Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic

Such an ordering might reveal a “genre of the Second of Khordād,” a category of films grounded in Khatami’s unexpected victory on 2 Khordād 1376 (May 23, 1997). But what would such a genre look like? Whereas Makhmalbaf’s Apple only hints at political reform, other films released during this period, including Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta‘m-e gilās (Taste of cherry, 1997) and Dah (10, 2002) and Bahman Farmanara’s Bu-ye kāfur,‘atr-e yās (The smell of camphor, the scent of jasmine, 2000), directly engage Khatami’s presidency and signal new thematic possibilities nurtured by his liberal cultural policies. Iranian films at the turn of the twenty-first century summon the dialectic that determined reform cinema at this time: political reform restructured aesthetic practices at the same time that filmmakers contributed to the development of a reformist discourse. In Kiarostami’s works, his engagement with reform redrew the limits of his aesthetic sensibility, whereas Farmanara’s film redefines the Iranian intellectual in reformist terms.

At the same time, films from this period speak to the technological innovations—including the rapid expansion of digital video technology—that were amending the standards of filmmaking and spectatorship at the time in Iran. The proliferation of digital video technology democratized filmmaking by providing affordable access to cameras and editing software, thereby allowing individuals to sidestep the government’s role as the subsidizer of expensive 35 mm film equipment. Whereas film studies has long acknowledged the democratizing effect of video technologies, the Iranian film industry’s engagement with video reveals new democratic orders vis-à-vis video technology. In the United States, for example, video technology—including VCRs, Betamax players, and camcorders—democratized media culture by enabling consumers to dictate the terms of their engagement with movies and television and by allowing filmmakers to access affordable moviemaking equipment. The rise of digital video technology in Iran, however, did more than just democratize filmmaking by providing affordable access to equipment. It also encouraged a system of production, distribution, and aesthetics that operated outside of the bounds of state control. It is no coincidence that these democratizing technologies reshaped culture in Iran at the same that Khatami identified democracy as an important part of his political agenda. The convergence of these films’ interest in the reformist movement and their experimentation with digital video constitutes an important attribute of reform cinema and a constitutive feature of a genre of the Second of Khordād.

As Khatami’s first term came to an end, film critic Nima Hassaninasab published an article titled “Zhānr-e dovom-e khordād” (Genre of the Second of Khordād) in Film, Iran’s foremost film trade journal. In this article, Hassaninasab suggests that Khatami’s first term as president profoundly affected Iranian cinema, and he notes that “everyone who has been following cinematic production for the last two decades agrees that some of the most important and successful films over the last four years were only made possible after the appearance of the present government.”² Hassaninasab provocatively proposes that these films together constitute a new genre, which he calls the genre of the Second of Khordād. The Second of Khordād—specifically, 2 Khordād 1376 (May 23, 1997)—was the day that Khatami was elected for the first time, but that date came to represent something much bigger in Iranian society. Following Khatami’s victory, he and his followers became known as Jonbesh-e dovom-e Khordād or the Second of Khordād movement. For many Iranians, the reforms that Khatami promised represented a new beginning in the Islamic Republic, and by memorializing the date of his election in this way, this segment of Iranian society sought to reset its historical clock with the Second of Khordād as the new starting point. Hassaninasab’s genre of the Second of Khordād also presupposes a new point of periodization, one that marks a new period for Iranian cinema. Whereas the Second of Khordād movement represents political change, the genre of the Second of Khordād points to changes within the film industry. This scheme suggests that cinema can do more than represent politics. A film industry, its practices and its aesthetics, can also reshape itself vis-à-vis a particular political system.

According to Hassaninasab, the films that constitute the genre of the Second of Khordād were bound together by their “engagement with themes that had previously been forgotten or unattainable.”³ Broadly surveying many of the films that were released during Khatami’s first term, he outlines a number of new themes, including immigration, marginalization, love triangles, and the unanswered needs of young people, but he focuses the bulk of his analysis on four areas that best represent the thematic developments in Iranian cinema during the first four years of Khatami’s presidency: (1) the rise of political content, (2) critical engagement with the Iran-Iraq War, (3) popular acceptance of stories that “engage earthly love and premarital relationships,” and (4) the development of more complex female characters.⁴

A genre of the Second of Khordād that comprises films with a new set of shared concerns accepts the idea that Khatami’s liberal cultural policies made possible the rise of these thematic developments. For Hassaninasab, the genre of the Second of Khordād offers the opportunity to consider what films are about when filmmakers are less restricted in what they can and cannot represent,⁵ and the films that constitute the genre of the Second of Khordād in Hassaninasab’s model relate to the reformist movement because they grew out of the open cultural atmosphere that Khatami’s presidency fostered. And yet a study of genre must account for more than just thematic content. A definition of the genre of the Second of Khordād, whose name recalls the genesis of the reformist movement, must suggest that these films communicate with Khatami and his policies and must register the video technology that made such communication possible and that contributed to the rhetoric of democracy that swept Iran at the end of the twentieth century.

Although this confluence redefined the terms of cultural and political engagement in Iranian society at the end of the twentieth century, it would not have even been possible a decade earlier. Following the revolution of 1978–1979 and the consolidation of cinematic affairs in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1982, the newly formed Islamic Republic banned all video-related technology, including handheld video cameras and video cassettes, and later VCRs and movies on video. This policy was part of a larger effort to control image making in Iran, a bold attempt to regulate viewership within the country and to curtail the unmediated circulation of images of the new republic outside of the country.⁷ Even as late as 1986, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a letter to all border custom agents reiterating the ban on “video cassettes and all related activity” and ordered that all blank tapes be sent to the ministry. Although in the absence of video cameras blank cassettes may have seemed harmless, the ministry warned that some of these tapes were not blank at all but rather had been “masterfully repackaged” before entering the country so that they appeared to be unopened blank tapes. The use of video technology by “individuals,” the ministry declared, was “unpermitted.”⁸ This report reveals the government’s anxiety about individual citizens accessing unregulated images and bringing them into the private space of the home, where they could no longer be controlled.

