1 Intro to Film Studies Term Paper Professor Mazumdar Shivani Kaul Auteur-as-Activist: Jafar Panahi and the Rise of the Iranian Underground What defines an author? Can any one individual compose an original work without any outside influence or intervention? The mid-20th century fervor for the director as wielder of the ‘camera-pen,’ sought to overthrow the studio-restricted ‘cinema du papa’ lodged in place (Stam 2000). Existentialist crisis and attendant celebration of iconoclastic individualism influenced the Cahiers du Cinema discourse seeking to inspire film studies methodology around directors who brought their personal vision to the screen via signature mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, or themes. Though influential for some time, and partly in place as evidenced by the plethora of auteur profiles still written today, the emphasis on directors as auteurs diminished after the post-structuralism assertion by Roland Barthes that the author had died in order to make way for the reader’s contribution to the coherence of any ‘text’. The author was an instance of writing, more akin to a mirror that reflected light than a light that generated it. Expanding on similar concepts, Foucault posited that naming an author served for purposes of categorization, and arose from observed discontinuities with established discourse that generate a new genre (1981). The spate of auteur-structuralist writing in cinema studies did not last for long, and has been criticized for overlooking diverse practices of cinema across the world, focusing too much on commercial directors, being ahistorical and apolitical, and coming from a male-centered Oedipal reaction to the fear of castration by the studio system (Stam 2000). Film studies moved on to examination of genre as methodological focus instead, but perhaps some value can still emerge from understanding the auteur as critical construct. Paisley Livingston summarizes reconsideration of a

2 limited auteur construct premised on a “cautious, modest authorship of at least some meaning of an utterance – not all” (Dix 2010: 147). Foucault’s exposition of the ‘author function’ privileges questions such as “‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse,” ‘Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?’” and “’Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?’” (Foucault 1981: 290). In line with this questioning, I intend to demonstrate that Jafar Panahi is an auteur, in the author-function sense of the term, while also couching his oeuvre in context of the history of filmmaking in Iran, post-Revolution cinematic censorship, Iranian production/distribution/consumption of cinema, and international film festival culture. Foucault had claimed naming the author serves the purpose of classification and the characterization of discourse; his name “remains at the contours of texts – separating one from the other” and is thus “situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence” (Foucault 1981: 284). Panahi’s transgressive discourse is certainly at the contours of what has been titled the Iranian New Wave of cinema, whose paragon Abbas Kiarostami has actually served as teacher and friend to Jafar Panahi. He “[gives] a particular political thrust to the same kind of narrative ellipsis and deliberate formal construction” (Rosenbaum 2001) characteristic of what Iranian literary critic Hamid Dabashi terms a ‘Kiarostamiesque’ Iranian cinema (Dabashi 2006: 398). Dabashi goes so far to say the styles and achievements of Kiarostami, Meshkini, and Makhmalbaf have come to an “epistemic conclusion – thus to an end” in Panahi’s cinematic oeuvre thus far (Dabashi 2006: 395). I would argue that this instance of auteurism arises from the meeting of documentary, commercial, transnational art, and underground cinema discourses in Iran, in one person. Born in 1960 in rural northern Iran but raised in the lower-class southern portion of Tehran, Panahi experimented with 8mm film in his youth, later making his first documentary during military service in the 1980-89

3 Iran-Iraq war (Teo 2001). During and after consequent filmmaking studies in university, Jafar Panahi made documentary films across Iran. Thus Panahi drew from his early training in Iranian documentary styles. Then he trained as assistant director under Abbas Kiarostami. His first feature film one year later, The White Balloon, featured many of the hallmarks of what is called Iranian New Wave art cinema. The film went on to play before the Nowruz Festival on national television for several years, and “became one of the most profitable foreign films in the US and Europe” (Reza Sadr 2002: 232). Though “poetic and artistic” (Teo 2001), his was a more accessible narrative and aesthetic than that of Kiarostami, as evidenced by The White Balloon’s widespread appeal. Panahi experiments with more self-conscious intrusion of the apparatus in The Mirror, which falls much more in line with conventions of art films as set out by Bordwell (1979). Both of these were circulated freely within and without Iran. The next two movies, The Circle and Crimson Gold, more distinctly demonstrate his particular style but with tighter editing and brisker pacing – again, are more accessible than the sometimesformalist exercise of watching a Kiarostami film. Many of Panahi’s “backers were foreigners” mixed with Iranian production, until his next film Offside “was entirely funded by domestic sources” in a response to critiques that he was supported by foreigners (Saunders 2007). Panahi expresses a desire to reach Iranian audiences, to move them, which he claims Offside achieved in its surreptitious distribution via piracy (Jafar Panahi discusses ‘Offside’ 2008). His most recent ‘effort,’ This is Not a Film, was filmed in part on an iPhone, smuggled out of the country on a USB stick and distributed via piracy in addition to art house cinemas (Turan 2012). This movie seems to reflect a burgeoning Internet video and underground cinema movement in Iran, as described by Hamid Naficy in the current Globalizing Period (2012). The backdrop of Iranian cinema

