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SCREENING REFORM

Campaign Movies, Documentaries, and Urban Tehran

The 1997 presidential campaign period marked a momentous development in the Iranian political process. For the first time, presidential candidates were allowed to release campaign movies to publicize their platforms and promote their candidacy. This new policy afforded filmmakers the opportunity to rally their support for Khatami in an unprecedented way. Not only could they use their celebrity to endorse Khatami, but they could also leverage their technical skills to campaign on his behalf.¹ This new campaigning rite also redrew the boundaries of voter spectatorship in Iran by representing candidates onscreen through a system of cuts, edits, and soundtracks typical of the film industry. Just as the 1960 televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon forever changed the landscape of American politics by putting the candidates on the small screen, so too did the campaign movies (film-hā-ye tablighāt-e entekhābāti) in Iran alter what it meant to visualize a candidate. No politician was better suited for the screen than Mohammad Khatami, the smiling seyyed (seyyed-e khandān) who, Time magazine suggested, “would look at home in an Armani ad.”² From his rosy cheeks and well-trimmed beard to his tailored, chocolate-colored robes and designer shoes, Khatami challenged Khomeini’s stone-cold stare, which was ever-present, plastered on buildings and billboards. The new campaign movies of 1997 allowed Khatami to redefine the face of politics in Iran, and his charismatic presence onscreen no doubt contributed to his landslide victory on May 23, 1997.

Filmmakers such as Seyfollah Dad, Behruz Afkhami, and Ahmad Reza Darvish directed campaign movies for Khatami, and many of them later found success in his administration.³ But these officially sanctioned movies represented only one avenue through which filmmakers engaged Khatami and his election. His eight-year presidency bore witness to an unexpected and unprecedented trend in Iranian cinema. For the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history, a high-ranking politician became a regular feature onscreen—and not just in state propaganda but also in documentaries and narrative films, both popular and so-called art-house productions. In particular, between 1997 and 2005 a number of films were released that dealt explicitly with Khatami’s campaign periods, both his initial election in 1997 and his reelection in 2001. Certainly these open representations of the political system spoke to the larger ideals of civil society that Khatami promoted during both of his campaigns. But political reform, more than just allowing cinema to push the limits of representation, became a major force or character within films themselves.

The complicated relationship between Khatami and the film industry during these electoral periods emerges forcefully in the works of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. She once attested to her special relationship to Khatami in an interview with Sight and Sound when she said, “I am sure that if Mohammad Khatami hadn’t been elected, this film [May Lady, 1998] would never have made it onto the screen.”⁴ Her next two films—Zir-e pust-e shahr (Under the skin of the city, 2000), a narrative film set during the 1997 election period, and Ruzegār-e mā… (Our times…, 2002), a documentary about Khatami’s reelection in 2001—foster both a theorization of what it meant for Khatami to function as a character within films and an appreciation of how certain filmmakers made sense of his election and later reelection. These two films in particular depend on the representation of urbanism, interrogate the documentary form, and reveal Bani-Etemad’s ambivalence toward Khatami and his reformist movement. The films together indicate that the harsh realities of life in the city create the need for political hope but at the same time block attempts to satisfy it. Bani-Etemad’s cinematic relationship with the city of Tehran ultimately betrays her critique of the reformist movement, which focused on repairing Iran’s global reputation rather than addressing its local problems.

Despite Bani-Etemad’s insistence that she be classified as neither a female nor a feminist filmmaker,⁵ the existing scholarship on her films focuses heavily on her role as a female director and her representation of women.⁶ Her body of work, however, indicates a distinctly urban style. The city of Tehran functions as both the setting and a complicated character in all of her films. By examining two of these metropolitan narratives, it is possible to move away from a strictly feminist reading of her films and to analyze her urban aesthetic. Under the Skin of the City and Our Times… together suggest that Bani-Etemad’s cinematic city depends on three features. The director employs a fusion of documentary and narrative styles that complicate the viewer’s understanding of representation and reality. She plots economic and class difference geographically on Tehran’s north-south axis to suggest a multiplicity of urban experiences. And finally both films depict housing crises in the south of Tehran and locate architectural experiences as nodal points through which other economic and class struggles are mediated. Bani-Etemad’s urban aesthetic powerfully attends to the complicated task of representing, promoting, and criticizing the reformist movement at election time.

DOCUMENTARY AND COMMITMENT, REALITY AND REPRESENTATION

Under the Skin of the City opened in 2001 to wide critical and popular acclaim and won the award for best director at both the fourth annual Cinema House Festival and the second annual Social Films Festival. It was also the first film by Bani-Etemad to be distributed in the United States.⁷ Under the Skin of the City, which takes place during the 1997 presidential elections, tells the story of a house and family, whose members each try to carve out a meaningful existence in an unfair and unforgiving urban landscape. Tuba provides her family with its main source of income as a factory worker and finds comfort in the stability of homeownership. Her husband, Mahmud, once a political activist, is injured and unable to work but attempts to assert control by plotting to sell the family home to a builder who is buying all of the neighboring houses. Mahmud is encouraged by their eldest son, Abbas, who works as a delivery boy, a job that requires him to navigate all of the city’s districts. He needs the money from the house to process travel documents so he can fulfill his dream of going to Japan to earn money. Ali, the younger brother and a promising student, who is teaching his mother to read, has abandoned his own studies to participate in campaigning efforts, much to the dismay of his family members, who hope that he can save them from financial hardship by going to college. The youngest child, Mahbubeh, pursues a close friendship with her neighbor Masumeh, whose drug-addict brother beats her regularly. Tuba’s oldest daughter, Hamideh, is also a victim of domestic abuse. Married to an abusive husband, she has one child and is pregnant with another; she regularly returns to her family’s home to escape the abuse.

The narrative comes to a head when Mahmud and Abbas sell the house, but the travel agency processing Abbas’s paperwork disappears with his money. In a desperate effort to recover the money, he agrees to an underground job delivering drugs. However, Ali foils his efforts by secretly dumping the merchandise during the long drive outside the city. Meanwhile, Masumeh has fled her abusive brother, abandoning Mahbubeh and joining a gang of homeless youth. Abbas, unable to account for the missing goods, must also flee, and the film ends on Election Day with Tuba’s announcement that she has lost everything. At the same time, she describes her reasons for voting and therein articulates a hope for change that remains with us long after the film’s images have left the screen. This moment in the film, in which Tuba mediates her personal desires through the electoral system, signals Bani-Etemad’s commitment to social commentary. Tuba makes a connection between her situation and her country’s circumstances. The parallel that she draws between herself and the collective brings into focus the fact that Under Skin of the City’s social concern is greater than just one woman or one family.

The film’s mode of representation also speaks to the social concerns that are central to Bani-Etemad’s work. Under the Skin of the City is framed as a documentary, bookended with two documentary moments. The opening shot, which shows an image of Tuba in a viewfinder as a documentary crew prepares to interview her about the upcoming elections, signals the fact that this is a film about documentary filmmaking, and the film also ends with the film crew interviewing Tuba about her decision to vote. Her slip in this final interview—when she mentions that “people are always filming”—hints at the possibility that all of the footage between these two moments in which the film crew appears onscreen might actually represent a documentarian’s visual evidence. Under the Skin of the City stages a documentary within the film, one whose reliability as a representation of the “real” is, at every turn, undercut by the film’s professional actors and its publicity as a fictional film. The film’s framing documentary moments suggest the extent to which Bani-Etemad’s social and political activism, including her critique of the reformist movement, is tied to her engagement with the documentary form.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad once described the relationship between film and reality by suggesting that the Iranian film industry is “duty-bound to attend to reality.”⁸ She attributed this level of commitment to the shared experiences of her generation of filmmakers, who began working and flourishing under the dire conditions of first a revolution and later an eight-year war. Bani-Etemad’s statement attests to a trend in Iranian art-house cinema in which filmmakers reveal a sense of obligation to reality and at the same time interrogate the ways in which film represents it. The commitment to reality in Under the Skin of the City is significantly different from the style appropriated by Abbas Kiarostami and others. Bani-Etemad’s film is invested in the documentary form, but it does not gather documentarian evidence or participate in a neorealist style. Instead, Bani-Etemad creates a fictional documentary crew in her film. The viewer hears the male director’s voice (which clearly does not belong to Bani-Etemad) and sees the film crew’s equipment. Images of the crew’s “documentary” are mediated through the equipment’s various screens. These images are different from Kiarostami’s Namā-ye nazdik (Close-up, 1990), for example, in which the film is the documentary. Under the Skin of the City adds a layer of representation: the camera captures another camera capturing the documentary subject.

