Compliance and Resistance in Iranian Cinema’s Censorship Landscape: A New Approach to Analyzing Iranian Films

I have observed a persistent issue of reading Iranian films based on censorship and resistance in many realms, including media, film festivals, reviews, and academia. In this paper, I will show how some significant scholars of Iranian cinema, though having contributed to our understanding of censorship immensely, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, have focused on resistance and have conducted a unidimensional reading of Iranian films. I call this fetishizing resistance and propose a more contextual approach that, instead of selectively isolating moments in films, aims to read them more contextually to illuminate the complex intricacies of making films under the censorship of the Iranian government, demonstrating films’ resistance as well as the injection of the Islamic Republic’s ideas into them. The Islamic Republic is an authoritarian state that seeks to control and deploy all aspects of information and communication technologies, including filmmaking. It regulates public discourse and individual expression, injecting its ideas into films with various techniques. In the following, I discuss how censorship works in Iran. Many studies on Iranian censorship do not investigate the mechanism of production and resistance in Iranian cinema, creating a gap in their analysis, which could be the reason for their shortcomings.

The Mechanism of Iranian Film Censorship

It would be more informative to discuss the process of film censorship in Iran in conjunction with other regulatory measures than to explain it in isolation. Iranian censorship has many precedents in history, and the Islamic Republic has directly or indirectly taken advantage of the methods previously used in other parts of the world in different periods. For example, in line with Iranian Islamic censorship, the Central Film Control Commission in Ankara, Turkey, censored films’ content to protect a 'true’ Islam in the 1960s and 1970s, the golden era of Turkish cinema (Mutlu and Koçer 2012). Moreover, sexuality is still one of the main reasons for censorship in Indian cinema.¹ Furthermore, the Hays Code in the United States exemplifies one of the most similar censorship measures. In the 1920s, in the Jazz Age, American films depicted gangsters and sexually liberated women dancing, drinking, and engaging in nontraditional sexual activities with glamorous and provocative clothing. The Hays Code was created to restrict what was perceived as propagating "low forms of sexual relationship" and forced films to respect marriage and dress their characters appropriately (Leff and Simmons, 20). It also imposed other restrictions on crime, religion, slavery, and so forth (ibid). The modesty censorship rules that came after the Filmfarsi genre in Iran are very much reminiscent of the Hays Code’s emergence after the Jazz Age.

However, they differ in that there is no Code in Iranian censorship. More significantly, the Hays Code was a reaction to preserve cinema by the motion picture industry itself from the attacks made by different sections of society (Wittern-Keller 2013, 16). On the other hand, enforcing censorship in Iran resembles censorship in China in its different periods and the Soviet Union in that it is governmental. For instance, in China during the cultural revolution, a "three-layered" process was created for censorship that began at the provincial (in the case of Beijing and Shanghai, municipal) level, passed through to the next level of review by the "cultural group," and ending with the Political Bureau, which was the highest authority within the party hierarchy that would greenlight screening or banning of a film (Zhiwei Xiao, 122). Similarly, in Iran, the process is also multilayered but in a different fashion.

In Iran, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG), with its sub-organization, Cinema Organization, is officially responsible for censorship. The contemporary process is that filmmakers must first be allowed into the system by an established producer to create a film. Then, they must submit their screenplay to the Ministry through that producer, obtain the permission of the Police, obtain the permission of intelligence services and other organizations if they have been mentioned in the script, and revise the script according to the notes provided by the officials in the Ministry and other organizations to obtain the permit to make the film (mojaveze sakht). After making the film, they should submit the completed version and revise it according to another series of notes to obtain an exhibition permit (mojaveze namayesh). However, after receiving the exhibition permit, the film may still be censored or banned for various reasons, such as if some people close to the system find it Islamically immoral. Therefore, due to the potential presence of many organizations in the process, it can sometimes become chaotic and ambiguous.

Also, much like in China and the Soviet Union, censorship in Iran begins at the producers’ and production companies’ stage because many are directly related to the system. In the Soviet Union, the party members were co-writers and co-directors (Kenez 2001, 127). Similarly, as Zhang (2008, 26) explains, the situation was as complex in Mao’s China, where party members were simultaneously working as "filmmakers and Party cadres." "For this reason, the boundary between government censorship and industry self-censorship became very blurry" (ibid). These situations lead to a production strategy in which the governments not only"reactive" censor completed films but they "proactively" encourage producing materials that align with their ideologies.

In Iran’s similar state-controlled censorship atmosphere, there are two regulatory measures: reactive and proactive (Babak Rahimi 2015, 360). Reactive measures are the ones that are immediately recognizable, such as adding to or removing some parts from the films, prosecuting filmmakers, banning the films, etc. As I will demonstrate in this paper, almost all significant studies on Iranian cinema have focused on reactive censorship measures. However, the more prevalent censorship measure in Iran is proactive meaning-making. Proactive film censorship measures in Iran create films aligned with the state’s interest, such as propaganda films. As I will demonstrate, they also create an atmosphere where the favorable regime’s ideas are injected into micro parts of other films that need their permits.

