Much like there was a war genre in Iran which spoke to existing social conditions, a woman's cinema needs to take shape today.

Points on Women and Cinema in Iran

1. Today, one tends to distinguish between two very different approaches in Iran when it comes to the issue of women in the movies. The first, and more widespread, is said to have paved the way for the careers of 62 woman film directors and hundreds of actresses, which is significant considering that at the time of the revolution, Iran had only one single female director.

But even those who share the second, more conservative attitude aren't fundamentally opposed to women being active in cinema, rather, they simply believe that Islamic codes should be taken more seriously.

For example, in one scene in the film "Sheida", in which actress Leyla Hatemi plays a nurse, Hatemi touches a wounded male figure to help him unto a hospital bed. This prompted a group of culturally conservative cinephiles to show the scene dozens of times - at a conference they entitled "Women and Cinema" - over and over again, in slow motion. This was their way of saying, 'we wish people wouldn't have to see this sort of thing'.


2. It bears mentioning,however, that compared to the number of directors as a whole, less that 6% are currently women. Actresses reach a share of 23%. As for female set designers, they're at 24%, woman scriptwriters are at roughly 10%, and among the 120 producers in Iran, six are women (IRNA, 19.12.99.).


3. The first Iranian audio film, Dokhtar-e Lore, dates back to the 1930s. The director, it is said, had a hard time finding an actress for the main part. Noone accepted the offer, until finally his driver's wife eventually agreed. Sedighe Saminejad Mehranghiz paid a heavy price for the honor of being the first ever Iranian actress. She was isolated and harassed, and people threw stones at her as she walked down the street. She died two years ago, at the age of 94.


4. In recent weeks, the one movie to have drawn the most attention to itself has probably been Behrouz Afkhami's Shokaran (Hemlock), which is to a great extent an adaptation of the mid-eighties Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction.

To cut the story very short, Sima, a divorced nurse with a bad smoking habit and a junkie father, spends a night with Mahmoud, a married up-and-coming businessman. They enter a sigheh, a temporary marriage, but when Mahmoud rejects her, she takes to pursuing him, even showing up twice at his family home. By way of retaliation, he has Sima's father kick her out in the street. The film ends with Sima's suicide.

Sima's motives for the chase are never entirely clear, with the film vaguely playing on sexuality, financial pressures, and sheer obsession all at the same time. If this is perhaps very typical in that women's characters are rarely portrayed in depth - within Iran or without - but are left to do their enigmatic things in their enigmatic ways bereft of rhyme or reason, Sima's ambivalence does have an interesting aspect to it.

In a good number of conversations I listened in on after seeing the movie, everyone seemed to agree on how disappointed they were in Sima, who starts out as strong-willed and self-confident, even buying drugs and taking exactly what she wants when it comes to men. Then, she suddenly starts obsessing with Mahmoud, accepting one humiliating rejection after another, while the audience learns that she had lied about the villa she claimed to live in, and that she actually lived with her father in downtown Tehran - for whom she had dutifully bought the drugs. Moreover, her suicide is a perfect solution for Mahmoud, who is rid of a pesky woman, now pregnant with his illegitimate child to boot. Rahat shod okhey. (As it happens, in Dokhtaran-e entezar - "Waiting Women" - the one other Iranian production to have created much of a stir in recent weeks - you get precisely the same denouement: an accommodating female protagonist takes her life, resolving an untimely dilemma for the male counterpart.)

But I eventually spoke to others who had seen something of the reverse. During the course of the film, they say, and this was the perspective of several press reviews (cf. Hamshahri, 8/2/79), Sima "rose" from being a supposedly wealthy, conceited, man-eating drug fiend to a desperate woman with a sense of honor - who would do anything for her father - and who isn't treated with the respect she deserves.

5. Ever since word got out that the movie may be banned, Shokaran is enjoying a boost in ticket sales. This time, however, it isn't the government, but the Anjoman-e parastari-e iran, the national association of nurses, that has taken action, in protest against what they call a negative representation of their profession. And it isn't the obsessive, victimized Sima they're objecting to, but Sima the chain-smoking, immoral hussy. "We expect more from a postrevolutionary director", they told Afkhami (cf. Sobh-e emruz, 7/2/79), "how many nurses do you think behave that way?".


6. Although I haven't been able to place this in a larger context just yet, I was struck by the ways in which Shokaran works with the automobile as a scene of action. To name but a few, one of the first scenes of the movie is a woman driving off, tires screeching, in a car rather more flashy that the one Mahmoud is sitting in, leaving him gazing after her in that vacuous manner of his. Later, a prostitute mistakes him for a client and sits down in the passenger seat next to him - prostitutes regularly walk certain avenues of Tehran - again, he stares after her, completely mystified by it all. The film ends with Mahmoud still staring blankly into nowhere in the driver's seat, having just discovered Sima's suicide on a highway between Tehran and Karaj. (Someone might like to write a paper on this, compare it to Cronenberg, perhaps: "Mute Moblity: Speechlessness, Desire, and Contemporary Urban Space in Shokaran").