4 Hamid Naficy’s recent Social History of Iranian Cinema looks inward into the idea of Iran’s national cinema, combining analysis of subject matter, structure of feeling, and style (2012). He demonstrates the transnational patterns in Iranian cinema date back to the 1920s, an early Artisanal Period of limited domestic production. Tight control by the Pahlavi state would only translate to censorship, but with expanded patronage for cinema in the second Pahlavi period. Foreign films from the USSR, UK, and US co-existed with rising domestic production characterized by two streams. Most films in this time were filmfarsi movies produced for commercial success, with many spectators flocking to see Iranian stars exemplifying Iranian traditions in the face of Western stereotypes. The other strand of filmmaking came from dissenting Westernized directors and writers who produced artistic new-wave cinema that did well at international film festivals, and the Pahlavi regime ironically both funded and heavily censored. Global distribution, international critical acclaim, censorship and simultaneous patronage characterized Iranian cinema even before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Naficy 2012). Prophetically, the more authoritarian the Pahlavi regime became, the more critical and outspoken the new-wave became. The Islamicate period begins with the revolutionary rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, who explicitly rebuked Westernized cinema for having corrupted Iranian youth. Thus movie theaters and film-making both became targets: a third of cinemas were destroyed, movies were banned, destroyed or painted over, and movie personnel were purged through arrest, exile, confiscated property (Naficy 2012). Postpurge, Islamic regime policy sought to encourage ‘correct’ film-making with steady patronage but draconian regulations, clearing the way for domestic production with foreign films banned. Women were wiped out from the cinematic gaze in this time, until the Globalizing era a decade later brought them back into directing and acting. Khatami and Ahmadinejad regimes mobilized media production, including film and television, as a means of public diplomacy with outside states in this time (Naficy 2012). The Iran-Iraq War spurred the documentary film tradition, as well as fiction war films.

5 Inconsistent censorship has allowed strains of resistance to emerge in underground, Internet, and dissident art-house cinema. Exile and displacement have resulted in what Naficy calls an ‘accented cinema’ – the films borne of diasporic experience (2001). The now much-lauded Post-revolutionary Iranian New Wave cinema emerged in context of curbed film imports (Naficy 2002), increasing privatization of film financing in the face of declining state support and public spectatorship, and serious obstacles to filmmaking. The sizeable Iranian diaspora has produced 300 films in the span of twenty years, but cinema at home is subject to strict Islamic veiling on-camera and heavy censorship that has curiously enough contributed to a unique allegorical style equally influenced by storytelling traditions such as the Shahnama (Mottahadeh 2007, Fischer 2004). However, this does not mean censorship is justifiable because it “makes artists more creative” (Farahmand 2002: 92). Film festivals Meanwhile Hamid Naficy argues foreign markets have been and will continue to be essential for cinema in Iran to remain viable (2002). But his analysis overlooks the fact that this foreign financing is possible for a minority of Iran’s directors who benefit from the network of distributors linked by the international film festival circuit. In the face of inflating film production costs and diminishing state support, this international exposure can facilitate opportunities for foreign production of local filmmakers in Iran who cater to global tastes – but only those who fit the aesthetic bill. Due to the favorable exchange rate, many interested French producers and distributors have cashed in by investing a fraction of the normal costs to make a film that goes on to the critical acclaim and global distribution via the film festival network – exactly what happened with Makhmalbaf’s 1997 film about rural women weaving rugs, Gabbeh (Farahmand 2002). Naficy’s two-tier classification of Iranian cinema into state-sponsored ideological films and popular socially-themed cinema does not evaluate the internationally-celebrated art cinema often

6 associated with Kiarostami as a separate entity, asserts Azadeh Farahmand (2002). She situates its critical success in domestic and international sociopolitical context, arguing that “growing attention given to Iranian cinema in the West must also be linked to recent attempts to develop diplomatic ties and promote cultural exchange between Iran and the West” with a convincing analysis of the last twenty years of ping-pong diplomacy between the US and Iran in particular (2002: 94). Nominating films for the festival circuit is done by the state, and has increasingly been done since the late ‘80s: international screenings of Iranian films almost doubled from 377 in 1990 to 744 in 1995 (Farahmand 2002). The 1997 last-minute entry at Cannes of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry was facilitated by the Iranian foreign minister’s realization that the film’s festival presence would have a good effect outside the country (Farahmand 2002). Film festivals tend to favor exactly the kind of political escapism and restrained ‘high art’ that simultaneously bring to life “village themes and location shooting in rural landscapes [which] reinforce the exotic look of Iranian films – and increase their marketability abroad” (Farahmand 2002: 103). His cinema is not popular within Iran, where he is often criticized for making movies for foreigners. Directors with equal if not greater aesthetic accomplishment such as Bahram Beyza’i are consistently overlooked in the rush to crown the most magnetic personalities (Farahmand 2002). An apolitical wave Why is this ‘New Wave’ after revolution all but revolutionary? Iranian cinema post-1983 centralization of cinematic administration has become further de-politicized, limiting political themes to “past events…or marginal issues” and overlooking the contemporary political or ideological state of affairs that a livelier print media has critiqued (Reza Haghighi 2002: 109). Azadeh Farahmand traces institutional funding flows, censorship patterns, bureaucratic hurdles that reduce the likelihood of “confrontational and socially critical films for fear of being held accountable for making anti-system or anti-establishment statements through their work” (Farahmand 2002: 91).