Unlike Kiarostami, who “intervenes” in and “pokes” at reality in his Close-Up, Bani-Etemad fictionalizes documentary filmmaking.⁹ This technique invites a reconceptualization of the relationship between representation and reality, and specifically the ways in which film creates reality and how we access it. The reconfiguration of representation and reality in Under the Skin of the City reveals the director’s critique of the reformist movement. The film trains the viewer to challenge the ways in which the reformist movement both has been represented and has represented itself. Bani-Etemad creates a complex system in which the documentary form is subverted in order to call into question the reality of the reformist movement.

Documentary is a complex mode because it represents rather than replicates reality.¹⁰ Despite documentary’s claim to reality, the nature of images and image making undeniably necessitates an insurmountable gap between object and representation.¹¹ Under the Skin of the City, a narrative film that introduces documentary filmmaking into a diegetic space, blurs and intervenes in the relationship between representation and reality on the one hand and narrative and documentary on the other. Bill Nichols has extensively detailed how documentaries use certain visual and rhetorical strategies to assert their authority and to collapse the boundary between reality and representation.¹² The documentary ethos—its claim to reality—has over time conditioned viewing practices within audiences, who consume documentary films differently than narrative films, and this practice of consumption, like the consumption of other mass media, is often uncritical. Under the Skin of the City through its representation of documentary challenges the authority that audiences have unwittingly granted documentary filmmaking and, by extension, other “discourses of sobriety” or systems of information that people assume are the truth, including politics, religion, science, and education.¹³

Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City is not the first film to disrupt the uncomplicated relationship between documentary and reality, and by fictionally representing the mode, she references an entire history of Iranian documentary, which features reflexive documentaries that problematize their relationship to reality as a means of critiquing the social and historical worlds they index. Early documentary work in Iran during the 1920s and 1930s, which included newsreels documenting the royal court and works by foreign documentarians who came to record the country’s heritage and development, eventually gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to what Nichols calls “a shift of epistemological proportions.”¹⁴ Regarding the American tradition, Nichols explains that whereas previously documentary “suggested fullness and completion, knowledge and fact,” more recently it has taken on the character of “incompleteness and uncertainty.”¹⁵ In Iran, a new reflexive documentary style coincided with the New Wave movement, which is generally regarded as a trend within narrative filmmaking. These documentaries, including Ebrahim Golestan’s Kharābābād (Ruinville, 1962), Forugh Farrokhzad’s Khāneh siāh ast (The house is black, 1962), Kamran Shirdel’s Tehrān pāytakht-e Irān ast (Tehran is the capital of Iran, 1966) and Un shab keh bārun umad (The night it rained, 1967), Nader Afsharnaderi’s Balut (Oak, 1968), Naser Taqvai’s Nakhl (Palm, 1970), Manuchehr Tayab’s Ritm (Rhythm, 1972), and Parviz Kimiavi’s Peh mesl-e pelikān (P as in pelican, 1973), attempt to unravel documentary’s claim to the real by problematizing its informing logic. This corpus of films challenges the presumed indexical relationship to a lived, historical world, and it inspired a trend within Iranian cinema that uses this “truth form” to reveal, counterintuitively, a series of untruths.

Kamran Shirdel’s 1967 documentary The Night It Rained is a representative example of the move in Iranian documentary filmmaking to call into question the representation of reality. The film provides a particularly engaging exploration into the nature of the relationship between documentary and the real within the Iranian tradition. It takes as its starting point a story from recent headlines and constructs the viewer’s initial understanding of the event by showing the printed media’s coverage of it. At the start of the film, a barrage of newspaper headlines and articles flash across the screen. A young boy heroically stopped a two-hundred-person passenger train outside of the village of Gorgan before it reached a bridge that had been washed out by heavy rains. The film reveals its purpose by showing a letter from the Ministry of Art and Culture that commissions the film crew to make a documentary about the event. The film primarily comprises a number of contradictory statements by journalists, railway employees, and government officials, none of whom can agree about the specific details of the event or even if it happened at all. The most contested detail is whether or not the boy would have been able to use kerosene to light his jacket on fire in order to signal the train to stop during a heavy rainstorm. Although logic prevails for many of the subjects interviewed, the most devoted advocates of the story insist that it was possible for the boy to ignite his jacket despite rains heavy enough to wash away a bridge.

Shirdel skillfully juxtaposes contradictory statements to underscore the unreliability of evidence, and in the process he casts doubt on the whole system of knowledge: how we create, access, and maintain knowledge. Early in the film, he also highlights a disconnect between the spoken voice and the corresponding images on the screen: The phrase “conversations between the men of Lamelang” signals the image of men standing silently with cigarettes in their mouths, and “Lamelang, with its pleasant climate and hospitable inhabitants” cues several shots of dogs playing in the rain. The uncertainty comes to a head late in the film, when the documentarian voice promises an interview with the heroic boy, who, the viewer hopes, will clarify the inconsistencies that the documentary has thus far uncovered. The boy’s statement conforms more or less to the affirmative statements in the film. Shirdel, however, interrupts his version of the story with images and sounds of contestation: “it’s a pack of lies” and “unfortunately, that is not the case.” This technique breaks up and destabilizes the boy’s account.

The viewer is later ushered into a one-room schoolhouse where a young boy is reading aloud from his textbook. The story that aurally unfolds is precisely the same sensational story that the newspapers and government have claimed for the boy, complete with the detail about the lit jacket, and the film never makes clear whether the boy’s heroic act was inspired by the story or whether the textbook story led the boy to make up a similar story. The Night It Rained ends in the same pool of uncertainty it has created. A letter from the local governor to the Ministry of the Interior confirms that the event reported in the newspapers is correct, which prompts a flood of audiovisual material that points to the story’s many fallacies. The Night It Rained demonstrates a subversive use of documentary within the Iranian tradition intended to compound the viewer’s conception of reality by providing layers of uncertainty and contradictory evidence. By calling into question the category of evidence, the film also questions the construction of truth and documentary filmmaking itself. The Night It Rained’s appropriation of the documentary form to question these categories no doubt shaped future cinematic efforts in Iran, including Under the Skin of the City.

