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You do not need to respond to all the readings for a given class, as long as your comments reveal a strong and in-depth reading of one of the texts. Commenting on two texts for a particular class is considered one post.

In approximately two paragraphs, cover some of the following:

  1. What is the main or central argument?
  2. How does the author make this argument? (Working through specific examples, and/or other authors and their terms and concepts?)
  3. What are the key terms, concepts, or distinctions used in this argument?
  4. In what ways is/are the argument/s or particular claim/s surprising, counterintuitive, or perhaps even problematic?
  5. How might we see parallels to contemporary examples or issues?
  6. In what ways might the author’s claims require a reexamination or response?

film:

Cleo from 5 to 7 / Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), 90 min.

The Circle / Dayereh (Jafar Panahi, 2000), 90 min.


2 complete paragraph (400-500)

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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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225840 . Accessed: 07/06/2011 21:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal. http://www.jstor.org 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 i~ii~iiii: -ii iiii'ii~i~---....... . ~--: -: r?i~ :::i-i :i~i-iii~i-i ...iji ~:: "At,~~i~ i~i~ iiiii'iiiiiriii:iiiiiii. . ...... ... ... Koriiiiii.iiiii 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 :: ::: ::::: ??? .-.:z _--iii~i.: i-i-i:ii:iii-_:i: ~iiiii:il :F :: li~~ ?1" $ ii ~ :I:::;:::-:::-:i: r-???-?i -W_ -: I : _ q- :: li~i~i~: ::: -1_: _-l:i--:i:iiii-ii-~ii iii - ~-ii-i Figure 2. As a fledgling flaneuse, Cl6o learns to look, and is looked at. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. the path on which ClIo has In many ways Doroth e encourages Clio along her superstitious fears and on her hold loosen She helps Cl6o already embarked. street Paris-the about affirms Cl6o's questions names, the people, the neighof the borhoods, the happenings. During portion her city journey in the comElmer Gantry, le charlatan, the feature not sees a movie, pany of Doroth6e, ClIo house they visit, but a comic short, movie of the on the announced marquee have would As chance which is also playing.42 it, the witty little silent film is not about the and to potentially transformative power of only about learning look, a street. is on city 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 • 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 4 • 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. 6 • 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 • 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: Women in a Widening Frame • 9 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- 10 • Camera Obscura 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 Women in a Widening Frame • 11 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, 12 • Camera Obscura 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 • 13 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 14 • Camera Obscura 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 Women in a Widening Frame • 15 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. 16 • Camera Obscura 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- Women in a Widening Frame • 17 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 18 • Camera Obscura 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- Women in a Widening Frame • 19 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- 20 • Camera Obscura 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 Women in a Widening Frame • 21 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) 22 • Camera Obscura 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 • 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 • 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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