A different kind of Iranian film: Iranian Women Unveiled

ABSTRACT

My feature-length documentary, Iranian Women Unveiled, is a portrayal of the lives and struggles of six influential Iranian women activists, now living in exile, engaged in a number of areas of political and social activism. The choice of women activists was a deliberate attempt to leverage an empowered representation of women in cinema, as a polar opposite to the dominant patriarchal and misogynistic portrayals in Iranian cinema. My film applies a particular perspective in the representation of women in cinema around a number of key themes, such as women's bodies, women's voice, dance, music and use of colour. The cinematic forms and devices that I employ aim to allow an actually existing, empowered image of the Iranian women to emerge. The film aims to challenge the dominant patriarchal portrayals of Iranian women, primarily in Iran’s official cinema, but also the cultural-relativist representations prevalent in many mainstream films in the West. My documentary is an application of this counter-perspective, contributing to novel ways of representing women, gender and sexuality in cinema, from a modern, emancipatory and feminist perspective. The screenings of the trailer and episodes of the film have already generated lively discussions within the academic community.

KEYWORDS:

• Iranian cinema
• women
• representation
• documentary film
• independent
• feminist

Introduction

My documentary, part of a practice-based PhD project, is a portrayal of the lives and struggles of six influential Iranian women activists, now living in exile, engaged in a number of areas of political and social activism. These areas encompass the fight for women’s rights and equality, for secularism, free thought and expression, for civil liberties, for the abolition of the death penalty and stoning, for justice for families of executed political prisoners, and for workers’ rights. The six women in my film, together, thus represent important areas of social protest in the current Iranian society against the Islamic regime, institutions and laws in Iran and, more generally, against political Islam.

By making this documentary I aimed to challenge the dominant stereotypical representations of Iranian women in cinema – whether in Iran’s official cinema or in the cinema in the West – which view women from Iran either through the lens of religious misogyny (in its extreme form in Iran’s official cinema) or from the perspective of colonial or postcolonial prejudice, as in orientalist and cultural-relativist narratives and productions both in Iran and internationally. As my target audience, I envisaged not only the academic community in the UK and internationally, in particular within the departments of film, media and cultural studies and the wider humanities, but also the interested general public and the feminist and civil rights activists’ communities. As the initial indicators of the impact of the film, I will be looking for the overall reception of the film, the generation of favourable and critical reviews, the start of a ‘buzz’, a debate and even a controversy, academic citations, requests for screening, interviews and invitations to speak, panel discussions and formal and informal feedback. Indicators of actual positive impact in the long run would be the emergence and practice of emancipatory, feminist perspectives in the representation of Iranian women in cinema, actual film productions based on such perspectives and the beginnings of the development of a progressive Iranian cinema.

A counter-cinema

The idea for my research and film started from observations and then critical thinking both as a consumer of films and in my own professional life with thirty years of experience in documentary video making and broadcasting. I began by considering how the portrayal of Iranian women in cinema had presented me with images I was uncomfortable with, to say the least, and which I found contrary to my own experience as a woman from Iran. I, therefore, set out to challenge those representations, critically examine them and explore the ideological meanings that underpin them. Based on this critical evaluation, I decided to make a film which, as a polar opposite of the prevalent practices, would provide an empowering representation of Iranian women in cinema; a representation which more accurately reflected the current reality of the lives and the struggles of Iranian women for emancipation.

More specifically, my critical evaluation identified three main forms, broadly speaking, in which these prevalent cinematic portrayals of Iranian women are manifesting themselves:

• The gross misogynistic, often religious, depiction of women in Iran’s official cinema, where women are wrapped up in chadors and only shown in relation to men, as traditional homemakers and subservient wives, mothers and sisters, faithfully following ‘their religion’ and its misogynistic edicts. Examples of Iranian films where this kind of depiction is prevalent include Mother (Madar, Hatami, 1990), The Glass Agency (Ajanse Shishei, Hatamikia, 1998), The Lizard (Marmoulak, Tabrizi, 2004), The Outcasts (Ekhrajiha, Dehnamaki, 2007) and Butterfly Swimming (Shenaye Parvaneh, Kart, 2020).