Bani-Etemad’s long and complicated relationship with the documentary form has critically informed her representation of it in Under the Skin of the City. Like Iranian cinema, the director’s career began with documentary. She directed documentaries for television early in her career and has continued to make documentaries alongside her feature films. The director noted that “documentary filmmaking is my first love,” and she claimed that “it is a way of keeping in touch with the multiple layers of society”¹⁶ by allowing her to “mediate more directly” her social “apprehensions.”¹⁷ At the same time, Bani-Etemad laments the fact that “documentaries are seen less often and discussed less frequently.” As a result, she locates the value of narrative film in its ability to “relate more often and more easily to a sympathetic audience.” Bani-Etemad ultimately finds the documentary medium “more appealing, and this aspect comes out consequently in [her] narrative films.”¹⁸ The director reconciles her competing desires to create documentary and to attract and affect a wider audience by blending narrative and documentary forms, and Under the Skin of the City powerfully attests to this composite style at the same time that it destabilizes it. The director shows the documentary filmmaking process, creates documentary-style footage, and includes sound bites from real political speeches, but the film was released as a feature narrative film and at several points makes reference to its fictional structure.

Under the Skin of the City’s narrative is framed by two documentary moments. The film opens with a closeup shot of a film crew’s video display. The blurry image in the display focuses to show the head of a woman. A man’s voice says, “Let’s roll,” before reminding the woman, “Your scarf…Fix your hair!” She promptly adjusts her headscarf, and the man asks, “How do you assess the role of female workers in the upcoming elections?” As the woman attempts to answer, the camera moves left and settles on the display image’s source: the woman sitting at a table with a man and a camera aimed at her. The woman is unable to answer the question beyond a statement of religiosity, and several women on the sideline shout their own thoughts as the man ends the interview and requests some shots of the women working at their factory posts. These images roll along with the opening credits. This first scene plays an important role in the establishment of the film’s documentary ethos. Iranian censorship codes prohibit the appearance of women in closeup shots, and women must remain properly covered whenever onscreen.¹⁹ The film’s first moments push the boundaries of acceptability and provide the viewer with the sense of witnessing something unproduced and not yet ready for public consumption. The film’s first active moment—the display’s pull into focus—reinforces the scene’s unedited, and therefore unmediated, ethos (figures 2.1 and 2.2).

FIGURE 2.1. The first shot of Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City shows actress Golab Adineh out of focus in the film crew’s video display. Frame enlargement.

FIGURE 2.2. Actress Golab Adineh fixes her headscarf on a video display, an act audiences do not usually see onscreen. Frame enlargement from Under the Skin of the City.

The film crew never formally exits the film’s narrative, and the viewer is left to wonder whether the crew has been incorporated into the film’s diegetic space or if the film crew acts as a bridge between the film’s narrative and the film’s self-conscious documentary world. The reappearance of the same crew in the film’s very last scene further complicates this distinction. A transition between a wide shot of Abbas running through the streets and a close-up of Tuba signals the film’s final scene. This transition also marks the moment at which the camera once again shares its perspective with a documentarian’s. Asked to explain why she is voting, Tuba eloquently articulates her reasons for voting, but a high-pitched beep interrupts her several times. Finally a familiar voice—the interviewer from the film’s first scene—asks her to start over because of technical problems. Clearly frustrated, Tuba complains, “Just forget about it! I just lost my house, my son ran away, and people are filming all the time.” Her final observation allows the viewer to consider the possibility that the same film crew has been following her throughout the course of the film, in which case this documentary’s informing logic would hinge on the development of Tuba’s political identity as enacted by the film’s events. By taking on the “documentary” classification as the framing permits, Under the Skin of the City makes the claim that the world it represents bears an indexical relationship to the lived, historical world.

Just as easily as Bani-Etemad suggests the possibility that this film is a documentary, however, so too does she provide evidence to the contrary. In the film’s first scene, when the video display pulls into focus, the viewer encounters Golab Adineh, a well-known actress in Iran. Bani-Etemad noted that she envisioned Adineh in that role when she started revising the screenplay six years before production began.²⁰ The director’s decision to employ professional actors, including her daughter Baran Kosari in the role of Mahbubeh, runs contrary to the tendency in Iranian neorealism to employ actors who have little or no acting experience. The result of this decision in Under the Skin of the City is the viewer’s simultaneous desire to read the opening scene as documentary and to acknowledge the fact that the woman in the frame does not work in a factory but is instead a popular actress. Slavoj Žižek’s concept of interface, a self-conscious screen within a screen that threatens a film’s delicate fictive web, further obscures the classification of cinematic mode.²¹ The film crew’s video display, by referencing the act of production, shows how Under the Skin of the City refuses to submit to the normative features of narrative film.

In the film’s final scene, the director similarly complicates the audience’s ability to negotiate the historical and the imagined. After noting that she is constantly being filmed, Tuba emotionally pleas, “I wish someone would come and film what’s going on right here. Right here! Who do you show these films to, anyway?” Tuba thus probes the limits of the documentary form and questions its ability to capture the depths of human suffering. She also questions the ability of documentary filmmaking to reach wide audiences. The film critic Rahul Hamid argues that this criticism by Tuba “betrays Bani-Etemad’s ambivalent feelings towards…the movie craze in Iran—and perhaps the political efficacy of cinema itself.”²² But this criticism describes too broadly the reach of Tuba’s statement. Bani-Etemad instead reveals the unmediated tension between documentary and narrative modes, in which the socially committed documentary form lacks affective prowess and therefore fails to reach diverse audiences.

Hamid’s misreading of this scene results from a misunderstanding of Tuba’s final question, in film-hā ro be ki neshun midin? (Who do you show these films to, anyway?). This question, which clearly references the narrow reach of documentary filmmaking, is also an ironic and self-referential act on the part of Bani-Etemad. Who Do You Show These Films to, Anyway? is the title of a documentary that Bani-Etemad directed in 1993. It focuses on a poor housing community in south Tehran and shares similar concerns with Under the Skin of the City. This reference to Bani-Etemad’s corpus of work combined with Tuba’s emotional plea interrupts the informed viewer’s inclination to read this final moment as documentary, because the director stages a confrontation with the artificiality of documentary filmmaking, which runs contrary to the viewer’s expectations regarding the relationship between documentary and the real.

Tuba’s closing statement thus captures the complexities of Bani-Etemad’s composite style in Under the Skin of the City. Her words, which criticize the sterile question-and-answer documentary form, enact an affective desire that is perhaps satisfied by the film’s fictional scenes. At the same time, this criticism creates a sense of urgency and relevance that ends the film. By creating and resolving—mediating and destabilizing—the tension between documentary and narrative forms, Bani-Etemad interrogates a relationship between truth and myth. This relationship is central to Under the Skin of the City, in which the city of Tehran represents an urban reality that is capable of demystifying a popular but misinformed representation of the reformist movement.

URBAN MYTH

Whereas films by Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf often focus on rural environments and depend on bucolic landscapes to produce a distinct poetic, neorealist style that dates back to Dariush Mehrjui’s Gāv (The cow, 1969),²³ Bani-Etemad’s films constitute a separate track in Iranian art-house cinema, one that interrogates urban spaces and experiences. For Bani-Etemad, Tehran is a site of “perplexing contradictions” that function alongside a “concentration of politics, economics and social issues” to make the city seem bigger and more “chaotic” each day. As such, Tehran serves as a complicated and unstable character in all of her films. Even in Gilāneh (Gilaneh, 2004), the story of a disabled veteran and his mother living in the quiet hills of northern Iran, Bani-Etemad notes that Tehran asserts its presence through the threats of displacement and urban migration.²⁴ Under the Skin of the City represents one of Bani-Etemad’s most complex portrayals of Tehran. In this film, the director explores the political possibility of the metropolis, and she envisions the capital city and its many paradoxes as signifiers of a reality covered up or overlooked by the reformist movement’s mythic presence.