7 Iranian New Wave style Though Jafar Panahi does not consider himself a political filmmaker in order to avoid the term’s association with partisan politics and propaganda, his filmmaking is dedicated to relaying images of the society he observes around him (Teo 2001). Critical appraisal of the contemporary urban condition in Iran is not a typical end of Iranian New Wave, but Panahi mobilizes many elements of its style inherited from his mentor Kiarostami to this end (Rapfogel 2001). The real-time unfolding of events onscreen, use of documentary-like video footage, allowance for ad-libbing, on-site locations, untrained actors, and long takes blur the lines between narrative and nonfiction cinema (lines that were arguably vague in any case). Several of these features result from low-budget, low-tech crews of amateurs that began to assemble semi-experimental documentary-meets-narrative cinema blend called ‘Italian neorealism’ after the influential 1940s-50s period of Italian filmmaking (Saeed-Vafa 2002). Indeed, Vittoria de Sica’s Ladri di bicyclette left a deep impression on the young Panahi (Teo 2001). Other features draw from myth, poetry and storytelling traditions that value fabula over syuzhet (Fischer 2004). Elliptical narrative, inconsistent character motivations, incomplete syuzhet possibly even broken by the intrusion of the apparatus demonstrate the lack of plot-motivated construction in Iranian cinema. Underground cinema Many film critics find only post-revolutionary Iranian New Wave influence in Jafar Panahi’s filmmaking, but I would argue there is increasing reference to the themes and practices of underground cinema in his work. “Underground filmmaking is a persistent form of activity in authoritarian states, which in the case of Iran refers to a production mode that involves filming without the state’s official authorization or supervision,” with clandestine use of amateur equipment done at significant risk with “deeply local and interstitial” production and global distribution post-2000 (Naficy 2012: 66). This is Not a Film is the more explicit example of underground filmmaking, but The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside

8 have all required subterfuge and clandestine on-site camerawork (Teo 2001). Panahi himself is aware of its presence in Iran: “a year ago in an interview I had predicted that there will be an underground cinema in Iran. We saw one such film at the Cannes Festival by Bahman Ghobadi ["Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats"] which will also be showing at San Sebastian. There are many other movies that are produced in this way. In a country like ours, if they stop filmmakers in one way the will find another way“ (Keogh 2009). Naficy claims the “true underground filmmaker” stays inside Iran (2012: 66); in that vein, Jafar Panahi has made it clear that he has no intentions to flee his prison or “let go of the game entirely”; chooses intend to “stick to [his] guns” and film his conditions (Teo 2001, Saunders 2007). Control tactics in Iran Post-revolutionary Iran is a case in which interdiction and sanctions justified by clerics and enacted by police regulate the individual’s imagination of his or her real conditions of existence. This was a practice already established by the Pahlavi regime, before Islamic revolution (Naficy 2012). Iran has a habit of mobilizing the repressive ideological apparatus to ensure the supremacy of the ideological state apparatus. To deter any temptation to link this argument with the Orientalist Asian despot fallacy, repressive censorship and targeted vendettas are hardly limited to Islamizing states. Contemporaneous with Pahlavi regime censorship, the United States purged the Marxist specter from art and entertainment industries in the 1950s. McCarthyism, Soviet propaganda, control of information and media in China and Turkey, and current attempts in the US to prosecute virtual actions through SOPA legislation: these instances reflect a tendency of paranoid polities to crack down on internal freedom of expression in times of shift and global insecurity. Control tactics of the Iranian regime include production and distribution by state institutions created in the 1980s, such as the Farabi Foundation, Mostazafan Foundation and the Ministry of Reconstruction (Tanner 2002). Then three stages of censorship lie ahead. The script revision stage scrutinizes everything from camera position to costume, exhibiting at film festivals requires permission,

9 and whether or not the finished product can be screened in Iranian cinemas must be decided (Beier and Wolf 2011). Banning in lieu of permission is not uncommon, and can even occur after initial approval depending on political moods (Tanner 2002). A recent case in point would be the originallyaboveground production and distribution of the expatriate-directed film My Tehran for Sale, whose main actress has been sentenced to time in prison and a series of lashings for indecencies such as shaving her head onscreen – but two full years after its normal release (Naficy 2012). Other measures of control: confiscated passports, jail time, and house arrest. Political prisoners have been executed as recently as last year (Beier and Wolf 2011). While perceived threats to the ideology of the Islamic regime are not taken lightly, they are not treated consistently. Kiarostami’s films are banned within the country, but his celebrity has been identified as a positive influence on Iran’s image abroad. This is increasingly true in post-Khatami Iran, where privatization and neoliberal cuts to state funding in the last twenty years rely more on foreign investment (Naficy 2002). Even if the films are banned for their content, their awards are welcomed home. In this context, Panahi’s statement is damning: “The space given to Jafar Panahi’s festival awards in Tehran’s Museum of Cinema is much larger than his cell in prison” (Bordwell 2010). Older underground filmmakers of Iran have long accused the feted festival circuit auteurs of inadvertently supporting the state (Naficy 2012). The popular social revolution in 1979 led to thousands of political refugees and exiles fleeing for the US and Europe over the next seven years (Naficy 2001), in a pattern of voluntary exile that the regime has encouraged. In a telling quote from Panahi, he confirms pressure to leave the country is strong: The censors would in fact really appreciate for people to leave the country — they’re encouraging us to leave the country. In 2003 I was arrested by the information ministry; they kept me and interrogated me for four hours. In the end their question was: ‘Why don’t you just leave this country and work outside of Iran, given that the core of your supporters live there?’ This is not limited to cinema, but extends to all cultural and political activity here — the government is encouraging them all to move outside of Iran. (Saunders 2007) Mediating state repression

