This paper examines the aesthetics of cinematic expression in Iranian post-revolutionary film and its relation to a subversive language that challenges and criticizes the ideological fabric of the Islamic state in self-reflexive works of post-revolutionary Iranian filmmakers. In the works of celebrated filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Milani, Bani-Etemad and Panahi, we witness the creation of movies where the urge to narrate a personal story elucidates the representation of a collective injustice. For instance, in the course of the documentary, In Yek film nist (This is not a film)(2010) , Panahi re-tells the horrific story of the events that led to his political arrest in the aftermath of the Green movement, where law enforcement imprisoned his entire film crew, and confiscated his film’s footage. In response to this personal- but historical- incident, Panahi creates a documentary that is a stylistic wonder, in its content as well as its self-reflexive style, where he utilizes three different media (a hand-held, a cell phone and a semi-professional camera) to document the filmmaker’s harrowing narrative of the raid. But the film’s underlying narrative constitutes a certain degree of political intrepidity, as we learn that Panahi films this time in defiance of a twenty year ban imposed upon him. In the midst of legal consternations, Panahi’s footage, its meticulous editing, and its contested content constitute a degree of subversive language and action. Most of his earlier movies, such as The White Balloon (1995), The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), Crimson Gold(2003), Offside (2006), also dealt with issues related to social malaise and the failure of a political and social culture. Panahi’s stark critique of Iranian social ills, however, resonates strongly when framed within a personal narrative in "In Yek film Nist." By offering similar examples in other post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, this paper will examine the social and political aesthetics of a subversive, self-reflexive cinema in Iran today.

This paper examines Iranian post-revolutionary cinema as a parallel project of aesthetic representation and experimentation that reflects the simultaneous struggles over political representation in more formal institutional spheres. After the Revolution, Iranian filmmakers faced practical and political barriers to developing films that would be acceptable to censors and audiences alike. In response to the imposed constraints on the portrayal of daily life (including heterosexual intimacy and women’s private dress), filmmakers developed a style of self-reflexive cinema that acknowledged the limits of representational naturalism and incorporated issues of audience response and directorial control directly into the cinematic project. This paper argues that in a contested post-revolutionary context, films about filmmaking became themselves political positions in the ongoing power struggle over democracy, representation, and citizenship. In particular, Iranian filmmakers broke down the almost universal reliance on the cinematic “fourth wall” of modern realism: the representational and philosophical construct (articulated in the eighteenth century by Diderot) that the audience is viewing a self-contained “real” world rather than an artificial composition. Breaking through the fourth wall disrupted the representational autonomy of cinema, and placed into question a number of other apparent distinctions: between the genres of documentary and feature films; between the viewer’s role as passive observer or active participant; between the authority of the director and the quiescence of the actors. By often inserting themselves in the narrative and representational frame, Iranian directors focused their audience’s attention on the arbitrary logic of cinematic narrative and authority, and on the contradictory parallels between on-screen and off-screen social relations. Reflexive films (films about filmmaking, films that merge the autonomy of the reality on-screen and off; films that force the audience to recognize their own complicity in the representational project) include examples by noted directors like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Panahi, but also less well-known figures whose works make use of similar reflexive techniques. Framing the paper with two films by proscribed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The Mirror, 1997 and Closed Curtain, 2013), the paper finds that despite and because of the pressures of Iranian institutional politics, filmmaking has been one of the most vibrant Iranian spheres of post-revolutionary sociological critique and cultural exploration, and has succeeded in foregrounding political questions of participation, agency, and authority through aesthetic means and narrative experimentation.

The character of the “akhund” or cleric has been, as much maligned as it has been romanticized in the post-revolutionary Iranian imagination. This paper looks at two post-Khatami era films, Reza Mirkarimi’s Under the Moonlight (Zir-e Nur-e Mah), 2001, and Kamal Tabrizi’s The Lizard (Marmulak), 2004 both of which are representative of how the clerical establishment is seen in Iranian society. The two films present an array of clerical types: the dogmatic literalist seminarian, the older heavy-handed bureaucratic authority figure, the criminal that pretends to be a cleric. But most importantly, Under the Moonlight presents the archetypal seminarian going through a crisis of faith. The protagonist, Seyyed Hassan, has little interest in literal interpretations, instead showing an appreciation for the figurative and poetic. He eventually comes to understand the profession as more a social undertaking to rid society of its ills than oversight and management of public piety. The two films “remain affirmative of the role of religion in one’s life” but they do much more than that. This four-tiered archetypal classification roughly reflects the range within which representatives of the clerical establishment and I want to argue Islam in general are imagined in the Islamic Republic. Why is it important to investigate the different faces of Islam as imagined by the Iranian public? Islam in today’s Iran is, as Thomas Tweed calls it, a “sacrospace,” where the interplay between arid theology (khoshkeh-mazhabi budan) and the complexities of earthly being are playing out to create new orthodoxies. As these films show, orthodoxy is defined differently among disparate groups within the Qom seminary. The films show that marginal imaginings of Islam, as presented by Seyyed Hassan who doubts whether its possible to find God in the seminary in Under the Moonlight might in fact, be more mainstream than we think. These characters reflect the possibility of new orthodoxies that have at the same time been written about by the New Theology movement. As Talal Asad points out, “The margins exist partially as a space to which society can relegate thinking and discourses it considers dangerous and destabilizing.” Iranian film has become one of those spaces where dangerous discourses about Islam are being shaped.

Witnessing as an almost impossible endeavor and the limited access to an origin of traumatic events more generally, has been the main focus of research in Trauma Studies. The implications of this claim for cinema has resulted in the paradox of the paralysis of traumatic experience coupled with the challenges of representing the absences attendant with the visuality of trauma. However, most recently, critics have opened a line of investigation into the framework of performativity whereby the witness in a narrative is thought of as a performer rather than merely a victim of trauma. This paper interrogates that kind of performativity of witnessing in Jafar Panahi’s 2003 film, Tala-ye Sorkh (Crimson Gold). Indeed, the combination of performativity along with a sense of a traumatized main protagonist characterizes Panahi’s antihero, Hussain. The affective representation of Hussain’s everyday engagements invites viewers to not only be moved by, but move in the narrative enunciation of his experiences. As a result, the opening scene of his suicide sets the stage for what Susan Sontag calls “an iconography of suffering,” and an already mourned for Hussain acts as a witness to the story preceding the eventual denouement. By emphasizing the performative act of witnessing, I call attention to the ways that the main character Hussain’s witnessing of the inhabitants, or characters of Tehran, incite our own witnessing as film viewers. By doing so, I argue that Panahi’s aesthetic moves that make Hussain act the role of witness allows viewers to simultaneously witness the everyday social class and gender dynamics that is constitutive of postwar Iranian society. Ultimately, I enable a reading of the critique of social class and masculinity in the film not merely as an attempt at reflecting social ills, but a way of highlighting the potential power of enacting a kind of social change through cinema by our own engagement with and attainment of a witness’s insight.