Like documentary, urbanism allows Bani-Etemad to investigate the representation of reality and to consider the ways in which multiple urban realities coalesce. This effort resonates with a long tradition in Iranian cinema, and in particular with a set midcentury metropolitan films that use the city of Tehran to expose the realities of harsh living conditions under Pahlavi rule. Farrokh Ghaffari’s Jonub-e shahr (South of the city, 1958) was the first film to provide a critical representation of Tehran. The film tells the story of a woman who slowly discovers a friend’s secret profession as a prostitute, and this plotline lays bare the city’s dirty underworld. With this gritty representation of Tehran, Ghaffari provides an alternative narrative to the Pahlavi government’s promotion of the country at the time as an oil-rich, modern nation. Through displays of unjust violence, the film also criticizes the luti system, a code of urban masculinity that has been valorized throughout much of Iran’s modern history.²⁵ A luti genre of films popular in the mid-twentieth century especially mythologized this urban figure and turned him into a kind of Robin Hood character.²⁶ South of the City, however, casts the luti in the role of pimp and thug and shows him as a deeply troubled character living outside of the rules of society not for the betterment of his community but rather for his own benefit.

Ghaffari’s depiction of the truths that underlined modernization and the luti myths required that the director violate the thematic and technological norms of Iranian cinema at the time. Indeed, South of the City was the first Iranian film to leave the set behind and shoot on location in the city’s streets. This innovation led to a gritty and realistic representation of Tehran’s poor districts that left many viewers unsettled. The film’s main actor, Ebrahim Baqeri, was even physically assaulted for his controversial portrayal of the luti system, and this act brings into focus the power of Ghaffari’s realistic style. The Pahlavi regime was also threatened by the unfavorable and realistic representation of life in south Tehran, and the film was banned and confiscated shortly after its release. The government reissued the film under the title Reqābat dar shahr (Rivalry in the city). This version of the film was so heavily censored that it no longer bore the critical traces of its predecessor, and it was even promoted as “preserving the traditional customs and beliefs of the honorable lutis.”²⁷ The case of South of the City functions as a precedent within the Iranian cinematic tradition for probing the city of Tehran to uncover and complicate politicocultural myth by providing urban images of the real (the real streets of Tehran, the real effects of modernization, and the real qualities of the luti) and thereby establishing a counternarrative.

Ghaffari’s film had a significant impact on other directors, who began using the city in this way. Notably, Kamran Shirdel was commissioned by the shah to create a series of documentaries that exalted the government’s modernization project. Instead, the director took his camera to the streets of Tehran and created an eighteen-minute documentary called Tehran Is the Capital of Iran that included startling images of city’s poorest citizens sleeping on sidewalks and in back alleys. The message was clear: the streets of Tehran were the reality of the shah’s modernization process, which excluded and hid a huge portion of the country’s population that did not fit into the orderly system that the shah envisioned.²⁸

In Under the Skin of the City, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad deploys the city of Tehran in a similar way and excavates the urban structures of the capital city in order to unravel the myth of the reformist movement. She attempts to expose the hopes and promises of the reformist movement as they are reflected in a sprawling and unrelenting cityscape. Tehran’s spatiality is exceedingly important to Bani-Etemad’s style of representation in Under the Skin of the City. Through a series of spatially organized fragments, Bani-Etemad’s camera redeems Tehran from the reformist movement’s dreamworld. The terms of the reformist myth are established early in the film. The film enters its narrative after the documentary framing by means of a bus ride through the streets of Tehran. It is fitting that as both Tuba and the viewer journey into the fictional domain, we are made to listen to a political speech delivered by Khatami. Although the 1997 elections serve as a regular feature in the film’s background, it is only in this moment early in the film that the reformist movement is given voice. Bani-Etemad cleverly manipulates the authentic sound bite to highlight the movement’s mythic premise. Khatami says, “And we shall broaden democracy and progress toward a civil society. We will try to strengthen continually the dignity and stability of this nation. Our developments were the product of a great revolution and our problems…” At this point, noises from a street fight drown out Khatami. The speech returns as Khatami says, “The result was first and foremost a recovery of ourselves and particularly of our youth…” before fading out once again. In many ways, this speech is very typical and likely recognizable to Iranian viewers. It pays homage to the revolution, emphasizes the importance of engaging young people, and outlines Khatami’s goals for his country, including democracy and civil society, two words that frequently punctuated his speeches.

By controlling our access to the audio clip, Bani-Etemad constructs and articulates a particular view of the reformist movement that informs the film throughout. It is significant that Bani-Etemad chooses to disrupt the speech with noises from the street. This clip, like a film’s soundtrack, exists in an extradiegetic space and not within the characters’ lives or world. It instead plays over the fictional realm. The fact that noises on the streets can interrupt the speech establishes a central thesis in Under the Skin of the City, as it becomes apparent that our audiovisual encounters with the urban experience alter and reconfigure our understanding of the reformist movement. This rupture occurs at a crucial part in the speech, right as Khatami is preparing to describe the country’s problems. The implication of this cut is that Khatami and the reformist movement have no conception of local problems. The images onscreen—a brawl between members of the basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia that reports directly to the supreme leader) and young campaigners—reinforces this idea by providing a visual alternative to the words “democracy” and “civil society” that play moments before. The rupture in the speech also tears the narrative’s suture. In other words, the speech and the contradicting images pull the viewer’s attention away from the narrative (i.e., Tuba’s journey home) and toward the historical world (i.e., Khatami’s election). This method heightens the viewer’s awareness of the fragility of both truth and fiction, because Bani-Etemad interrupts both real, recognizable speeches and her own narrative.

Jāme‘eh-ye madani (civil society) formed the basis of Khatami’s moderate political platform during the 1997 elections. Understanding the limits of the political system and the nature of factionalism in Iran at the time, Khatami was careful not to define clearly what he meant by “civil society” or how he intended to deliver the country to that ideal. Mohsen Kadivar, a well-known theologian, suggested that civil society represented during the elections an alternative to velāyat-e faqih, the basis for the governmental system in the Islamic Republic.²⁹ As such, Khatami easily garnered support from young voters, who were increasingly frustrated with the political and economic status quo in the late 1990s, without ever revealing a salient civil society agenda. Shortly after Khatami’s election, however, Iranians began demanding accountability and sought to understand how the new president intended to revise the Islamic Republic’s legal system to include the ideals of civil society, like tolerance, freedom, and mutual respect.³⁰ Over the next two years, and especially after a series of violent attacks on student protestors in 1999, people became increasingly skeptical of Khatami’s ability to deliver on his promise of civil society.³¹

Although Under the Skin of the City takes place during the 1997 elections, it was filmed and produced in 2000, as disillusionment with Khatami and his promise of a civil society were on the rise. Bani-Etemad, therefore, reexamines the historic elections and gently uncovers in Tehran’s cityscape the ways in which Khatami’s rhetoric of democracy and civil society failed to address the country’s problems even in 1997. Scholars and pundits within Iran generally agree that conservative forces blocked Khatami’s efforts to enact reform and that, had he been successful, the country would have experienced a political, cultural, and economic revival.³² This understanding of the situation constitutes the myth of the reformist movement, against which Under the Skin of the City reacts.³³ In the film the city of Tehran functions as a particularly poignant example of the ways in which broad notions of democracy and civil society—reform within the existing structures of the Islamic Republic of Iran—were never able to address local and economic problems. Khatami, as a cleric and former associate of Khomeini, was attempting to create reform from the top down, but Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City returns this political narrative to the street level, and this vantage point reveals the reformist myth’s shortcomings.

The street-level perspective adds a fragmented dimension to the representation of Tehran in Under the Skin of the City. The film is absent of wide-angle shots that show large segments of the city and does not feature any aerial shots that attempt to capture visually the city’s entirety. In a film explicitly about Tehran, the absence of an establishing shot of the capital city is telling. Bani-Etemad defies Hollywood conventions to emphasize the street-level perspective that determines her film. Michel de Certeau distinguishes between those who read the city from above with panoramic views and those who walk the city, writing it without being able to read it.³⁴ In Under the Skin of the City, Bani-Etemad’s camerawork invites the viewer to identify with the latter.

