Persian theatre traditions (Culture/History)

Taziyeh:

Dabashi: "Contrary to Aristotelian mimesis, in Taziyeh there does not exist a stage-based, one-to-one correspondence between reality and its dramatic representation. The mimetic act in Taziyeh, as a result, is not permanent. It is spontaneous and transitory. A Taziyeh actor can do his lines as Shemr or Imam Hos-sein, and then while still on "stage" turn around and chat with a friend in the "audience" about a business matter. A quintessential condition of this manner of mimesis is that in Taziyeh there is neither a stage nor a proscenium, as there is in Greek theater, nor, as a result, an audience distinct from the actors. The stage is where the audience is, and the audience is integral to the stage. Acting as a result is not stipulated as a permanent (for the duration of the play) representation of some other reality. In Aristotelian mimesis, no actor ever comes out of character to say anything. If you notice in European theater, even when the actors all come to stage to acknowledge the applause of the audience they remain absolutely silent and in costume, for they are still onstage, and as a result they cannot dissolve the mimetic illusion of their characters. Not so in Taziyeh, where acting is predicated entirely on a spontaneous, momentary, and transitory conception of representation. The actor says his line and then he is no longer Imam Hossein or Shemr (historically, no women were allowed to act in Taziyeh, and just like old-fashioned Shakespearean plays in Europe, all the female roles were played by male actors). This particular manner of mimesis might be attributed to the doctrinal prohibition of artistic representation in Islam, or it might be related to the absolute inimitability (for they have an exclusive claim to infallibility) of Imams and saints." ....{compare to Brechtian vs Aristotelian conventions...}

"My suggestion here is that the double-edged sword of icastic (Muhakah) and phantastic (Takhyil) mimesis in Persian aesthetics gives the character of our literary, visual, and performative representations an altogether different quality than a mimetic tradition that gives primacy to one and ignores the other.
The best place to see this dual mimesis in operation is in a Taziyeh performance, because this passion play is formally and stylistically the dramatic embodiment of this particular mimetic feature. The mise en scene, narrative conventions, performance techniques, staging, costume design, sound effects, dramaturgical tensions, musical accompaniment, and audience participation in Taziyeh are mimetic modes both icastic and phantastic—without the two being (except at an analytical level) overtly identifiable. The dialectic result of these two conflating modes of mimesis is a kind of realism that usually baffles an audience that is conditioned to Aristotelian mimesis."

Influential on the cinematic modes (reflexive, breaking the fourth wall, characters shifting out of mimesis, etc) of Beyzai, Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Panahi especially with The Mirror, etc, and more generally of many of the traits of reflexivity in Iranian cinema in which fact and fiction merge.

http://iranian.com/Arts/Taziyeh/
http://asiasociety.org/time-out-memory-taziyeh-total-drama

The Travellers (Film)

1992. Dir: Bahram Beyzai.


Context:








The Film:

• Dabashi, on the film's ties to the Taziyeh tradition: "Consider the opening gambit of The Travelers—a woman facing a camera and telling the audience that she and her family are going to have a car accident and die. As you know, the stories of Taziyeh are pious remembrances of the lives and predicaments of Shia imams and saints, and the drama that animates a particular Taziyeh performance is not one of a plot crescendo in which a major crisis is generated, drawn out, and then resolved. The audience knows the story by heart, even before they have entered the theater (or the mosque or the street corner or wherever the Taziyeh is performed). So the challenge of Taziyeh is not to tell a story that no one knows and then let the hidden trauma gradually unfold. The challenge of the Taziyeh performance is in how to tell the story, for the plot of the story is already evident, or known. (In this respect Taziyeh is, of course, like European opera, where the audience again probably knows the story, or, if they have forgotten it, a summary is given to them before the opera starts.) So when Mahtab Davaran faces the camera and tells everyone what is going to happen, Beizai, in effect, is using a standard dramatic feature of Taziyeh—the audience has full knowledge of the impending tragedy before it even takes place. The result is rather shocking, because in cinematic narrative we are not supposed to know what the central conflict is until such time that it happens. But Beizai has here adapted a standard feature of Taziyeh drama, wedded it to a well-known principle borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock—that fear is when you know what is going to happen but you just don't know when it's going to happen—and alchemized the result with mesmerizing energy." [M&M, 263]

Reception:

The 'Kanun' Institute (Industry)

The Centre for the intellectual development of Children and Young Adults founded in 1965 on the initiative of the Shah’s wife. Its objective was to set up a large children’s library in Tehran and to promote the production and publication of reading material suitable for children and adolescents.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Intellectual_Development_of_Children_and_Young_Adults

Hamid Dabashi (International Reception)

Cultural historian, commentator and academic, originally Iranian from the South-West, but has lived and worked in NYC for a long period. Has written several books about Iranian cinema in English.





