Poetry, Cyborgs and Aesthetics: Notes on Iranian Cinema. Introduction
The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast, Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)
In my small night, alas
the wind has a rendezvous with the leaves of trees
In my small night rests the fear of ruin
Listen…
Do you hear the blowing of the darkness?
I look at this good luck like a stranger
I am accustomed to my hopelessness
Listen…
Do you hear the blowing of the darkness?
In the night now something is happening:
the moon is red and disturbed
and above this roof, which at any moment might fall,
the clouds like the crowds of mourners
seem to await the moment of rain
A moment
and after that—nothing.
Behind this window the night is trembling,
and the earth
stands still in its course
Vague things lie behind this window,
you and I, uneasy
O you are green all over,
put your hands like a burning memory in my loving hands
and entrust your lips like a warm sense of life
to the caresses of loving lips
The wind will carry us away with it
The wind will carry us away.
The passage above is from a poem entitled The Wind will Carry Us Away, written by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad in the early 1960s. In an accurate way it illustrates how she, among other modern young Persian poets and artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, ruptured with the classical tradition in poetry and art that dominated in Iran at that time. As in The Wind will Carry Us Away, the natural world appeared in these poems again and again. In this work, it is tempting to suggest that the poem positions the wind as a force in alliance with the moon, the clouds, and trees. At the same time, it is regarded as a force encompassed with life on its own as it traverses and connects with political and other social structures. For as one may see it, the poem underlines a perspective of “life” itself as being in the wind, the tree, the moon, and the clouds, a perspective that stresses the principles of art and life as inseparable from processes taking place in nature and society, hence the relation between art and life. This relation underlines that the modern female artist writing these words dedicated her entire oeuvre to explore connections between modern art and life in Iran of the 1950s and 1960s, or, to be more precise, the relationship between nature, art, politics and everyday life that she always accentuated with a critical acclaim.
Eventually, Farrokhzad came to emphasize this relationship via the medium of film. In 2017 The Wind will Carry Us Away and Gift, another poem she wrote in the 1960s, were translated and published for documenta 14, which was held in Athens and Kassel the same year. Her one and only film, The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast, 1963), was screened at the EMST—National Museum of Modern Art, Athens. This analogue film, a black-and-white documentary, silently follows the residents of a leper colony outside Tabriz in Northern Iran. The sound of the colony is muted but some voices are audible throughout the film, reading verses from the Old Testament of the Koran as well as the poetry of Farrokhzad. As the voices read, the camera records and mediates the everyday collective lives of the colony. The film thus provides an image of Iran not often seen or heard. This was because of the social reality of Iran, as in the lepers, that the film portrayed. It was also because of how such reality was mediated through modern poetry, now created and revealed by a woman.
When some of Farrokhzad’s poems were translated into English for the journal Iranian Studies in 1968, one year after she tragically passed away in a car accident, the author T.M. writes that her works provide “raw and powerful imagery” of an “unabashed expression to desires and perceptions that have been long hidden in Iranian women.”[1] The way in which she unmasks “social hypocrisies, mocks the bureaucratic imbecilities” made her into one of the most important figures of modern Persian poetry. Most importantly, as T.M. concludes, her works show how she was hoping for a “world to come where freedom, love, and simplicity shall reign.”[2]
This themed Wuxia issue is not about modern Persian poetry per se. Neither is it about the works of Forough Farrokhzad. Yet, in the history of modern and contemporary Iranian art there is a fine line between film and modern poetry. Perhaps because of the language and histories of defining and exploring life via words. Or perhaps because of a long history of silencing and censuring visual images. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979 a new system of image production and new ways of dictating the terms of visual art led to a drastic reshaping of the art historical consciousness in Iran, overriding knowledge of pre-revolutionary artwork and artists. Although film and art thrived under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime, films with social critique were heavily censored. If this issue begins with a poem written by Farrokhzad many years before the Iranian “Cultural Revolution”, it is precisely because of the way in which the visions and critical legacy of modern Iranian poetry live on in Iranian Cinema.
Iranian Cinema has a long and complex history, and the ambition of this issue will not be to write its history or identify paradigmatic ruptures, changes, or tendencies. Instead, our ambition has been to develop some contemporary notes on the poetics and politics of Iranian cinema. The wind, the love, the life, the trees, and memories that Farrokhzad and many other modern and contemporary artists wrote about in the 1950s and 1960s return in Iranian cinema again and again: the women, water, and trees in Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan, 2009), the search for a cherry tree where the male protagonist searches to fine someone to bury his dead body in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Ta'm e guilass, 1997), the three women on temporary leave from prison as they move around the streets and people (and their own destinies) of Tehran as in a large circle in Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (Dayereh, 2005), or the modern romantic Iranian history of the young woman on the river in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1996).[3] These and many other films are a part of the New Iranian Cinema, a generation of films beginning in and around the 1980s that placed Iranian cinema back on the map within the so-called ‘first generation’ of the New Wave in the 1960s. For the poetic dimension, as in the modern poem, is one among many other paths within the history, politics and aesthetics of Iranian cinema.