In order to capture several different urban perspectives, Bani-Etemad creates a fragmented picture of Tehran, as the camera moves disjointedly from one geographic location to another but never provides a large-scale image of the space traversed. The film’s visual and narrative structures depend in large part on complementary scenes from different sectors of the city. An architectural firm on the top floor of a skyscraper in downtown Tehran is contrasted, for example, with the textile factory where Tuba works. The office scene features classical music playing in the background and shows an orderly arrangement of desks and offices occupied by men and women in colorful, Western-style clothing. The noise of the machines in the factory provides an uncomfortable point of contrast for the viewer, who has just been drawn in by the soft sounds of classical music in the office. The factory only employs women, who are all dressed in traditional black veils. The vertical scan of the office’s skyscraper and the camera’s horizontal movements in the factory emphasize the city as a three-dimensional space. The film highlights the value of occupying the city’s highest point as Abbas enters the skyscraper and his friends warn him, “Don’t forget us little people on your way up!”

Under the Skin of the City similarly compares geographically diverse social structures, and the family is a particularly rich area of exploration for the film. In one scene, Tuba arrives home and discovers her granddaughter playing in the narrow alleys of the neighborhood. Explaining her unexpected arrival, the granddaughter says, “Daddy beat up Mommy and told her to get lost…so we came here!” The members of the family have competing approaches to Hamideh’s arrival, and her presence becomes a source of contention. Their reactions range from Mahmud’s anger to Mahbubeh’s meddling to Tuba’s pragmatism: she points out that the family does not have the physical space or financial resources to care for a pregnant woman and her young daughter. The house’s architecture and, specifically, its courtyard mediate the conversation and emphasize the family’s lack of space. A traditional Iranian home features several rooms or apartments organized around a central courtyard. In this instance, Hamideh stands in the small central courtyard and the family members offer their commentary from the various rooms or during their passage between them. The lack of privacy both within and outside of the home is apparent: at one point, Tuba, afraid that the neighbors will hear, reprimands Mahmud for yelling through the door.

The scene switches to a house in an affluent neighborhood in north Tehran, and the camera captures the area’s desirable hilltop view of the city. Inside, the home’s texture is rich with lush fabrics, and it comprises only interior spaces, unlike the traditional courtyard structure that the film emphasizes in the preceding scene. A fight between mother and son ensues; the son has been stealing car radios despite having the financial means to buy them, and the family’s reputation is at stake. Abbas interrupts the quarrel, and the son mocks him for his work ethic, even though they are approximately the same age. Mother and son fight for control of the car keys; the son is eventually victorious and speeds away, nearly hitting Abbas as he walks on the side of the street.

Bani-Etemad’s technique with these juxtaposed scenes resonates with the “conflict” of Eisenstein’s montage theory, wherein montage represents the development of an idea through the “collision of independent shots.” The dynamism that results from the collisions of independent shots acts as a site for the production of new ideas and concepts. In other words, unexpected contradictions and conclusions explode from the collision of two shots “opposite to one another.”³⁵ In Under the Skin of the City, the fragmented vignettes underscore a geographically and economically diverse set of urban realities that equally constitute Tehran. At the same time, these fragmented scenes together generate some threads of continuity related to the experiences of family and reputation.

Under the Skin of the City thus fragments the city of Tehran by providing the viewer with juxtaposing sights “that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic.”³⁶ The film, however, is not fragmented and features a cohesive narrative structure that allows Bani-Etemad to connect different segments of Tehran. Under the Skin of the City was the second-highest grossing film in 2001, and this achievement indicates the ways in which the film appealed to popular audiences, including the expectation of a coherent narrative.³⁷ Rahul Hamid notes that “the majority of screen time is devoted to Abbas’s exploits, but Tuba is at the core of the film.”³⁸ The reason for this disparity in screen time rests in the fact that Abbas plays a functional role in the film’s geographic shifts. Under the Skin of the City consists, for the most part, of corresponding images from the north and the south, mediated by transitional highway scenes. Abbas, as a delivery boy, possesses the mobility necessary to permeate both spaces and functions as the viewer’s guide. These regional shifts encourage the viewer to make comparisons—visually and socially, spatially and economically—between the two parts of the city and to consider the different ways that people make sense of their urban spaces and the vast differences in these approaches based on their geographic location within Tehran.

Highways, cars, and traffic as points in between these various locations together constitute a distinct kind of space in Under the Skin of the City that generates a constitutive set of economic, political, and social features. Abbas travels the streets and highways of the capital on his small scooter. Using a car borrowed from his boss, the entire family only makes one road trip together—to north Tehran—during the course of the film. This journey, which takes place early in the narrative, plays an important role in determining the symbolic distance between south Tehran and the financial districts of the north. Before the family enters the highway, they are stopped by a passing train, which stays onscreen for more than ten seconds. The viewer is thus made to wait, just as the characters do, and the train’s presence emphasizes the ways in which mobility is blocked or limited for those citizens in the southern part of the city. The scene continues with a series of shots that accentuate the highway’s unrelenting size and that capitalize on north Tehran’s visible appeal (figure 2.3).

FIGURE 2.3. Scenes of northern Tehran highlight its natural beauty. Frame enlargement from Under the Skin of the City.

Although the family begins its journey in daylight, the point of arrival is marked by the darkness of night, and Bani-Etemad thereby adds a temporal aspect to the city’s spatial configuration. Tehran’s structure depends on a spatial and social stratification that emerges along its horizontal axis to divide this urban space into clear northern and southern regions. The city’s middle- and upper-class residents live almost exclusively in the northern half of the city, and, as geographer Ali Madanipour notes, this polarization remains “clearly visible in Tehran.”³⁹ Under the Skin of the City demonstrates how this visual structure maintains social stratification through spatial means and effectively keeps Tehran’s poorest citizens out of the city’s financial centers through a highway system that is inaccessible to those individuals without a car. The absence of car ownership in the south is revealed in the film through an aerial shot of Tuba’s neighborhood. The sound of a car alarm encourages the viewer to search through the monochrome sprawl of buildings and alleyways for the source the sound: the borrowed car, uncomfortably parked in a drain. The southern neighborhood clearly lacks both the financial and spatial resources necessary to acquire a car, and Under the Skin of the City brings to light at several different points the difficulty of navigating Tehran’s vast geography without one. The challenges of public transit emerge as Tuba and her coworkers are slowed by the sail effect of their chādors while attempting to catch their bus home. Meanwhile, the perils of pedestrianism are conveyed to the viewer as Abbas walks back to work after returning a car to his boss’s home and is almost hit by the same car as a seemingly endless city sprawls before him. These moments test the bounds of access to urban space while drawing attention to social and economic diversity within the city.

For Bani-Etemad, the city’s ability to represent the various human experiences that exist on its concrete surfaces extends beyond spatial and even temporal dimensions. Tehran functions as an affective surface that captures and mirrors the emotional responses and impulses of its inhabitants. In this way, Bani-Etemad’s cinema gives in to Walter Benjamin’s notion that film opens up the viewer’s perceptions of the city and, through camerawork and editing, inscribes it with features that have previously gone unnoticed. In Under the Skin of the City, the streets and buildings of Tehran match the characters’ excitement and elation and pain and suffering. For example, after Abbas declares his love to one of the women working in the architectural office and she receives him favorably, he speeds around on his scooter, weaving through the city’s streets, which have been decorated with colorful lights for the Iranian New Year celebration called Nowruz. In the absence of music, Abbas’s excitement in this moment is conveyed to the viewer through the city’s visual appeal. The film’s background thus takes on the characteristics of the protagonist, and this scene brings into focus the fact that the city is not always a site of impasse and fragmentation but also sometimes a place of inclusion. The city supports the characters in a way in which they cannot necessarily support each other.

