.C., there was only a village sense of collectivity. According to Mumford,
the new esthetic structures of the city-the wall, the temple, the palace, the marketplace-enabled the individualinhabitantto "identifyhimself with the personality of the city.""2In fact, he credits the city with having as one of its principal
functions "the making and remakingof selves."33
If this is the case for the whole of recorded history, it is just as true in the
world of fictional literature. From the familiarstories of the Greeks and the connections their literarycharactershave to their cities-Troy, Athens, Corinth-up
to the nineteenth-century work of Dickens and Baudelaire and on to twentiethcenturywriting-for exampleJoyce'sUlyssesand D6blin'sBerlin Alexanderplatzthe character-formingnature of the city is plain to see. By focusing on the Sand/
WoolfNarda tradition,I mean to show that women artistsalso recognize the city as
important in forming a woman'spersonality.
Although the street provides the primaryspace for flaneuristicwalking ("Life
in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations thrives among the gray
cobblestones," says Benjamin),34newsstands, caf6s, bookstores, and movie theaters, connected as they are to the street-actually extensions of it-also beckon
the flaneur/flaneuse.35
One remarkable scene in Cldofrom 5 to 7 makes clear the tie between the
the woman in her ongoing process of transformation:when Cleo enters
and
city
the Montparnasse caf6 le D6me in her new role of flaneuse, she notices everything in this rich sidewalk caf6: posters on the bulletin board, paintings on the
walls, tables, chairs, a pinball machine, a jukebox, a newspaper rack. She seats
herself momentarily at a small table, positioned next to a floor-to-ceiling column covered in mirror mosaics, a mirrored surface into which, for the first time,
Cleo does not look. In becoming part of the caf6 world, she ceases to be a spectacle on display, for herself or for anyone else. Next to her, the multifaceted
surface mirrors her image and the images of the caf6's interior in an infinitely
fragmented pattern.
As fragments of Cleo's image and fragments of other objects-people and
things, light and movement-come together to form a new, complex pattern,
Cleo indeed becomes the figure "the ground of [whose] being is the existence of
everything else."36
When Clio gets up from her table and continues her stroll through the caf6,
the mirroredfragments materializebefore her eyes into various distinct and individual people. She continues her observationsinside and out, even makingthem a
kind of test. She plays a song on the jukebox that she has recorded and for which
she is well known, La Capricieuse, and watches to see how people respond. Quite
simply, they don't. They continue their typical caf6 activities-reading, smoking,
looking about, conversing, drinking, coming and going. Clio is lost in the crowd.
10
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
Like George Sand and VirginiaWoolf's narratorbefore her, she is on her own two
feet, using her own two eyes to observe the city and become part of it.
Varda's Mental Movie Theater. The caf6sequenceis an especiallystrikingexample of Varda'scinicriture, a word she coined to convey the notion of "cinematic
writing."Vardapoints out that what the cinema has to deal with is a way of narrating: "Not illustratinga screenplay, not adapting a novel.... I have fought so much
since I started ... for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion,
sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape which has to do
with cinema and nothing else."37What Vardapresents in the caf6 scene is nothing
less than a total visual, aural,and imaginativerealizationof film as textual process.
She gives shape to the "visualemotion, sound emotion, feeling" of Clho'stransformation as she responds to the sights and sounds of the caf6. The director uses this
technique throughout the second half of the film. The city yields up its myriad
fragments, and Clho, in observing them and becoming part of them, incorporates
them as she becomes transformedfrom spectacle and fetishized object into a subject who looks, a flaneuse. Varda'sinclusion of the column with its multifaceted
mirror surface-independent presence and representation of the whole-is an
especially brilliant conception, since it encapsulates in one stunning visual image
the story of the film and its narrativeprocess.
Virginia Woolf has written of the resemblance between bookstore browsing
and street haunting-books on the shelf of a secondhand bookshop are like crowds
on the sidewalk. While browsing the shelves, "One is forced to glimpse and nod
and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street
outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a
lifetime."38The interaction, charged by that "flash of understanding," between
book and browser, street and stroller, in both cases brings life to the encounter.
Varda reveals a similar connection between the processes of film viewing and
flanerie. We feel a sense of expectation as Cleo, changed by what she saw in the
caf6, begins to stroll the city street. A rush of images, snatches from the life of
the city, meets her eye: the street, the sidewalk, the storefronts, the shopkeepers
and shoppers, the browsers and passersby. The soundtrack, too, signals change.
Earlier Cleo actually walked (i.e., her high heels clicked) to the rhythm of one of
her songs playing in her head; now her footsteps become part of the rich mix of
ambient sound that complements the sights surrounding her. As Cleo walks, listens, and looks-selectively, furtively even, still fearful but with her curiosity
awakened-her "mind'seye" suddenly begins to intercut memory material with
present perceptions. This, Vardaexplains, is what cinema is all about:
Images,sound,whatever,arewhatwe use to constructa waywhichis cinema,whichis
movie
supposedto produceeffects,not onlyin oureyes andears,but in our"mental"
theaterin whichimageandsoundalreadyarethere.Thereis a kindof ongoingmovie
all the time,in whichthe moviethatwe see comesin andmixes,andthe perceptionof
alltheseimagesandsoundproposedto us...pilesup in ourmemorywithotherimages,
otherassociations
of images.39
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
11
By this point, the viewer shares Cl6o's memories, and we are privy to her
"mental movie theater" as Varda intercuts city-street images with images from
other contexts: Angele posed on Clo's loveseat and Jos6 seated on Cleo's bed,
both gazing at her. Suddenly the face of the tarot reader appears, followed by the
likeness of a man Cl6o saw at the caf6 engrossed in reading his newspaper.With
Clo we re-view the image of her wig hanging on the mirrorwhere she left it, a
visual encapsulationof the existence she just fled. The picture of her clock and the
sound of its continuing tick on the soundtrackremind her, and us, of the passage of
time and of its limitedness. Finally, we see a shot of a frog swallower she saw
perform-a grotesque,nightmarishstand-infor Clo herself, a performerand object
of everyone's gaze. Like the African masks, the frog man reflects in an escalated,
literalway an aspect of Cl6o'smasquerade,which she is now,with difficulty,beginning to drop. With these multiple images, Vardarenders visually what Woolf described as the harmoniousfunctioning of eye and mind-a cinematic presentation
of the processing of flineuristic Denkbilder.
By now, Clo has begun to be part of the city. Her presence in the caf6 and in
the street, her walking,looking,listening, and musing, compose a part of the whole.
While she does not yet have the sense that the street "belongs"to her, certainlythe
pleasure of the moment causes her to feel like a different person.40One of the
privileges of flanerie is being able to entertain the possibilityof being many selves,
in Woolf's words, "to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single
mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.""41
For Clo, the exhilarationof the new is tempered by the fear of the unknown
and the fear of transgressing.Her first brave steps are only a start;she must continually summon up courage to proceed along her path. Thus, the scene of Clo
strollingin the street which began with lovely new city discoveries and modulated
to the "movie in her mind," closes with a claustrophobic dream in which she is
blocked from crossing the street by a great stream of pedestrians choreographed
to move en masse across the entire space of the screen. Surrealisticallycomposed,
and accompaniedby the tickingof a clock, the image of this staringcrowd is enough
to paralyzeClo. When she finallymanages to break through the barrierand cross
the street, she becomes more afraidas she glimpses the aforementioned man with
the saber performing self-mutilation.