10 Panahi has noted in another interview that widespread press coverage can counterbalance the otherwise unchecked power of the state (Kaufman 2001). Pressure from the international community has been successful in his own release from notorious Evin prison in May 2010, and might be one reason he is not dealt with more swiftly as an example of what happens to dissident directors. Mohamad Rasoulof, Jafar Panahi’s friend and collaborator, was also charged with crimes against the state. The two have become icons of the freedom of creation, expression, and thought in Iran (Anonymous Filmmaker 2012). A chronology of resistance Panahi began his career with children’s cinema, at which time he ran into no trouble with the authorities (Saunders 2007). It was only when the children in his stories grew up and faced the reality of Tehran in his feature films that his work raised flags. In 2000, The Circle was banned. In a separate instance of police action in the US in April 2001, Panahi was detained at a New York airport for ten hours – part of it spent chained to a crowded bench (Panahi 2001). He returned to Iran, vowing not to visit the US again. Subsequent films Crimson Gold and Offside were denied distribution permits. In 2003, the Information Ministry interrogated the director for four hours after arresting him (Saunders 2007). For standing in a street along with many other citizens in support of the oppositional candidate in June 2009 Panahi was also arrested, as well as for attending the funeral of a young protestor to which thousands flocked as a martyr (Beier and Wolf 2011). Several more arrests happened that year (Bradshaw 2010). In December 2010 he was formally charged with “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security,” “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” “preparing an anti-government film bearing on the post-electoral events,” for owning “obscene films,” participating in demonstrations, making a film without permission, organizing protests in Montreal, giving interviews to foreign media, and not giving scripts to actors (Bordwell 2010). A 750-page dossier listing his crimes against the regime amassed by the Revolutionary Courts in Tehran demonstrate the silent but copious

11 machinations of a police state (Beier and Wolf 2011). Arrested again in March 2010, this time he was charged with making an “anti-regime” documentary about the opposition’s Green Movement (Brooks 2010). After being forcibly awoken, stripped, psychologically tortured, and hearing repeated threats to his family during his stay at Evin prison, Panahi circulated a letter of protest via Cannes on May 15th, 2010 describing his conditions for the previous 77 days of imprisonment, and his decision to fast in retaliation (Levy 2010). He was released on the equivalent of $200,000 of bail, which required mortgaging his home (Turan 2012). The hunger strike plus an international campaign by thousands of filmmakers, professionals, and scholars might have had some effect on the release. As of the fall of 2012, Panahi is under house arrest, currently sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking (Stebbins 2012, Taylor 2012). His lawyer has filed a first appeal that has been rejected, but he awaits the verdict of a second appeal submitted (Turan 2012). Target of the state Why has Panahi in particular drawn the ire of the Ahmadinejad-led regime? While banning of films and heavy censorship are commonplace in Iran even before the revolution, more visible directors have not been detained and targeted by the regime (Beier and Wolf 2011). But the last four years have been particularly tense for the current Islamic regime: missile tests in Iran and brutal repression of support for the opposition party in 2009 herald more vigilant censure and enforcement than before. Because film festivals in particular have been a powerful means of public diplomacy abroad, filmmakers embody the state of Iran and its codes of morality even in Cannes, Montreal, or New York. But when Iran has closed off relations with the international community by testing nuclear missiles within range of Israel and several other countries, international film festivals become treacherous terrain for artists to navigate (Keogh 2009). Even Kiarostami drew criticism among religious clerics for kissing Catherine Deneuve on the cheek onstage at Cannes in 1997, but he did so in the process of winning the Palme d’Or for Iran in a time when its image suffered abroad (Jeffries 2005). Jafar Panahi’s

12 interaction with the foreign public includes festival circuit screenings of all his films, invitations to festival juries, and awards such as the Camera D’Or at Cannes Film Festival, Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival for The Circle, Un Certain Regard Jury Award for Crimson Gold, and Silver Bear at Berlin for Offside (BFI 2012). Possible international transgressions include a number of interviews in the US, Europe, and Australia (at least fifteen in twelve years) about working conditions in Iran, and enthusiasm for the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi demonstrated with green scarves donned by other jury members at the Montreal Film Festival (Keogh 2009). The latter event incited Ahmadinejad's art advisor Javad Shamaqdari to threaten "a boycott of festivals by 'Iranian artists' if protests continued” (Keogh 2009). The enemy, which has been disappointed concerning their plans for a velvet coup and a soft war in Iran, tries to keep up the fever of their subversive activities at foreign art and cinematic events,' he announced. ‘The Venice film festival was a vulgar display revealing the enemy's plan.’ (Keogh 2009). In a country where two revolutions are still alive in the collective memory, the challenges of secularization and modernization pose a serious threat to continued hegemony (Reza Haghighi 2002). Thus Panahi’s bold preference to highlight contemporary socially realist themes is interpreted as treachery on an international level. His track record of directing banned films, serving jail time, and being sentenced to house arrest demonstrate this growing intolerance of the current regime in “the darkest age for filmmaking in Iran” (Beier and Wolf 2011). I would argue that Panahi’s filmmaking is not only read as subversive texts by the Iranian regime, but are intended to be instances of subversive utterance. His filmmaking is distinguished by a preference for strong female protagonists, preoccupation with the present, sculpted urban cityscapes and soundscapes, the specter of violence and the state, and tense and darker atmospheres that recall features of noir cinema. His filming everyday life under authoritarian repression in a way that highlights the present condition’s social problems rather than aestheticizing a timeless, exotic locale is a major shift in Iranian cinema, one that would make any government uncomfortable.

