Ayatollah Khomeini (Culture/History)

Interest in mysticism (e.g. in the writings of Ibn Arabi)... making him somewhat less conservative than the majority of the ulema.



Relevant quotes:
"Cinema is one of the manifestations of culture and it must be put to the service of man and his education" [a pragmatist view towards cinema, wishing to islamicise it rather than ban it]

Houshang Golshiri (Culture/History)

1937/38?-2000.

One of the most gifted and influential writers of his time, Golshiri was born in Isfahan and raised in Abadan, and thus brought a fresh and unexpected vision to the Persian fiction of his time, which had become increasingly based in Tehran. Golshiri's family returned to Isfahan, where he finished high school, and where he went on to attend the University of Isfahan. Upon graduation, he began teaching at various elementary and high schools in the region. His increasing political activism landed him in jail in 1962. By the mid-1960s, Golshiri had published a potpourri of poems and short stories, and then was instrumental in establishing Jong-e Isfahan, a progressive literary journal that quickly moved to the vanguard of Iranian fiction. Between 1965 and 1973, Jong-e Isfahan was among the leading literary journals of the time, initiating some serious critical discussions about the nature and function of fiction.

Golshiri had begun writing fiction in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s his short stories and poems were appearing in various literary journals. His first collection of short stories, Mesl-e Hamisheh (As Always, 1968), announced a major literary voice—confident, defiant, with detailed attention to a range of prose and narrative techniques. But it was not until the publication of Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) that the Tehrani literary critics had to pay a visit to Isfahan. This novel was adapted into a film by Bahman Farmanara in 1974: see Prince Ehtejab.

Golshiri's second novel, Christine va Kid (Christine and the Kid, 1971), was not as critically acclaimed as Prince Ehtejab, but as an experiment in autobiographical narrative it was a tour de force of unparalleled daring and experimentation—staccato phrases, broken and unreliable memories, miniature-like narrative depictions, implication of the reader in the narrative, and many other similar tropes. His political activities then once again landed him in jail for about six months in 1973.

At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Golshiri was active in organizing the famous "Ten Nights" of poetry and prose readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, a watershed of revolutionary mobilization against the Pahlavi regime. In the summer of 1978, he was invited to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. While in the US he gave a series of lectures to Iranian students across the country.

Forough Farrokhzad (Culture/History & Director)

Born: 1935, Tehran. Died: 1967, Tehran (Automobile accident).

More famed as a modernist poet, of iconoclastic and feminist tendencies, she also made her name as a filmmaker with the short documentary about a leper colony, The House is Black, made in 1962.

Before this she had made her first steps into the world of cinema by working with Ebrahim Golestan, whose 1958 documentary A Fire she edited. That documentary, with its Bronze Medal award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival represents the first Iranian film to win international acclaim. She then collaborated on more of Golestan's films. She and Golestan were in love and were rumoured to be having an affair (Golestan being married). She also wrote scripts and acted in a few films. All of this was perfect apprenticeship, but one should not get the idea that filmmaking was particularly important to her creative life. Her poetry remains what is regarded as her greatest achievement and is not diminished in the slightest if one removes her brief brush with cinema. Nor is there any evidence that she value cinema any more than her other non-poetry artistic endeavours, such as painting or travel writing.

The failure of her marriage (she was a 16-year-old bride who convinced her father to let her marry) and subsequent divorce leading to her having to leave behind her only son, were traumatic and guilt-inducing experiences which inspired her art. In a way she had to leave behind her husband and son (and her father, i.e. all three patriarchal symbols) in order to fully emancipate herself as an artist. Dabashi reads in her art a simultaneous fear and attraction to the guilt and shame that consumes her. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.

Dabashi writes: "I feel I have wasted my life," she once wrote in a letter to Golestan, "and know much less than I should at the age of twenty-seven." This was in 1962, by which time she had published three of her five volumes of poetry and made The House Is Black, The same sentiment is evident in her travelogue from her trip to Europe in 1956. Whatever great work of art she saw in Italy left her feeling far more humbled than inspired.

Her works of poetry include the collections:

• Captive (1955)
• The Wall (1956)
• Rebellio (1958)
• Another Birth (1964)
• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (1967)

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

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]

Persian Miniature Painting (Culture/History)

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

Sohrab Sepehri (Culture/History)

(1928-1980)
Poet and artist. Considered one of the greatest proponents the New Poetry movement which occurred in Iran in the 1950s and 60s, Sepehri was actually also a painter. He can in some ways be seen as the poetic counterpart of Abbas Kiarostami, who took the title of Where is the Friend's House? from a poem by Sepehri, as well as dedicating the film to him in the first frame.
 

"In 1951, Sepehri published another collection of poetry, The Death of Color, and by 1953 he had graduated from the College of Fine Arts— the top of his class, he went to the royal palace to receive recognition from the monarch, who had just been restored to his peacock throne by a CIA-engineered coup. In 1957, Sepehri traveled to London and Paris, where he studied lithography at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1958, his paintings were exhibited at the Venice Biennale. By 1960, he had secured funding to go to Japan and study wood engraving. After returning to Iran he traveled to India, came back to Iran and began traveling around the country and exhibiting his work throughout the early 1960s, while publishing volumes of his poetry, and in 1970 he moved to New York and lived on Long Island for a few months. He spent much of the early 1970s showing his paintings in Europe, North Africa, and the Levant, including Palestine." [Dabashi]

Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Culture/History & Industry)

Responsible for regulating the import and export of films in Iran. As of the early 1990s, it set limits on foreign, especially US, films, with for example, in 1991 and 1992 only one and two US films licensed for exhibition in Iran respectively. Iranian cinemas must pay higher tax to show foreign films, with these taxes subsidising the Farabi Cinema Foundation and production of new Iranian films.
The Ministry reserves the right to censor scripts or films, at various production stages, including after they are finished and screened at the Fajr International Festival, which is organised by the Ministry and falls under its supervision. The films there are classified (by the Ministry) into four categories, 'A' through to 'D', based on their perceived quality according to a mix of formal and social criteria. A and B films receive far more support and distribution.

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) supervises Iran's film industry. Its censorship regulations include rules of he jab (women's veiling and modesty). Films undergo multiple stages of inspection, in addition to synopsis and screenplay stages. The precise rules are always changing, due to debates between government agencies and filmmakers, film critics and audiences - but not always to filmmakers' benefit. Mohammed Khatami, who was appointed Minister of the MCIG when it began in 1982, was known as a supporter of controversial filmmakers like Mohsen Makhmalbaf - one of the reasons why he was removed from his post in 1992.

Mohammed Khatami (Industry & Iranian Culture/History)

Generally reputed as being more liberal and reform-minded, and benevolent towards the arts. Was the Minister of Culture and Islamic Orientation between 1982 and 1992, and later President of the Islamic Republic in 1997, holding the post until 2005.
In 1983, one measure taken was to ban the distribution of video cassettes and close down video clubs across Iran.
Farabi Cinema Foundation was founded, which oversaw the cinema reforms and reported back to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance

References:
Albert Elena book, 'The School We Went To' chapter.