The paradox that Joseph Slaughter discusses in Human Rights, Inc.-- i.e. the fact that repressive and dictatorial regimes speak the language of human rights and indeed oppress and repress in the name of those very rights--is nowhere more evident than in contemporary Iran, where the current government’s insistence on both its exceptionality and exemplarity in the face of external pressures concerning the human rights of its citizens has exacerbated the domestic perception of the impossibility of either achieving justice or publicly discussing its absence. This has led to the proliferation of alternative forms of critiquing the political nature of justice in Iran, including forms that appeal to or seek to engage an international audience. One such form is film. While many critics have observed the way in which the state-monitored cinema of Iran has ironically managed to defeat the imperatives and constraints of the system that oversees it, this paper attempts to go beyond that thesis to demonstrate the ways in which films made over the past decade in Iran increasingly suggest not only that justice is impossible to achieve within the Iranian juridical sphere but that the medium of film itself can serve as a form of extrajudicial appeal. Many of these films achieved remarkable success among both domestic and international audiences. Of the films this paper addresses, Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” engages the institution of justice most explicitly, setting its opening and closing scenes in a courtroom and addressing two different kinds of legal cases that must be resolved within the parameters of the film, while Jafar Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film” addresses the outcome of his day in court indirectly, by following a day in his life under house arrest. Both films appeal to the audience for justice, asking them to serve as judge and jury, but can the verdict audiences reach be transformed into real political consequences for the regime these films critique? The Cine Foundation, its “White Meadows” project, and its commitment to producing a series of protest films that would lobby for the reversal of Panahi’s and his collaborator Mohammad Rasoulof’s sentences, suggest that film does indeed have the power to mobilize international response to injustices perpetrated by the Iranian legal regime. This paper will examine the White Meadows project and other ways in which film has been marshaled as a form of extrajudicial appeal.

The television series, Pahlavi Hat, currently being aired in Iran is a representation of the social and cultural transformations the Pahlavi monarchs imposed on twentieth-century Iran. Named after the type of hat Reza Shah Pahlavi made Iranian men don as a sign of having embraced the program of modernization, the TV series also takes aim at the sartorial changes Iranian women were forced to undergo. Under the cover of the theme of clothing, this dramatization of history decries the many forms of injustice to which Iranians were subjected during the reign of the Pahlavis. In this presentation I will analyze the series’ manifest attempt at negotiating a path between a discourse of rights based on Shi’ite jurisprudence and a grudging acceptance of the necessity of certain reforms. On the surface, the series offers a binary opposition between Iranians who, on the one hand and under the influence of foreign powers, particularly the French and the British, become enforcers of new standards and, on the other hand faithful Muslims who do endorse the idea of improvements to public health, delivery of basic education, and the country’s infrastructure. But the ideological polar oppositions the television series aims to convey are undermined, given that the defenders of faith fail to articulate an alternative vision of reform. Instead, they stage their rage against the injustices they and their compatriots suffer. Over and over again the community leaders are called upon to oppose what are seen as obvious abrogations of the law such as forcible unveiling of women, introduction of Western suffragists’ ideas, and the substitution of sharia law with an imported secular system of justice. As the cries of injustice grow louder, those who oppose the reforms increasingly take aim at the foreign instigators of change, i.e. the British and their desire to make Iran into a consumer of its goods. In my analysis I will focus on particularly charged moments in the series when the possibility of resisting the injustice of becoming disenfranchised and subject to imperialist forces is raised, but ultimately foreclosed. Instead of fulfilling its didactic intention to reinforce Iran’s capacity and will to assert its autonomy, in this re-envisioning of history Pahlavi Hat fails to demonstrate how justice might have been served and, by extension and perhaps unwittingly, ends up drawing attention to fundamental questions of rights and justice that have not been resolved by the new regime in power.

TehranAvenue.com was an important online cultural mouthpiece between 2000 and 2010. Though now closed, TA still has a presence in the form of an archive. And though it did not have the same kind of traffic enjoyed by mainstream religious, entertainment, and sports websites in Iran in the 2000s, it served as an important organ for intellectual discussions of music, art, urban life, and open-source software. According to its creators, the web magazine created a community of writers (and, pointedly, not bloggers) and readers around Tehran’s cultural life. At the same time, like much of Iran’s literary history, the content of the website suggested that it’s focus on aesthetics and culture was also an engagement with questions of politics and justice. However, while politics has tended to be coded allegorically in twentieth-century Iranian literature, politics and art are often contiguous in Iran’s blogosphere. In this presentation, I will provide a history of TA based on interviews with the site’s creators. Secondly, by triangulating digital, urban, and transnational theories, I argue that TA created a transnational urban-digital public sphere. After establishing the context of this cyber-urban transnational space, I will offer close readings of specific articles published on TA. The creators and writers of TA very intentionally wrote against the notion of the blog. The blogification of digital space, for TA’s community, amounted to digital navel gazing. By contrast, an article that had passed through an editorial process and addressed a readership functioned as a form of “address” (in Michael Warner’s terms)—of locating the speaker and addressing a public. Given the locatedness of this particular public, the content of these articles take on pointed political urgency. By reading a number of cultural commentaries (particularly art reviews) I argue that TA developed a community of organic intellectuals. As such, their comments on art, on music, and even on open-source software were tantamount to an engagement with political questions of freedom and justice. Cultural commentary functioned not only to challenge the Islamic Republic’s limits on individual self-expression, it also functioned to challenge late capitalist assumptions about Iranian culture in relation to the supposed freedoms of North America or Western Europe. In this sense, TA developed a cyber-urban sensibility (with loyalties to digitally distributed urban publics rather than national or religious formations) that deployed cultural commentary as a kind of political activism.

In this presentation, I will analyze Asghar Farhadi’s 'The Separation of Nader from Simin' as an attempt to challenge the pathos of distance and the idealization of otherness which haunts films such as Jafar Panahi’s 'White Balloon' (1995) and Abbas Kiarostami’s 'The Wind Will Carry Us' (1999). In the White Balloon, Panahi’s heroes are children that animate, in their beings, the purity of form yet to be broken by the corruption of the guilt-ridden public. In Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, it is the unspoiled spirit of the villagers as set against the initially cynical arrival by the cameramen who then obscure the very forms that they fear their representation would exploit -- and perhaps -- contaminate. I provide a reading how the latter two films, in exalting the idealization of particular states of being (the innocence of children, or the simple grace of villagers) simultaneously betray the concomitant anxiety of contamination (of those otherwise supposedly static states). These markers of idealized and fetishized innocence that are always and already on the verge of a great and inevitable fall, stage the impossibility of justice as a melancholic loss without return. In contraposition to these worlds as always already formed, separable, and inevitably doomed, Farhadi’s 'A Separation' shows how realities that are seemingly divided by gender, class, generation, religion, and levels of commitment nonetheless interpenetrate, revealing the idealized and/or demonized other firmly within the self. This disruption of the (melancholic) anticipatory gesture of arrival is both reflected in the deep sadness that pervades the film, and also in the therapeutic function of/to the audience, who is left to map the trajectories of failure and loss without being privileged by the possibility of delivering a final judgment.