As Clo embarks on the next stage of her journey through the city, she is
joined briefly by her friend Doroth e. An artists'model, Doroth e is by definition
an object of the gaze, yet she is an object with a difference. "Oh,"she says when
Clio asks her about it, "it'snot me they see. It's a form, an idea." This way of
thinking is foreign to Clio, who has always allowed herself to be positioned as a
fetishized object, though now she is receptive to the possibility of change. Not
only does Doroth e show Clio that one can take other attitudes towardone's body,
she also teaches Clio a great deal about the fine art of city looking; and while
travel in the company of another person is not, strictly speaking, characteristicof
flanerie, Dorothee is exceptional in that she serves as a model to Clo. Her friend's
spontaneity and imagination enable Cleo to treat the fragments of the city as bits
in a giant kaleidoscope, creating ever-changingpatterns for the viewer.
12
Cinema Journal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
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The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
the path on which ClIo has
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Clio along
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helps Cl6o
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names, the people, the neighof
the
borhoods, the happenings. During
portion her city journey in the comElmer Gantry, le charlatan, the feature
not
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pany of Doroth6e, ClIo
house they visit, but a comic short,
movie
of
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on
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have
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which is also playing.42
it, the witty little silent film is not
about
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and
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only about learning look,
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is
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looking, but set
Near the end of her walk, Cl o's makes the acquaintanceof Antoine, a French
soldier on furlough from the AlgerianWar.Like Doroth6e, Antoine suggests new
ways of looking at the world, new ways of thinkingabout it, and new ways of being in
the city. Unlike Doroth e, however,Antoine is not an old friend but a new acquaintance. That Cl6o is able to reach out and respond to him is a clear sign of transformation from her prior self-absorbed solipsism. When she tells Antoine, "Today
everything amazes me," she is speaking as a woman who has learned to look; as a
man, Antoine takes looking for granted. She is even able to talkwith Antoine about
her fear of death, since he too must contend with his own fear of dying in combat.
Afterwalkingthrough a city parktogether (the Parc Montsouris),Cl6o and Antoine
take a bus to the hospital for her laboratorytest results. On the way, while looking
out the window, they see two medical professionals in white lab coats carryinga
small boxlike structure across the street. On closer examination,they see it is an
incubatorcontaining a prematureinfant, visible through the transparentcover. On
CinemaJournal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
13
the soundtrackthe voice of a woman passenger on the bus exclaims, "Oh, look, a
preemie! It'sjust like Snow White in her glass coffin!"This curious sequence presents us with a new kind of image. Unlike the Africanmasks and the frog-swallowing man, reflections of Clio as fetish and performer,this neonatalimage reminds us
of the transformationClio has undergone. She is no longer a narcissistic Snow
White, a spectacle behind glass, a "preemie"with her eyes closed. For Clio, that
position was only temporary.In the context of the city street, Cl o has discovered
the curiosityand courage to feel her own subjectivity-to become a flaneuse.
By granting Clko the name of flaneuse, this essay places Varda'swork in the
context of George Sand and Virginia Woolf in a tradition that lays claim to the
activity of flanerie for women. Cldofrom 5 to 7 shows the transformationof its
protagonist as rooted in her direct involvement with the city-walking in the city,
looking at the city, and coming to know the city-and it portrays Paris as a presence that both responds to and structures her flaneuristic activity.Thus, the film
makes a strong statement about the possibilities and even the necessity of flanerie
for women's subjectivity.In the end, Clko and the city claim each other.
Notes
My special thanks to Anne Callahan, Pamela Caughie, Susan Cavallo, and Eleanor Honig
Skoller for their generous help with earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also to the two
anonymous readers for CinemaJournal.
1. The term is William H. Whyte's in City: Rediscovering the Center (New York:
Doubleday, 1988), 79.
2. Quoted in Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French
Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 229, from Agnes Varda,"Propos
sur le cinema," Cindma 75, no. 204 (December 1975): 47-48.
3. See Flitterman-Lewis'sdiscussion of the ways in which mirrors function in the film.
Ibid., 272-73.
4. Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions:The Temptationsof Emma Bovary (New York:
Doubleday, 1991), 9.
5. Joan Riviere, "Womanlinessas a Masquerade,"in Victor Burgin, James Donald, and
Cora Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy (New York:Routledge, 1989), 38.
6. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade:Theorizing the Female Spectator,"in
John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, eds., The Sexual Subject:A "Screen"Readerin Sexuality (New York:Routledge, 1992), 234.
7. Here Cl6o specifically uses the masquerade of beauty to deceive Jos6 about her illness
in the same way that she accomplished her own self-deception earlier ("If I'm beautiful, I'm alive.")
8. See Claudia Gorbman's brilliant analysis of this scene, "Cldofrom 5 to 7: Music as
Mirror,"Wide Angle 4, no. 4 (1981): 46.
9. George Sand, Story of My Life, ed. Thelma Jurgrau(Albany:State University of New
YorkPress, 1991), 893-94.
10. JanetWolff, "TheInvisibleFldneuse:Women and the Literatureof Modernity,"Theory,
Culture & Society 2, no. 3 (winter 1985): 41.
11. VirginiaWoolf, "Street Haunting, A London Adventure,"in Andrew McNeillie, ed.,
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), 155.
14
Cinema Journal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
12. Walter Benjamin cites an Alexander Dumas novel in which the flaneur-hero "decides
to go forth in search of adventure by following a scrap of paper which he has given to
the wind to play with." "The Flaneur,"in Charles Baudelaire:A Lyric Poet in the Era
of High Capitalism, trans. HarryZohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 25.
13. Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema," in Leonard Woolf, ed., The Death of the Moth and
Other Essays (New York:Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1942), 180-86.
14. Ibid., 180.
15. Woolf, "Street Haunting," 156. Emphasis added.
16. Woolf, "The Cinema," 181.
17. Woolf, "Street Haunting," 157.
18. Ibid., 160.
19. This mode of flanerie, to be carried out on a country road, was suggested by Makiko
Minow-Pinkney in "Flanerie by Motor Car?" (paper presented at the 1997 Virginia
Woolf Conference in Plymouth, N.H.), a reading of Virginia Woolf's "Evening over
Sussex:Reflections in a Motor Car,"and seems partially,at least, a misreadingof Woolf's
"Street Haunting."
20. Although Benjamin seemed to suggest that the nineteenth-century Parisian flaneur
was destined to disappear once the department store was established as a popular
institution (see "The Flaneur" and "Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris"),he noted a
return of this "classical"flaneur in twentieth-century Berlin, again strolling the streets
and absorbinga city landscape "composed of nothing but life." Benjamin, "The Return
of the Flaneur" (review of Franz Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin, 1929) in Gesammelte
Schriften:Kritikenund Rezensionen, vol. 3 (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1991), 195.
21. Susan Buck-Morss, citing an idea of Adorno'sin "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman,and
the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,"New German Critique 39 (fall 1986): 105.
22. Siegfried Kracauer,"Cultof Distraction,"New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 91,
93. Kracauer applies the term Zerstreuung, sometimes translated as "diversion"instead of "distraction,"to the experience in the Berlin movie palaces of the 1920s as
well as in city streets.
23. The term Denkbilder, in its narrowest and most specific usage, applies to the series of
thought-images or city sketches Benjamin wrote in the mid-1920s, including "Moscow," "Marsailles,"and "Naples." See Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,AutobiographicalWritings,ed. Peter Demetz (New York:Schocken Books, 1986).
More broadly,the term refers to the thought-images or city sketches produced in the
mind of the flaneur/flaneuse while strolling through city streets. In both cases, the
visual, the fleeting, and the fragmentaryare characteristic.
24. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 57.
25. Ibid., 110.
26. See Laura Mulvey, "Pandora:Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,"in Beatriz
Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York:Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1992),
64-67. Punishing the woman for active looking is also a film convention; see, for example, Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks, ..." in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia
Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds., Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism
(Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984), 83-99.
27. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York:Oxford University Press,
1973), 165.
