Mamta Kalia

the Majlis declared in March 1987 that
“Our entertainers, male or female, did
not enjoy the same esteem that they
enjoy today from lay and religious
people…this is a real revolution”, 14 he
was perhaps referring to the slackening
of the state’s stranglehold on cinema,
even though censorship regulations had
remained the same. He also went on
record saying that “It is true that a
film must have a message, but this does
not mean that we must deny its
entertaining aspects.” 15 Rafsanjani’s
successor Khatami moved a step further
by stating that “I believe that cinema
is not the mosque…If we remove cinema
from its natural place we will no longer
have cinema.” 16
This brings us to the last segment
of our essay. Can the slower pace of
editing, long shots, location shooting,
non-continuity editing can be seen as
a realist but at the same time nonmodernist
strategy of figuration? The
question assumes critical importance in
the light of the new Iranian cinema’s
attempt to relocate women to new sites
within the diegesis. The widespread
tendency in Iranian art films is to shoot
mainly or exclusively in the exterior.
Undeniably, limited budgets, small crews,
outdoor locations and local characters
add to the realism of the film. But there
are also three other ways in which postrevolutionary
Iranian cinema differs from
other cinemas of realism – (1) The way
the look is organized within the diegetic
space (2) The near absence of close-
134 :: April-June 2010
up shots and (3) the limited use of the
shot-reverse shot and the absence of
the spectacle. Besides veiling also
influences mis-en-scene and filming style.
Objects and boundary marking features
such as fences, walls and columns,
constantly obstruct vision. Long tracking
shots with these obstacles in the
foreground highlight them as a visual
barrier and as metaphors for modesty
and veiling.
The American feminist film theorist
Mary Ann Doane has suggested that
veiling generates a fetishist desire for
the onscreen woman. She argues that
a supplementary surface over the face
“functions to hide an absence.” 17 But
Islamic ideologues argued just the
opposite. It came to be widely held that
by veiling, female bodies became healed
and emblematic of chastity. This is why
the new Iranian cinema encouraged
greater visibility of women provided they
appeared veiled and purified on the
screen. Actually, veiling can be a doubleedged
sword. Naficy reminds us that:
For every stratagem of veiling . . . there
is one that violates it or plays with it, turning
the veil not only into a powerful semiotic
and political icon, but also into a dynamic
instrument of power, sexuality and
transgression. . . . Walls and veils may
segregate people but . . . they tend to provoke
curiosity and to offer visual pleasure by
exhibitionism and voyeurism. . . . By playing
with the veil, [women] create the necessary
distance that promotes scopophilia
(pleasurable looking). At the same time, these
strategies turn them, as the subjects of
scopophilia, into erotic objects, thus, ironically,