Asian Cinema - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2016

Iranian censorship forbids depictions of unrelated men and women touching one another. Given this, western scholars generally view Iranian cinema as poor territory for exploring love, sex and desire, with some even suggesting that pornography and Iranian cinema are two contrasting entities. Granted, it is difficult to find a direct representation of love and sex in Iranian movies but this limitation does not mean that Iranian cinema is devoid of such topics. In fact, as Hamid Naficy and Shahla Haeri both argue, Iranian directors have proposed very sophisticated, complex and ingenious methods for discussing eroticism, love and passion in their movies. When faced with strict censorship and social and moral barriers, what methods have Iranian directors developed in order to address love, desire and passion? In what ways do these methods emancipate or emasculate Iranian artists in their quest to express love and eroticism? This article attempts to answer these questions, arguing that it makes little sense to say that any authoritative system with a system of hegemony could prevent its citizens from expressing this impulse in their works since the sexual instinct is life’s drive and only at the moment of death can humans deny its existence. What is essential, radical and utopian is to read the meaning of eroticism in Iranian cinema through the specific culture in which the drive has been developed and shaped.

The 1970s witnessed an explosion of sex in Iranian cinema, and the representation of bodies and desires became more explicit than ever. The rise of on-screen sex flew in the face of successive guidelines released by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs (MCA) in 1966 and 1972, which sought to limit the production and exhibition of films that featured sexual relations. This article explores this paradox and begins to trace the contours of a history of cinematic sex in mid-century Iran by examining film industry advertising schemes, especially film posters, alongside three sex-driven films: Mansur Purmand’s Shir tu shir (Chaos) (1972), Feraidun Goleh’s Zir-e pust-e shab (Under the Skin of the Night) (1974), and Parviz Sayyad’s Dar emtedād-e shab (Into the Night) (1978). I argue that what emerges from such an analysis is a complex capitalist system wherein the film industry both produces and markets sex but also creates the illusion that anyone can purchase the visual experience of sex. By democratizing sex through its popular representations, the film industry fuelled its own capitalist agenda but also contributed to the larger systems of consumerism and sex that was overtaking the surfaces of Iran, particularly Tehran, in the final decade before the Islamic Revolution

Behrouz Afkhami’s Shokaran (Hemlock) (2000), produced by Howzeh Honari, set in 1995, depicts Mahmoud, a happily married man who finds himself stuck on the junction of religiosity and modernity. Mahmoud, who is religious-minded, becomes attracted to Sima, a widowed head nurse, and suggests that they contract sigheh. Mahmoud keeps his sigheh marriage a secret, and soon decides to end it, but Sima is pregnant. Sima threatens to ruin Mahmoud’s life, but realizes that she cannot do it. At the end of the film, Mahmoud is driving home with his wife when he realizes the road is blocked because of an accident. In Shokaran, Afkhami exposes a number of social problems, including sigheh marriage, and how religious regulations are used as a facade to justify social injustice. He sheds light on the double standards dominant in sigheh marriages. He dramatizes how the political becomes personal as individuals strive for morality. Through the character of Sima, Afkhami’s Shokaran reflects how the social and moral corruption of the time is mapped onto a woman’s body and how in order to eradicate social and moral corruption, a woman’s body has to be eradicated. Sima, who was desired and lusted after at the beginning, suddenly becomes despised and stigmatized. In this way, the socially peripheral Sima becomes symbolically central for she poses a serious threat to Mahmoud’s nekah marriage. Afkhami portrays a realistic treatment of love, sexuality and women through Sima’s body, which becomes the catalyst for a symbolic struggle between the social, religious and sexual forces.

The article examines different representations of masculinity in Iranian cinema, using Shahin Gerami’s essay ‘Mullahs, martyrs, and men: Conceptualizing masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran’ as the basis for its analysis. The article looks at examples of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema – in particular Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Nargess (1992) and Kamal Tabrizi’s The Lizard (2002) – featuring male characters that can be considered in light of the masculine archetypes that Gerami identifies. This analysis is prefaced by a brief consideration of representations of masculinity in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in particular Masud Kimiai’s Dash Akol (1971) as an example of the luti or ‘tough guy’ genre. By considering these different representations of masculinity, the article aims to address the gender imbalance in recent studies of Iranian cinema, most of which focus predominantly or indeed exclusively on the representation of women, as well as challenge stereotypes of Iranian and/or Middle Eastern masculinity more generally.

Representations of corporal struggle with and against the wind correspond in a very immediate sense to struggles for liberation from enslavement in Iranian history. They unfold in acknowledgement of Iran’s legacy of trade in black bodies. This article is a meditation on the ways that the wind in post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema functions to liberate the film viewer from its enslavement by the cinematic codes of sexual difference to the normative spatio-temporal coordinates of voyeurism and melodrama. This liberation plunges the viewer into the pleasures of a spirit that dwells in two worlds and forges a bond in complicity with film that is cinephelia otherwise.

Given his immense influence on cinema in his homeland, much has been said about Abbas Kiarostami as a quintessentially Iranian director and artist. Yet his most recent films – Shirin (2008), Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012) – offer interesting terrain for exploring how he deals with love and empathy beyond borders. This article examines these recent films to argue that Kiarostami’s growing cosmopolitan vision encompasses one way of going beyond the notion of the gaze as a mode of objectification and domination. Relying heavily on the power of the image, his is an aesthetic that invites care and empowerment, transcending violence and objectification by teaching the audience to look in new ways.