Despite clever attempts to repackage blank tapes, the ban was effective, though not absolute, in limiting access to video technology in the country. Statistics show that in 1992 there was 1 videotape per 22.5 people in Iran, compared to 1 videotape for every 3.8 people in the United States.⁹ But the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the changing of the guard within the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance ushered in new rhetoric and ultimately new policies with regard to video technology. In May 1993, Ali Larijani, the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, announced that the ministry intended to lift the ban on video technology. Although politicians had previously positioned video as part of an assault on culture (tahājom-e farhangi), Larijani argued that “we must know the qualities of mass communication in order to combat the assault on culture.”¹⁰ Importantly, he also moved beyond the Islamic Republic’s anxiety about cultural onslaught from the United States and Europe and advocated for video because it would allow Iran to share its culture globally and facilitate education and research within the country.¹¹ The decision to legalize video technology prompted controversy,¹² especially within the country’s periodicals, and one editorialist even called video a “little devil” that people welcome into their homes.¹³ Nevertheless, the ministry moved forward with the legalization of video and released regulations on the production of videos in September 1993.¹⁴ Two months later, 1,000 video clubs, owned and operated by Iran-Iraq War veterans (basijis), opened.¹⁵

During this period of legalization, the government sought to assuage people’s concern and encourage the use of video through initiatives like the subsidization of video making and the first video festival.¹⁶ By the time that Seyfollah Dad used a Betacam to shoot Khatami’s campaign movie four years later, video technology had gained tentative acceptance in society. However, it was not until Khatami’s presidency that video achieved widespread popularity and became associated with the ideals of democratization that marked the use of video around the world. In his study of video, Michael Z. Newman reminds us that the history of any medium must include attention not only to technological exceptionalism but also to the changing cultural status of that medium.¹⁷ In the case of Iran, the height of political reform witnessed a shift in the cultural value of video, as it moved away from its status as a vehicle for tahājom-e farhangi, the assault on culture, and toward its place alongside concepts like democracy, civil society, and the rule of law.

If the four years between the legalization of video technology in 1993 and Khatami’s election in 1997 marked the gradual acceptance of the medium within Iranian society, then the period of reform between 1997 and 2005 signaled its rise to widespread popularity. Advertisements for video equipment and services provide valuable information about both the growing popularity of video and the kinds of hopes and ambitions that video technology represented for Iranian society at this time. Between Khatami’s first month in office and the middle of his second presidential term, the number of advertisements for video-related products more than tripled in the monthly publication Film and totaled more than a quarter of all advertisements in the periodical.¹⁸ These advertisements marketed video equipment, such as cameras, tapes, and editing software, as well as services, such as rental clubs, videography and editing services, and filmmaking organizations that used video equipment. The marketing programs that informed these advertisements, although entrenched in capitalist agendas, contributed to a new discourse about video and its relationship to the film industry. Video offered a world of possibilities, from the chance to record “the beautiful world…exactly as it is” and to “create and preserve happy memories” to twenty-four-hour-a-day access and immediate playback options.¹⁹ As one advertisement boldly declared in a two-page spread, “Bring the cinema home!”²⁰ Video technology meant that filmmaking belonged to everyone and that the consumption of moving images was no longer confined to public spaces.

The rhetoric in these advertisements spoke to a larger global discourse about video that positioned it as a democratizing force. In the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, video technology spoke to democratic goals in a number of ways. Whereas the VCR allowed people to watch television and movies on their own terms, the ability to produce moving images easily and cheaply with camcorders meant that individuals could take control of airwaves and network programming. But more than anything it was the camcorder’s claim to authenticity that imbued video with a sense of democracy, and amateur video footage played a special role in the promotion of democratic ideals, including civic movements and political protests, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the circulation of amateur video footage showing LAPD officers brutally beating Rodney King.²¹

In Iran, too, video came to represent democracy. In particular it afforded filmmakers the chance to operate outside of the strict polices that had previously regulated every aspect of their work. It also gave every citizen the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s visual discourse, to participate in the image making that the Islamic Republic had so desperately tried to control, and it freed spectatorship from the hands of the governmental control. Samira Makhmalbaf, for example, noted that the only way to film using expensive 35 mm equipment was to rent it from the government, which required approval and constant oversight. Digital video, on the other hand, only required preliminary approval.²² Abbas Kiarostami also saw the video camera in democratizing terms and claimed that the digital video camera “frees cinema from the clutches of production, capital, and censorship.”²³ For both Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami, government control was tied to the flow of capital, and video, a relatively cheap technology, allowed the act of filmmaking to exist outside of the restraints of capitalism and state control. In general, during this period people sought to position media, including video, as fundamental to the civil society that Khatami promised.²⁴

Video technology, in addition to contributing to the rhetoric of democracy in Iran at the turn of twenty-first century, opened up an unprecedented conversation about copyright law, both internationally and locally, and such a discussion would not have been possible had it not been for Khatami’s emphasis on the rule of law during his presidency. Whereas debates about the ethics of video spectatorship during the period following the legalization of video technology took shape around questions about how the mass consumption of unregulated images would affect the well-being of society, during Khatami’s presidency examination of the ethics of video spectatorship became a discussion of copyright and the legal right to access the work of others. For example, in 2001 the illegal exhibition of contemporary Iranian films on NITV, a U.S.-based Persian-language satellite channel popular in Iran, prompted discussions about Iran’s failure to participate in one of the international copyright conventions.²⁵ Similarly, in 2002 a law was passed that prohibited the screening of movies on busses without written consent from the films’ owners.²⁶ These cases highlight the role that video technology played in facilitating debates about the role of law in society and what it meant to live in a civil society.

Whereas certain segments of the film industry, including distribution companies and producers, worried about the implications of video technology from legal and financial points of view, filmmakers took a much more positivist view of the medium. As a result, their experimentation with video technology and their attempts to represent it suggest an appeal to the ideas of democracy, civil society, and the rule of law that determined video’s cultural status at this important moment in Iran’s history. Filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Farmanara used video technology to intervene in the discourse of reform that shaped Iranian political and social engagement during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Both directors were established and successful filmmakers at the turn of the twenty-first century and, therefore, did not necessarily benefit from or require the financial affordances that video provided to amateur video makers at the time. Nevertheless, video still played an important role in their films, as both an aesthetic and a political possibility, one driven by a desire to operate outside of the hegemonic structures of power that had controlled the film industry for the better part of two decades.

