A talk between filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, artist- turned-filmmaker Shirin Neshat, and Sina Motalebi from BBC Persian discussed the current and future state of Iranian filmmaking. I suppose we all know that making films in Iran wasn’t the easiest, but I had never realized how difficult it actually is. Furthermore, under Ahmedinejad’s regime, obstacles have gotten harder to get through.
The talk was an hour long, but brought up a number of issues faced by filmmakers in terms of censorship and the basics of obtaining filmmaking permits.
The most vocal of the panel was Ghobadi, whose recent release No One Knows About Persian Cats is ”an underground film about an underground music scene”. The idea of the film was to be able to talk about the creative repression through a means different from the usual allegorical Iranian style. Ghobadi was very expressive during the debate probably due to his recent change having been self-exiled to New York. ”Since I started making films,” he said, “I was forced to tell lies.” His dealings with the government were clearly far from pleasant; he explains the way the government officials he has to deal with are constantly giving him the run-around when it comes to getting signatures. He explains that at one point, he decided to grow a beard in order to be able to communicate with officials at all. Having to get permit signatures is a must within the process of making films because everything else is set up to fall on that; that is, without a permit from the government to make the film, no body will help with anything else (equipment, studio rentals, location shooting becomes difficult, etc). The filmmaking process in Iran, he explains, starts to become very different than that of the rest of world where people having to cut out certain parts of it just to get things moving (nobody makes storyboards, was his example.)
The process is made so difficult for filmmakers, they, on the panel, continually stress what talented filmmakers there are in Iran that are not able to make their craft and get their work and ideas out. According to Ghobadi, we only get access to about “20% of film attempts from Iran”. There, for an independent filmmaker, it is extremely difficult to survive on that practice alone due to the difficulties in actually being able to produce work. With most people of a certain age married with families, it simply makes it more difficult.
Clearly, censorship plays a big role in all this. Artists have underground meetings where they can have conversations; emails are not used for discussion for fear of tracking. A very important point that came about was on the relationship between censorship and the deeply poetic metaphorical style that has become inherent in Iranian cinema in the last 10 or 15 years. Ghobadi explains that the reason why there are so few story lines in Iranian cinema is because when the filmmaker goes through the gratuitous process of censorship and self-censorship and having to go back and forth changing details in the movie in order not to get hassled by the government for permits, there is only so much they are left with.
Taking all of this into great account, the question of the debate remains: What is the state of Iranian cinema now? The difference today is that the stringent ways of the government have only gotten more stringent. Shirin Neshat, a prominent artist since the 1980′s who has now put out her first feature film Women without Men, was also on the panel. Neshat is criticized quite a bit for producing work that subjects her Iranian background despite her being an exile. Many find that her distance from the ‘reality’ puts her in a role where she is exploiting the topic and image. Personally, I do not adhere to that particular criticism, but nonetheless, her answer to the discussion’s question was directly related to her role as an ‘outsider’ and Ghobadi’s new status as an exile. From her point of view, there will only be more exilic voices on Iran. Artists will not have the choice if they want to continue doing film work. Abbas Kiorastami, she said, has just completed his film in Italy; while Jaffar Panahi has been put under surveillance with his passport confiscated (he was arrested this summer for being outspoken against Ahmedinejad’s win) and is thus unable to express himself in anyway let alone through cinema. The concern that comes through this to Neshat, which I agree with, is what affect this will have on the style that has become so quintessentially Iranian. The Iranian film aesthetic that has developed and been fostered in these years may be in danger of filmmakers are unable to work in the country itself. She explains that some of the interest in Eastern art and cinema can be quite superficial in the sense that it is a reactionary interest still based on the unknown East, the Islamic, the Iranian/Middle Eastern and so on. We have not yet reached a point where works from the Middle East will be judged by its own merit on the same level as work from any other region rather than simply be spoken of because it is from that ‘axis’. With all the current politics now adding to the political mystery that Iran seems to bring about in the West, it is important to be sure that the Iranian aesthetic is continued to be practiced and not influenced by what audiences, especially Western audiences expect.
Ghobadi ended the panel on a note that may have encapsulated Neshat’s point and his, and that was that it was unfortunate that the panel had to take place in London with so many key people in the Iranian film industry missing. The panel would have been much more “powerful” had they all had the chance to speak as well.
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Funny coincidence: the whole class went to see the film “No One Knows About Persian Cats” today. Found it very interesting, technically innovative, though I could have a few bones to pick with it and how it was presented …
The point here is that I increasingly think that places like London have all the technical know how and freedom but too few real life problems to share around for everybody wanting to be the great artist (if art stems from experience). In places like Iran, there is perhaps an overabundance of stories and problems to tell, too much life, but too few possibilities to tell these stories.
So a fine balance. I guess we need to even this ration out by importing problems/art from other countries to fill the gap numb middle class existence in the West produces.
Depending on our tastes, we are drawn to works that communicate or are done through difficult means. I suppose its the perseverance and passion that comes out in work that makes it so strong.
In this case, its the extreme need for creativity to get around censorship that pushes the work into being a much more unique. But also its the mode comparable to the “third cinema” that has such a strong message, addressing issues relevant to the greater cause/public making the medium seem all the more powerful…
One of my thoughts in regards to this is the point in the end – whether or not filmmakers leaving Iran will have an affect on the “Iranian film” (the poetic, the allegorical, etc.) Will that perseverance still resonate in the stories now being told under less stringent, Western means? And will the social/political messages relayed in the cinema remain strong?
This is rather funny, especially with the “No One Knows About Persian Cats” film.
I agree, the film is a great example in innovative guerilla film-making under tough conditions. But when you look at the quality of the film, you wonder whether it was really done under such a “low budget.” Film was professionally edited, post-produced, color corrected, sound mixed etc – in Germany, I believe, to be specific. For anybody involved in producing films, this kind of professional work does not come that cheap. So things are always more complex that the marketing apparatuses would have us believe.
Furthermore, I still find it rather interesting how Iranian cinema is articulated always as the underdog cinema produced under repressive conditions and against insurmountable odds. Of course there is a lot of that also in Iran but when we look at this particular film, are we not talking here de facto about an upper middle class coming-of-age story? If you look at the film a bit more closely, virtually everybody else in the film – representatives of the political repressive apparatus, especially the poor or other social groups – vanish to the background to become the anonymous faceless hostile characters or the sleekily-edited environment in which music videos play are visualized (scenes of beggars / junkies etc).
That said, I love the film and how it was done and its representation of the music scene in Iran. I just find it a bit too convenient to use this as yet another example of the “politics” of Iran. Surely, things are a bit more complex there than a bunch of upper middle class kids wanting to explore their individuality through music while faced with the evil Other that constantly threatens their creativity.