7. One of the most successful films in the history of Iranian cinema was not only directed by a woman, but was also a radical critique of women's status in Iran. Tahmineh Milani waited eight years for the permission to produce Do Zan (Two Women), a movie that eventually drew over three million viewers.


8. Last December, Milani held a talk at the University of Tehran, and answered students' questions.

"Much like there was a war genre in Iran which spoke to the existing social conditions, a woman's cinema needs to take shape today. I don't mean merely hiring more women in the film industry- having more female directors, writers, camera people, actresses, etc. Sex is not important here. What is important is to make movies that reflect women's perspectives and experiences. Movies today -simply aren't attempting to show or discover what Iranian women in today's society are thinking."


9. One recent film in which the issues of 'women' and 'war' are tentatively shown in relation to one another is Ruban-e ghermez (Red Ribbon), a futuristic story of a woman who returns to the ruins of her village in a onetime war zone, and tries to make sense of the rubble that is left. She soon finds herself courted by two desperately horny men who live nearby, one of which is the owner of an enormous lot full of abandoned army tanks, the other is a minesweeper.

The two rival suitors become increasingly belligerent and aggressive, as if clicks, grunts, and the chest-thumping idiom of war were the only language they had left, all of which is apparently suggesting a thing or two about courtship, Iranian style. At one point, the female protagonist is trapped in a tank for a certain period of time, where she finds herself stuck face to face with skeletons that had been left within. While waiting for help, she suffers nightmares of countless unsightly suitors asking for her hand in marriage. If meant as a gesture of sympathy on behalf of the director - the illustrious Hatamikia - perhaps as an analogy between the brutality of war on the one hand, and a claustrophobic, violent space that women are confined to, on the other, it doesn't leave much room for any intelligent reaction on her behalf, apart from kicking and screaming until she's eventually rescued by the smiling tank vendor.


10. Unfortunately, however, the distinctly manicheistic slant in Tahmine Milani's Do Zan makes it (just as) easy to criticize as simplistic and victimizing, which is what many in Iran have been quick to do.

The fact that I myself was sceptical about the movie had probably less to do with the movie itself than with the context in which I first came to see it - a film festival in Geneva, Switzerland, last September. With Iranian cinema being as hip as it is at the moment, the place was packed, though many of the viewers were actually members of the Iranian expat community which lives in and around Geneva. They're known to reminisce about the Shah, and charge 80$ for Nowrooz parties.

I couldn't help thinking that, if in an Iranian setting, Do Zan is perhaps the most important and politically ambitious movie to have been produced in recent years, outside Iran, it's perhaps a bit of a disaster.

Admittedly, in the context of what the West has come to expect from Iran, "Two Women" is an exception. The Iranian movies that are most cherished in the West are deeply rural in setting and in flair - old women washing splendid carpets, olive trees, barefoot kids hopping about in the Iranian hinterlands - and it so happens that these movies have a tendency to avoid woman characters altogether. The popular, soapy, fast-paced blockbusters shown within Iran are indeed very different, in more than one way.

Milani tries to come to terms with the ways of life of "regular", urban Iranians, from the perspective of a young middle-class woman - and that alone is indeed a considerable contribution to the overall representation of Iran outside the country. Moreover, when it comes to women's issues as a legal problematic, i.e. to socioeconomic circumstances that block women's attempts at independence, the film is pertinent and to the point; for example, if legislation in Iran recognizes only physical violence as one of the grounds for divorce, the film goes a long way in showing the efficiency of symbolic violence in the home.

What is mystifying, however, is the overall, faultless symmetry the movie insists on. A Tehrani woman enjoying a blissful marriage and a perfect spouse, thanks to whom she's pursuing a career as an architect, is contrasted with another woman, pitted against a Neanderthal of a husband, and some nutcase stranger whose brutal "courtship" it is that triggers the dramatic main narrative. As the title already suggests, the film is built up around clean-cut oppositions, not only between one woman and another, but also between emancipation/tradition, victim/perpetrator, reactive female innocence/male violence, etc. The oppositions are played out against each other with such matter-of-factness that at worst, you'd find them as as well-matched as Yin and Yang, or Laurel and Hardy.

Watching the smug expressions on the faces of the people sauntering out of that auditorium in Geneva, I marveled at how deeply satisfying a cinematic experience it must have been. Speaking of oppositions, when it comes to little brown women in need of rescue from big brown men, Europe has never had a doubt as to where it fits into the picture.

Within Iran, on the other hand, it would nonetheless be hard to disagree that any such highly politicized, in-your-face piece of work that reaches millions of viewers across the country in its struggle to bring women's issues to the forefront of public debate has clearly been worth the effort. What low-budget, openly feminist pendant could ever hope to attract such crowds in Europe, or anywhere else, for that matter.

TZ

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