Quotes:

• "I believe in a bifocal perspective in what is enduring in our cinema—a vertical and a horizontal perspective. Horizontally, our cinema is linked to a global conversation currently underway among all the major filmmakers around the world. Vertically, I believe Iranian cinema is, inevitably, deeply rooted in a cultural universe much older than the history of film as an art form." [M&M, 258]
• "It is in the global performance of our art that we as Iranians can begin to see ourselves—and as a result I consider this awkward resentment that some of our compatriots have developed for the success of Iranian cinema abroad—they consider these films domestically irrelevant— entirely misplaced. Of course a Kiarostami or Panahi film cannot attract half as many people as a melodrama with perhaps a little bit of localized feminism thrown in for good measure. But the success of Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf abroad does not mean they are domestically superfluous. Those who accuse them of irrelevance need to consider the following: Those who object to the global success of Iranian films and point to their domestic irrelevance have a rather limited conception of what they call "the West."" [M&M, 28]
• "What exactly is particular about Iranian cinema? Quite a number of things. It comes out of nowhere. It is simple. Its exoticism is accessible. It is aesthetically ascetic, minimalist in its narrative construction, to the point of pictorial nominalism. It has "the Third World" written all over it. It reveals an image of a culture and society sharply different from that portrayed by the European and the US media since the Islamic revolution. Iranian cinema confirms its European and American audience's belief in the technological superiority of their culture. Iranian filmmakers are not glamorous and their simplicity set against the extravaganza of places such as Cannes or Venice is particularly disarming. A cinematic culture nauseated by excessive violence and tasteless sex is soothed watching a Kiarostami or a Makhmalbaf film. Iranian cinema is at once avant-garde and simple to read. No obscure theory is required to decipher it, as it is in reading a Bergman or a Tarkovsky or a Godard. Iranian cinema, in effect, laughs in the face of complicated cinematic theories, defies them all, posits its own manner of seeing things, and yet it cannot be ignored. Iranian cinema is neither theorized nor does it need to be theorized in terms (at once local and global) inimical to the social production of its own specific aesthetics. Iranian cinema is its own theory." [M&M, 329]

Amir Naderi (Director)

Born: Abadan, 1946.

Bahram Beyzai (Director)

Born: Tehran, 1938.



His output is not limited to cinema. He is a major scholar of Iranian performing arts, and has taught and written on the topic.  He is completely at home in classical Persian prose and poetry, painting, music, intellectual history, and philosophical discourse. But he is also equally at home with world cinema. He has written an authoritative book on Chinese theatre. He has directed and written plays, including the very influential 'Four Boxes' (1967), an allegory about oppression.
He is one of the most learned masters of Taziyeh, the Persian passion play.
His first film was a short, made for the Kanun in 1969. In the 1970s he began to emerge as a significant figure in Iranian cinema.
Once the Islamic Republic came to be, Beyzai was among those censored and harassed by its regime.
In the 1990s he made only one film, as his decision to stay in Iran meant he had little opportunity to work. His films also received comparatively little attention from the global cinema community, in part due to their complex nature rooted in the semiotics of Persian mythology, and also in part due to the 'NIC' of the likes of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf coming to define Iranian cinema internationally while other filmmakers were not given the same amount of scrutiny.

• Dabashi calls his style a form of 'mythic realism', deeply embedded in the symbolism of Persian culture. He wrote of the director: "Beizai is a filmmaker whose cinema, more than anyone else's, is rooted in the deepest layers of Iran's cultural memories, all the way back to its inaugural mythic imaginings"
• 
  
• Beizai once said, "You see, my duty is to show you things that you have not experienced yet and that are not tangible to you, for things that you already know are no longer of any interest to you. You cannot call these things that I show you unreal. Pages of newspapers are full of incidents, but since they have not happened to us we think they are unreal." [Dabashi, M&M, 257]

Filmography:

• Thundershower (1971)
• Journey (1972)
• The Stranger and the Fog (1974)
• Crow (1976)
• The Ballad of Tara (1979)
• The Death of Yazdegerd (1982)
• Bashu the Little Stranger (1986)
• The Travellers (1992)