28. The term is Frank P. Tomasulo'sin "TheArchitectonics of Alienation:Antonioni'sEdifice Complex,"Wide Angle 15, no. 3 (July 1993): 4.
Cinema Journal 40, No. 2, Winter 2001
15
29. Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and
Visuality (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1988), 88.
30. Ibid., 98. I have substituted "flaneuse"for Bryson's"entity."
31. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations,and Its Prospects (New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 69.
32. Ibid., 68.
33. Ibid., 116.
34. Benjamin, "The Flineur," 37.
35. Benjaminincluded the arcadesamong the flineur's areaof interest and Woolf'sflaneuse
frequented bookstores.
36. Bryson, "The Gaze," 98.
37. Agnes Varda,"AgnesVarda:A Conversationwith BarbaraQuart,"Film Quarterly 40,
no. 2 (winter 1986-87): 4.
38. Woolf, "Street Haunting," 163.
39. Varda,"AgnesVarda:A Conversation,"7.
40. Anke Gleber notes that "the uncommented, uninhibited, and unobserved presence of
a female person in the streets is in no way acknowledged as a self-evident right.""Female Flinerie and the Symphonyof the City,"in Katharinavon Ankum, ed., Womenin
the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), 74.
41. Woolf, "Street Haunting," 165.
42. Watching Elmer Gantry (1961), with Burt Lancaster in the role of the charlatanperformer-preacher,might have been one lesson too many for Cl o, who by now has
caught on, having seen the frog swallower and the saber thruster in performance.
16
Cinema
Journal
40, No. 2, Winter 2001
A rare glimpse of Tahereh’s face in Through the Olive Trees
(Zire darakhatan zeyton) (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, France/
Iran, 1994). Courtesy Artificial Eye
Women in a Widening Frame:
(Cross-)Cultural Projection,
Spectatorship, and Iranian Cinema
Lindsey Moore
This article addresses the entwined issues of gendered and cultural representation in contemporary Iranian cinema. One of the
remarkable features of recent Iranian film is its allegorical use of
gendered tropes, in particular the (in)visibility and (im)mobility
of women in social space. The female body, which has been
defined in historically charged and culturally assertive terms, is
constantly reinvested thematically and technically. In Iran, as in
more conventionally “postcolonial” sites of knowledge production,1 the relationship between vision and embodied, gendered
objects is both culturally specific and informed by cross-cultural
encounter. This article urges continued attention to the import of
female representation in relation to a film’s reception both within
and outside of the national viewing context.
I assess the implications of verisimilitude in three films:
Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (Zire darakhatan zeyton)
(France/Iran, 1994), Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (Sib) (Iran/
France, 1998), and Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s
Copyright © 2005 by Camera Obscura
Camera Obscura 59, Volume 20, Number 2
Published by Duke University Press
1
2
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Camera Obscura
Divorce Iranian Style (UK, 1998). The difficulty in generically
categorizing these films, particularly the latter two, rests on the
exploitation in each case of the hinge between documentary and
dramatic technique. It is my intention not only to contextualize
this strategy in relation to postrevolutionary Iranian cultural
politics, but to investigate the effects of generically hybrid texts
that enter the international sphere. As Laura Mulvey suggests, the
modishness of contemporary Iranian cinema is partly due to its
masterful treatment of the fact that “cinema is ‘about’ seeing and
the construction of the visible by filmic convention.”2 Given that
any encounter between Iran and “the West” carries an ideological
charge, however,3 the political valence of representation remains
more precarious than an explicit demarcation of the distance
between signifier and referent would resolve. This article demonstrates Mulvey’s assertion but presses upon the issue of woman as
the perennial bearer of filmic and national or cultural meaning.
I argue that, once subjected to a cross-cultural viewing dynamic,
Iranian women on screen continue to signify ethnographically as
the “always already known.” Trinh T. Minh-ha’s pithy formulation
that “there is no such thing as documentary”4 enables us to trouble the epistemological comfort zone of non-Iranian spectators
(such as myself), but also to assess the representational strategies
that shape the film text at the point of its origin. Thus I reconsider
the relationship between film and the phenomenal, particularly
in cross-cultural viewing contexts.
Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees opens, before the credits, with
the self-introduction (addressed to the camera) of Mohamed Ali
Keshawarz, the actor who plays the director, followed by his
attempt to select, from a crowd of young veiled women, a female
protagonist for the film-within-a-film, which is the embedded narrative of Olive Trees.5 The scene combines panning and close-up
shots on the women’s faces as they intone their names and (lack
of) addresses. Olive Trees is the third installment in a trilogy based
thematically on the devastating earthquake of 1991 in Roudbar,
north of Tehran.6 (Subsequently, the voice of a male character—
whose identity is not revealed—makes an intratextual reference
Women in a Widening Frame
•
3
to the first film and comments ambiguously that he does not
like cinema or art, “but because of the earthquake.” It is unclear
whether he chooses to participate in the film and, if so, whether
his decision is motivated financially or by the desirability of representing the event to the outside world.) The opening scene, which
functions as mise en abyme to denote the processes of the film as
a whole, foregrounds the haggling agency of the young women.7
After Mrs. Shiva (Zarifeh Shiva), the director’s assistant, interrupts his posturing with the pragmatic reminder of the need to
hurry up as the “girls are hungry,” the movement of the director
and camera through the crowd emphasizes the individual identities of the identically dressed and veiled respondents. It then
incorporates a reversed perspective. The director, now the object
of scrutiny, is challenged by the girls, who refuse to stay in orderly
lines. They ask, “Where will you show it? You’re filming us. . . . Oh,
what does it matter?” and then accuse him, “You won’t show it.
Are you going to show it to us? Your last film went out on Channel
2, which we can’t get here. Why bother?” Eventually they decide,
however, “We film! But you’ll have to show it!”
Kiarostami’s films typically feature multiple focalization, a
blurring of the line between fictional events and characters and
those “drawn from life,” and the reflexive framing of films within
films, all in order to sustain a resistant perspective on the process
of filmmaking. Rather than being purely formalist strategies, these
techniques can be understood as an engaged commentary on the
act of viewing; in the scene just discussed, issues of who and what
is filmed and who gets to watch are considered not only intrinsic
to the finished product but also open to negotiation by the participants. As such, it demonstrates the mutual influence of textual
and public realms and foregrounds the Kiarostami credo: “We are
never able to reconstruct truth. . . . So if we distance the audience
from the film and even film from itself,” the audience is reminded
that “we are reconstructing reality.” Kiarostami believes that “it is
the audience who should seek the answer” to any text and that, by
insisting upon defamiliarization, “cinema and all the arts ought to
be able to destroy the mind of their audience in order to reject the
old values and make it susceptible to new values.”8
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Camera Obscura
Some commentators have challenged K iarostami’s
metatextual and self-reflexive propensities. Azadeh Farahmand,
for example, cites a minimal use of female characters as evidence
of Kiarostami’s “political escapism [that is] a facilitating, rather
than a debilitating, choice, one which caters to the film festival taste for high art and restrained politics.” Through the use
of mediating characters and rural landscapes, “the viewer can
maintain his [sic] distance and remain uninvolved, be fascinated,
securely appreciative.”9 As Trinh points out, if films are seen only
as artificial constructs, then the social interactions and practices
represented remain “framed” or resistant to political challenge.10
However, in foregrounding the way Kiarostami reflects an international taste for “exotic” landscapes, Farahmand overlooks his
equally insistent focus on communities in transition as a result of
the forces of nature and modernity. She also underestimates the
extent to which, as Negar Mottahedeh points out, subversion is
written into the fabric of Kiarostami’s films, which encourage the
spectator to imagine what lies outside the frame or is not ascertainable to the gaze—hence to question accepted limits of representation.11
An analysis of the thematic and specular focus on women
in Through the Olive Trees productively troubles Farahmand’s critique. The film suggests that women manipulate visual codes and
strategically use silence in a complex and variable relationship to
both social and representational practices. The fact that the film
begins with close-ups on women’s faces in 1994 is, given the ideological context I discuss below, a relatively radical gesture. Moreover, the scene opens onto a film that is thematically and structurally concerned with the ways female perspectives on events exceed
the filter of the male, intradiegetic filmmaker. This is discreetly
signaled in the driving scene subsequent to the credits. The camera, facing outward from the dashboard, aligns the spectator’s
perspective with that of Mrs. Shiva and deflects our engagement
with that character from her face to her voice. Infrequent reverse
shots focus obliquely, via the car’s side mirror, on the faces of
those who speak to her, including some young boys. This tendency to defer spectatorial satisfaction is replicated in relation to
Women in a Widening Frame
•
5
the female love interest, Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian), who plays
the wife in the embedded narrative of Hossein (Hossein Rezai),
her frustrated suitor in the “real life” framing narrative. Tahereh
refuses to return either the gaze or conversational overtures of
Hossein; indeed, she assents to complete the dialogue between
them required by the “fictional” script only when threatened with
the loss of her part. Her constantly averted face and determined
silence exacerbate Hossein’s yearning as well as viewer curiosity;
the film is ultimately about Tahereh because both she and her
response to the events unfolding about her remain enigmatic.