On May 18, 1997, five days before Mohammad Khatami’s landslide electoral victory, as his campaign video circulated in overdrive, Abbas Kiarostami’s film Taste of Cherry momentously won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Although Iranian cinema had previously enjoyed much success at international festivals, this award marked its first major win, and it catapulted Iranian cinema and Abbas Kiarostami onto the international film scene. But film critics and scholars soon began suggesting that the win was political, tied to the upcoming elections in Iran. Roger Ebert, for example, wrote a critical review of the film,²⁷ which Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa positions as the critic’s commentary on the political nature of the film’s win at Cannes.²⁸ Azadeh Farahmand similarly argues that “Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997, the year that Khatami was elected Iran’s president, his image as a moderate leader circulating in the western Media.”²⁹ Time magazine further solidified the connection between reformist politics and Kiarostami’s film when it selected Taste of Cherry as one of the ten best films of the year and in the same issue praised Khatami for his willingness to engage in international dialogue.³⁰ Time’s suggestion that both Khatami’s “dialogue among civilizations” and Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry attempted to engage Iran globally in similar ways hints at a deep ideological relationship that scholars have yet to excavate fully. Kiarostami has claimed that he will “never make a political film,” and yet Taste of Cherry, although seemingly apolitical, reflects the philosophical crises that Khatami’s reformist movement sought to resolve, and the film and its video coda participated in a new popular discourse that culminated with Khatami’s political platform.³¹

Taste of Cherry is a minimalist film that follows a middle-aged man, known throughout the film only as Mr. Badii, as he circles the dusty outskirts of azTehran in his Land Rover. He drives almost aimlessly, looking for someone to bury him after he commits suicide. During the course of his travels, he picks up three men: a Kurdish soldier, an Afghan seminary student, and an Azeri taxidermist. To each of his passengers Mr. Badii offers a considerable sum of money to come to the grave site he has prepared for himself and cover him with dirt. All three men are visibly uncomfortable with the frankness of Mr. Badii’s offer, and each passenger reacts to Mr. Badii differently, their responses conditioned by their varying ages and social perspectives. The young Kurdish soldier is made so uncomfortable that he just jumps out of the car while it is still moving. The seminary student attempts to dissuade Mr. Badii by offering Islam’s perspective on suicide. The taxidermist, older and more experienced, offers his own experiences overcoming despair in an attempt to convince Mr. Badii to put off his plans and wait for something better. Once he sees that the protagonist is unwilling to change his outlook, the taxidermist reluctantly accepts the offer so that he can pay his sick daughter’s medical bills.

The film’s final scenes unravel the certainty of Mr. Badii’s plans. He leaves his car for the first time in the film as he tracks down the taxidermist at work to request that the taxidermist shake him before covering him with dirt, because it is possible he will just be sleeping. This request is followed by uncertain and voyeuristic images that show Mr. Badii’s shadow in his apartment and do not clearly indicate whether or not he takes the pills to kill himself. The uncertain momentum comes to a head when the scene changes to reveal Mr. Badii lying in his uncovered grave, and we are confronted with the possibility that we may never fully know whether or not Mr. Badii actually killed himself. The film abruptly destabilizes our investment in Mr. Badii’s decision when a long black-screen sequence marks the transition from 35 mm film to digital video. What at first seems like the next morning quickly becomes behind-the-scenes footage, as the actor playing Mr. Badii interacts with the film crew and we watch the production team at work. This coda powerfully reminds the viewer of the film’s fictionality, and it accords with other efforts by Kiarostami to draw attention to the camera’s delicate position between fiction and reality.

Although these aspects of the film play into a larger reformist aesthetic, the film furthers our understanding of a genre of the Second of Khordād by engaging the reformist movement’s most basic philosophical question about the reconciliation of a revolutionary, Islamic political system with more moderate democratic ideals. Taste of Cherry locates the answer to this paradox in the circular journey of reform and in video technology, which, far from punctuating the film in its final moment, opens up a whole world of new possibilities. Taste of Cherry reveals Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement and the democratizing value of video technology as reactions to the social and political concerns that shaped Iranian discourse in the late 1990s, as products of a particular sociopolitical moment that are ideologically tied to each other.

Taste of Cherry’s global success emerged from its engagement with universal questions about the meaning of life and death. Scholars have thoroughly examined the film as a philosophical statement that engages the fleeting nature of human life, and they have made connections to the commentaries on death in the literature of Iranian authors like Omar Khayyam and Sadeq Hedayat.³² Although the Iranian government took this candid discussion of suicide at face value, it has been suggested that the film’s coda, which exposes the profilmic space, was a move on the director’s part to appease censors, who otherwise saw the film as promoting suicide.³³ Despite the emphasis on the film’s representation of life, death, and suicide, Taste of Cherry betrays a sense that the issue of suicide is less the thrust of the film and more a means through which Kiarostami probes a cross section of society, what Laura Mulvey calls the film’s “social experiment.”³⁴

The film’s delicate structure is wrought with moments in which Kiarostami wryly casts doubt on both his own and the main character’s intentions. For example, the seminary student invites Mr. Badii to eat with him and a friend who has prepared a meal. Mr. Badii declines the offer by saying, “Thank you! I know he’s prepared food but eggs are bad for me. Some other time! Goodbye!” Both Mr. Badii’s concern for his health and his look to the future contradict the conversation he has just had about his upcoming plans to kill himself. Later, as he drives the taxidermist to work, Mr. Badii pulls out into traffic. His passenger yells, “What’s wrong with you? Are you in a hurry to die?” At this point in the film, the viewer is well aware of the fact that Mr. Badii is actually in a hurry to die. By including this line in the film, Kiarostami turns the forthcoming suicide into a joke, undercutting the severity of the film’s premise.

