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:
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