Mary Ann Doane has memorably theorized the function
of veiling mechanisms in enhancing women’s desirability as screen
fetishes, arguing that a supplementary surface over the face “functions to hide an absence”—castration or (lack of) truth—and
signifies “a dangerous deception of duplicity attached to the feminine.” Doane, however, indicates that her approach is restricted to
the trope of the veil in Western discourse, a caveat that is applicable here.12 Tahereh’s strategic elusiveness is not intended to mystify
and hence eroticize the figure of “woman.” Rather it represents a
trenchant assertion of Tahereh’s right to choose her own suitor
rather than to be pursued. Her oft-mentioned stubbornness and
sense of self-worth rest on her self-fashioning as literate, educated,
and modern; similarly, she resists wearing the costume assigned
to her on the grounds that “she’s a student, not an illiterate peasant” and “no one wears dresses like that anymore.” It is noteworthy that, with one exception, she refuses to return the look of Hossein and the spectator because she is reading. The potential of the
crowd at the start of the film to assert agency through a command
of the word and to assert the right to see rather than be observed
is thus realized through the female protagonist. Her elusiveness
does propel the narrative by exacerbating a desire for romantic
closure, but this, too, is ambiguously realized. The final scene culminates in an extreme long shot in real time in which Hossein follows Tahereh into the distance and then begins to return alone.
Does she maintain her aloofness, or is he returning to tell the film
crew of his success? This final scene exceeds the perspective of the
homodiegetic film narrator and thus our own.
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Camera Obscura
Although the means are fictional, Kiarostami’s crowd of
veiled women, Mrs. Shiva, and Tahereh function as agents in a
rich and complex filmic history, which, since 1979, has been centrally concerned with female representation. Through the Olive Trees
demonstrates an internalized sensitivity to gendered codes that
has necessitated a strategic reconsideration of the implications of
the viewing act per se.
From its inception, the content of Iranian cinema has
been strongly influenced by a dominant national political ideology. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as in the Pahlavi era,
the state has censored political dissent and provided financial support for films that positively reflect government policy.13 Iranian
cinema’s greatest crisis came in the buildup to the revolution,
when the clergy defined film as an agent of cultural colonization,
and arson attacks were made on cinemas throughout the country. The industry was resurrected, however, because the Islamic
state recognized its value in transmitting both ideology within
Iran and a more benevolent national image beyond its boundaries
to offset the negative stereotypes produced through the Salman
Rushdie affair and the hostage crisis of 1979–80. The number of
postrevolutionary films screened at foreign festivals increased dramatically, from 2 in 1986 to 230 (of which 11 garnered awards) in
1990. However, Iranian cinema has thus far not proved itself to be
viable economically without foreign markets and, in many cases,
cofunding. Moreover, as Hamid Naficy observes, the striking success of contemporary Iranian cinema has not mapped back onto
a commensurate improvement in the international profile of its
government.14
Subject matter is scrutinized in a tiered censorship system monitored by the production and distribution house Farabi
Cinema Foundation under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic
Guidance (Ershad). The most recent trend in the industry is a
relaxation of controls, due in part to the challenges to censorship
posed by new technologies (video, DVD, and satellite), but also
to relative liberalization under Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami (minister of culture and Islamic guidance until 1992 and
president of the republic since 1997). Reflecting ongoing political
debate and the inconsistent application of ambiguous rules, cin-
Women in a Widening Frame
•
7
ema and related technologies exist within what Naficy describes
as “a fluid cultural space in which all kinds of slippage and transgressions, as well as countermeasures, are possible” (55). Moreover, Iranians in exile, who form a politically and ideologically
varied group but tend to be opposed to the conservative faction
of the regime, contribute enormously to the total output of that
which is categorized as Iranian cinema.
In the case of films produced within the country, all
gendered representations and interactions are considered suspect. According to regulations imposed in 1982, women in Iran
must be visibly chaste. As justified officially by their social status,
exemplified by but not limited to the raising of children as responsible Muslim citizens, women must not be treated as commodities
or sexual objects.15 Landmark regulations approved in June 1982
reflected the official Islamization of the cinema and led to a precise stipulation, early the next year, of the female imagery allowed
on film, including the wearing of hijab (modest dress) at all times
to cover all parts of the body except the face and hands. Close-ups
on a woman’s face, any sexual connotation, and all physical contact
between men and women were prohibited, and severe constraints
were laid upon other forms of cross-gender communication.
This background of representational containment serves
to contextualize Through the Olive Trees. It also illustrates Naficy’s
argument that Iranian official discourse rests on an “injection
theory” of cinematic power, in which the line between reality and
representation is assumed to be permeable and unmediated (44–
45). As such, images of unveiled women are thought to contribute
to the moral corruption of men and greater society. Iran’s history
of imperialist domination is explicitly harnessed to underlying
assumptions about threatening female sexual presence.16 Afsaneh
Najmabadi explains that, in the buildup to the revolution, the
“gharbzadeh [‘westoxicated’] woman came to embody at once all
social ills: she was a super-consumer of imperialist/dependent–
capitalist/foreign goods; she was a propagator of the corrupt culture of the West; she was undermining the moral fabric of society;
she was a parasite, beyond any type of redemption.”17 By contrast,
concealed and thus “cured” female bodies became a conduit for
notions of communal purity and therefore subject to social sur-
8
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Camera Obscura
veillance. “Warrior brother” and “veiled sister” were complementary and officially sanctioned gendered identities, which emerged
within revolutionary society, symbolizing persistent militancy, ethnoreligious pride, and asceticism.18 Thus the Iranian chador (black
head and body cover) was dialectically reconceived in 1979, as
was the Algerian haïk in the Algerian War of Independence from
France (1954–62), in terms of resistance to colonial or imperial
control. Although Iranian women were construed as active players, their role was sternly defined by symbolic parameters that
paradoxically defined women sartorially, and hence corporeally.
However, the most common sign of revolutionary participation, the chador, emerged alongside other politically nuanced
forms of veiling that disappeared from the postrevolutionary
scene. The term hijab has subsequently come to replace chador,
not only in Iran but also as a transnational term for “Islamic veil.”