These ironic moments in the film invite us to think outside of the narrative structure and to contemplate a set of concerns not necessarily tied directly to the conversations that take place between the film’s protagonist and his various passengers. These counterexamples to Mr. Badii’s suicidal plans indicate that something else is at play with regard to the discussion of suicide, without necessarily devaluing the significance of the life/death discourse that the film establishes. Taste of Cherry undertakes philosophical inquiry, but its stakes are not necessarily life or death. Instead, the film shoulders the same philosophical project as Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement and attempts to reconcile a body of inherited policies with a contradictory set of future desires.

Taste of Cherry’s premise—a man looking for someone to bury him after he has committed suicide—offers an interesting paradox within an Iranian-Islamic context. On the one hand, suicide is considered a grave sin according to Islamic law, a fact emphasized in the film by the seminary student. A person who takes his own life is denied passage into paradise. On the other hand, burial is a rite of passage according to Islamic tradition and functions as one step in the process of gaining entrance into paradise. Whether or not someone who has committed suicide is eligible for a proper burial remains a topic of debate within Islamic jurisprudence, and there are a number of hadiths that indicate that during his lifetime the Prophet Mohammad refused to perform funeral prayers for individuals who had committed suicide.³⁵ Shari‘a, or Islamic law, constitutes a spectrum wherein mandatory and lawful actions (halāl) constitute one end, prohibited actions (harām) form the other end, and in between are actions that are to varying degrees desirable or undesirable. Mr. Badii’s goal, suicide and burial, creates tension between these two ends of the spectrum, and his foresight and intentionality strike the viewer as particularly strange.

Ultimately, it is the tension that arises from Mr. Badii’s two-part pursuit (his suicide and subsequent burial) that cinematically recreates the reformist movement’s most fundamental philosophical concern. Mohammad Khatami’s moderate political platform, which encouraged concepts like global engagement, civil society, and the rule of law, was in constant tension with the revolutionary system of governance that he both inherited and helped create. Olivier Roy, for example, argues that the biggest task that Khatami and his supports faced was secularizing a political system within a society that is culturally and socially invested in “its heritage and origin: an Islamic Revolution.” He also claims that in broader terms Khatami’s election brought to light “contradictions” about the relationship between religion and politics in the Iranian constitution.³⁶

The contradictions in Khatami’s political philosophy extend beyond the constitution and reach to his leadership style. Keyvan Tabari notes that one of the great “paradoxes” of Khatami’s leadership, and especially of his promotion of a rule of law, was that he claimed an “open mind” while also working from the seat of a system that limits political participation to those individuals “who pass a strict loyalty test.”³⁷ Khatami’s support of the Islamic Republic (as a governing system), the Iranian constitution, the velāyat-e faqih, and at times the basij did not readily accord with his promise of open democracy and civil society. Indeed, Abdolkarim Soroush, who provided a philosophical framework for Khatami’s early work, criticized Khatami for these contradictions and argued that Khatami’s “practical vacillation” was the result of “theoretical vacillation.”³⁸

These paradoxes, contradictions, and vacillations would ultimately open Khatami up to criticism. At the time that he was elected in 1997 (just days after Taste of Cherry’s win at Cannes), however, the possibility of reconciling these competing desires brought hope to Iranian society.³⁹ Khatami’s promise to pay homage to the revolution of 1978–1979 while also moving the country forward appealed especially to the sense of stagnation and revolutionary discontent that had come to a head in the country by the late 1990s. Taste of Cherry conveys this sense of stagnation while attempting to navigate through it. Like the reformist movement in 1997, the film represents the challenges of overcoming history while maintaining hope for the future.

Taste of Cherry constructs tension through its representation of journeys. The film’s visual structure depends on medium shots of Mr. Badii’s Land Rover circling through the dusty outskirts of Tehran. These shots, which show the car making small circles and big circles, punctuate the main character’s various conversations. In his study of the film, Marco Della Grassa carefully charts the moments of silence and dialogue in the film and provides the following breakdown:

These contemplative periods, however, do not occur in complete darkness, and the accompanying images serve as visual clues that guide the viewer’s experience. Shots of Mr. Badii circling consume a substantial portion of the silent stretches. The languid movement of Mr. Badii’s Land Rover ultimately reveals the disparity between the film’s visual structure and its narrative structure. The film’s dialogue, which focuses heavily on suicide, establishes a life-death continuum that forms a linear structure, intersecting and overlapping the visual structure’s circularity. The journey to death as a linear process is underscored by the taxidermist, who warns, “Life is like a train that keeps moving forward, and then reaches the end of the line, the terminal. And death waits at the terminal.” The character’s use of a transportation metaphor forces us to compare the linearity of life/death with the car’s dizzying turns, which scratch circles onto the film’s dusty landscape.

The film’s circular movements may reference a Sufi journey, a quest whose destination ultimately becomes the experience of movement.⁴¹ Taste of Cherry’s circularity also references the sense of stagnation that began developing in the early 1990s, at the same time that Makhmalbaf’s Nowbat-e ‘āsheqi (Time for love) and Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamun (Hamun) sought to represent the inertia of Iranian intellectual life. In Taste of Cherry, the tense interplay between silence and dialogue helps construct this sense of stagnation. Although the long periods of silence encourage contemplation, they make us restless and uncomfortable at the same time. The film also visually inscribes stagnation through its setting, the function of which is never made entirely clear. This dirt-filled space might be a construction site. We see heavy machinery, but piles of dirt are the only things being moved around or constructed. At one point, Mr. Badii gets out of his car and the viewer only sees his shadow. A dump truck backs up and dumps a pile of dirt onto the shadow. The shot widens, and Mr. Badii is covered in a cloud of dirt. Both he and his shadow are effectively buried. Although it is tempting to read this scene as foreshadowing Mr. Badii’s suicide and his burial, a better interpretation might stress the feeling of being buried alive, which captures the sense of futility that arose from the stagnation that Iranian society experienced at this time. Mr. Badii stresses this feeling during his discussion with the seminary student. He says, “There comes a time when a man can’t go on. He is exhausted.” The character’s sentiment resonates with the discontent of a generation, the origins of which we saw in films like Hamun and Time for Love.

