Keepinga distance

Iranian film-making began three years after the birth of cinema when, in the summer of 1900, Modhaffar Al-Din, shah of Iran, returned from a trip to France totally enamoured by this new medium.

By the 1960s many of those involved in the cinema industry had gravitated towards film making from an essentially literary milieu. Poets and novelists became film directors and the films they produced tended most strongly towards realism. As the shah's hold on power became increasingly tenuous, the state became ever more censorious and any film maker who dealt with social or political problems was immediately accused of trying to destabilise the regime, and hence of treason. During this period, those Iranian film makers who were not imprisoned, as was, for example, the director Mohsen Mekhmelbaf, either emigrated or kept quiet.

It took a few years for the relationship between the new Islamic regime and the cinema industry to become crystallised. Initially the cinema industry came under heavy attack, culminating in the burning of a number of films. Soon, however, members of the Iranian intelligentsia were able to convince Ayotallah Khomeini of the potential of creative media, and cinema especially. And so the Farabi Institute, a governmental body, was established with the aim of entertaining the religious spectator. It was entertainment with censorial restrictions, though: women were not allowed to appear on screen without the hijab even in scenes depicting a woman by herself at home; a required distance was to be maintained between men and women appearing in the same frame; and bearded men could not be portrayed in a negative light. On top of these censorship restrictions, the Iranian cinema industry had to face another obstacle, this time economic -- the withdrawal of government funds from the industry in 1992. Such constraints, however, did not prevent Iranian film makers from producing high quality, internationally acclaimed films.

Thanks to increasingly amicable political relations between Egypt and Iran, this is the first year that the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) has hosted Iranian films. In addition to To Be or Not to Be (directed by Kyanoosh Ayari), which is entered in the official festival contest, a special section of the festival, Lights on Iranian Cinema, is devoted to Iranian film. Although the CIFF catalogue/programme includes six titles, there are in fact nine Iranian films being screened at the festival. The three, all directed by Abbas Kiarostami, that were not mentioned in the catalogue/programme are: First Graders (1984), Where is My Friend's Home (1987) and Close-up (1990).

Two of the films screened in the first week of the festival provide clear examples of the ways in which Iranian directors not only adapt to the constraints imposed by censorship but, more importantly, do so in a creative manner, making of the limitations imposed an interesting filmic idiom.

The May Lady deals with the life of a video documentary director, a divorcee whose 20-year-old son shoots the films for her. The film, interestingly and in an indirect manner, deals with pressing problems facing the Iranian cinema, problems that serve as a microcosm of broader social issues. The difficulties encountered by the protagonist, an Iranian woman director, become a mirror for the personal and social problems facing Iranian women at large.

Into the texture of The May Lady are woven snippets of the documentaries made by the protagonist. These focus on the plight of mothers and the many problems they face in contemporary Iran, particularly with state security organisations. The protagonist's son is arrested for attending a party where both sexes are present, and is only released after an argument between his mother and the police officer. To counterbalance this scene, which might seem subversive in the eyes of the authorities, Bani Etemad has includes another scene in the film in which a police officer behaves cordially.

Despite censorship the film contrives to contain a certain amount of love-interest which is handled intelligently and sensitively. Indeed Bani Etemad capitalises on the constraints imposed in order to heighten, lyricise and intensify the love relationship portrayed in the film. The viewer never sees the man who is in love with the protagonist -- we only hear his voice over the phone, or as voice-over when she reads the letters he sends her. By not allowing the man to appear at all -- thus fulfilling the censor's requirements concerning the distance to be maintained between men and women appearing on screen together -- the director succeeds in marginalising the man and focusing, instead, on the woman protagonist's emotional state and the internal conflict she faces, torn as she is between her relationship with her son, on the one hand, and her sense of femininity, on the other. The film ends on a sad note, with a poignant scene in which the protagonist brings her relationship with the invisible man to an end in order to continue with her life as usual.

In spite of the successful appropriation of censorship requirements and their conversion into a sophisticated filmic idiom, some constraints Bani Etemad could neither escape nor transform. The protagonist always appears wearing the hijab, even in the privacy of her home. Yet even here the director was unable to resist a little subversive jab at the censor: in one scene the protagonist, home alone, begins to remove her head scarf... then CUT.

The Father, set in the Iranian countryside, follows the relationship between a boy and his stepfather. The boy, who works in a shop in a seaside town, saving money to be able to support his widowed mother, returns to his village only to discover that his mother has married a police officer. The boy is certain that his mother was forced into the marriage by her new husband who, simply because he is a police officer, is judged by his stepson to be the personification of evil. Such is the boy's hatred that he destroys his stepfather's small garden and even makes an attempt on his stepfather's life.

The film pivots around bridging the gap between the stepson's wildly erroneous image of his stepfather, and the reality of a police officer who happens to brimming with paternal feelings and who married in order to make a family. And just as Bani Etemad's The May Lady does not merely adapt to censorship constraints but rather actively utilises them, so too Majidi's The Father.

Majidi's film uses the photograph as leitmotif and symbol at two crucial dramatic moments. The boy's discovery at the end of the film that his mother and stepfather are not merely married, but happily and lovingly so, is catalysed by a photographer. The director could not show intimate domestic scenes on screen -- how could he with given the distance that has to be maintained whenever men and women appear in the same frame? So enter the happy, closely knit family photograph, father and all.

This discovery and reconciliation -- with the photograph as medium -- comes after a sequence of scenes drawing out the increasingly tense relation between stepfather and stepson has emotionally exhausted the viewer. The boy steals his stepfather's gun and runs away with it, only to be arrested by the stepfather. The journey back to the village through the desert is long and the stepfather is literally dying of thirst. The son, jolted into compassion by the spectre of death, pulls the dying step-father to a spring. The photograph falls out of the latter's pocket and floats on the surface of the water close enough for the boy finally to realise that his mother and her new husband love each other.

The photograph in this final scene, indeed the entire final scene, beautifully echoes and balances an earlier scene. When the boy, upon first returning to his home village, washes his face in a spring of water, a photograph of his dead father which he was carrying in his pocket slips out and he is unable to save it from drowning. It is a crucial scene that foreshadows not only the complications of the plot but also the film's resolution, the discovery and reconciliation, that occurs in the final scene.

Iranian cinema appears to be going from strength to strength. Not only have film makers continued to make remarkable films in the face of heavy-handed censorship, Iranian government officials are now taking steps to provide an atmosphere more conducive to the making of cinema. Not long ago, the Iranian minister of foreign affairs intervened to lift the ban that had been placed on Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherries, ostensibly because its director had refused to screen it at the Tehran Fajr (Dawn) Festival, but in reality because it dealt with the issue of suicide, something prohibited in Islam. Still, the film was released and went on to receive the Palme d'or.