Mamta Kalia

subverting the rules of modesty and the
religious ‘commandments of looking’, which
are designed to prevent women from
becoming sexual objects. 18
In contrast, the gharbzadeh
(westoxicated) woman came to be viewed
as the embodiment of all social ills.
Publicly visible, wearing an overcoat (ruposh)
and the headscarf (ru-sari), and
a super consumer of imperialism,
capitalism and foreign goods, a
propagator of the corrupt culture of the
west, the gharabzadeh was believed to
have undermined the moral fabric of
Iranian society. 19 Redemption was only
possible if women could be reclothed.
Modes of veiling could be borrowed from
other cultures. As Lindsey Moore has
suggested, “In Iran, as in more
conventionally “postcolonial” sites of
knowledge production, the relationship
between vision and embodied, gendered
objects is both culturally specific and
informed by cross-cultural encounters
as well”. 20 The Iranian chador which
was revived in 1979 is similar to other
forms of veiling such as the haik in
Algeria. However, from 1982 onwards,
the chador was displaced by the
ubiquitous hijab, indicating some kind
a Pan-Islamic engagement between Shiite
Islam and its non-Shiite followers in the
Arab world.
In the late 1980s and the early 90s,
a younger generation of filmmakers was
already contesting the gendering of
Iranian cinema by bringing it in line
with the feqh regulations. This resulted
in a foregrounding of female protagonists
in films such as Bani Etemadi’s Banue-Ordibehesht
and Mohsin Makhmalbaf’s
Naubat-i-Ashighi. Few years later women
filmmakers began to question the way
in which Iranian women were being
represented in the films. From three
women directors in the pre-revolutionary
Iran, the numbers have now swelled to
eight, including internationally acclaimed
directors such as Samira Makhmalbaf
and Tahmineh Milani. This inspired
Mehrjui and Mokhtari to reappraise the
roles women played in Iranian films.
The result was the production of strong
women-oriented films such as Sara
(Mehrjui, 1992) and Zinat (1994).
Contemporary Iranian cinema has
emerged as the site where Iranian culture
and identity (iraniyat) can be constantly
negotiated and women seen as its filmic
bearers. New Iranian cinema has been
acclaimed by international audiences for
its realism, reflexivity and narrative
strategies that are different from those
of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Critics
and scholars have also noticed the
nuanced portrayal of characters,
particularly the roles of women in
everyday life. For example, Moore has
suggested that “One of the remarkable
features of recent Iranian films is its
allegorical use of gendered tropes, in
particular the (in)visibility and
(im)mobility of women in social
space. 21 Similarly, rejecting the charge that
censorship (veiling) has inhibited
creativity, Hamid Naficy argues for a
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