The presence of the film’s minor characters positions this sense of stagnation and ineffectiveness not just as an individual predicament but also as a national condition. Mr. Badii’s first passenger, the Kurdish soldier, suggests that he is in a rush to return to the barracks. A series of follow-up questions, however, reveal that the soldier is hastily making his return even though he is not required to report back for duty for at least another hour. Mr. Badii points out the ridiculousness of rushing back only to wait. The film’s protagonist often seems to be in the position of pointing out the characters’ inefficiency. At one point, he chats with an Afghani laborer, whom he invites for a ride in his Land Rover. The worker claims that he cannot leave his post even on a holiday, because he must ensure that no one steals the machinery. Mr. Badii points out that the machine he is guarding is so big that no one could possibly steal it. But the Afghani worker insists that he must remain in his watchtower. The film’s main character also chats with a Lor man who collects plastic bags around the construction site. When Mr. Badii asks him for a favor, the man replies, “I just collect bags.” The man walks away, and the title sequence begins. The ethnicity of these characters is significant. In this film, Kiarostami maps Iran’s ethnic and cultural diversity, and he gives particular weight to those groups that have been marginalized. By showing these marginalized groups in the context of futility, the film shows how far this sense of stagnation reaches: to the outskirts of the city and of society.

The challenge of Taste of Cherry comes when one attempts to trace this metaphor to some end. The film features two narrative layers: one aural and one visual, one linear and one circular. It suggests that the linear journey between life and death might offer some reprieve from the circular patterns that haunt Iran’s modern history. Yet the film confounds its own philosophical reasoning when the taxidermist says, “Of course, death is a solution but not at first, not during your youth. Forgive me for dragging you off along this rocky road.” This statement throws doubt on the linear progression as a way out and redeems the circular journey as hopeful. The phrase “rocky road” is a reference to a point earlier in their conversation when the taxidermist tells Mr. Badii to take an alternative route to the city. When Mr. Badii says he does not know the way, the taxidermist replies, “I know it. It’s longer but better and more beautiful. I’ve been a prisoner of this desert for 35 years.” In this way, the film advocates the reform that Khatami’s movement promised rather than revolution. In other words, the taxidermist’s monologue, which is so powerful that it causes Mr. Badii to reconsider his suicide, suggests that it is not necessary to reconceptualize the idea of the journey. Sometimes the longer and more beautiful route is the way out. Khatami’s reformist movement similarly recognized how young the Islamic Republic was—at that point not even twenty years old—and sought to work within the existing structure rather than completely shifting gears and advocating for another revolution.

Although no other character is able to sway his beliefs on suicide, after his conversation with the taxidermist, Mr. Badii changes his tone significantly and suggests that he may not kill himself after all, that he might just be asleep in the grave. The film positions hope outside of the linear journey to death and, in doing so, redeems the circular journey. For the viewer, who at this point is invested in the characters’ decisions, the possibility that Mr. Badii might spare his life and continue driving in circles is hopeful. As chapter 5 more fully demonstrates, reform has also been a circular concept in Iran’s modern history, and Taste of Cherry locates hope in the cycles of reformist ideology.

Tehran has functioned as a physical manifestation of the country’s reformist efforts, and its representation constitutes an important feature of reform cinema in Iran. One of Taste of Cherry’s final scenes shows Mr. Badii moments after his conversation with the taxidermist, which throws his suicide plans into doubt. He meaningfully stares at the Tehran skyline at dusk. This scene, colorful with the sun’s final moments, clashes with the rest of the film, which is literally brown with dirt. Several cranes are at work in the center of the skyline, reminders of the patterns of construction and deconstruction that define Tehran. The bright colors and the crane revive the possibility of hope and of reform. Although Taste of Cherry never fully advocates either, the brief possibility acts as a momentary reprieve from the film’s otherwise heavy stagnation.

Our ultimate reprieve from this stagnation emerges from the film’s coda, which positions video technology as a redemptive force. A shot of Mr. Badii lying in his grave as a thunderstorm rolls in fades out while the sound of the storm continues to haunt the black screen. After a minute of darkness, rain, and thunder, the chants of soldiers doing military drills replace the thunderstorm soundtrack, and the black screen gives way to a grainy, green-tinted long shot of the rural countryside, presumably the site of Mr. Badii’s grave (figure 3.1). Then a sudden cut reveals a cameraman walking with a 35 mm camera. The shot pans out, and Homayun Ershadi, the actor who plays Mr. Badii, walks up to the director, Kiarostami, and hands him a cigarette, followed by a shot of a member of the sound crew squatting in the grass. These details destabilize any possibility that this scene represents the morning following Mr. Badii’s suicide. In fact, this final scene does not even qualify as the film’s end, because we are no longer in the film. We are now outside of it, watching its production.

This coda may have been a clever maneuver on Kiarostami’s part to outsmart censors by destabilizing the story of Mr. Badii’s suicide, and it certainly conforms to the director’s previous self-reflexive aesthetic. But the film’s final scene also makes an important statement about video technology, a point emphasized by the dramatic way in which Kiarostami ushers his audience into video spectatorship. Following a long stretch of black and thunder, the video footage, whose quality is markedly different from the previous 35 mm footage, reframes our perspective and makes it impossible to ignore the video camera’s presence.

Kiarostami, now a figure onscreen, provides some clues to understanding what video achieves in this coda and what it realizes within Taste of Cherry that conventional 35 mm film cannot (figure 3.2). After the video camera establishes the presence of the film crew, it settles on the marching soldiers, and we hear Kiarostami direct, “That’s enough. Do you hear me? Tell your men to stay right there, around the tree to rest for a few minutes. Filming is done…” Although the film’s English subtitles indicate that Kiarostami states that “the shoot is over,” he actually says filmbardāri tamum shod, or “filming is done.” Yet the fact that filming is complete does not mean that the movie is over, and several more minutes of footage, gathered with a video camera and set to Louis Armstrong’s somber “St. James Infirmary” unroll before us.⁴² Within Taste of Cherry filming and videotaping function separately, and video seeks to accomplish something to which film can only allude.