Anne-Emanuelle Berger observes that this “discursive shift points
to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a
transnational pan-Islamic movement.”19 Hijab thus signifies a complex, contemporary relationship between local culture and transnational, politicized religious practice. Nevertheless, specifically
Persian/Iranian (as distinct from Muslim or Islamist) cultural
characteristics remain pertinent to the context under discussion. Naficy proposes a dominant etiology of the self in which an
inner, reliable, stable “core” is separated from an outer, variable,
unreliable, and easily influenced “shell.” A “boundary zone, veil
or screen” protects the core from contamination and from “leaking” to the outside or being revealed. Defensive strategies such as
dissimulation, evasion, masquerade, and ritual courtesy are the
social norm. Naficy concludes that veiling “is operative within the
self” and so “is pervasive within [Iranian] culture,” a point astutely
made in Kiarostami’s representation of the enigmatic Tahereh.20
Private and public spaces are similarly mapped by binary
codes that include lawful/forbidden contact (related to rules of
kin). Naficy comments that veiling as a social practice is never
“fixed or unidirectional” but that both women and men “see and
organize the field of vision of the other” (50). He elaborates:
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For every stratagem of veiling . . . there is one that violates it or plays
with it, turning the veil not only into a powerful semiotic and political
icon, but also into a dynamic instrument of power, sexuality and
transgression. . . . Walls and veils may segregate people but . . . they tend
to provoke curiosity and to offer visual pleasure by exhibitionism and
voyeurism. . . . By playing with the veil, [women] create the necessary
distance that promotes scopophilia (pleasurable looking). At the same
time, these strategies turn them, as the subjects of scopophilia, into
erotic objects, thus, ironically, subverting the rules of modesty and the
religious ‘commandments of looking’, which are designed to prevent
women from becoming sexual objects.21
Naficy’s description of ways that the veil can be wielded to manipulate and control voyeurism and exhibitionism suggests not only
that women are the predominant objects of the gaze but that
this is a position they encourage. As we have seen, Kiarostami’s
Through the Olive Trees encodes multiple modes of looking but disseminates the agency of the look to men and women, subverting
an economy that would link vision, either within the film or by the
spectator, with the promise of satisfaction. Moreover, if interaction between men and women is regulated by a culturally specific
Symbolic, this has significant social variations and is constantly
renegotiated.22 If we read Mohamed Ali Keshawarz of Olive Trees
as a fictional stand-in for Kiarostami, then the former’s cosmopolitan ignorance of the local custom of withholding women’s names
from all but their nearest kin may be an ironic comment on the
difficulties of representing “Iranian” reality.
Revolutionary discourse itself was not univocal. Ali Shariati,
an important intellectual mouthpiece for the revolution, had promoted the figure of Fatemeh, the Prophet Mohammad’s daughter, as an alternative to the problematic model of the “westoxified
woman.” But revolutionary women, eventually hailing from the
entire social spectrum, politicized the figure of Zeynab, Fatemeh’s
daughter, as the archetype of women’s militancy rather than piety.
That the voluntary donning of the chador was strategic and contingent is indicated by the fact that, once the Shah had fled the
country in early 1979, women removed what had been predominantly an anti-Pahlavi symbol. As Naghibi argues, this did not pre-
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vent a series of repressive veiling measures being legislated in the
immediate aftermath of the revolution, culminating in the Veiling
Act of 1983 (565–66). This has been, at times, violently enforced,
often by female agents (as referenced in Tahmineh Milani’s film
Two Women [Do Zan] [Iran, 1999] when a female vigilante on the
streets of Tehran hectors the female protagonists to cover their
hair properly).23
The imposition of hijab, signifying in terms of social organization as well as sartorially, has politicized women’s presence in the
cinema industry. Films in the early 1980s were characterized by the
cutting or blocking of images of unveiled women and by a pervasive
absence of female characters. The mid-eighties saw the “pale presence” of women as background figures, filmed in long shot and passive roles. Since the late 1980s, however, women have had a more
dramatic presence in both diegetic and directorial roles.24 Commentators affirm, against the prevailing Western stereotype, that
Iranian women are now massively visible in every aspect of Iranian
life. The increase in the number of female directors of major popular and art-house films since the late eighties is, to some extent, a
result of the incorporation of hijab in production contexts (witness
Kiarostami’s Mrs. Shiva as a fictional example). As Ziba Mir-Hosseini
explains, “Paradoxically, the enforcement of hejab became a catalyst: by making public space more morally correct in the eyes of traditionalist families, it legitimized women’s public presence.”25
In this context, Jaafar Panahi’s The Circle (Dayereh) (Iran/
Switzerland/Italy, 2000) sounds a warning note. The film follows
a group of escaped female prisoners around Tehran, emphasizing their frustrated attempts at invisibility and flight from the city.
The women’s unexplained criminal statuses are extended allegorically to enable a broader exposé of authoritarian surveillance
mechanisms and social practices in which men must officially
account for women’s presences. In frequent scenes, the women
cover their faces with the chador in order to achieve anonymity
within the crowd and thus to avoid the police who seem to lurk
at every corner. However, anonymity is decoupled from agency.
Because female students cannot take public transport out of the
city without the permission of a husband or father, one of the
central characters, Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh), fails to realize
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Jaafar Panahi’s The Circle (Dayereh) (Iran/Switzerland/Italy,
2000). Courtesy Artificial Eye
her dream of escape to the countryside. She eventually obtains a
ticket out of town but is too fearful to board the bus. Panahi uses
bird’s-eye perspectives, confined spaces, and a circling camera to
emphasize the claustrophobic psychogeography of the bus station,
in which passages and staircases lead nowhere, doors are barred,
and police are pervasive. This exposure of the effective internalization of social surveillance debunks both Naficy’s erotics of the
frustrated gaze and assumptions that hijab equates to unmediated
female public presence.
In relation to the presentation of women on-screen, the
rules of hijab dictate a constant awareness of two spectator positions, that of the audience member (as unrelated to the woman
on the screen) and that of the male character (who, even if related
diegetically, is constrained by extradiegetic codes of viewing conduct). This necessitates new strategies for enacting gendered interplay and, by extension, maintaining plot and character credibility.
In Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady (Banoo-Ye Ordibehest)
(Iran, 1998), for example, the female lead veils in front of her son
because the actors are not related, which undercuts the diegetic
family relationship. The same film, however, both parodies and
transcends visual taboos. When the son gives his mother, Forugh,
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a pair of earrings, she puts them on under her headscarf and asks,
rather farcically, how they look. Forugh manages to conduct a
romantic relationship with a doctor on the telephone in which,
although the lovers are never seen on-screen together, allusions
and nuances push the boundaries of officially defined propriety.
This technique undermines the efficacy of patrolling gendered,
visual interaction by foregrounding an alternative erotic dynamic
of speaking and listening.26
While it is necessary to problematize a relationship between
political repression and artistic creativity, it is clear that the close
monitoring of images has had some practical benefits for the
national film industry, not least through the severe restrictions
placed on imported films. The banning of song, dance, and sexual reference, formerly the staples of Film Farsi, has contributed to
the flourishing of art-house cinema.27 Milani’s immensely popular
films, in which feminist themes resonate through melodramatic
plots, suggest the potential for, but also dangers of, crossover
genres. In August 2001, Milani was jailed on the premise that her
latest film, The Hidden Half (Nimeh-ye penhan) (Iran, 2001)—which
deals openly with the social legacies of the 1979 Revolution and
portrays aggressive and sexually confident women—was counterrevolutionary and un-Islamic. The film had been approved
by Ershad and screened to sold-out audiences in Tehran until
its removal after one month.28 The script for Two Women, completed in 1991, was not approved for years on the (erroneous)
grounds that it unsympathetically portrays men. Milani exploits
the binary notion of the self as privately conceived and publicly
monitored in this film. She employs alter-ego characters in order
to illustrate the range of choices potentially available to women.29
Fereshteh (Niki Karimi), whose name means “angel” in Persian,
is unable to rebel and seek a fulfilling relationship with a man
as an equal, as her friend Roya (Marila Zare’i) does. Ironically,
the well-behaved Fereshteh becomes the target of a stalker, whose
intrusive look extends to violence when he jealously throws acid at
Fereshteh’s cousin’s face, assuming him to be her boyfriend. The
incident is richly allusive, suggesting that female desire is active
and specular but inherently excessive. Even Kiarostami’s Hossein accuses Tahereh of leading him on with “a look,” an asser-
Women in a Widening Frame
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tion that is not, however, confirmed within the diegesis. Mohsen
Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (Iran/France, 1996) is organized around
the yearning gaze of the eponymous heroine for her distant or
mythically projected lover. (He is “like an illusion,” in her words.)