On the other hand, Iranian censorship targets not only the films but also the people in the industry, such as directors and actresses. Mohammad Rasulof, Jafar Panahi, and Tahmineh Milani are filmmakers who faced imprisonment in Iran. Marzieh Vafa Mehr faced imprisonment for appearing without a proper veil in My Tehran for Sale (Geranaz Mousavi, 2009). This type of reactive measure of censorship also has precedents in the world. Directors escaping Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Spain in Franco’s reign testify to these measures. In Hollywood Blacklist, aka the McCarthyism era, anyone in the industry suspected of having communist tendencies would be prosecuted (Pollard 2015). Moreover, in Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), filmmakers became the target of censorship, and many artists were prosecuted as well (Xiao 2013, 122).

In short, censorship in Iranian cinema exhibits similarities and discrepancies with censorship practices in other parts of the world. Although it resembles the US historical censorship practices, it diverges from them in being state-controlled, like China and the Soviet Union. The Iranian government aims to produce what it desires by utilizing a multilayered reactive and proactive censorship system.

Targets of Iranian Censorship

What the Islamic Republic censors is also the subject of debate. Much has been said about Iranian film censorship, and the consensus is that the source of it is political. In the first four years of the Islamic Republic, Sadr (2006) argues in film censorship, "purely political perspective overshadowed all considerations" (185) Similarly, in his extensive research on film censorship in post-revolutionary Iran, Zeydabadi-Nejad (2009) considers "Political expediency" to be the main factor of film censorship in post-1989 era (43). However, in the works of these scholars, only a few numbers of censored films are treated, which is inadequate to reach such a conclusion.

Two issues should be addressed here. First, there is a tendency to differentiate political issues and modesty censorship rules that target women. Such a distinction is problematic since these rules are considered by many as political, and with the Woman-Life-Freedom movement in Iran, it has become more apparent how the regime sees them as a political device. In the case of Zeydabadi-Nejad (2009, 52), it gets ironic as his example of "political" censorship is The Circle (2000) by Jafar Panahi, which is censored because the political atmosphere of the time could not tolerate the portrayal of women in that film. Second, even with this differentiation, although censorship has a political aspect, this study argues that most censored films in Iran are not censored for their critical portrayal of social or political issues. Indeed, some scholars, e.g., Haghighi, assert this assumption. In "Politics and Cinema in Post-revolutionary Iran," Haghighi (2002) contends that Iranian cinema in its entirety is apolitical.

The key to understanding the atmosphere² of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema is its reaction to pre-revolutionary films. As Hamid Naficy (2011a) describes, the Iranian post-revolutionary is "Islamicate cinema" as opposed to immoral and inappropriate films that were produced before the revolution (8). This Islamization is the only significant difference in imposing censorship between post and pre-revolution cinema. Political and religious criticism was censored in both periods, resulting in a trend of self-censorship on these issues in tired and fearful filmmakers over time. Naficy, Azadeh Farahmand (2002), Agnès Devictor (2002), and some other scholars, though with different views, have explored the self-censorship process among Iranian filmmakers. Thus, this research proposes that what remains to be the target of censorship is the portrayal of women. Most films in contemporary Iran are censored because of the modesty censorship rules.

Although there are some exceptions to this notion, e.g., Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), there are many examples to prove it: In recent years, Manouchehr Hadi’s Rahman 1400 (2019) was censored for its sexual references, Kianoush Ayari’s Kanapeh (The Couch, 2017) was banned due to veilless female characters, and his Khaneie Pedari (Father’s House, 2012) was prohibited because of the representation of namoos killing (murder of a woman by a family member because of the supposed "family honour") in Iran. Many more films have been the victim of woman-centred censorship, which did not follow the modesty rules of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Moreover, it is insufficient to measure censorship by just enumerating cases of banned films. If we see censorship as an atmosphere in which films are being made, we must consider that any female portrayal in Iranian cinema is subject to severe censorship. It, unfortunately, has been normalized over the years of Islamic censorship in Iran, and it seems the audience does not see the veil, the un-naturality of females’ speech, the limitation of their movement, their actions and agencies, and the bodyless faces as Hamid Dabashi (1998) puts it. Non-modesty political issues, religious matters, and other censorial red lines could happen in some stories and some moments in films. However, censorship is at work whenever a woman is portrayed in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Iranian Censorship in Significant Studies