Because the video technology in Taste of Cherry operates outside of film, it can reveal truths about the “filming” whose completion Kiarostami has already declared. By rendering the filmmaking process visible, the video coda exposes the fiction of the narrative and saves us from having to face the possibility of Mr. Badii’s suicide. Video as a medium explodes Taste of Cherry’s ending and redeems it from film’s linearity. A film, even when it is wrapped in a circular canister, is a straight line, with a tangible beginning and end. But video, whether digital or analog, rejects this linear trajectory. Videotape, for example, charges endlessly in circles as it navigates the cassette’s anatomy, maneuvering between guides and capstans and around drums and reels. Video provides the possibility of taping over, looping, and immediate playback, all of which overcome film’s linearity. The final image we see in the video coda shows Mr. Badii’s Land Rover once more rounding a bend before the cut to credits. This moment, caught on video, renders the uncertainty of Mr. Badii’s suicide immaterial because it supplants the tentative shot of Mr. Badii lying in his grave as the movie’s last image. Instead, Taste of Cherry concludes by locating video technology in the very circularity that Mr. Badii’s narrative seeks to redeem.

Shot entirely with two digital video cameras mounted on the dashboard of an SUV, Kiarostami’s 10 continues the theorization of video technology that began in Taste of Cherry, and it demonstrates how the convergence of video and cinema contributed to the discourse of reform in Iran at the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Like Taste of Cherry, 10 was released in the context of one of Khatami’s campaigns, this time shortly after his reelection in 2001. With 10 Kiarostami returns to and expands on many of the stylistic features that made Taste of Cherry so successful. This film also marked Kiarostami’s return to the international film festival scene. After his success with Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami stated that although film festivals had played an important role in supporting his work, that phase in his life was over.⁴³ Nevertheless, he screened 10 at Cannes in 2002, where it received little attention. This movie also represents Kiarostami’s return to an urban space. After Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami released Bād mā rā khāhad bord (The wind will carry us, 1999), which takes place in a Kurdish region of Iran and conforms more closely to the director’s previous rural aesthetic. 10, on the other hand, finds articulation in the streets, concrete, and traffic of the capital city.

10 comprises ten discussions between Mania Akbari, a real-life visual artist and photographer, and various passengers as she drives around Tehran. The movie takes place entirely within the tight interior space of her SUV, and the use of the car as a narrative device constitutes a striking similarity between 10 and Taste of Cherry. 10 was shot with two digital video cameras, and Kiarostami claimed that the video cameras’ presence links 10 and Taste of Cherry, two films with disparate subject matter.⁴⁴ During the shooting of 10, the cameras were fixed on the dashboard, one in front of the passenger’s seat and the other in front of the driver. We only see footage from one of these cameras at any given time, and Kiarostami carefully controls the viewer’s access to images of the characters.

During the first sixteen-minute sequence, for example, we cannot see the driver. Instead, we only see her ten-year-old son, with whom she is arguing. Because we only see the son and his uncomfortable movements as he accuses his mother of being selfish and of loving no one but herself, we are made to identify with him.⁴⁵ This strategy puts us in the uncomfortable position of identifying with a boy who uses what Alberto Elena calls “verbal violence” to berate his mother.⁴⁶ We must come to terms with or challenge our passive spectatorship, and this technique proposes a new kind of video spectatorship.

Whereas nearly a century earlier Walter Benjamin celebrated the development of film technology for providing audiences with endless vantage points and perspectives, Kiarostami limits those perspectives in his configuration of video spectatorship.⁴⁷ Kiarostami intentionally does not adjust the camera’s zoom, so each passenger fills the frame differently.⁴⁸ This strategy draws our attention to the camera’s framing, or the process by which the camera establishes its frame and chooses to include or exclude subject material.⁴⁹ In this way, Kiarostami’s video spectatorship invites us to consider the nature of authenticity in the camera’s presence, rather than taking its authority for granted. Empowering the viewer to determine for him- or herself the limits of the camera’s frame speaks to a twenty-first century Iranian rhetoric of democracy.

Each of the ten sequences in 10 begins and ends abruptly, and these various sequences form a countdown that begins with ten and ends with one. This structure creates the impression that the movie is building up to something, that Akbari’s SUV has a final destination. However, the final sequence (number one), which is the movie’s shortest, simply repeats images and scenes that the viewer has already seen. 10 diverges from Kiarostami’s previous works with its decisive focus on the condition of Iranian women.⁵⁰ Indeed, the director has been criticized for rendering women absent from most of his films. He has explained his lack of attention to women’s issues by pointing to the codes of censorship that limit how he can represent women onscreen, and he claims that he does not “give any false impressions” that grow out of these restrictions. He later admits this omission as a mistake, one that he redeems in 10 by “giving a realistic picture of the Iranian middle-class woman as she actually is.” He says, “I can assure that it is all very true to life…. In other Iranian films there is always someone who goes around adjusting the women’s headscarves just before they start filming, but that is frankly the death of cinema.”⁵¹ His observation about women’s scarves nods to the rule that all women must be properly veiled whenever onscreen, even in scenes depicting their private lives, where they would not normally be required to cover their hair. Certain films meaningfully draw the viewer’s attention to the cinematic absurdity that this rule creates. For example, Tahmineh Milani’s Afsāneh-ye āh (Legend of a sigh, 1991) features a scene in which a young woman springs from bed already wearing her scarf, and Under the Skin of City shows Tuba combing her long hair, but Bani-Etemad frames the shot in such a way that we cannot see her head, only her disembodied hair.