Poetry, Cyborgs and Aesthetics: Notes on Iranian Cinema is about the relation between art and life in Iranian Cinema. Or to be more precise, the issue aims to evolve some further discussions about artistic film practices and the potentials and ambitions of the medium itself in the present situation in Iran—a situation where politics, technologies, activism, economy, feminism, natural environments, and the “social” seem to be in radical flux. For despite the fact that Islamic Republic of Iran began to ‘remove’ art production and art history from society and education after the revolution, artists have consistently produced art of political and social discourses inside and outside Iran. What is Iranian Cinema? Why has the medium historically been so essential for artists and filmmakers in Iran? Why is it still so significant today? How and to what extent has it become an agent in the larger ecologies of economy, art, everyday lives and politics in contemporary Iran? Is it still an avant-garde instrument with which to render and operate the larger poetic and political concerns of life? These questions are the essential concerns of the texts of this issue. Yet, the ambition is not to answer them or to provide a conclusion. Instead, they have been the leading questions in the dialogues between artists, filmmakers, writers, scholars, activists and curators, living inside and outside Iran, that this issue has developed.
The poetic and political aspects of Iranian Cinema are concerns that film scholar Annie Fee discusses in the first article of this issue. In “This is Not an Iranian Art-House Film: Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran” she frames the film both as a comment on the legal situation of Panahi and as an exploration of cinephilia. In Taxi Tehran, as she notes, this love of cinema is explored and gently parodied via the self-reflexive “directionlessness” of Panahi’s taxi as it travels through the noisy streets of Tehran. In two extracts from the book Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema—«Islamic Cyborg» and «Mohsen Makhmalbafs Gabbeh: «Livet er farge!», «Kvinnen er farge!»”—the cultural critic and theorist Negar Mottahedeh provides a feminist passage to Iranian Cinema.[4] In «Islamic Cyborg» she associates technologies of film with politics and the human body and argues that Khomeini in the 1980s created his own vision of cinema where a technical construction of a national body—“a technosensorial national body” on a collective scale. Contemplating Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Mottahedeh notes how the body constructed by Khomeini’s machines would “take control of its senses. It would come back to life through its technologically modified organs.” These Iranian bodies were imaginal; they were Islamic bodies ingesting the film technology’s “purified senses of seeing and hearing as its own”. In her second contribution, «Mohsen Makhmalbafs Gabbeh: «Livet er farge!», «Kvinnen er farge!»”, Mottahedeh explores the feminist potential of Iranian cinema through a reading of female subjectivity and weaving in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (1996). In the film, as she notes, weaving is a technical means to create interconnections between the past, present and future, while as a material process it forms gender and subjectivity, just like the medium of film.
Some of these critical reflections are continued in the next part of the journal, which provides four notes on a particular film, event, artist, or filmmaker of profound importance whether that be of historical, political, social, or aesthetic significance. Contemplating similar concerns of women and subjectivity and the Iranian avant-garde, writer and curator Övül Ö. Durmusoglu provides notes on Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast, 1964.) In Durmusoglu’s text, Farrokhzad’s film and modern poetry are explored in light of feminism, the essay film, and care politics in our contemporary world and global crisis. This is followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and co-editor of this issue, Kaveh Tehrani, and the filmmaker Sina Ataeian Dena on Davandeh (The Runner, 1985), and some “Notes on Still Life (Tabiate Bijan, 1974)” written by the filmmaker Ali Asgari. In the final part, “Notes Emancipatory Possibilities of Iranian Cinema”, media scholar and activist Banafsheh Ranji and journalist and activist Rooholah Sepandarand discuss the feminist agenda of Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006) and the socio-political films of the Kurdish filmmaker Keywan Karimi. In outlining what they identify as the “landscape” of contemporary Iranian cinema, they highlight the films of these particular filmmakers as contributors to the “emancipatory possibilities” of film where art and politics are integrated in radical ways.
Somewhere in the middle, the journal presents a selection of drawings made by the artist Mirak Jamal. The works are childhood drawings that in their own poetic way emphasize some aesthetics, imaginations, and histories of a farewell with Iran, forming an archive of the life and memories of the artist himself. A few years after the Iranian Revolution, Jamal and his family fled from Iran to the former USSR. In 1986, they immigrated to Germany where they lived for some years. The drawings made by Jamal at the age of five and onwards were collected by his mother, and some of them have her notes at the bottom, indicating the year or the themes he would describe when making them. While the collection—which has become an important part of Jamal’s practice, which today involves paintings, sculptural works, and installations—shows the imaginations and perceptions of a child, they tell a story of the lives of a post-revolution of Iran and its political circumstances. Viewing the works of the archive chronologically, it becomes clear that the imaginary changes with the moves and ruptures he experienced. While some of the works appear as still lifes of the private homes of the artist—vases, radios, furniture and plants, as in their home in the USSR, which housed only Iranian emigrants—others show images emblematic of Soviet imagery: soldiers, weapons and tanks, sometimes juxtaposed with images of tsars, Persian anecdotes and folklore as well as childish imagery absorbed through films and cartoons. This changes in the very final passage, where images absorbed by Mirak in the Americanized and post-Nazi Germany intrudes: dollar signs, Western cars and styles of modern European architecture. When considering these works and the different passages of histories they assemble, the collection of drawings appears as an archive of an intimate and political history of the life of the artist as well as an archive of an Iranian diaspora, preserved by the medium of drawing.
Notes
[1] T.J, “Forough Farrokhzad: The Bitter Loss,” Iranian Studies 1, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 52-53.
[2] Ibid., 52-53.
[3] Shirin Neshat has in fact used Farrokhzad’s poetry in her own films and photographs.
[4] It should be mentioned that this is the first time the work of Mottahedeh is translated into Norwegian.
On print in Wuxia 1-2, 2018