Naficy categorizes the portrayal of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema into four phases. In each category, he explains how censorship has contributed to some themes, Genres, and styles in Iranian cinema. In the first two phases, Naficy (2011b, 111–112) formulates his arguments in a binary relationship between artists and the government where the government is much more potent than the artists. There is no place for resistance in these two phases, and directors "adapt" to them. For example, in the first phase, the "Women’s Structured Absence," in the early 1980s, in the virtual absence of women and no ability to show sex, Naficy believes directors turned to two distinct styles: the violence of war and action films and the genre of children’s films where children replaced women as "delicate and beautiful elements" or onsor-e latif (ibid, 112–114). It is clear that Naficy sees the censor as a barrier, as reactive, but the censor does not just restrict; it also produces. As mentioned, censorship in Iran works in both reactive and proactive manners. The proactive ones produce films that are in place to promote the government’s legitimacy. By promoting, for example, children’s films of Abbas Kiarostami in this period, the Islamic Republic created a less radical, softer image of itself in international communities. Abbas Kiarostami’s and other children’s films of the era were being made parallel to the violent behaviors of the regime, including the mass execution of the Islamic Republic’s oppositions and a state-supported serial killing of Iranian intellectuals. Thus, Naficy’s claim could be reformulated as follows: since the Islamic Republic censored women, it encouraged the creation of films in the children’s film genre by funding, support domestically and internationally, awards, and the promise of screening with no reactive measure to offset its violent image. Even promoting violent films by some parts of the Islamic Republic could be aligned with inducing momentum in young people to join the war.

There is no unilateral relationship between the Islamic Republic and filmmakers, and the regime cannot proactively produce whatever it desires. However, it is crucial to remember that in a censorship environment, the regime’s reactive and proactive measures and adaptations and resistance by the filmmakers exist simultaneously. Until all the players in the game, all the factors do not intersect, a genre, a style of filmmaking, and a trend cannot exist, and, in the end, the body of the film that is produced carries recognizable wounds and traces of this process.

Naficy, like other scholars I discuss here and many critics, exhibit a tendency toward "fetishizing resistance." Fetishizer of resistance puts on a resistance lens to read films, extracts moments of that film, and describes how that moment is resistant to the censorship and the regime without referring to the context of the film and the production process it has gone through, thus substituting a part of a film for the whole. For example, Naficy discussed how some directors "subverted" the modesty censorship rules. In Leila (1997), Darius Mehrjui³ uses close-ups to depict the female character undressing instead of medium or long shots that would reveal her body (124). Interestingly, Naficy does not discuss how these "subversions" could have happened.

Moreover, his unilateral analysis overlooks that modesty rules, which go well beyond dress and hijab and extend to behaviors expected of women, are being proactively produced in the film. If the purpose of modesty rules is to make good, subservient wives and mothers, Leila is the emblem of what a Muslim inside the Islamic Republic, a regime member, would desire: a woman who finds a second wife for her husband. Could Mehrjui have performed this "subversion" in one scene had it not been for the film’s whole narrative arc, which aligns with the Islamic Republic’s ideology? Another illuminating example of how Naficy treats censorship with a resistance lens is how he refers to evading the "no touching" rule in Iranian censorship by placing mediators between men and women. First, his example, Gabbeh’s (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996) whole narrative arc, could be read as proactive meaning-making for the system, where women who create these gabbehs, in reality, suffer immeasurably but are depicted as romantically as possible. It is important to note that the film is a production of Iran’s Ministry of Handicrafts (co-produced with MK2). Therefore, it is, in essence, an advertisement for Iranian carpets⁴. Secondly, when finding patterns of evading the "no touching" rule, the most significant one in which the touching actually happens is what Hamid Taheri (2023) calls the "violent touch". Taheri shows how filmmakers, after the popularization of the technique by Mehrjui’s Hamoun (1988), have taken advantage of it to reach a more realistic portrayal of male/female relationships. Naficy and many others do not refer to the violent touch, probably because formulating this violent behavior as "resistance" is problematic. In other words, it cannot be fetishized.

Hamid Dabashi (1998) has a more contextual approach to resistance. He introduces his idea of "body-less faces" in the Islamic cinema of Iran, arguing that this issue has created a paradoxical situation for Iranian filmmakers. For example, in Mehdi Fakhmizadeh’s The Spouse (1994), although the main female character is a working woman that should potentially be a sign of power for her, the film is paradoxically normalizing the Islamic dress that conceals the body (ibid, 363). In an analysis of Pari (Mehrjui, 1998), he points to the philosophical inclinations of the film’s female character. However, he also mentions that due to her pale, emotionless face that hides itself, like her body that is hidden by the censor, "Pari is the nightmare of a culture of abstraction that had it not been for Kiarostami, Beiza’i and Makhmalbaf and their gloriously real camera would have totally forgotten how to live" (368). However, Dabashi states there is resistance to this Islamic cinema. For example, Iranian films resist normalization by using colorful local female dresses as an alternative to modest Islamic dresses (ibid, 365). Another way of resistance is that Iranian films, such as Beiza’i’s Ballad of Tara (1979), employ veiling and Islamic dress as subversive narrative devices. In the case of Beizai, he reexamines womanhood through mythological storytelling, where women utilize their bodies as hunters and fighters while being mothers (ibid, 368).