The film employs the frustrated desire of its heroine to comment
allegorically on social hierarchies and restriction. The lover thus
symbolizes escape from a system in which Gabbeh’s needs are constantly frustrated by the priorities and hierarchies of the clan (her
father’s return from the city, her grandmother’s death, her uncle’s
wedding, and her mother’s pregnancy). Gabbeh was banned in Iran
until early 1997 due to the emphasis, in this seemingly innocuous
film, on female desire, despite the fact that the two characters are
not shown in the same frame until they depart on horseback near
the end of the film—and then only in long shot.
While Milani has achieved notoriety outside Iran due to
her arrest, neither her work nor that of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad,
Iran’s foremost documentarist of urban life, is well known internationally. Farahmand usefully emphasizes the socioeconomic and
institutional factors that have led to the celebrity status and selfreflexive styles of directors such as Kiarostami and the Makhmalbaf family. Many Iranian directors actively target the international
market; the fact that Kiarostami films screen earlier and more
commercially successfully abroad than in Iran is obliquely alluded
to in the demands of the young women at the start of the film that
they should constitute its primary audience.30 Hadani Ditmars,
drawing on a roundtable discussion at the 1997 Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, proffers a summary and critique of the ongoing
debate over audience-oriented content: “There’s a vast difference
between what the Iranian public likes to watch and what European
art festivals screen. . . . Certain less well-known Iranian film-makers in the audience complained that the directors famous in the
west pander to European tastes and don’t show authentic Iranian
reality. But how does one define Iranian reality, which is so much
less monolithic than either American political propagandists or
Islamic Revolutionary apologists pretend?”31 The cited recourse
to authenticity and the objection to superficial images of Iran may
appear somewhat at odds with Naficy’s model of a Persian “core”
self that must remain concealed. To map a psychosocial etiology
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onto the function of a nationalist imago, however, would be to
conflate analytical categories. Stuart Hall’s suggestion that postcolonial representational work tends to “keep these two ends of the
chain in play at the same time—over-determination and difference, condensation and dissemination” is applicable here.32 That
is, the will to represent multiple and often contradictory social
realities is enmeshed with the need to respond to already existing,
received, and often pejorative ideas. Nevertheless, the assimilation of films into preconceived aesthetic or ideological categories
at the point of reception can occlude the variety and development
of national cinemas; as such, continued work on diverse representations of Iranian (post)modernity is obviously desirable.
It is worth adding that the work of any director tends to
develop technically and thematically. Kiarostami’s extraordinarily
minimalist Ten (France/Iran/US, 2002) uses confined space and
gendered thematics to comment more overtly on social issues than
do his previous films. Shot from the dashboard of a car and cutting between one camera pointed at the female lead and another
at the passenger seat, Ten presents a divorcing woman at the center
of a nexus of interrelationships, ranging from familial to random
and transient associations. Sexist social attitudes are evident in
her son’s belligerence and parroting of her estranged husband’s
abuse. This is interrupted by dialogue between the woman and
her sister, friends, and diverse other women, including a prostitute, a young woman who shaves her head, and an elderly woman
on her way to the mosque. Both literally (through her seemingly
random driving) and structurally (through the presentation of
the film in ten chapters), the female protagonist is shown negotiating a contradictory urban modernity. The viewer’s inconsistent
access to her face, as she alternately wears and takes off sunglasses
and rearranges or lets slip her headscarf, indicates what Naghibi
describes as a common practice of actively “playing with the categories of self-effacement and performance, modesty and vanity.” The bad-hejabi disturbs the reductive veiled/unveiled binary
of oppression and resistance still assumed in non-Muslim overfreighted conceptions of “the veil.”33 As such, material and supplementary veils in Ten point beyond the sartorial self-representation
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of one woman to signify catachrestically, in Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s terms, as “concept metaphor without an adequate referent” in the cross-cultural encounter.34
While it is problematic to generalize a “native informant”
position, Iranian women do engage dynamically with their complex environment and assert the need to localize the politics of
feminism. In contemporary Iran, conceptions of gender are constantly changing as a result of internal debate among different
factions of the clergy, women’s groups, associations and journals,
and work produced by Iranian emigrants.35 Cinema has proved
a powerful means of displacing official discourses through the
metonymical use of “woman” to signify broader social issues and
to transgress the limits of censorship regulations. This may lead,
however, to the displacement and deferral of the experiences,
limitations, and demands of women’s lives; as Farahmand suggests, the repeated visualization of “women’s plight” can lead to
one-dimensional characters and repetitive thematics.36 Moreover,
while productive theoretical debates have taken place recently
on the subject of relatively valorized forms of women’s agency in
diverse cultural contexts, 37 I suggest that a certain fascination
remains with images of “other” women as cultural victims. In
order to demonstrate this phenomenon, I turn to Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple.
Makhmalbaf’s precocious talents, her family’s film credentials,
and the unusual subject matter and presentation of her first
full-length film captured the imagination of international audiences.38 The impetus for The Apple was a television report on the
Naderi family, who lived in a deprived district of Tehran and had
become entangled with social welfare in a child-custody case.
Because the family had already been critically represented in the
popular press, the premise of the project was to fill out the case
with nuance, sympathy, and attention to change. Makhmalbaf
contacted the family through a welfare center, obtained permission from the father, and began filming ten days later as the girls
were about to be released.
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The plot is simple: Concerned families in the neighborhood petition the local director of welfare about the neglect
and virtual imprisonment of the Naderi twin girls, Zahra and
Massoumeh, aged twelve. Welfare agents take the girls into custody until their parents engineer their release by promising that
the girls will be washed, taught some skills, and allowed to leave
the family compound. The parents cannot keep these promises
because the mother is blind and the father does not want to leave
the girls “unprotected” when he leaves to beg and buy ice and
bread. Frustrated, Mrs. Mohamed, the social worker, eventually
locks him in behind the same barred, inner gate that has confined
the children. In the midst of the dispute, the girls are released
on the streets of Tehran, where they have a series of adventures
and begin a tentative education in social relationships. The film
ends with Mrs. Naderi stumbling alone out of the house onto the
street, where a boy in an upstairs window taunts her with an apple
dangled on a string. She finally seizes the apple.
All of the family members play themselves. The writing of
the script followed rather than preceded each of the eleven days of
filming, which meant that the family actively influenced the shape
of narrative. Makhmalbaf indicates that some events are fictional,
such as the locking up of the father by the social worker. However,
key symbolic elements, such as the girls’ fascination with apples,
emerged from “the children’s own world” at the time of filming.39
The girls thus contributed to the diegesis through their spontaneous actions and choice of props. Because Makhmalbaf entered the
drama as it was still unfolding, the girls’ experiences are captured
while they are adapting to the outside world. This sense of immediacy is enhanced by the use of a handheld camera, which, for
example, follows the girls down the street on their first escape.