• The more subtle representations of women, found in both Iran’s official cinema (especially films exported to international film festivals and more or less independent productions outside Iran), which reinforce an unrealistic, traditional and weak image of the women in Iran; images which, above all, are more revealing of the prejudiced perspectives of the respective filmmakers. Examples of such films include A Separation and About Elly (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin and Darbareye Elly, Farhadi, 2009, 2011), Ten and Shirin (Dah and Shirin, Kiarostami, 2002, 2008), Two Women and Unwanted Woman (Do Zan and Zane Ziadi, Milani, 1999, 2005) and Nargess and Under the Skin of the City (Nargess and Zire Pooste Shahr, Banietemad, 1992, 2001).

• The orientalist, cultural-relativist representation of Iranian women (and, more generally, women from ‘the East’) found in movies made in the West, but also in Iran’s official cinema, which, having elements of both the two forms above, stereotypes Iranian women as weak, traditional, loyal, religious, bound to the kitchen and the house, and at best as victims. Here, these ‘women from the Islamic East’ are assumed to be content with their traditional, second-class position, as voluntary bearers of the compulsory hijab and servants of the men in the house. Examples include Not Without My Daughter (Gilbert, 1991), House of Sand and Fog (Perelman, 2003), 300 (Snyder, 2007), Argo (Affleck, 2012) and RoboCop (Padilha, 2014).

The following themes and choices, which I employed, helped to leverage the project’s aim of giving an empowered image of Iranian woman:

• An all-women cast – to challenge a male-dominated cinema, protected by a male-dominated misogynistic state;

• Women activists – to challenge the notion of passive women, to highlight women’s action to change their own and the social circumstances; active, confident, powerful women;

• A collective of women – to highlight a sense of collectivity and sisterhood and commonness of purpose, and the power that the collective generates through combined action;

• The filmmaker as an activist – she appears as a collaborator in the film, along with the film’s subjects, and her own life story is narrated in the written work;

• The project as an act of intervention in the struggles – a work of activism, and not merely (or primarily) an academic research project;

• One-woman crew (from research to filming and post-production) – to highlight an empowered position for the woman filmmaker, who, furthermore, has sole and total control and decision-making;

• Women’s bodies – how the existing control (through reactionary opinion, laws and regimes) on women’s bodies is challenged via nude protests;

• Women’s voices – how the ban by an ultra-reactionary misogynistic religious regime on women laughing, singing and dancing in public and in the presence of men is challenged by the women in my film being loud, vocal, singing and dancing in public;

• The use of bright colours, and specifically, the colour red – to defy the dark and black colours of covering women and girls and making them invisible, formless, character-less and identity-less; to highlight colours of life against the colours of death and mourning practised and imposed by the religious regime;

• Scene selections in filming and then editing – to emphasise the women subjects’ powerful presence and position in society, at public events and at home, e.g. as leaders and as main speakers at public events and protests;

• The mise-en-scène, props, cutaways, use of footage, photos and objects, which were carefully planned to depict the modern and progressive character of the current-day Iranian woman, in contrast to the stereotype of being regressive and traditional;

• Absence of hijab or other religious coverings for women, and, on the contrary, depiction of anti-hijab public protests by women (the Girls of Revolution Street), scenes of nude protests by activists outside Iran, the wearing of bright clothes, the drinking of wine and the use of make-up to emphasise the liberated and defiant status of the Iranian woman and the anti-hijab and anti-religious fight by the women in Iran.

The theoretical context

As the methodological choice for my project, I opted for an activist, practical, anti-fatalist and emancipatory feminist approach. Thus, the method underpinning the project is one which emphasises the human ability to change their circumstances; that history is made, not given or pre-determined. Thus, it adopts a non-deterministic reading of Marx’s method and philosophy of change, embodied succinctly in Marx’s critique of mechanical, passive, one-sided materialism, which sees the human being only as the product of circumstances, but not at the same time as the agency that changes those circumstances. For the ‘practical materialist, i.e. the communist’, writes Marx, ‘it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing things’ (Marx and Engels 2011). This is in contrast to old materialism (including that of Feuerbach), which conceives Man only as an ‘object of the senses’, not as ‘sensuous activity’. Similarly, in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx criticises old materialism for not conceiving ‘human activity itself as objective activity’ and for forgetting that ‘circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself’. The ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ ends with the famous 11th thesis that ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx and Engels 1845). This active, human agency-centred perspective allows for the kind of activism, which my research has been informed by and which it has tried to reflect in its exploration of the issue of women's representation and in the documentary.