One of Hamid Naficy’s most significant contributions to the study of Iranian film censorship is formulating the Islamicate⁵ gaze theory that emerged in the third phase of his categorization. This gaze theory considers every private place in Iranian cinema, such as the bedroom or bathroom, public. It also forbade close-ups or suggestive interaction between female and male characters at the time. Essentially, Islamicate gaze theory presupposes the presence of a male audience in Iranian films whose gaze women are expected to veil from (ibid, 114–116). There are significant formal consequences for Iranian cinema emerging from this gaze theory: First, many directors like Panahi filmed only in public places to avoid unrealistic portrayals of women. Second, since women were always in longshots, they were "desubjectivised" and "decoporealised", denied of their bodies and subjectivities (ibid, 114–121). And finally, "the suspension of disbelief, which is part of film spectatorship in general, has to be augmented by the suspension of disbelief about the veil" (ibid, 120). Iranian filmmakers brought back the subjectivity of their female characters and close-ups to their narratives in the following phases. However, the other restrictions based on the Islamicate gaze theory still remain.

These Islamicate gaze restrictions that continue to this day are investigated by Negar Mottahedeh (2008, 2), who believes Iranian post-revolutionary cinema is the "apotheosis of 1970s feminist gaze theory" since Iranians created a cinema that stood against the perceived "contaminating influences" of mediating technologies and guarded against "Western melodrama’s dominant codes of voyeurism and fetishism" (ibid). In response to the restrictions of the new gaze theory, filmmakers made films that, in their form, carried a second-level message that was an allegory of their production condition, "mediating the national situation and the constraints on the industry" (ibid, 3). She calls this form a displaced allegory (ibid).

Consequently, she claims, Iranian film language, anchored in the veiled figure of women that acknowledges the presence of male viewers (ibid, 14), can only be analyzed by considering its production conditions, including the censorship of Iranian cinema and a Shiite cultural and political context that governs filmmakers consciously and unconsciously (ibid). Although Mottahedeh makes claims that are difficult to prove, such as the claim that Iranian women’s cinema could not have been possible without the modesty censorship rules (ibid, 11) and having a fetishizing approach to resistance in films in her analysis, her contextual approach to the Iranian film text as reflexive of conditions of production such as censorship, and the dominant culture, offers an accurate textual analysis strategy.

While Mottahedeh and Dabashi have contextual approaches that aim to analyze Iranian cinema more holistically, they do not explain how filmmakers could have performed their perceived resistance or circumvented censorship in different phases. In other words, they do not discuss the mechanisms that made the resistance possible. Why were films successful in some cases, and why sometimes were they banned and directors prosecuted? Seeking to bridge this gap and studying the last phase of Naficy’s categorization, "Veiling and Modesty as Political Criticism", Langford has investigated the resistance to the modesty rules by utilizing the Melodrama genre.

In "Practical Melodrama: From Recognition to Action in Tahmineh Milani’s Fereshteh Trilogy", Langford (2010, 345) argues that Tahmineh Milani’s films take advantage of the primary Genre of Iranian cinema, Melodrama, to provoke empathy and demonstrate the political and societal issues arresting the development of Iranian women. She claims that Melodrama has become a crucial tool and means for figuratively demonstrating ideas that otherwise would have been censored. Using Linda Williams and Thomas Elssaesser’s ideas, Langford also claims that Melodrama smuggles a critique of society and raises sympathy for victims under powerful forces beyond themselves (ibid, 344). She states, "These more powerful forces would invariably be the contradictory social attitudes and morals put in place and perpetuated by dominant (patriarchal) ideology. Melodrama allowed these social contradictions to be explored on a personal and emotional level" (ibid).

Langford’s analysis of Milani’s film has two significant outcomes. She shows how films, especially Melodrama, can be read as resistant by decoding their "hidden layers." Simultaneously, it shows how misleading it could be to analyze films textually without investigating their context thoroughly, which, in a way, resulted in her implying that Iranian censorship can be "tricked" by Melodrama. As meticulous as her reading is, Langford, in line with some other international scholars such as Niklaus Reichle (2014), draws conclusions about the Iranian censorship process that are not accurate. Milani’s Fereshiteh trilogy consists of three films: Do Zan (Two Women, 1999), Nimeh-ye Penhan (The Hidden Half, 2001) and Vakonesh-e Panjom (The Fifth Reaction, 2003). First, she does not mention that Milani was prevented from making the first film for five years because "the censors claimed that her film would make women por-ru (shameless and challenging)" and she had "unjustly criticized the man in her film" (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2009, 46). Secondly, Milani was jailed for the second part of the trilogy. Therefore, not only did the censors not get tricked by using Melodrama and figurative language, but they also reacted with extreme measures. Proposing a more accurate explanation of the process, Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad (2009, 30) rightfully challenges the idea of "tricking censorship" and instead believes "there are complex negotiations at work" in Iranian censorship.

