Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution
Director: Nader Takmil Homayoun
First Run/Icarus Films
98 mins.
In Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution, Nader Takmil Homayoun situates the
development of Iran’s internationally acclaimed national cinema relative to the broad
political social and religious events that conditioned it, from the mid-sixties to the
present. The strength of this remarkable documentary lies in its strategy of using the
history of the image as a means of exploring the shaping of ideology, contrasting
documentary news footage of historical events with the social reality portrayed by the
contemporary film images. Drawing upon a wide catalogue of films and newsreel
footage, the documentary offers an insight into the two revolutions – political and artistic
– and their joint battle to produce, and consequently control, the national imago.
Commentary from a wide selection of Iranian directors affords the viewer an opportunity
to understand and interpret the various modes of representation in terms of the
ideological conflicts at play in their production.
The development of an Iranian cinematic language is shown as emerging from its
early dependency upon western genres and style in the sixties and early seventies, to
focus upon questions of realism – specifically the need to portray the social problems and
everyday struggles of the ordinary Iranian, which had been previously excluded from
representation. This move to document a specific, local reality, instead of replicating a
generic, imported fantasy, is linked to the socio-political agenda of specific filmmakers,
as we see in Ghafari’s depiction of the life of the underclasses in “South of the City”, and
Shirdel’s (1965) documentary sequence shot on the streets of Tehran, neither of which
made it to the screen. The gap between officially sanctioned filmic representations,
depicting (westernised) lifestyles of power and affluence, and the everyday reality of the
majority of Iranians, is proposed as a key factor in shaping the ‘poetic-realist’ trend that
came to characterise the New Wave directors such as Mehrjui, Ghaffari, Kimiai,
Golestan, and Kiarostami.
The prescient films of Kimiai (‘The Journey of the Stone’) and Beyazi
(‘Downpour’) captured the growing mood of political dissent and the increasing
emphasis on religion, foreshadowing the imminent 1979 revolution. Homayoun captures
the moral backlash against cinema that followed, documenting the burning of cinema
houses, while making clear that it was the overtly sensationalist nature of the majority of
mainstream films that occasioned this attack. The importance of cinema as an ideological
tool, recognised early on by Khomeni (‘we are not against cinema, we are against what is
ungodly’) set the stage for the cultivation of a properly Islamic cinema, guided by the
Ministry for Cultural Affairs and the Farabi Foundation, giving rise to ‘greenhouse’ or
‘pasteurised’ cinema – with Mehrjui’s ‘The Cow’ serving as the model. The intricate
balance between the sanctioned image and its subversion is skilfully brought out by the
filmmaker, as he situates the cinematic output relative to the shifts in political and
religious boundaries, using newsreel and photographs to document the context within
which the directors were working. The 1980-88 war with Iraq is presented as a
particularly fraught site of contestation. Homayoun sets news footage of the conflict
against official filmic representations that offered a blend of mysticism and heroism
designed to rouse citizens to becomes willing martyrs to the cause, balanced by the
attempts of film makers such as Naderi to present alternative, unvarnished depictions of
the conflict.
The final section of the documentary takes on questions of censorship, allowing
the post-revolutionary directors such as Makhmalbaf, Naderi, Panahi, Ghobadhi and
Bani-Etemad to discuss their own ways of working within the constraints of the new
republic. The initial struggle to construct an authentic national imago is reframed as a
need to go beyond what has come to define Iranian cinema aesthetics, namely, its use of
child actors, the emphasis on traditional values, the depiction of nature, and its strong
connections with Persian poetry. Contemporary Iranian films characteristically draw
upon the conventions of neo-realism and documentary in order to question the politics of
representation, playing with the historical use of the image for ideological ends - both
imperialist and revolutionary - as well as its capacity to reflect reality and work as a
catalyst for social change. However, this dichotomy becomes the reflexive root of Iranian
cinematic practice, as scenes from Makhmalbaf’s ‘Salaam Cinema’ emphasize. The
success of the domestic film industry, at home and abroad, is shown to have kindled an
infatuation with the film imago, evidenced by the thousands of hopeful starlets that turn
up to Makhmalbaf’s open casting session – the same hoards that decades earlier were
burning down cinemas now audition as facsimiles of the same Hollywood icons Iranian
cinema set out to displace. On the one hand, this speaks to the successful resolution of the
struggle to construct a national cinematic identity, as Makhmalbaf claims: “Ideology
blinded us – when you take off the blindfold you say “Ah – that’s who I am!” On the
other hand, the documentary adroitly shows that although the development of Iranian
cinema is closely conditioned by its historical circumstances, the power of the image still
remains under the sway of a global politics of representation.
Lindsey Hair
SUNY Buffalo