Nowhere do these contradictions become more apparent than within the cycles of construction and destruction that grow, rejuvenate, and paralyze every metropolis. The narrative, including the depiction of the contractor who attempts to buy Tuba’s house and of Abbas’s work with an architectural firm, provides the film with ample opportunity to show construction sites throughout the city, and it is never quite clear whether the viewer is witnessing a building in the process of construction or deconstruction. The visual similarities of these two in-between moments capture the fact that that they are interrelated. That the city is replete with these cyclic processes becomes clearer when they are laced with human emotion. Abbas plows through the streets of Tehran after discovering that he was the victim of a scandal that robbed him of all his savings and the money acquired from the sale of his family’s home. Despite his rapid progress through space and time, he is always framed by buildings that are being (de)constructed. These shells without windows or doors, these concrete skeletons, reflect his anguish. His financial, moral, and emotional destruction is captured perfectly by the half-completed/depleted structures, and his inability to escape them suggests the city as a dynamic space that functions outside of the bounds and laws of normal spatial experience by accommodating affective as well as temporal variables.

These moments of deconstruction are redeemed only at the point of construction. As Tuba packs and prepares to move, reduced once again to the role of tenant, her house is literally being torn down around her. The house that held her life together and distinguished her as a homeowner now parallels her financial and familial ruin. However, the film’s final scene reveals Tuba’s political hope as she lists the loss of her house and son as reasons for voting. This political hope, examined in greater depth later, is significant here because it functions as an act of productivity born of the destruction that the film’s events have facilitated. The relationship between the collapse of Tuba’s house and the birth of her political identity suggests the city of Tehran as a cyclic site, a fact reinforced by the cycles in Tuba’s life and especially her return to being a tenant. In her final statement, Tuba notes the historical cycles in which post-revolution Iran has also been caught: “There was a time when we complained but you said we were fighting a war. It was the truth, so we accepted it. After the war, you asked us for patience because the country was in ruins, so once again, we put up with it all…. Now there is someone who wants to save us, so I’m here to vote.” Her use of the word ruins (kherābeh) is particularly interesting. Combined with the film’s many demolished and collapsed sites/sights, it indicates the ways in which the city’s surface encapsulates the country’s social and economic problems. More than that, Tuba’s final declaration, “I am here to vote,” suggests that these ruins—both despite and because of their cyclical nature—can be appropriated as spots for improvement or reform.

Under the Skin of the City’s representation of Tehran through geographic fragmentation, cycles of (de)construction, and an intimate relationship between building and affect sympathetically guides our gaze to the unique experiences of the city’s marginalized poor, working-class citizens. As a result, the film shows particular concern for the ways in which the political system (as represented by the elections in the background) plays out in these poorer districts of south Tehran. The director reinforces the existence of a relationship between the political system and south Tehran by locating the elections’ presence only in the city’s southern half. References to the reformist movement and the upcoming elections only appear in the sections of the film that focus on the southern part of the city. In his examination of Paris, Benjamin also takes an interest in the city’s marginalized characters. He is particularly attracted to those individuals who position themselves outside of the normal cycles of consumerism and commodity; these figures on the cityscape become essential to his effort to uncover the myth of modernity. In a similar effort, Bani-Etemad focuses on Tehran’s margins to expose the reformist myth, and these characters and the neighborhoods they inhabit represent the holes left unfilled by the reformist movement’s political platform.

The development of Tuba’s political identity rests at the center of Under the Skin of the City. The film’s engagement with the documentary form signals a documentary’s informing logic. The documentary framing at the beginning of the film reminds us that this film requires an interpretive skill set appropriate to an argument-based structure rather than a narrative plot. If one were, therefore, to evaluate Under the Skin of the City as a documentary—as the film’s framing structure encourages—then it is possible to see the rise of Tuba’s political identity as a speculative solution to problems that the film depicts. Tuba’s inability at the beginning of the film to communicate her expectations for elected officials and her articulate final political statement suggest that the film’s tragic events have informed and inspired her newfound political involvement.

Implicit in her statement, however, is tension between the factors that have led her to vote and the aims of the candidate for whom she is voting. Tuba’s remark that “now there is someone who wants to save us, so I am here to vote” is punctuated by references to the loss of her house and son. The reformist movement—as represented in the film by Khatami’s speech about democracy and civil society—seems unprepared to handle the economic and social concerns that have affected Tuba’s life. Making sense of this tension and determining the exact relationship between the hopes and needs of south Tehran and the reformist movement’s proposed political shift represents one of the film’s greatest challenges, and inequalities in housing and gender are two categories that prove useful to the analysis of the political incongruity that the film reveals.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad has focused much of her career on the housing crisis in Tehran. She has directed three documentaries on the topic: Gozāresh-e 71 (Report of 71, 1991), In film-hā ro be ki neshun midin? (Who do you show these films to, anyway?, 1993), and Bahār tā bahār (Spring to spring, 1995). Her interest in architectural and residential experiences figures into her feature films as well, including Under the Skin of the City. In this film, housing informs both the director’s sociopolitical commentary and her cinematic style. She decided to film a large portion of the scenes as long shots, and she has stated that this cinematography was intended to create the effect of “peeping into a neighbor’s house from on top of the wall.”⁴⁰

Traditional Iranian houses are surrounded and separated by walls that configure private and public spaces. That is, homes in Iran are fully private spaces, visually inaccessible to passersby on the street. Farzaneh Milani notes the relationship between this architectural feature and the practice of veiling, arguing, “Like walls that enclose houses and separate inner and outer spaces, the veil makes a clear statement about the disjunction between the private and the public.”⁴¹ Under the Skin of the City highlights the wall as a unique neighborly architectural feature. It serves as a meeting point for Mahbubeh and Masumeh, who climb up ladders and meet on top of the wall that separates their homes to study and gossip. The film provides the viewer with a neighborly perspective that encourages the same kind of empathy as is found in neighborly life. In this way the film’s form adds force to its critical observations on the status of housing in south Tehran. At the center of this crisis is a lack of physical space and a rapidly growing urban population; these problems necessitate the reorganization of traditional horizontal living structures into vertical structures that can accommodate more people. This desire to build up motivates the constructor who ultimately buys Tuba’s house, and the film reinforces this impetus with wide horizontal shots of the neighborhoods in south Tehran juxtaposed with narrow vertical shots of north Tehran. The desirability of physical space in Tehran allows the contractor in the film to buy out entire neighborhoods in south Tehran, where the immediate need for access to financial resources outweighs the stability of homeownership.

The sale of Tuba’s house affords Abbas the opportunity to purchase a visa to pursue his dreams abroad (with the additional promise of financial return), and it allows Mahmud, who is unemployed, to reassert his power as the head of the home. But it is Tuba who provides for the family and finds comfort in the stability of owning a home. After Abbas and Mahmud sell the family home, she laments, “I used to carry stuff on my back, moving from one rented house to another…. Now, at this old age, when what I needed was some space, you had to do this?” Although Tuba believes that she has earned the right to homeownership, it eludes her because she is a woman, and the contractor, who tells Tuba to “go to your man. I don’t deal with womenfolk,” demonstrates the dynamics of gender segregation in homeownership. Tuba’s name, likely a reference to Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Tuba va ma‘nā-ye shab (Tuba and the meaning of night, 1989), similarly highlights a relationship between gender and homeownership.⁴² In Parsipur’s historical novel, Tuba’s status as a female homeowner at the turn of the century—the result of her young marriage to an older man and the subsequent divorce—distinguishes her, and the financial and practical comforts of homeownership set her on a path of discovery that allows her to uncover within Iranian society a fully engrained patriarchy that oppresses women at every turn.⁴³ In Under the Skin of the City, it seems unlikely that Khatami’s broad discussion of civil society can undo a deeply and historically determined system of economic and gender injustice.