Zeydabadi-Nejad (2009, 6) states that there are two complementary negotiations at work in Iranian cinema. On the one hand, filmmakers negotiate with the system to navigate its censorship regulations. He adds that the constant negotiation of boundaries with censorship officials is a form of resistance for filmmakers that challenge the regime’s control (ibid, 14). Based on his interviews with people in the industry, he argues that negotiations between filmmakers and officials in MCIG shaped post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. For example, in the early years of the Islamic Republic, a subcategory of religious films called mystic film dealt with the theme of "love of God". Gradually, in negotiation with the system, filmmakers associated "earthly love" as a symbol of "love of god" or "real love," therefore, paving the way for romantic relationships in films between men and women (ibid, 42). These negotiations also depend heavily on the time’s government’s ideologies, tastes, and needs. In line with Zeydabadi-Nejad’s ideas, one could argue that the fourth phase of Naficy’s categories that witnessed a rise of "women’s films", political films against patriarchy and addressing gender issues, would not have been possible without a reformist, more liberal government.

On the other hand, the audiences also partake in the negotiation of meaning in watching films (ibid, 6). They interpret films concerning the intended or unintended messages of films and, in this way, resist the state’s imposition of meaning (ibid, 14). Therefore, acts of cultural resistance are not singular revolts but everyday plural acts against the regime’s power performed by both filmmakers and audiences (ibid). In this way, Langford’s reading of Iranian Melodrama is an act of resistance.

As accurate as his analysis is, Zeydabadi-Nejad does not fully adhere to his own theory. I agree with him that there are complex negotiations at work. Still, I can’t entirely agree that negotiations’ outcomes are always “resistance”. The opposite is true most of the time. A resistant idea could become neutral or aligned with the regime’s ideas in these negotiations. Moreover, it is essential to acknowledge that the regime maintains the dominant position in this negotiation. They have the authority to ban and cut films and imprison artists. Therefore, there are negotiations; however, the outcome is often favorable to the Islamic Republic.

Another misconception that could arise from Zeydabadi-Nejad’s negotiation theory on the part of the audience is that if the audience reads a film as resistant, that film will become a resistant piece, paving the way for misattributing and overusing the word. Audiences can have a resistant reading of even a propaganda film, but it doesn’t mean the film resists the Islamic Republic. Moreover, it could encourage reading films with a resistant lens, which fetishizes resistance and misses the parts favorable to the Islamic Republic. I want to clarify that I do not place a value on what is for or against the Islamic Republic. My aim is to read films based on censorship. There are unlimited readings of a film, but if one aims to read a film based on censorship, we require a more contextual approach that considers resistant elements and their opposite inside a film.

Finally, his theory does not include diegesis negotiations, and the reason Zeydabadi-Nejad and others do not refer to this matter might lie in their insistence on finding resistant elements in their readings. Many filmmakers afraid of the reactive censorship measures proactively make meanings inside their films aligned with the regime’s ideology. In other words, they negotiate with the system inside their narratives. The fear the artists face under the ambiguous censorship of the Islamic regime is immense. For example, why was Milani imprisoned if she could have successfully negotiated with the system and made and exhibited her films? This case demonstrates the complicated censorship in Iran, where although MCIG is officially responsible for censorship, different agencies such as Police and intelligence services can interfere. In the case of Milani, Mohammad Khatami and Ahmad Masjed Jamei, the reform government’s president and the head of MCIG, respectively, appealed to the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and Milani was freed from jail. Even though Iranian filmmakers undergo every stage of censorship, the system’s reactionary tactics of these kinds create an environment of uncertainty that induces significant self-censorship among Iranian artists, the self-censorship that could potentially leave traces of voluntary, proactive meaning-making for the regime in their films.

Therefore, for a theory to be more inclusive and illuminating in analyzing Iranian films based on censorship, it must take into account the conditions of the production of the film, its negotiations with the system, reactive and proactive censorship measures imposed on it, be holistic and avoid fetishizing resistance a film’s scene, frame, or any separated parts.

Perspectives on Censorship and Iranian Cinema

In an institution like the factory, for example, the worker’s labor and the worker’s knowledge about his own labor, the technical improvements—the little inventions and discoveries, the microadaptations he’s able to implement in the course of his labor—are immediately recorded, thus extracted from his practice, accumulated by the power exercised over him through supervision. In this way, the worker’s labor is gradually absorbed into a certain technical knowledge of production which will enable a strengthening of control. So, we see how there forms a knowledge that’s extracted from the individuals themselves and derived from their own behavior. (italics by me, Foucault, 84)

Using Foucauldian terminology, the Islamic Republic has gained knowledge through microadaptations performed by filmmakers over the years. It has created a censorship environment in which many Iranian films proactively produce meanings in micro parts, a scene, a dialogue, and a frame inside the films aligned with the regime’s ideals. This is as opposed to the previous understanding of censorship in which the censor would work reactively to ban or cut scenes from the films or prosecute filmmakers, or the filmmakers would only resist these regulations.