Resources:

http://offscreen.com/view/bahram_baizai

Bashu the Little Stranger (Film)

1986. Dir: Bahram Bayzai.




Context:







The Film:

Bashu is a young boy from Southern Iran, close to the Iraqi border. Indeed he does not speak Persian but a dialect of Iraqi Arabic. His mother and sister are killed by a bomb during the Iran-Iraq war (glimpsed in brief flashback, and in the apparitions he - and perhaps even other characters- seems to see throughout the film). After surviving this he escapes on a truck, which takes him all the way to Northern Iran, somewhere around the Mazandaran province by the Caspian sea.
Bashu is completely bewildered in the jungles of Mazandaran. He hears the sound of an explosion and runs away in fear, thinking that these are the Iraqi bombers attacking, even though the sound has come from dynamite being used in the construction of a tunnel. He flees, bewildered and confused, through the rice paddies and woods, having no clue where in the world he has landed, for he was asleep when the truck left and he has no indication that he is even in Iran.











Reception:

Through the Olive Trees (Film)

1994. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.

Co-produced with CiBy (France), the Farabi Film Foundation (Iran) and Miramax Films (USA).



Context:

Kiarostami had first noticed some romantic tension on the set of Life and Nothing More..., with Hossein's attempted courting of Tahereh in real-life meeting some hurdles.






The Film:
The film begins with the actor playing the director, Mohammed Ali Keshavaz, directly addressing the camera in front of a crowd of young, chador-chd village women auditioning for the film. One woman asks if the film will be shown in her village and whether there is any point in making the film if it is not shown: Tour last film went out on Channel 2, which we can't get here.' At the outset, the film activates self-reflexive anxiety, not only about the construction of the film artefact but also about who its main audiences are - not rural inhabitants whose earthquake tragedy the crew has come to film, but 'cultural consumers back in Tehran and in cities around the world'.

Hossein is in love with Tahereh in real life and wishes to marry her, although her family have rejected him because he is illiterate and has no house. The film director, acting like a matchmaker, gives Hossein a second chance, potentially enabling life to imitate art.

In numerous retakes, Hossein repeatedly fluffs his line, displaying the complexities involved when art tries to imitate life. The repetition breaks the naturalistic illusion, together with clapperboards [with the title of this film rather than And Life Goes On written on them???] announcing the start of each take and bleeps calling for retakes.

Hossein sees the silver lining behind the earthquake, as a leveller that has put him and Tahereh's family on an equal footing, since their primary (class-driven) complaint against him as possible suitor was his not owning a house, by destroying everyone's houses. He expounds his logic in the truck scene, to the surrogate-Kiarostami... ("The rich should marry the poor, the illiterate the literate, the homeowners the homeless...")

The motif of the zigzag path (from e.g. Where is the Friend's Home? where it recurs several times on a hill, and also arguably the winding roads of Life and Nothing More... especially the finale) appears here too near the end, when Hossein and Tahereh climb up one before entering the olive grove of the final shot.

Events are referred to before they happen. This begins in the prologue, where the fictional director, talking direct to camera, relates that 'actors were hired on location'. Past tense shifts into present tense as we see the actors being hired before our eyes. In another instance, Hossein reports his visit to the cemetery where he sees Tahereh at her parents' grave (they perished in the earthquake), then the scene is dramatised (and filmed). This 'flashback' to the cemetery, where Hossein makes his proposal to Tahereh, happens almost without warning, our only bearing being that we've previously been told of this moment in an earlier (later in time) scene in the film.

Point-of-view shots are rare in New Iranian Cinema; but there is a startling instance of one here in the cemetery, where the camera takes Tahereh's position and shows Hossein as the point of her glance. Later, Hossein reveals, 'Since [you gave me] that look, I've been following you ...'.

Off-screen sound is used, especially (again, a Kiarostami trait) in the car journey scenes, which restrict the audience's view to a POV shot through the windscreen.

A shaky camera that is never quite sure where to stand, a story line that cannot resist departing tangentially, a dialogue that oscillates between a Tehrani accent and the local Gilaki dialect, a fiction that is prohibited by a reality it cannot control, a paradise-like village ravaged by an earthquake and invaded by this oudandish camera crew, a director who while waiting for a new leading man casually leaves his set to mingle with the local children or chat with the cook in his camp, and scores of other, similar ends that release this film and all its narrative boundaries into the surrounding hills of the village are the defining moments of Kiarostami's deliberately free-form mode of storytelling. [Dabashi M&M, 312-3.]