13 Contemporary Iranian society Jafar Panahi has expressed his desire to create a testament to the present moment so true to life that it might one day serve as a “document of what life was like at the time” (Saunders 2007). Other Iranian directors have played with the notion of real time and cinematic time with long takes and mixing documentary footage in with the fiction, but Panahi’s style is so “ensconced in reality” that it takes filmmaking in the present tense to an extreme (Goldsmith 2006). The White Balloon completely takes place in real time; the camera keeps pace with the young female protagonist through the streets of Tehran (Dix 2010). We hear a radio proclaiming that the New Year will arrive in an hour, and one hour later in the story’s time as well movie time it is the Persian New Year. When Mina in the The Mirror removes her fake cast and refuses to continue acting, the camera follows her home surreptitiously, with only some parts of her journey edited out. The Circle’s syuzhet is markedly trimmed down from the fabula, but the long takes in the streets of Tehran and “busy traffic-like narrative pacing” still couches the story in the hustle and bustle of the capital city over the span of one day (Kaufman 2001). Offside unfolds in exactly ninety minutes, in order to match the time limit set by the football game that commences with the beginning of the film and ends with its conclusion. Parts of the shooting were done outside the stadium while the football game in the story actually took place in reality. Crimson Gold spans the fictive time of several days, but temporal touchstones abound - like when the jeweler mentions the ‘current’ and soon-to-expire trend of Italian necklaces in Tehran. The screenplay was also based on a real pizza delivery man who tried to pull off a jewelry heist but killed the owner in the process, reflecting Panahi’s goal “to go to the streets and portray the events of the day" using "real issues, real people, real locations" (Wilson 2006). Tehran as mise-en-scene Panahi has often cited the city of Tehran as a major influence. The concept of the flaneur in his work has been described elsewhere (Niazi 2010), and is certainly a compelling theme if we examine the

14 plethora of long takes in the point of view of curious, independent women whose eyes devour the sights and sounds of the cityscape from within their chadors. The leisure and detachment of the flaneur is not a feature of his cinema, however. There are no long shots that lack a point a view – the sights we see are not for the pleasure of the spectator alone, as in Kiarostami’s films. Long shots from an almost omniscient vantage point are contemplative and detached features of a less socially engaged cinema than Panahi’s. In The Circle, the marvels of the city we see onscreen are always eventually accompanied by a set of eyes looking – the characters ground us to their context and make sure we cannot pretend to be privy to the ‘perfect information’ Baudry flags as vehicle for ideology. While Kiarostami’s films favor interior shots of automobiles as private, contemplative space, Panahi has used the motorbike consistently in each of his films as a mobile unit capable of extending our field of vision – parallel to the camera. Crimson Gold has at least six separate sequences following the characters (pizza delivery men) on motorbikes in the city. When two passengers are seated on the same motorbike, Panahi takes the opportunity to capture their exchange in closer mid-shots that reveal the nature of their relationship while reversing the camera to capture a point-of-view shot of the city as it passes. Hossein’s friend points out young women who could be good targets for bag-snatching in a twoshot that alternates with a full shot of the young woman in question, as she walks. Hossein remains quiet, perturbed by a conversation in a crystal-maze-like café that took place one scene earlier. Intermittent long shots allow the audience to understand the landscape the two buddies navigate – full of traffic, sirens, and narrow stretches of asphalt. Both The White Balloon and The Mirror open with 360 degree shots that steadily pan urban intersections. The dawdle and occasional rush of passersby, of motorbikes and cars passing through the frame as it dispassionately moves reveal the bustling community of Tehran. There is no glimpse of horizon or unimpeded distance in these cityscapes – this is not an aesthetic of asceticism or mysticism, both terms attributed to Kiarostami’s filmmaking (Elena). Even when trapped inside his home in This is

15 Not a Film, Panahi cannot help but look out over the city from his balcony, bringing the camera and the spectators with him. The bright daylight streaming in through multiple windows that are never too far from the camera lens remind us that there is a profilmic urban expanse out there waiting to be explored. A sequence in which Panahi sits facing the camera in a mid-shot while buttering some bread seems banal until we realize the open window to the right of his head beckons us, but remains hidden to Panahi behind his head. House arrest means the city outside his window will be as ‘real’ to him as it is for us; neither is able to walk directly into that space to walk in step with Iranians. Sound as marker of time and place Images of sidewalks, buildings, passersby, traffic – these are not the only features of the city; each of these sights has a sound. An urban crowd must be evoked through aural soundscapes. The hum of motorbike motors, voices, and their slight echo in a narrow backstreet dress the screen as credits roll in the beginning of The White Balloon, even before the visuals begin. The radio is an important object that is never seen, but heard intermittently in The White Balloon, The Mirror, and Crimson Gold. As a bearer of current events it is a temporal marker. Its association with broadcasting technology places it in an urban location, and thus it also conveys the sound of a cosmopolitan habitus. The city’s chatter and debates of the day also emerge in a clever sequence in The Mirror, in which Mina gets into a shared cab heading for her part of town. The sound recording device is still on her, but she has walked off the set with the camera following her from a considerable distance. While she sits in the car, we see it from the back as it drives down the road in the middle of traffic and can only make out a few silhouettes of the voices we can hear. They discuss the place of women in the home and society and division of labor while Mina and the audience overhear the entire conversation. We become like any over-curious stranger in a public setting, eavesdropping on the murmur of gossip that circulates in a city. Information and opinions travel in urban settings, often without clear origins or speakers – just like in the shared cab