In the early years of the Islamic Republic, both reactive and proactive censorship measures would work in a macro fashion, creating an atmosphere for some films to be made or usually banned complete films. The system gradually moved toward micro-managing. Nowadays, the proactive censorship of the Islamic Republic has changed radically, and their ideology is injected, whether by their direct notes or by the artist’s voluntary self-censorship, into micro parts of a film. I am not implying that these measures have not existed before or that there is an evident change in censorship methods. However, these micro-injections are more prevalent now. Mehrjui is one of the first directors to clearly and directly enter an explicit negotiation of meaning inside his films’ narratives with the regime. The example of Leila that I mentioned, or when he designs a narrative where Pari, an intellectual woman, goes to a mosque or that she constantly prays (zekr gooi), or the references in his films to the Islamic traditional rituals such as Nazri could be seen as this type of ideology microinjections⁶.

Therefore, as mentioned, these proactive microinjections are sometimes not imposed directly on the filmmakers. They have adopted these measures, and it is a self-censorship process that, for many, has become unconscious. As Naficy (2011a) recounts, one of the temporary "liberal" censorship measures was to remove the approval of the screenplay stage for A-list filmmakers such as Bahram Beizai. However, "while this removed one of several phases of censorship and was welcomed by most artists, it also forced the filmmakers to become their own censors or to risk financial ruin" (38). Although this "advantage" is removed now, filmmakers are still their own censors in many occasions not just to pass the stages of censorship in MCIG, but because they know, like Milani, they could face the reactive measures of the regime even after the screening of their film.

The Islamic Republic has accumulated knowledge of censorship based on these microadaptations or self-censorship. Also, as mentioned, like China and the Soviet Union, many Iranian filmmakers and producers are on censorship boards themselves and know the craft, injecting the regime’s ideas into the esthetic of the films they review via censorship notes. Therefore, this is a system that is developing steadily. They accumulate knowledge of censorship with the help of filmmakers, produce agents of censorship in the body of the government with this knowledge, and give these agents the power to produce films. This process continues in a cyclic-evolving mode. Of course, the process is not as neatly performed as hoped, and many agents become dissident after some time, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf. However, most agents or insiders remain in the system and enjoy the opportunities provided for them in the system.

These agents are also producers of films with internationally celebrated directors. Before becoming a producer, Asghar Farhadi worked with Mahmoud Razavi, the current prominent propaganda producer in Iran. Saeed Roustayi’s last film, Leila’s Brothers (2022), which premiered at Cannes, was produced by a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer, Javad Norouzbeigi. He also broke into the industry with Life and a Day (2016), produced by Saeed Malekan, another prominent propaganda producer. Houman Seyedi’s Sheeple (2018) was produced by Said Sa’di, who started his career by filming the Iran-Iraq war and was the production executive for the Art and Cultural Institute of the Islamic Fighters (Razmandegane Eslam). These are just some examples, and the root of the regime has grown inside Iranian cinema’s soil, linking people and films from various ideologies. Therefore, there is no clear binary between artists and the regime, and like Mao’s China, the boundaries between censorship and self-censorship are blurry.

From a market’s point of view, because of this situation, some filmmakers and the government have diverged over the years. Filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, Ali Asgari, and many more do not obtain permits and make films outside the regime’s proactive censorship. These films are made for international festivals and markets and expect no return from the domestic market. All of these filmmakers face the reactive measures of censorship. Rasoulof and Panahi were imprisoned, and Ali Asgari is banned from leaving the country at the moment I am writing this paper.

However, filmmakers such as Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Roustai, Houman Seyedi, and many others have succeeded in both domestic and international markets. This is a new phenomenon of the post-Farhadi period. Farhadi’s films, as I have discussed previously , mark a significant departure from the previous art-house Iranian films in that they enjoy both markets concurrently (Taheri 2023). Whether there is an insider present in the production or not, in their negotiations with the system, these films show signs of both resistance and compliance with the regime’s ideology because of their market needs. The negotiations of these films sometimes happen both inside the narrative and in the paratextual discourses surrounding a film.