In 10 Kiarostami chooses to navigate around this trap by confining the narrative space to a car’s interior, a mobile setting that he believes more closely approximates women’s reality. Just as in Under the Skin of the City, 10 establishes the car as a specialized space, bound by its own rules and regulations. Whereas Under the Skin of the City brings to focus the car as a source of social and economic mobility, 10 theorizes the car in Iranian society as a semiprivatized space, susceptible to certain public laws, like those that dictate the modesty of one’s clothing, but private enough for intimate conversations and sometimes the transgression of legal gender relations. Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib argue that 10 is different from other films about women that were released in Iran at the turn of the twenty-first century because it gives the audience “direct access” to a woman’s space, and this perspective radically alters the relationship between object and subject. Its lack of wide shots ultimately creates a spatialized female intimacy that other Iranian films fail to achieve.⁵²

10 marks a shift in Kiarostami’s body of work to include the representation of women, a trend that began with The Wind Will Carry Us. Kiarostami’s exclusion of women began before his work in film, and even the commercials he directed throughout the 1960s did not feature many women.⁵³ Kiarostami had remained consistent in his exclusion of women over the course of his forty-year career up until this point, despite a revolution that drastically restructured the policies regulating media industries. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, with films like 10 he not only included female characters but also aggressively tackled the issue of women, both in Iranian society and in the film industry. This shift spoke to the consolidation of the “women’s question” in society at this time and the possibilities opened up by digital video technology, both of which contributed to discourses of reform at the turn of the twenty-first century. Just as Taste of Cherry and Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement reacted in kind to the stagnation that weighed heavily on Iranian society in the late 1990s, 10 responded to the growing concern over the status of women in the Islamic Republic. This evolution is in step with the reformist movement’s shift from being a philosophical venture to being less philosophical and more invested in specific social issues.

Women’s participation in Iranian society occupied a central position in Khatami’s political platform, and this particular issue distinguished him from other contemporary politicians.⁵⁴ During his presidency, in step with concepts like civil society, democracy, and human rights, Khatami addressed the oppression of women and even criticized Islamic jurisprudence for not taking into account the realities of modern life when addressing the rights of women.⁵⁵ In 1997 he famously stated that “women and men are different, but women are not the second sex and men are not superior.”⁵⁶ In 2000 Khatami published a book called Zanān va javānān (Women and youth). The book stresses the significance of engaging both women and young people in systems of governance. Khatami argues that one role of government is to facilitate women’s recognition of “their rights and capabilities” and to allow them to “acknowledge their merits.”⁵⁷ With this statement he moves beyond the previously held notion that men, and their government in particular, must guard women. As a result of this progressive thinking, the feminist magazine Zanān (Women) endorsed Khatami during both of his elections. During his presidency, what appeared to be women’s reform marked the streets of Tehran, and the enforcement of dress codes was relaxed considerably, a move that visibly changed the visual composition of the cityscape. Press restrictions were also relaxed, and in 1998 the secular feminist journal Jens-e dovom (Second sex) received a permit for publication. Khatami also established the Center for Women’s Participation, which was led by Vice President Zohreh Shojai and encouraged the formation of women-based nongovernmental organizations.

At the same time, Khatami’s line of thinking with regard to women featured an explicit paradox. For Khatami, women played an imperative role in the home, in the family structure, and within private spaces, and he wondered whether this special place in the home would marginalize them in society. He called on Iranian society to contemplate this potential contradictory duality, asking “how we can have women in the public sphere without disintegrating the structure of the family.”⁵⁸ During his presidency, however, Khatami never succeeded in solving this paradox.⁵⁹ He was also unable to overcome conservative forces to achieve the level of women’s rights that he had promised. Most notably, he failed to get the Guardian Council to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); many of the bills in support of women’s rights that the sixth Majles (2000–2004) passed met the same fate. Despite, or perhaps because of, these failures, Khatami’s presidency brought discussions about women’s rights in Iranian society to the forefront in unprecedented ways.

Kiarostami’s 10 responds to this heightened discourse about women. It critiques the status of women during Khatami’s presidency, and more specifically it challenges the policies that regulated the representation of women onscreen. The film’s penultimate segment is especially poignant in this regard. Mania chats with her friend, who rode in the SUV earlier in the movie as well. The friend has grown dependent on a man who refuses to marry her, a fact she has finally accepted. Mania comments that the woman’s veil is particularly tight, a fact that the viewer has already recognized based on earlier images of her. Mania jokes, “Are you modest? Why is your veil so tight? It doesn’t suit you.” This observation triggers a minute-long scene in which we are uncomfortably forced to watch the friend as she plays with her scarf, slowly pulling it off to reveal that she has shaved her head. By any measure, this scene is powerful and shocking, but it is especially so within the context of Iranian cinema at this time, because even the slightest transgression in women’s clothing might have been perceived as a serious moral transgression.

In this scene, we watch as Kiarostami and the actress unexpectedly and unapologetically violate the law, and at the same time we are forced to witness the women’s vulnerability: her shaking hands as she adjusts her scarf, her uncertain laugh as Mania interrogates her about cutting her hair, her tears, and ultimately her bald head. The shot, generated from a mounted, stationary camera, refuses to change its perspective or alter its focus to provide the viewer with some visual relief. Instead the viewer remains an uncomfortable voyeur for a relatively long stretch of time. This scene violates and at the same time challenges the laws of onscreen modesty. At the center of the law requiring women to veil is a belief in the tantalizing power of a woman’s hair. In 10 a woman unveils, but she has no hair, and this image draws attention to and undermines the very foundations grounding the laws that regulate women’s public appearance.⁶⁰

Mohammad Khatami, in his role as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, played a crucial role in establishing the film industry under the Islamic Republic, and shortly after he began his tenure as minister of culture and Islamic guidance in 1982, the ministry was charged with generating and enforcing a set of guidelines that governed the production and exhibition of moving images. These regulations demanded that films represent “chaste” women who participate in society while raising “God-fearing and responsible children,” and that directors must not use women to “arouse sexual desires.”⁶¹ Khatami’s ministry was responsible for interpreting these ambiguous guidelines, and at that time the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance prescribed the “commandments for looking (ahkām-e nigāh kardan),” which took the shape of “laws that enforced the veiling of Iranian women from their male counterparts both on and in front of the screen.”⁶²

Kiarostami’s 10 points to the restrictive policies that Khatami helped create, especially when a woman unveils herself onscreen. 10 underscores the covalence of open discourse about women’s rights on the one hand and the contradictions of the laws of modesty that determine the very shape of women onscreen on the other. In this way, the movie highlights the contradictions of Khatami’s leadership in the Islamic Republic, in his role both as president and as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, by drawing attention to the incongruity between his presidential policy toward women and his profound effect on the film industry. The tension that 10 creates points to the paradox of Khatami’s rhetoric about women: the challenge of reconciling a woman’s specialized role in private space with her right to live and work in public spaces. Like Khatami’s reformist movement, 10 never provides a solution to this paradox and cannot, therefore, be part of a film industry that demands women’s modesty. 10 was the first film by Kiarostami to be banned by the Islamic Republic, and it marked the first time that the director openly criticized regulations on the film industry.⁶³ In an interview with Shahram Tabemohammadi in 2000, Kiarostami confirmed his belief that filmmakers ought to work within the codes of censorship.⁶⁴ 10 therefore demonstrates a notable shift in the director’s attitude toward the film industry, and this shift was a corollary of the paradoxes of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement, especially its policies regarding women.