No young woman speaks to a young man in this film. Tahereh in fact epitomizes forbidden speech, which elsewhere is equally present. Young men do not fare much better. There is an absolutely mesmerizing scene where Azim, a local man who was first supposed to play the lead role, finally confides in the director that he cannot talk to Tahereh, "because whenever I talk to a girl, I stutter." This is the ultimate sign of an arrested culture in which an unarticulated sense of fear and shame prohibits the most natural of acts.

The long shot is almost identical to the penultimate sequence of Close-Up, where Kiarostami again instructs his camera and sound crew to stay out of private, and supremely beautiful, moments in people's lives.

Gary Dauphin, in The Village Voice (on 21 February 1995), has brilliantly captured the essence of this hauntingly beautiful shot:

"How Kiarostami weaves together these disparate threads is the film's closing gift to its audience. The last scene is less an ending about Hossein and Tahereh than it is a revelation of what Kiarostami has been doing throughout the film, the image comprising a cinematic gesture so in keeping with his always gende intrusions that to even reveal its existence is to do Kiarostami something of a disservice. Let's just say that much like Hossein's final trip through the grove of the film's tide, getting the point of Olive Trees1 ending requires a certain measure of faith, not so much in Hossein's blind love for Tahereh as in Kiarostami's love of all of them."

[Car motif, relevant for later films] The last shot is even more perceptive if one remembers that Kiarostami's camera has learned to know its limitations and keep its nose out of people's business only after its very opening shot when the camera literally opens into a wall, from which both it and the car that carries it have to turn away as they begin their journey into people's lives. The initial version of this delicately constructed sequence was damaged in a film laboratory, and Kiarostami had to reshoot it. The camera and the cars of the director and the assistant director in fact have similar intrusive functions throughout the film. They always have to negotiate an uncomfortable passageway for themselves into lives and spaces in which they do not belong. 

The ending was changed at the last minute, because of the director's own growing sympathy for his 'character' Hossein, whose importance grew as the production went along, helping Kiarostami shape it into something different than initially intended. (Note that at some point before the end of the shoot he'd described his film as a tale of social injustice and inhibiting traditions, but the final result is something more than this alone, in fact being the closest thing Kiarostami had ever made to a love story thanks to the ending.) Kiarostami's original ending was more pessimistic. Again the film shows the transformative power of cinema, as Kiarostami allows himself to show the ideal ending, the way he would wish real life were, as Tahereh finally (albeit we barely see it from afar) talks to Hossein. The music accompanying this memorable ending is a concerto by Cimarosa.

The extreme-long-shot of the end, where Hossein and Tahereh are reduced to mere dots in the distance, is of course partly down to censorship, but also displays Kiarostami's restraint in getting too close in moments of intimacy (think of the ending of Close-Up for example). It perhaps also indicates uncertainty in its open-endedness as Kiarostami himself knows no more than us of what will become of these two characters, hence adding a layer of real-ness to them. He has merely presented them to us. (But in many ways we know he also manipulates them while shooting, as the repetitive filming scenes show). This goes with the film's hybridity, as half-fiction, half-documentary.

The ending of course, also invites the audience's active participation, in choosing which interpretation or which ending they want to see (glass half-full or half-empty?),

Yet again in the same issue of Film, Naghmeh Samini gave by far the most insightful reading of the concluding scene of Through the Olive Trees, calling it a "magical long shot," and noting how the camera:

in the most sensitive moment, precisely at that instant when because of our previous cinematic experience we expect an answer for all our curiosities and thus share in the emotional climax of the work, the camera shies away from the focal center of contention, and authoritatively imposes its distance on us too. As if it does not consider us intimate enough, or think us worthy of closely witnessing this love poem.

On the same long shot, Ahmad Talebi-Nezhad, in his piece in the December 1994 issue of Film, offered a similar reading, emphasizing, however, that the intimate expression of love—of a sort that could persuade Tahereh to marry Hossein—is simply not permitted in Iranian cinema nowadays, and thus he accounts for the social and political imperatives underlying this hauntingly beautiful long shot. [Dabashi M&M, 292]

Reception:

As for his previous films, Kiarostami was attacked by some quarters of the Iranian press for this one. The magazine Naqd-e cinema accused (once again) him of taking advantage of the tragic earthquake in his filmmaking.

It met warm response at its Cannes screening however. The film was also set to serve as his 'breakthrough' into the US market, where it was shown at NY and Chicago festivals and purchased for distribution by Miramax.