The audience, including ordinary filmgoers, film critics, and academia, contributes to developing intricate proactive censorship strategies. The audience’s knowledge and competence in interpreting the films evolves, especially in the contemporary internet age, with social media and other platforms for open communication relatively outside the control of the Islamic Republic. Their reading can be considered an act of resistance against the state’s hegemony, as Zeydabadi-Nejad has shown. However, the insider audience, who favor the Islamic Republic, can reinforce the system’s position in interpreting the films or attack the unfavorable elements they have identified fiercely. Consequently, the audience’s increased knowledge and engagement in the interpretation process motivates the state to develop its censorship strategies to become either more subtle or aggressive in its reactive and proactive meaning-making censorship system. Therefore, another cyclic feedback system is at work in the reception of the films that should be considered when studying Iranian films’ relation to censorship. This is why studying paratextual discourse surrounding a film is also significant.

In short, the relationship between the Islamic Republic, filmmakers, and audiences is an evolving process. Filmmakers resist and adapt to the censorship measures for various reasons. On the other hand, the audience’s interpretation evolves. Consequently, both factors motivate a cyclic and evolving censorship system in the Islamic Republic that seeks to proactively produce the meaning it desires using various techniques based on its accumulated knowledge, most of which it has gained through the filmmakers and the audiences themselves.

I will analyze About Elly (2009) in the following to show how these considerations could work in analyzing a film. I have chosen this film first because although some scholars, such as Mehregan (2022) and Langford (2017), believe Iranian cinema has shifted away from the poetic, metaphorical language of allegory after A Separation (2011), I believe it was About Elly that laid the ground for many of the recent films in form and microadaptations to the regime’s censorship. The film’s language is nonpoetical⁷, and one can see the traces of censorship more directly. Secondly, Farhadi’s success in Berlin with this film was one of the first instances where a filmmaker with a high domestic market appeal could also win a significant award at one of the big three (Cannes, Venice, Berlin) and started a wave of what I mentioned as post-Farhadian films, demonstrating both resistance and compliance. Finally, the negotiations of this film with the system surpassed the film itself because of the issue of the government with its actress, Golshifteh Farahani. Therefore, it can be an excellent example of how the newly developed censorship methods, resistances, micro-adaptations, microinjections, and paratextual discourse negotiation could interact in one film.

The Case of about Elly

About Elly is about a group of young Iranian couples that travel to the north of Iran for their vacation, bringing an outsider, Elly, to potentially match her with Ahmad, one of their members. The following is a short example of how this film can be read with the considerations I described. Many points could be made about the film; however, the following serves as an example of the approach in action and is not a comprehensive analysis.

In this film, men and women interact intimately in public places and a villa in north Iran. They are all from the middle class except for Elly, performed by Taraneh Alidoosti, a working or lower-middle-class guest. There is no shyness or the old type of "modesty" where women kept their distance from na maharam men (husband, father, brother, son, and uncle), didn’t laugh and kept their happiness contained in a shy smile. They participated in social gatherings in a non-segregated manner, meaning they weren’t kept away in the kitchen, for example, to make the food and talk among themselves. They were joking and playing games in the main room. Their manteaus were shorter than usual in Iranian films, and they were more careless with their hair and movements. Most were portrayed as equal to men and had input on everything. For instance, in one scene, men and women all voted to choose a villa equally. To take matters further, Sepideh (Golshifeteh Farahani) was the group’s leader, which caused a sense of insecurity in her husband, Amir (Mani Haghighi). All these pointed to a new type of female portrayal in films, and this collective image could be considered a resistance to the dominant interactions in Iranian cinema. Iranian middle-class audiences also recognized this new image and responded positively to it in paratextual discussions, such as those in social media, and the box office.

Another level of resistance emerges in the characterization of Elly. At the insistence of Sepideh, she has joined this journey to meet Mahmoud (Shahab Hosseini), Amir’s brother and Sepideh’s brother-in-law. She searches for a better life with someone not only from the middle class but from Europe, specifically Germany. The portrayal of the act of migration, leaving Iran, as a way for women to improve their quality of life could be considered a critique of the state and an act of resistance. Nevertheless, the more significant resistance is unfolded when, after her disappearance in the sea, it is revealed that she has a fiancé. Therefore, she was betraying him by being there. One should consider that in Iranian society with stricter societal norms, the act of thinking about someone else by women when they are in a conventional relationship is considered taboo. Elly has doubts, can’t participate in social interactions, and has a deep sense of sadness in her, reflecting her inner doubts about her act of searching for a better life and disregarding her fiancé. In this way, Farhadi grants the agency to his character to perform acts outside the defined borders of modesty. Even in the narrative, there are hints that her act was considered "immodest" by other characters. Hasan Abbasi (2009), one of the most radical theorists close to the government, believes this film aligns with the feminist project of haia zodai (Modesty Dissolution).

Another nuanced resistance regarding the modesty rules was a critique of masculinity in the film. Amir, meaning a king, is irritated by his wife’s level of competence, agency, and popularity. Moreover, when Elly’s fiancé finally emerges, it is revealed that he is a traditional, religious man who says prayer a few hours after his arrival, potentially hinting that Elly longed to abandon her traditional lifestyle for a more modern one before her death. However, regarding censorship, it introduced a new complex form of negotiation with proactive and reactive measures of the system. All these resistances are being performed with a complex diegesis negotiation with the system that potentially could reduce its extent.