In reality, and against the expectations raised by their physical liberation at the end of the film, social workers subsequently
placed Zahra and Massoumeh in a new home and Mrs. Naderi
died.40 These are sobering reminders that the film—despite its
temporal proximity to and eventual participation in the events,
the authenticating effect of the camera work, and the active contributions of the actors—is ultimately conceived and realized as
a finite narrative drama. Makhmalbaf asserts rather disingenu-
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ously, “I don’t judge, I just show things as they are. Let people look
at themselves and see what is wrong and what is right; if they want
to change, they can.”41 In fact, the use of repeated motifs—plants,
hands, apples, and mirrors, discussed below—define this as a
poetic realist film, in which symbolic elements are interwoven to
imply an extradiegetic narrative perspective.
However, the presentation of Mr. Naderi reflects Makhmalbaf’s insistence on the emotional complexity of her characters.
The film juxtaposes the girls’ neglect and incarceration with the
father’s distress, articulated through invocations of God and pleas
about poverty and his wife’s blindness. While the patriarchal precepts on which he bases his life are presented as outmoded, they
are given weight, albeit ironically, through his reading from popular street texts such as “Advice to Fathers.” The imaginary community provided by religion and tradition is figured, with pathos,
as inadequate compensation for the family’s exclusion from a rapidly changing society. Nevertheless, there is an evident hypocrisy
in the father’s position; while the camera witnesses him locking
the girls in every day, he blames their incarceration on his wife.
More elliptically, the girls’ social emancipation is presented
as also fraught with ambivalence. Mrs. Mohamed and the father
insist that the girls need to learn social skills in order to marry,
and the social worker gives them each a comb and a mirror. If
these represent the demands placed upon public female identity,
self-presentation, and modesty, in particular, then the girls’ insistence on reflecting everything in their mirrors, from the lock on
the gate to the neighborhood goat, is a disarming deflection of
their symbolic purpose. (The young boy selling ice cream also
becomes absorbed in combing his hair.) The film focuses on marginalization but implies, simultaneously, that full participation
in society may bring dubious privileges. Similarly the lures of the
outside world—apples, ice cream, and watches—are rarely accessible, at least not without money.42
This context of urban poverty, illiteracy, and family disability works to explicate, if not justify, the parents’ treatment of
Zahra and Massoumeh. The family is thrown into relief as a particular case via a backdrop of social and economic diversity in the
neighborhood; the resourcefulness of the female social worker
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and the interventions of the women neighbors render the trope of
female incarceration relative. The Apple is troubling, nevertheless,
in its presentation of Mrs. Naderi. When asked about obtaining
the parents’ permission to recreate the twins’ experiences, Samira
Makhmalbaf has said only that the father was the relevant source
of authority.43 Mrs. Naderi is blind, illiterate, and verbally abusive.
Because she speaks a Turkish dialect, she can communicate with
neither the neighbors nor the social workers.44 In the opening
scenes, she forces her daughters to conceal not only their faces
and heads but even their eyes, implying not only that girls are vulnerable to the gaze of others, but that a visual relationship with
the world is inherently dangerous. Given the symbolic equation
of apples with freedom (however ambivalently inscribed this is),
the early close-up on Mrs. Naderi’s hand as it grips an arm of each
girl, one of which limply holds an apple, metonymically represents
the mother as an incarcerating rather than liberating force.
In the closing minutes of the film, Mrs. Mohamed leaves
the gate open as a lure for the mother to emerge after the departure of her husband and daughters. Mrs. Naderi deliberates anxiously on both the inner and outer thresholds of the house. She
looks at herself in the mirror, her reflection denoting the disparity between what the camera and spectator perceive and what she
herself can see. When she stumbles into the street and calls for
her daughters, she is teased by an apple, raised and lowered on
the string by the boy in the opposite window. The final, frozen
frame, in which she finally grasps the apple, suggests an epiphany of understanding facilitated by the intervention of outsiders (social workers and, arguably, the film crew). Her muttered
refrain, “Come here. Don’t let go of the children. Come home.
Take the children by the arm,” has no audience within the diegesis but, I suggest, echoes beyond the final frame.
Makhmalbaf presents both mother and daughters as physically and verbally disabled females in a traditionalist, poor subsociety, victims of a seemingly insurmountable set of discriminations. Mrs. Naderi’s physical disempowerment through blindness
extends to her overall silencing in the dispute that rages between
Mr. Naderi and Mrs. Mohamed; her only mode of intervention is
to swear at both them and the girls. However, the thematic asso-
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ciation between vision, voice, and power is displaced to the focus
on the twins who, cut off from contact with society, cannot speak
properly and are impaired in their physical movement. Corresponding with Mrs. Naderi’s inability to defend herself verbally
is the fact that she cannot see what is being filmed and so can
function only as filmed object. When she mumbles frequently
that she is scared, the film does not explore the nature and cause
of her fear. Thus, while there is a constant sympathetic focus on
Zahra and Massoumeh, who incarnate the symbol of the stunted
plant that opens the film, no empathy is sustained with their
mother and, at the end of the film, Mrs. Naderi’s situation has
not improved with that of her daughters. When Mrs. Mohamed
encourages her to seek help, she struggles to free her hand, but
the motives for her resistance are not pursued. It appears that
the camera is experienced as another traumatic intrusion, given
that Mrs. Naderi remains off-screen, in the shadows of the house,
or with her face completely covered. While the media are represented critically via microphones thrust at the girls in welfare
and the reductive lampooning of Mr. Naderi in the newspaper,
The Apple underplays the fact that it, too, consists of an encounter
between filming and filmed subjects.
This elision becomes more troubling once the film enters
the cross-cultural domain. There, the film is sanctioned as an
authentic representation of social reality because, as Jasmin Darznik suggests, The Apple is “a story that the West has been waiting for Iran to tell about itself.”45 Trinh exposes a stubborn inclination to identify “the fundamental referent of the social” in
cross-cultural viewing acts of any genre, a tendency that is exacerbated when visual texts purport to “catch reality on the run.”46
This propensity has a substantial historical pedigree in which
the political economy of the gaze is weighted unevenly. Fatimah
Tobing Rony, mobilizing a Saidian frame of analysis and citing
Claude Lévi-Strauss, describes how explorers, anthropologists,
and cultural tourists have historically seen “what they already
knew they would find, images predigested by certain ‘platitudes
and commonplaces.’ ”47 While anthropological discourses have
undergone a self-reflexive turn, a range of commentators affirm
that Islamic cultures and identities are still assigned a place out-
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side the teleology of progress.48 The tendency is exacerbated in
relation to Muslim women, who are assumed to live at odds with
dominant Islamic discourse, the law, the nation-state, historical
archives, and technology. As such, female experience is construed
metonymically, rendering women as ethnographic objects rather
than historical subjects.49
It is within this epistemological framework that we can
interpret what Darznik encapsulates as the predominant reaction
to the then seventeen-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf, whose “very
presence [at Cannes] seemed a paradox. . . . Was Iran a country
that imprisoned girls in their homes or a country that set them
free to make films of international repute?”50 Makhmalbaf’s
subsequent work has clarified her intrinsically skeptical attitude
toward existing representational frameworks in Iran and beyond.
In At Five in the Afternoon, the discourse of the Koran is explicitly
revealed as alienating for the female protagonist who is struggling, like the setting of post-9/11 Afghanistan, to come into
independent being. However, her futile attempts to gain access
to the rhetoric of female politicians (such as Indira Gandhi) suggest a wider impoverishment of discursive frameworks for female
agency. More holistically, the virtual realism of Blackboards (Takhté
siah) (Iran/Italy/Japan, 2000), set on the amorphous borders of
Iran and focused on a black and blank canvas on which nothing is
successfully named, disables assumptions that represented objects
can be transmuted into useable statements about social reality.