16 sequence. What Panahi seeks to weave the “daily dialogue that you hear in the streets, in the cabs, on the buses, and everywhere you go” into his films to situate them in time and space (Wisniewski 2006) Street musicians are a dynamic presence onscreen in several of Jafar Panahi’s films as well. They open and close The White Balloon, and mesmerize female protagonists Mina in The Mirror and Nargess in The Circle. Their musical presence usually precedes them onscreen, but once the camera reaches them, it lingers there appreciatively. Panahi’s evident fondness for musicians finds outlet in his short film The Accordion, which stars two young street musicians. There is no non-diegetic sound in Panahi’s cinema. Rare examples of musical strains in later works almost seem too faint to be heard by the protagonists, except in his head. The bathroom scene in Crimson Gold in which Hossein uses the second-floor washroom in a stranger’s luxurious apartment features a soft-jazz background score that could be coming from the ground floor, but seems much more fitting as the acoustic equivalent of the sophisticated array of colognes and floral arrangements in front of him. Police sirens wail throughout several motorbike ride sequences. The sound is menacing and has no source in sight – we never see the vehicles rushing off. But the characters onscreen don’t flinch, as though they are accustomed to the constant accompaniment of security forces on the hunt. And it’s quite possible they are. In fact, “the artfully arranged sound landscapes” are like “acoustic portraits of a police state” (Beier and Wolf 2011) Women as survivors Many women have started to re-enter the filmmaking industry in Iran in front of and now behind the camera, but Jafar Panahi’s cinema has dramatically problematized the woman’s condition in Iran since his first forays into feature film (Kauffman 2001, Rosenbaum 2001). Four out of five of his feature-length works have unaccompanied female protagonists who constantly approach Iranian society in Tehran with what seems like reasonable expectations of freedom, but are repeatedly denied. His

17 empathy for a gender experience he does not know directly first developed through observing his daughter and sisters (Kaufman 2001). Panahi recalls that his sisters endured more restrictions in movement than he while growing up: When I was a kid, there were times when my sisters did not dare to put their noses out of the door, they were not allowed to go out. That actually suited me, since they gave me money to go see movies and tell them when I came back. (Behar 2009) A profound example of his feminist commentary in image, sound, and narrative would be the opening sequence in The Circle, a movie he wrote as well as directed. While the credits roll, the screen is black. In the absence of this image, we hear cries, shouts of a female voice. It could be anyone – we have no visual signifiers to understand who is in pain or why. The screaming and weeping does not seem age- or context- specific either – it could be that of a child sobbing or adult woman undergoing torture. The most we can tell is that 1) this is likely the voice of a woman, and 2) that she is experiencing distress. This is how we enter the filmic world of The Circle, how we are birthed into it. The metaphor is made complete by the wails of a newborn child, a verbal proclamation in a woman’s voice: “It’s a girl!” In the next moment the ‘lights’ turn on: suddenly we are graced with our first visual, a pure white screen. It is the moment of birth – we as spectators are new, fresh, and unblemished – as is the newborn daughter. But it is through clever sleight-of-camera that Panahi mastered since his last film (The Mirror) that we are fooled, that the wool has been pulled over our eyes. In the next few seconds, the overexposed shot meters down ever-so-slightly, and we realize the vision of purity is actually a white metal wall in harsh clinical lighting, ominously inset with a small rectangular window bolted into place. Purity or prison? Panahi’s carefully-controlled release of filmic information equates the two: blink, and one blends into the other. The seven defiant protagonists in The Circle spend the rest of the movie trying to escape that prison of purity, but ultimately end up back in one dark cell together. The charges against them remain vague to us, likely because they are vague to the police as well. Being female seems reason enough to