Housing functions as a point of access to an array of gender inequalities that rise to the surface in Under the Skin of the City, the most important of which is violence perpetrated against women. The film engages two acts of domestic violence that together elicit a number of practical and political responses. Hamideh, who is beaten by her husband, is forced back into the cycle of violence because Tuba must accept the fact that the family does not have space in their home to accommodate a pregnant woman and her daughter. During Hamideh’s stay at the house, the film includes several shots of the interior spaces, partitioned and divided with makeshift curtains assembled from old sheets; these crowded images underscore the lack of physical space in the home. Hamideh’s situation is contrasted with that of Masumeh, the family’s next-door neighbor and Mahbubeh’s best friend. Masumeh is abused by her brother, who, although a drug addict, beats her and cuts off her hair after he discovers that she went to a concert. Masumeh breaks this cycle of violence by running away. She and Mahbubeh later meet in Mellat Park, and her style of dress and heavy makeup convey to the viewer that she is working as a prostitute.⁴⁴ When police raid the park, both girls are arrested, and Tuba is unable to bail Mahbubeh out of jail because she no longer has the deed to the house, which she needs as collateral for the bail money. In this way, Bani-Etemad ties this social problem into the economic conditions that determine the building industry.

Tuba’s son Ali, a young political activist campaigning for Khatami, responds to the violence against the women around him by arguing that “these sorts of things happen as long as women are ignorant of their rights.” The irony and futility of this statement are rendered apparent by Tuba’s lack of rights in homeownership. More than that, Ali’s statement, which accords with the reformist movement’s answer to women’s problems, encourages Iranian society to reconsider the way it thinks about women and their rights within an existing political structure rather than revising that structure as a whole.⁴⁵ However, Tuba’s dismissive reaction to her son’s statement suggests that this approach is unable to accommodate practically her socioeconomic reality. And it is ultimately this reality—the experience of one family in south Tehran—that destabilizes the reformist myth and highlights the fact that Khatami’s broad vision for his country was out of touch with most of its citizens. The city of Tehran functions a particularly rich site of exploration for Bani-Etemad because its numerous complications bring to focus the many ways in which the reformist movement was never equipped to deal with the country’s immediate, local problems. Under the Skin of the City was produced in 2000, at a time of growing criticism of the reformist movement’s inability to enact broad change for a better society. The articulation of Tuba’s political aspirations in this film represents nostalgia for a lost hope, covered and obscured by the reformist movement’s phantasmagoria.

MAPPING TEHRAN AND THE UNTIMELINESS OF DOCUMENTARY

The lost hope that emerges in Under the Skin of the City is taken up and explored further in Bani-Etemad’s Our Times…. Identified by the Iranian journal Film as one of the most important cinematic events of 2002, Our Times… is a documentary that examines the campaigning period preceding Khatami’s reelection in 2001.⁴⁶ This film shares common concerns with Under the Skin of the City; in particular, it represents Khatami’s reformist movement alongside housing crises in the south of Tehran and within the context of documentary filmmaking. These points of intersection between the two films enable a productive comparison that exposes Bani-Etemad’s critique of the reformist movement. These two films work together first to reveal the political hope, necessitated by the urban experience, that underpinned the reformist movement’s popular rise and later to reorganize our understanding of the reformist movement’s failure to accommodate that hope. Our Times… contributes to reform cinema by underscoring the spatial and geographic features of Tehran as a means of resisting the traditional chronological and temporal markers that guide a viewer’s understanding of documentary. As a result of this reconfiguration of time, Bani-Etemad freezes time as a powerful statement on the reformist movement’s inability to progress or enact reform.

Our Times… comprises two seemingly disjointed parts. In the first section, Bani-Etemad follows a group of young people campaigning for Khatami. Many Iranians were disillusioned with Khatami after his first term in office. He was unable to create the changes he had promised because his efforts were blocked by conservative forces. As a result, the young campaigners meet resistance at every turn. However, in spite of these challenges, they are ultimately successful, and the film’s first section ends with Khatami’s reelection. In the second part of the film, Bani-Etemad tracks down the forty-eight women who had registered to run for president that year. The Guardian Council discarded their names because women in Iran, although able to run for parliament, may not seek the office of president. Bani-Etemad interviews several of them but focuses the bulk of this part of the film on one of them, a woman named Arezu. The director follows Arezu as she scourers the city looking for an apartment because she is being evicted from her current residence. Arezu’s effort is complicated by the fact that she is a poor, young single mother who has no husband to petition on her behalf. Only twenty-five years old, she was married twice before, both times to heroin addicts. She eventually finds a new living arrangement, but the film ends as she returns to her job the next day to discover that she has been fired for missing three days of work to look for housing.

Determining a relationship between these two disparate parts represents one of the film’s greatest challenges. How does one make sense of a film that begins as a documentary about the 2001 elections and ends as a documentary about one woman’s attempt to find a place to live? The filmmaker, who provides Our Times… with its godlike documentary voice, initially suggests a chronological structure. In a scene that bridges the two sections of the film and shows the director driving through the busy streets of Tehran, Bani-Etemad says that she is worried that her daughter will have questions that she won’t be able to answer. She never identifies the nature of these hypothetical questions, but the camera continues to follow Bani-Etemad during her drive, and the viewer gets the sense that she is moving forward, searching for these answers.

The film’s second section begins with the sound of interviews being arranged; the image shifts to an office scene before quickly returning to Bani-Etemad in her car as several more interviews are lined up by cell phone. The repeated use of footage of the director in her car suggests that these interviews, and the entire second part, take place after the car ride and therefore well after the elections. We make sense of the disjointedness of the film by constructing a chronological reading facilitated in large part by this transition. The election in the first part of the film raises questions, and as a result the documentarian collects visible evidence in the second section to answer these questions. The construction of this kind of argument conforms to viewers’ expectations of a documentary.

However, during the course of the second section, Bani-Etemad unravels the chronological structure that the viewer has come to accept. As the central character, Arezu, searches for a house, news of the upcoming elections slowly permeate the film’s background. Well into her story, Arezu buys a paper and the camera focuses on the headline, which reads, “A vote for Khatami is a vote for reform.” Later, a radio announces that there are “only a few more days left until the election, and the candidates have started their campaigning efforts.” In Iran candidates have a limited campaigning period; thus this announcement suggests that perhaps the two sections of the film are not even synchronic and that Arezu’s story, despite occupying the second position in the film, actually commences before the first section. The second section, like the first, ends on Election Day. The viewer is forced to recognize the overlap of time and as a result must question the argument-based structuring process that Bani-Etemad claims for her project.