In the docudrama Divorce Iranian Style, Kim Longinotto and Ziba
Mir-Hosseini self-consciously respond to the challenge of representing contemporary Iranian women. The idea for the film originated with Longinotto, a British director whose work is characterized by collaborative filmmaking, the use of an all-woman crew,
and the portrayal of non-Western cultures. Longinotto was interested in the lack of fit between the culture presented in Iranian
art films and the “demonized view of Iranian people in England”
that prevailed in the early 1990s. She was particularly motivated to
collaborate with Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian now resident in Britain,
after reading Mir-Hosseini’s Marriage on Trial (1993), an anthropological study on women and sharia law.51
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Divorce is set predominantly in one family court in central
Tehran. It was filmed over a period of four weeks for Britain’s
Channel 4 and consists of a series of legal cases in which women
file for divorce, alimony, and child care. The film was imbricated
from its inception in a cross-cultural politics of representation:
the BBC refused the project, arguing that British audiences are
resistant to subtitled documentaries and that the veiled protagonists of the drama were too “anonymous” and not “sexy” enough
(25). Furthermore the Iranian government, uneasy about muchpublicized divorce rates and deteriorating family values in the
West, first rejected the film proposal. Commissioning editor Peter
Moore commented wryly that, from its inception, the project felt
“like a forced marriage.”52 Mir-Hosseini recalls that most people
“wanted us to change our theme, to film a ‘politically correct’
issue which reflected a ‘positive image’ of Iran, such as marriage
ceremonies, female members of parliament, or mothers of martyrs”; the directors responded that a foregrounding of the subject
of martyrdom would only contribute to sensationalist expectations about Iran (181, 173).
This prefilmic negotiation helped the directors to clarify
their presentation of the project and the representational politics that it entailed. They decided to focus on personal and social
complexity—what they hoped were universal, albeit culturally
inflected, concerns. By producing “powerful yet non-judgmental
narratives,” they wanted to foreground individual experiences of
specific sociolegal realities and thus to complicate assumptions
about Iran as a special or extreme context of gendered politics.
Divorce presents the cases of six women, four of which—those of
Massy, Ziba, Jamileh, and Maryam—are developed in detail. MirHosseini explains the editing principle:
We tried to focus on commonalities rather than on the exotic and the
different, to remind the viewer that marriage is a difficult institution . . .
that societies and individuals deal with this in different ways. . . . We also
wanted . . . to give glimpses into the lives of ordinary people. Above all,
we wanted to let the women speak, to show them as individuals going
through a difficult phase in their lives and to communicate the pain—
and the humour—involved. (191)
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Standards of privacy were enforced throughout; none of the litigants (including husbands) are shown without prior consent. The
focus on a single court enables the directors to “focus on characters and develop storylines” or “self-contained” narratives.53
As the courthouse is defined as masculine space, the allfemale crew (all of whom observed hijab) are assumed by the
female litigants to be “on the right side”; as such, they often smile,
wink at, and appeal directly to the film crew as witnesses.54 MirHosseini indicates that the two directors present themselves as two
facets of the same person, with herself as culturally, linguistically,
and legally fluent mediator and confidante, and Longinotto in a
more detached, discrete role. Mir-Hosseini consistently held her
face at the same level as Longinotto’s camera, and the two women
never spoke to each other in court except where remarks explicitly addressed to Longinotto required translation. The directors
do not, however, attempt to erase their presence from the film, in
which their voices remain audible on the soundtrack as well as in
the framing voice-overs.55
For Mir-Hosseini, Divorce is loaded with both personal and
professional freight. In Islam and Gender, she explains,
I found myself in an uncannily familiar situation of shifting perspectives
and self-redefinition: as well as refocusing my views on the complex
politics involved in the representation of women, I once more had to
confront, articulate, and honor my own multiple identities. During my
debates with clerics in Qom [for research toward Islam and Gender],
I had to justify my feminism; now I wanted to articulate the Muslim
and Iranian aspects of my identity [to British television executives and
Iranian officials].56
Mir-Hosseini has gained a heightened awareness of the performative nature of identity. When she met women outside the court during her own divorce proceedings, she remembers, “I often started
by relating how my own marriage broke down and how I obtained
my divorce . . . I soon noticed that every time I told my story it
sounded different: I emphasized parts of my experience that
related to those of the women I was talking to. I became increasingly sensitive to situations; to how different contexts produce
Women in a Widening Frame
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23
different narratives, how one can control this production, how
much depends on one’s perspective” (xiv). Divorce was presented
in Channel 4’s True Stories series and is offered to Western audiences as a previously undiscovered “angle of vision” on Iran. However, Mir-Hosseini’s third-eye perspective implicates herself as not
only a mediating subject.57 Her discourse interacts with those of
women experiencing social and legal conflicts similar to her own;
as indicated above, the project encourages other women to articulate aspects of her Muslim and Iranian identity in her place. This
reverses the authoritative balance implicit in a project that purports to “let women speak.” Further, both directors commit themselves as actors in the drama. After a dramatic off-camera scene in
which Maryam rips up a court order to hand over maintenance of
her child, the directors refuse to testify against her.58 This incident
signals a rejection of an objective position and aligns the directors
in subversive solidarity with Maryam against the law.
The film makes a vital ideological intervention in its presentation of official discourses as permeable. By persistently and
even aggressively engaging with the law, women across the social
spectrum are shown actively to participate in contemporary
debates on gendered rights in Islamic Iran. As in Panahi’s Circle,
women battle a frustrating and contradictory system, but here the
protagonists mobilize a range of creative strategies. Massy publicly exposes her husband’s sexual shortcomings and beguiles the
court officials in order to reclaim her “lost” legal papers. Sixteenyear-old Ziba asserts her legal right to continue studying while
married and openly manipulates her husband by threatening
to file for abuse. Jamileh uses the court session merely to “teach
[her husband] a lesson,” as she has no intention of divorcing
him. Women are not revealed as hopelessly oppressed but as an
articulate force. The final voice-over, superimposed on the face of
each of the main characters in slow motion, indicates that all have
achieved some degree of success in their dealings with the court.
As Tobing Rony suggests, by foregrounding the resistant and collaborative practices of filmed subjects, ethnography
becomes exponentially more enabling. As she states, the “third
eye turns on a recognition: the Other perceives the veil, the process of being visualized as an object, but returns the glance. The
24
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Camera Obscura
gesture of being frozen into a picturesque is deflected.”59 Nevertheless, while the makers of Divorce claim “the subject position of
the listener” instead of “the dominant position of the gazer/criticizer,”60 the two modes of cultural encounter are never entirely
separated. A subjective bias is implicit in the dominant thematic
and camera focus on women, and, in one instance, Mir-Hosseini
criticizes Ziba’s husband for marrying a young girl. The crew’s partiality constitutes an insertion of values—albeit occasional and provoked by events such as Maryam’s torn paper—into the cultural
space of the diegesis.61 Despite the useful undermining of the
authoritative distance of the filmic apparatus, it may be construed
that the film team is instrumental to the outcome of cases that
are ordered into narrative closure. Thus, as in The Apple, editing
and structuring practices are complicit in the processes of representation. Further, Longinotto’s camera does not altogether resist
voyeurism. In a case not extensively covered, one woman shields
herself from the camera with her face veil, which does not prevent
the camera from focusing on her hidden profile and the hand that
holds her veil in place. The informing discourse of the film is further revealed through the juxtaposition of court scenes with those
in the mosque at prayer time and with shots outside, in which the
late Ayatollah Khomeini’s portrait looms large on a billboard, thus
linking religion, politics, the law, and patriarchal dominance. However, a nuanced scene is included in which female officials outside
the courts monitor the attire of the women who enter judicial proceedings. Although the court women strictly monitor the hair and
makeup of the claimants, their friendly tone and joking suggest
some degree of ironic capitulation to the rules. When one woman
removes her makeup, an official says jokingly, “Now you look like a
real lady!” The court secretary...
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