18 merit abuse, abandonment, and imprisonment in The Circle. The film was banned in Iran (as is the case with all his films since then), and might have marked Panahi as a troublemaker. As Naficy explains: “Because one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Islamic Republic was its treatment of women as second-class citizens, any examination, evaluation, or criticism of women’s status became a judgment on the regime itself and on its Islamicate values” (Naficy 2012: 52). Men are not consistently cruel in any of his films, however. Panahi’s commitment to never show an “evil character, male or female,” prevents him from producing Eisenstein-like propaganda (Walsh 2003). In Offside, one of the girls trying to sneak into a football game from which women are banned escapes but returns to the holding-place where soldiers have rounded them up because “she realizes there may be consequences for the soldiers if she does run away” (Wisniewski 2006). Both are “trapped within social restrictions, and the kind of discrimination that is exposed in the movie affects all of them and has consequences throughout society“ (Wisniewski 2006). Several tense-turned-tender moments in close contact with soldiers in The Circle actually reveal them to wear shirts the same size as a protagonist’s male friend or relative, or miss home enough to secretly call their mothers in the middle of the night with another protagonist’s help. A soldier earnestly attempts to befriend the wary young girl at the heart of The White Balloon, telling her she reminds him of his sisters at home. Another touching two-shot place pizza delivery man and nubile soldier side-by-side in the dark, as the fifteen-year-old recruit nervously admits he’s never touched a girl and is underage. Soldiers “don't always come across as threatening, but often appear clumsy and out of their depth, as if the uniforms they are wearing were a few sizes too big for them” (Beier and Wolf 2011). They are boyfriends, sons, and brothers, conscripted at the age of eighteen, and not targets of Panahi’s critique. Tension and anxiousness Watching a movie by Jafar Panahi is not a relaxed exercise in contemplation. Such an experience is reserved for films such as Through the Olive Trees by Kiarostami, the movie Panahi actually

19 helped direct early in his career. While “tension between documentary immediacy and a set of strictly defined formal parameters” has become a trademark of Panahi’s style through Offside (Wilson 2006), I find the secret behind such tension to be his camerawork, noir influences, and the mise-en-scene of the police state of Iran itself. When filming in narrow alleyways and side streets of Tehran, neither telescopic zoom nor long shots are possible. Instead, The White Balloon was composed of mostly midand full shots that capture a crowd of men at one glance, at most. Such proximity to the filmic subjects can draw us closer into a character’s subjective experience of the setting. Walls seem to tower in midshots of children, and even full shots never fully reveal an unhindered skyline – we are surrounded by walls on all sides. A closed-ness, bordering on claustrophobia, typifies these spaces. The camera movement and orientation magnify the tension latent in this mise-en-scene. When ‘following’ the protagonist in a Panahi film, the camera does not trail after the actor or along the side. The camera precedes the character’s movement and thus moves the audience forward through space, but backwards. The experience of ‘walking backwards’ with a character head and trunk taking up most of the frame is unsettling over a long take, and made tense by the hazards of an active urban setting. A dramatic example of this arises in a Crimson Gold motorcycle sequence, when Hossein rides towards ‘us’ and the camera, exits the screen at our lower left with engine still running, and re-enters the screen further up on the screen on the left. For several moments, the camera position and orientation has prevented us from anticipating what happened to the character and thus causes tension in the spectator. This strict control of the reverse mid shot in motion has been characteristic of Jafar Panahi’s cinema since The White Balloon. The Circle and Crimson Gold feature elements of noir. Distressed protagonists trying to navigate outside social norms and structures are surrounded by an urban dystopia that is at times frightening. The night scenes are dark, and characters faces often thrown into shadow – a kind of realist low key or no key lighting. The compositional tension is evident in such scenes at night, epitomized in the Crimson

20 Gold long take in which Hossein climbs a series of zigzag stairs on the side of an apartment building. The oblique lines, alternating shadow and streaks of light, and dizzying height to which he climbs are reminiscent of the noir visual style. Water is a presence in sound only: both movies features peals of thunder in the middle of the night. Narratively, the viewer is disoriented by the number of different directions, roads, alleys, and locations that Hossein visits, building a sense of labyrinthine structure and complex chronology. Hossein is touched by a disillusionment borne of sensitivity, and suffers for it. In Panahi’s own words: “if you really see what’s going on around you, it’s going to make you suffer deeply....that’s Hussein’s situation” (Walsh 2003). His criminality is thus seen as an instance of the lone wolf’s recognition of truth – the one who has seen too much of the world and is weary of its ways. The eventual psychosis themes explored in later noir emerges throughout Hossein’s performance in Crimson Gold. After experiencing discrimination for his class background in a jewelry store, he has a moment of shock that spills over once he exits the store. A mid-shot hovers dangerously close to one side of his face as he rolls his eyes and runs his hands over a shaking head. Panahi takes the time to stay there and emphasize that he is not well, as does the actor playing Hossein (who is actually a pizza delivery man and improvised here). The women escaping from prison in The Circle are also extremely sensitive to lewd comments by men that suggests psychological wounds borne of sensitivity and long-endured suffering similar to Hossein’s characterization. In both cases we never see the buildup of these emotional scars; no visuals from their past inform us who caused their trauma. The bruising on Nargess’s face in The Circle, Razieh’s brother’s sensitive wound as early as Panahi’s The White Balloon indicate the pervasity but silence of violence in his cinema. Hamid Dabashi compares the specter of violence to a phantom: "you see through it, but it lacks a source or physical presence — who has perpetrated it is made intentionally amorphous….the result is a sense of fear and anxiety that lurks in every frame of his film, but it is a fear without an identifiable referent" (2007: 396). In never materializing the source of violence onscreen,