In the absence of a linear structure, Our Times…offers structure through Tehran’s topology. As noted previously, the city is divided into northern and southern regions; this division, geographer Ali Madanipour notes, represents “the main feature of the city’s spatial structure.”⁴⁷ The northern half of the city, home to the city’s middle and upper classes, is settled comfortably at the base of the Alborz Mountains and enjoys “a wide range of social and physical privileges over the southern half.” Geographically, these benefits include “a more diverse skyline and a degree of visual supremacy over the south,” better flood control, and a more moderate climate. The desirability of this space means that the northern part of the city comes with “larger houses, lower densities, higher land prices, smaller households, higher rates of literacy and employment, higher concentrations of modern facilities and amenities,…more green space…a better water supply and a higher defensive value.”⁴⁸ Throughout the twentieth century, city planning efforts—lead by three consecutive governments—reinforced this divide.⁴⁹ The affluent districts of the north and the poor districts of the south are, therefore, separated by an insurmountable social and physical gap.⁵⁰

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s work captures and is informed by this visually inscribed urban feature. Whereas the first part of the film (about the young campaigners) takes place in north Tehran, the second part unfolds in the southern part of the city. This sets up a series of juxtapositions that confirm the visual supremacy of the north. The film’s representation of the north consists of scenes that show greenery, planned pedestrian spaces, and striking panoramic views of the cityscape. On the other hand, the film’s focus on south Tehran emphasizes the lack of green space, an absence of pedestrian resources, and the dilapidation of physical structures (figure 2.4).

FIGURE 2.4. A young campaign volunteer stands under posters of Khatami in north Tehran. Frame enlargement from Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Our Times….

These visual disparities are compounded temporally: the first section on the north of Tehran lasts eighteen minutes, and the second section is three times as long. This distribution of time mimics the city’s population. The north of Tehran, as a privileged area, consists of a much smaller number of people, whereas the south is bigger in terms of both land space and density. Although the second part of the film tells one woman’s story, it is representative of a much broader experience. The social and economic struggles that Our Times…portrays in the south of the city apply to a large number of people. However, the film’s first section documents a narrow experience open to a specific class of young Tehranis who have the financial resources and support to engage in campaigning efforts. In light of the horizontal axis that the film visually and temporally sketches, it is worth reconsidering the transitional scene that connects the film’s two parts. The shots of the director driving in her car, more than just representing a mystic search for the truth, suggest relocation and physical movement as she repositions her documentary subject in the south.

By laying her documentary structure over a map of Tehran’s north-south divide, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad encourages a comparative perspective that illuminates how the political process that she is portraying plays out in these two distracts. The northern part of the city is alive with excitement about the upcoming elections. The campaigners are engaging people in political debates; the streets are covered in posters and other campaigning materials; and there are rallies in which Khatami addresses a stadium full of supporters. Meanwhile, in the south, the candidates’ campaigns have been relegated to the background at best. They make appearances only in the form of a brief radio announcement, a newspaper headline, and a few scattered posters. The people in this part of the film are uninvolved and seemingly uninterested in the political system. For this reason, it is easy to overlook the lack of a linear chronological structure. In contrast to the heightened political activity of the first section, the political apathy of the second signals the absence of elections.

The most startling difference between the two parts of the city (and the film), however, involves the acquisition of private space. Arezu’s story in the film is marked by an inability to locate housing for her family. This struggle and her frustrations are shown onscreen for almost an hour. However, the first part of Our Times… opens with the young campaigners cleaning and setting up their headquarters. They easily secure an office on a quiet residential street to use as the base for their campaigning efforts. This space is crucial to their political participation; without it, they would be unable to organize their campaigning strategies. By the same logic, Arezu’s lack of private space prohibits her political participation. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad selects Arezu as a documentary subject because she was one of the few women to register to run for president. When asked why she wanted to become president, Arezu identifies a number of social and economic problems that plague poor communities in Tehran. Ironically, she is unable to participate in the very process for which she registered. In the end, Arezu is so consumed by her search for housing that she does not even have time to vote. Her urban experience, then, at once creates the need for political hope and blocks her attempts to satisfy it.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s geographic structure allows us to contemplate a notion of documentary time. Because documentaries construct arguments about the lived, historical world and establish what Bill Nichols calls “discourses of sobriety” that imagine their relationship to the real as “imminent,”⁵¹ one might assume by extrapolation that documentary time is necessarily real time. However, Our Times…comprises two disjointed parts that overlap chronologically and refuse temporal cohesion. The film is premised on an argument and a reasoning logic that depend on a linear progression that is ultimately and paradoxically unsupported by its visual evidence. This documentary’s temporality is, in fact, untimely. This concept of untimeliness has gained momentum recently in discussions of critical theory. Wendy Brown, who has played a crucial role in the articulation of this model, argues that untimeliness offers “a different sense of the times and a different sense of time.”⁵² Our Times…challenges the viewer’s conception of time in order to challenge his or her understanding of the times. The film’s title, Ruzegār-e mā… (Our times…), plays with this idea further by serving as an umbrella category for multiple narratives that are far from unified, and the director’s opening commentary emphasizes this difference. She says, “Spring 2001: Strange, stormy days. The eighth presidential elections in Iran. I intended to make a record of that era, but where should I start? From what point of view? Society was filled with fear and hope, doubt and trust.”

Brown argues, “Untimeliness deployed as an effective intellectual strategy, far from being a gesture of indifference to time, is a bid to reset time.”⁵³ It is through her efforts to reset time that Rakhshan Bani-Etemad visualizes her critique of the reformist movement. By holding time still, she suggests the lack of progression, and especially the lack of improvement or reform. Khatami’s election to the presidency in 1997 represented more than just a change in political power; it also marked a semantic shift. Phrases like “civil society” and “democracy” replaced the revolutionary rhetoric popular in the republic during its first twenty years. However, Khatami’s first term proved unsuccessful in delivering the changes that these concepts promised. In fact, in four years, none of the country’s economic and social problems had been addressed. By holding time constant and making geography a variable, Bani-Etemad made her film undeniably local, inextricable from the city it depicts. By fixing the viewer’s gaze on the city of Tehran, she stages a confrontation with its problems. Khatami focused much of his energy on repairing Iran’s global reputation through concepts like a “dialogue of civilizations.” Both of Bani-Etemad’s films bring into focus the local economic problems that were for many Iranians more urgent.

Bani-Etemad’s effort to hold time still resonates with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “Angel of History,” Thesis IX in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). Benjamin imagines a construction of history in which we look backward while being propelled forward by a “storm” called “progress.”⁵⁴ Inspired by a Paul Klee painting called Angelus Novus, the Angel of History is caught between the momentum forward and backward and is held momentarily at a standstill. Khatami’s reformist movement was similarly stuck: constantly staring back at the revolution, unable to look away but at the same time pushed forward by its desire to progress. Bani-Etemad’s Our Times… demonstrates that for the reformist movement the tension between the past and the future resulted in a static present.

Under the Skin of the City and Our Times… together articulate a political hope that is discovered and later lost in the urban desires that once gave force to the reformist movement. The almost messianic quality of the reformist movement that emerges when Tuba announces, “Someone has come to save us, and I am here to vote,” gives way to near negation when Arezu is unable first to run for president and later to cast a vote. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s cinematic unraveling of the dreams and desires that paradoxically grounded and destabilized Khatami’s movement endowed the reformist aesthetic with a new sense of space and time, wherein Tehran functions as a site of constant change and never-ending unchange. These spatial and temporal reconfigurations recover economic, political, and social urgencies that exist separately from the reformist myth.

Bani-Etemad’s political assessment in Under the Skin of the City and Our Times… betrays a cinematic relationship with Mohammad Khatami and his reformist movement that is much deeper than just modes of critique. Both films depict and criticize the political process, and this level of representation is unprecedented in modern Iranian history. By relaxing the codes of cultural control and inaugurating artistic forums for open political debate and critique, Khatami made significant strides toward the ideals of democracy and civil society that he envisioned. Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City and Our Times…—despite their criticism of the reformist movement—are, therefore, representatives of a group of Iranian films that participated in the formation, articulation, and propagation of a new set of political and philosophical reformist ideals.