A Revolutionary And A Feminist

This feature on the incarceration of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was published in Times of India, Crest Edition on 12th of June, 2010. 

Satyen K. Bordoloi revisits the works of the firebrand Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and Iranian films overall  in an attempt to understand what make a government so fearful of this little filmmaker.

At Cannes Film Festival this year, a little man’s presence was greatly felt by his absence. At every screening and public function a seat was left empty in hounour of Jafar Panahi. French actress Juliette Binoche broke down during a press conference when Panahi’s hunger strike was announced by Abbas Kiarostami. The most powerful filmmakers of Hollywood Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, Ang Lee and Oliver Stone among many others issued statements asking the Iranian government to release him.

While most of us in India were busy gossiping about how our ‘beautiful’ actresses make a mess out of their dress once again in Cannes, Jafar Panahi’s life was unfolding in a true melodramatic manner, like a Hollywood or Bollywood blockbuster, and very unlike the subtle and gentle films made by him.

DAVID VS. GOLIATH

Yet it is ironical that all the ‘great’ directors of India that makes the largest number of films every year, have less combined influence on the world of cinema, than this one man. In the last few decades, besides a few little known Indian filmmakers whom the mainstream have largely ignored (including Vikramaditya Motwane's film ‘Udaan’ that was applauded at Cannes this year), Indian films have lacked the power to charm Cannes. This is very unlike the 50s and 60s where India was a dominant force in Cannes with Chetan Anand’s ‘Neecha Nagar’ winning the highest prize at the very film Cannes film festial in 1946. If you compare Indian and Iranian Cinema in the last three decades, you’ll realize how in the fight between David and Goliath, the Iranian David has won hands down, even against the mightier Hollywood. A brier history of Iranian Cinema leading up to Panahi will answer why.

THE IRANIAN NEW WAVE:

In 1969, a little known Iranian director Darius Mehrjui, made a film called the ‘The Cow’ followed by Masoud Kimiai and Nasser Taqvai’s ‘Calm in Front of Others’. This set ablaze a trend of cultural and intellectual dynamism in cinema. The Iranian audience became discriminating and encouraged new ideas and trends and in the next 3-4 years, close to 40 noteworthy films were made establishing the Iranian New Wave firmly in the map of World Cinema. Iran emerged as the new centre for creative filmmaking in the world.

Yet, it had taken over a decade and a half to build up. After the coup that Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, a political and intellectual movement started that built the romantic climate for a socially committed literature to develop, which in turn inspired cinema.

Directors like Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi, became the pioneers of the Iranian New Wave, with Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi and Samira Makhmalbaf carrying this baton of creativity.

SAVING THE WORLD:

This cinematic movement was influenced primarily by the Italian Neorealistic movement of realism in cinema. Despite this European influence, Iranian films are unique. By blending fiction with reality using a documentary style in feature films, the filmmakers developed a visual poetry in cinema infused by a humanistic concern that is influenced by the filmmaker’s local identity as opposed to influences from other films centers like Hollywood and Europe. Iranian cinema is a perfect example of what ‘national’ cinema can and should aspire to be in a globalised world, influenced and yet staying aloof from the world at large.

Thus while Hollywood is busy saving the world in its cinema while the nation does the opposite in real life, the European filmmakers are mostly busy with existential angst of a bored, developed and ‘civilized’ world and the Indians continue to be occupied with love stories set in places and rooted in ideas that have only a remote connection to the reality of the actual world, Iranian filmmakers have busy themselves with little problems of little people in the last four decades, that strangely are still the problems of humanity at large. Thus in reflecting the reality and bringing it to the world’s attention, it is Iranian cinema that is truly saving the world and cinema, one soul at a time.

PANAHI’S CINEMA

Jafar Panahi, a close friend, compatriot and disciple of Abbas Kiarostami, stormed into the world of cinema in 1995 with one such little film about a girl’s attempt to buy a goldfish while the local traders in her street try to cheat her of her money. ‘The White Balloon’ was thus a commentary not just on Iranian life, but the world at large where greed is not satisfied till it has robbed the innocence that is truly precious to humanity. The film won numerous awards, including the Golden Camera at Cannes.

In his 1997 film ‘The Mirror’, a little girl tries to find her way through the maze of ‘big’ people, as her perspective holds a mirror to the world of elders. However, halfway through the film, Panahi takes a leap of cinematic narrative as the young girl throws her scarf and refuses to act saying that she wants to go home, her real home. The audience is suddenly jolted out of the reality of a realistic film and into a different reality, where the frames are neither colour corrected, nor composed. A handheld camera follows the real girl as she heads home. Though the fictional world has broken apart, and we see that the real life girl is much more assertive, it is left to the audiences to decipher whether the two worlds are really that apart.

WOMEN IN IRAN

His 2000 films ‘The Circle’ is another bold narrative experiment. The film follows the story of one woman to another, with the common thread being that they are all ‘fallen’ women according to Iranian customs and laws. Not stopping long enough to tell the complete story of either character yet making the audience empathize enough, the film shows a microcosm of the treatment meted out to a large cross section of women in Iran.

Panahi’s preoccupation with woman in Iran continues in ‘Café Tansit’. After the death of her husband, an independent woman defies tradition that asks her to marry his brother, and reopens the husband’s café that becomes successful with truckers because of its good food and family atmosphere. The envious brother-in-law evokes custom and complains to the authorities. Ironically, this veiled indictment of Iranian traditions, became the first film to be submitted by the country to the Academy Awards. 

Pahahi is more direct in his criticism of the nation’s treatment of women in his 2006 film ‘Offside’. It is a simple story of a few football fanatic women who try to sneak in to watch the Iran-Bahrain match but are caught by the ‘vice squad’. A strange situation for the rest of the world, but a real threat for women in Iran who enjoy far less fundamental rights than the men. The film questions the morality of men that hold themselves superior. As in his other films, the women are no less capable or ingenious than the men, but are victimized because of their sexuality. Yet, like his other films, they show a greater compassion than the men, who are also not stereotyped and shown with kindness in all of his film.

AN IRKED REGIME

Thus while his predecessors and contemporaries have concerned themselves with life in Iran overall, Panahi’s preoccupation is with the condition of woman in Iran, and indeed in many parts of the world. With a compassion and sensitivity rare in cinema he has put forth their case in film after film. Even in film that have not been about women, like ‘Crimson Gold’, a story of a pizza-delivery man in Tehran, he critiques the regime.

This cinematic criticism and his vocal support of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and his protest against the disputed elections last year, inflamed the administration enough for them to drag him out of his home in March and keep him incarcerated for three month and threatening his family, purportedly for him trying to make another film criticizing the regime.

Panahi went on hunger strike to protest against this ill-treatment evoking a unified response from the cinematic community worldwide prompting the Iranian regime to release him on the 25^th of May.

And like the ‘vice squad’ dare not touch a group of women dressed as men who have sneaked into the football match because they are around international journalists in his film ‘Offside’, perhaps the Iranian government was rattled by the large number of protests across the world against his arrest.

Actress Juliette Binoche who has known Panahi for 15 years aptly described him in a press conference at Cannes saying, “For his supporters and his enemies alike, Panahi has become the closest thing world cinema has to a bona fide revolutionary, the dangerous firebrand who will not be silenced.”
The world waits with bated breath what this revolutionary filmmaker and cinematic-poet makes next.