In the twentieth century, this methodological approach and tradition included, loosely speaking, thinkers who reacted critically (albeit with an idealist bias) to the fatalist and technological Marxism of Soviet Communism and the official Communist Parties in Western Europe – theorists such as Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin and Adorno and others from ‘Western Marxism’ (encompassing Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School).

A more contemporary representative of the activist, ‘practical materialist’ and anti-fatalist tradition, which in my view more closely shares the approach of Marx, is the Iranian Marxist Mansoor Hekmat (1951–2002), who applied an activist and human-agency centred method to late twentieth-century political and social analysis and party-political socialist activity. Hekmat's Marxism has had an important impact on the political and social activists in Iran's opposition, including the women participants in my film, who make several references to him in the film. See, for example, Hekmat (2000, 2001).

In my documentary, to use Julia Lesage’s 1978 term for early feminist documentaries, I have ‘show[n] the unshown’ (Lesage [1978] 1990, cited in Waldman and Walker 1999, 287) by a portrayal of representative, but at the same time, ordinary women. Those documentaries aimed to raise awareness and create a feminist community, for example, Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975), Behind the Rent Strike (Broomfield, 1974), Women of Rhondda (Esther Ronay, Mary Capps and Mary Kelly, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Segrave, Humphry Trevelyan, 1973), With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade (Gray, 1979), Harlan County, USA (Kopple, 1976) and Union Maids (Klein, Mogulescu and Reichert, 1976).

I have followed a similar path with my documentary, both in the sense that my documentary in itself is a work of activism and in portraying activist women. My own activism as a filmmaker and my symbolic participation in certain scenes provide an added element to my documentary as not merely a passive reflector and interpreter of reality, but also an active participant in bringing about change. In the West, women’s documentaries such as School Without End (Scuola senza fine, Monti, 1983), and in the Iranian diaspora's independent filmmaking, women filmmakers such as Pantea Bahrami and Lila Ghobadi may be counted as activist documentary filmmakers, whose films are committed to consciousness-raising themes, especially on women’s and human rights subjects.

Towards a progressive Iranian cinema

My project showed how in a society living under a systematic state misogyny, enshrined in its laws and built into its ideology, women have become important agents for change in opposing the regime, not just for themselves but for the society as a whole. Thus, as a counterpoint to the misogynistic portrayal of women in Iran’s official cinema, I decided to make a film with a predominantly female cast from Iran; moreover, women who are all powerful women’s rights campaigners and activists. My film highlighted the activism of these women, who in turn welcomed the film as an active, practical contribution to their own activism and campaigns; as an artistic production with a powerful political and social message and impact.

At the time of writing, my film in its finished form has not yet had a public screening as it is at the final stage of the doctoral examination. So the actual impact of the film needs to be assessed at another time and over a longer time frame. However, my talks and presentations on the film so far have generated interest, questions, discussion and debates. This was the case during my presentations at two consecutive annual Work Play Conferences at Middlesex University (April 2017, March 2018), my talk at Politicised Artistic Practices, also at Middlesex University (October 2020), and my presentation at MCRAW (Media & Cultural Resistance: Beyond Gender Stereotyping) International Conference at Manipal University, Dubai Campus (May 2016). In my presentations, I have included stills and episodes from the film and also a trailer. Finally, the publication of my book chapter ‘Women, Agency, Documentary: First Cut of Shahla’ in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (Parsafar 2020), which discussed a stand-alone episode of my film, namely Shahla, has also received positive feedback from readers and colleagues and students within the academic community.

Conclusion

Applying an activist, feminist and emancipatory perspective, my film aimed to challenge the dominant patriarchal portrayals of Iranian women, primarily in Iran’s official cinema, but also in many mainstream films in the West. The overall reception so far, judging from the audience reactions at screenings of the trailer and episodes of the film, has been positive, generating lively discussions within the academic community. The film could serve as a practical example of the application of an alternative counter-perspective with the aim of providing an empowering representation of women in both Iranian and international cinema.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pune Parsafar

Pune Parsafar is a filmmaker, researcher and educator. She is a PhD candidate, nearing the completion of her practice-based PhD at the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries at Middlesex University London. She is currently researching representation of Iranian women in cinema, including in documentary, fiction and experimental genres. Her film, Iranian Women Unveiled, is a feature-length documentary, portraying the lives and struggles of six influential Iranian women activists, now living in exile, engaged in a number of areas of political and social activism.