Although these men and women are not all mahram, they are unnecessarily related, except for Elly, who is very careful about how she acts. Her carefulness is justified by her not knowing anyone. Each couple is connected by blood through their wife or their husband to the others. In other words, they are part of an extended family. Moreover, the most significant feature that limits the scope of resistance is that Elly dies. She is drowned in the sea, and her death is a reminder of poetic justice that the sinner, the "immodest," gets what she deserves. Although this death is a dramatic act, potentially influenced by a generic tradition, this theme aligns with the Islamic view of the state, reinforcing the ideas embedded in the modesty rules. One could argue she was doomed to die under modesty censorship, and the film could get banned if she didn’t.

Moreover, Amir violently hits Sepideh after Elly’s death because she insistently brought Elly and lied about her marriage status. His physical violence seems to be justified for other characters. Justified violence against wives is something the Quran and the Islamic Republic allow. This action could be read as aligned with a sadistic Muslim male gaze (Taheri, 2023). Mostafa Abedinifard (2019, 117) suggests that this act in the film shows "how men of different social statuses might consciously or unconsciously exploit male privilege to secure the patriarchal dividend." (emphasis in the original) However, I firmly believe that at that point in the narrative, the violence is treated as justified rather than a critique of masculinity. I see these as the potential results of censorship notes, internalized censorship or unintended dramatic consequences. However, whatever the reason, Farhadi, consciously or unconsciously, proactively produces what the system desires and eschews reactive censorship.

Unfortunately for Farhadi and the film, the situation went beyond his control. Golshifteh Farahani appeared unveiled in Body of Lies (Ridley Scot, 2017) and on its red carpet, and the film was temporarily banned. However, this obstacle showed that the negotiations with the system in this work go beyond diegesis. The film’s co-producer is Mahmoud Razavi, one of the most influential producers in Iran and a consultant to Mohammad Reza Ghalibaf, the head of the Iranian Parliament. In one of the few instances in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema, a right-wing president, Ahmadi Nezhad, interfered, and the film was exhibited. There is no evidence connecting the producer, the film’s proactive measures, the film’s unbanning, or even its not being censored in the first place due to its crossing the boundaries. This disparate information can be connected through this type of analysis, which could explain About Elly’s direct and indirect negotiation with the system.

Overall, About Elly shows signs of resistance to the modesty rules potentially limited by their reinforcement in close reading of the film. The film also features negotiation with the system on a production level, with the role of its producer and the interference of a right-wing president.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hamid Taheri

Hamid Taheri is a doctoral candidate in media studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, where he investigates the effects of modesty censorship rules on Iranian films. He has written extensively in Iranian and foreign publications and peer-reviewed journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. He is also a translator, and Rick Altman’s Film/Genre, translated into Farsi, is the most renowned of his translations. Taheri is also a screenwriter and filmmaker whose name appears on several TV series, feature and short films.

Notes

1 See Mehta, M. (2012). Censorship and sexuality in Bombay cinema. University of Texas Press.

2 I am using the word atmosphere to refer to the discourses, mechanisms, and various factors that are at work in film production and reception in Iran.

3 At the time of the publication of this paper, Mehrjui and his wife were brutally murdered. According to official findings, their murder seems irrelevant to Mehrjui’s status as a filmmaker; however, the reaction of many directors and artists, such as Mani Haghighi, that fear this could be the start of another wave of state-controlled serial murders of intellectuals, following the chain murders of 1988-98 in Iran, shows the extent of ambiguity and horror that artists and intellectuals face in Iran under the Islamic Republic’s regime and is a significant topic of study for the future.

4 Because it is state-funded for advertisement, it can even be considered propaganda.

5 It is important to note that the Islamicate gaze is different from Islamization in that the latter was a process of “purifying” Iran from “toxins” such as Western ideals. However, the Islamicate gaze and Islamicate cinema, though they were reinforced in the process of Islamization in post-revolutionary Iran, refer to the gaze and cinema that is a product of a predominantly Muslim country. This is how Hamid Naficy uses the words following Marshall Hodgson’s formulation of the term “Islamicate.” However, I must emphasize that this formulization is faulty and needs more discussion. To reduce the cultural products of some countries to religion, however predominant that religion might be in those countries, is problematic. The formulation seems in line with a Western gaze and needs a comprehensive discussion that is not the issue of this study.

6 There is always a justification for these injections, such as the interpretation that these elements increase the realism of the work. However, when reading a film based on censorship, it is necessary to recognize which elements align with the censor’s ideals.

7 I do not agree with Langford that this film has a figurative language.