21 the spectator is left to his or her own devices in imagining the perpetrator. And in a filmic world haunted by rules, restrictions, and punishment – like a midnight crackdown on dance parties by an entire unit of soldiers in Crimson Gold, we realize the men responsible for creating a police state are never onscreen, but the scars from their symbolic violence against women and the working class remain. Filmic circles But Jafar Panahi is not without hope, despite the uneasy portrait of Tehran he conjures. His consistent exploration of the circle provides the possibility of saving something amidst the trauma. Not only is one of his movies titled The Circle, but critics have noted the 360 degree shots and circular features of his cinematic touch (Kaufman 2001). The slow and steady panning around a stable axis (later a moving axis in Crimson Gold) is in the establishing shots of The White Balloon, The Mirror, and The Circle. The tight-knit ring around of social groups marking their boundaries is another type of circle in all of his movies, perhaps visually crystal-clear in the moment Razieh’s mother pulls her away from a huddle of men watching a snake-charmer in The White Balloon. A cyclical narrative structure is most explicit in The Circle, where all prison escapees end up back in jail by the end of the film. Crimson Gold begins with the same jewelry heist and murder footage with which it concludes, The White Balloon begins and ends with a journey towards Razieh’s home. The inevitability of the circle’s boundaries, the terror of reliving the same fate again and again are considerably pessimistic readings of the round. But there is also a cycle of rebirth to associate with the same theme. The opening sounds in The Circle are those of a woman’s cries of pain that soon turn into a gasp for life: the wail of a newborn child. Her mother’s name means ‘ever-fresh,’ in a poignant reminder that we can be born anew from our own destruction countless times. Characters in his first three movies return home to a circle that knows them and provides support. Even in The Circle, the young women sit next to one another, touching, in a visual expression of solidarity even while imprisoned. Perhaps it is possible for Iran to emerge from its

22 own cycles of violence reborn among friends, families and neighbors once more united against a regime that no longer represents them. Towards conclusion Jafar Panahi’s body of work reflects a confluence of Iranian cinematic styles and forms that interact in the mind of a filmmaker who remains resolute about the exercise of his individuality and freedom of expression. His “far bolder work than most recent Iranian films” speaks to a unique set of aesthetic and ethical principles that set his work apart (Teo 2001). Such distinctiveness is rewarded with imprisonment and house arrest in present-day Iran. The disproportionate sentence handed to Panahi and Rasoulof “serves as a drastic warning and a demand to exercise self-censorship and refrain from criticizing the regime” (Beier and Wolf 2011). Under a state that increasingly mobilizes its repressive apparatus to ideological ends, ‘authorship’ and related innovations in discourse would come under attack. In issuing the harshest sentence for a major artist since 1979, the regime has ironically also marked him as an ‘auteur’ filmmaker whose stories make it “hard to ignore the absurdity of the predicament faced by his central characters” and all Iranian citizens (Wilson 2006). In his prophetic short movie The Accordion, a boys’s beloved accordion and sole source of income is wrenched from his hands by a religious zealot who seeks to purify the air of any music or dance outside a mosque. We see the boy gathering rage as his hands clench and body speeds through a busy marketplace, telling his sister he will soon do something drastic as his eyes locate a sizeable rock that he picks up. Suddenly we hear strains of music – the boy stops…it is the sound of his accordion. The distorted, painful playing wafts through the marketplace and leads him to a small green square. The source of the sound? The same religious zealot sits absorbed in an earnest, shy attempt to try and play the instrument he confiscated minutes ago. The girl walks forward, playing her drum, and soon her brother follows and takes back his accordion to play a lively song. The man collects money on their behalf.

23 Meanwhile Panahi sits without his accordion, awaiting judgment and clenching his fist in frustration and defiant hope. This is Not a Film is at once a petition and challenge to the state. Seeing Panahi retell the stories he longs to breathe into life with nothing but tape, carpet, and gestures, we realize how essential filmmaking is to his identity, and mourn with him when his enthusiasm alternates with bitterness at being banned from exercising his imagination. Its underground or ‘third cinema’ nature marks it at the height of a post-2000 spate of documentaries dealing “unflinchingly with violations of individual rights, gender inequality, curbs on freedom of speech,” made by Iranians of all backgrounds and locations seeking more openly hostile indictment of the state than “indirectly, as fiction cinema tended to do” (Naficy 2012: 5). Jafar Panahi’s work has already been celebrated in retrospectives this year organized by the British Film Institute and the Harvard Film Archive. But his ‘efforts’ will hopefully not only serve later academic categorization purposes, foreign festival markets, or will they solely spin off a series of related films or other ‘texts.’ Instead, we see that his oeuvre has generated actions and movements across the world in matching defiance of any repression of expression, thus accomplishing the most radical potential of any ‘author function.’ The director notes with considerable inspiration himself: 114,000 people signed a petition sent to FIFA to protest the exclusion of women at football games in Iran, and a group of young female protesters called the White Scarf Girls sat in silent resistance with a sign that read ‘we don’t want to be offside’ outside the Iran-Costa Rica match stadium (Jafar Panahi discusses ‘Offside’ 2008). As David Bordwell ironically notes, perhaps Panahi’s case is our present-day proof that filmmaking can still change the world (2010). Total Word Count: 8,872 Films Cited A’ineh (The Mirror, Jafar Panahi, 1997) Badkonake Sefid (The White Balloon, Jafar Panahi, 1995)

24 In Film Nist (This is not a Film, Jafar Panahi, 2011) Ladri di bicyclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica, 1948) Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006) Talaye Sorkh (Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi, 2003) The Taste of Cherry (Tam’e Gilas, Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

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27 Wisniewski, C. (2006). An Interview with Jafar Panahi.” Reverse Shot. < http://www .reverseshot.com/article/jafar_panahi_interview>