10’s relationship to the reformist movement is less direct than what we see in the films of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, which explicitly depict Mohammad Khatami. Instead, 10 and Taste of Cherry, released immediately before and after Khatami’s two elections, helped establish and critique the discourse of reform that buttressed Khatami’s political platform. The films intervene philosophically on behalf of and in opposition to the tenants of the reformist movement. But 10’s social critique also furthers our understanding of the genre of the Second of Khordād and demonstrates how a reformist aesthetic transformed the shape of movies in Iran. Specifically, 10’s innovative use of digital video cameras and footage has had a profound effect on Iranian cinema, and it has reconfigured what it means to operate within the regulations of the Iranian film industry.

Kiarostami’s first foray into digital video occurred in Taste of Cherry, and the journalistic quality of the video coda opened Kiarostami up to censure by critics who believed this technology to be unbecoming of Kiarostami’s art-house style.⁶⁵ Kiarostami’s decision to shoot 10 exclusively with digital video cameras must thus be considered within both the immediate artistic context and the broader cultural-political context. The director gives us further insight into his decision in the short movie 10 on Ten (2004), originally intended to be an extra on the French DVD of 10. The short takes place in the dusty setting of Taste of Cherry and represents the director’s most pointed commentary on the digital form and its effect on his transforming vision for Iranian cinema. In 10 on Ten, Kiarostami advocates on behalf of digital video cameras because they eliminate directing and directors. He claims that the digital camera, small and sometimes concealable, encourages the “artist to work alone again,” because he is no longer bound to investors, capital flow, or the limitations of his technical abilities. Everything is “self-contained” in this tiny box, which frees the director and invites “new discoveries.”⁶⁶ As Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib note, the digital camera “continues looking when the film camera averts its gaze,” and it “does not attempt to frame the action but only [to] cover it.”⁶⁷ However, the disappearance of direction does not mean the disappearance of the auteur, and 10’s ninety minutes were fashioned from more than twenty-three hours of raw footage gathered over several days. The director whittled the movie’s shape and controlled precisely what we see and hear.

Because of the video camera’s independence—the fact that it does not require processing or specialized technical crews like film does—Kiarostami sees it as closer to reality than the 35 mm camera. He claims that video eliminates the “artifice” between his eye and reality, and that its sweeping 360-degree shots “record the truth, the absolute truth.” He likens the technology to “a god: all-encompassing and omnipresent.”⁶⁸ By positioning video technology in terms of the divine and as a medium through which we might discover the truth, Kiarostami returns to the mysticism that shaped reform cinema during the early 1990s. But at the same time his advocacy of digital cameras also helps us understand why he suddenly took up the representation of women in 10. He previously stated that he avoided female characters because restrictions on the film industry rendered any representation of women unauthentic. The digital video camera, however, allowed him to operate outside of those restrictions and to get as close to his female subjects as possible.

In 10 on Ten, during his discussion of 10, Kiarostami claims that digital video “will bring about fundamental structural changes to the concept of film, cinema, directing, cinematography, and acting.” He foresees digital cameras ushering in the expansion of cinema, a move away from “clichés, traditions, imposed forms, and pretentious aesthetics.” The language that Kiarostami uses in his impassioned endorsement of digital video recalls the very democratic rhetoric that linked video to political reform during this period. He says that digital cameras provide the filmmaker with “liberty” and that they allow the filmmaker to sidestep “traps set by capital and capitalists.”⁶⁹ This impetus to experiment, the commitment to re-form, is a crucial piece of the reformist aesthetic.

Shortly after Khatami’s election in 1997, Bahman Farmanara, a contemporary and friend of Kiarostami, submitted a script to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for a political film called Az Abbas-e Kiarostami motenafferam! (I hate Abbas Kiarostami!).⁷⁰ He thought he might be able to capitalize on Khatami’s victory to end his forced retirement from the film industry. Although he hoped that the script’s title would throw off censors, the ministry immediately rejected the script. Farmanara was particularly upset by this rejection, concerned that he might never work as a director in Iran again, because he was denied permission even after the country’s most moderate president was elected into office. In response, Farmanara wrote a synopsis for a script about a dying director who has been refused permission to direct and thus decides to make a movie about his own funeral using a video camera, because such a movie would not require permission from the ministry.⁷¹ He claimed that he submitted the synopsis “as a joke,” and much to his surprise, the ministry asked for the full script, which ultimately earned Farmanara a permit to begin work on The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine.

The film marked Farmanara’s long-awaited directorial return to Iranian cinema after an absence of nearly a quarter century, and it is fully entrenched in the political atmosphere that ushered in his homecoming. The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, a relatively short film (ninety-three minutes), is interrupted midway by a two-minute clip of Khatami giving a speech. The main character, played by Farmanara, watches the president on TV, and the film’s viewer is made to watch with him. The mise-en-scène signals a complicated relationship between Khatami and Farmanara. As Farmanara listens to Khatami, he lazily sprawls on a couch; above him hangs a picture of a man in Qajar attire whose face has been erased. Iranian audiences immediately recognize the man in the picture as Shāzdeh ehtejāb (Prince Ehtejab), the title character in a modernist novel published by Hushang Golshiri in 1969. Farmanara made his second feature-length film and a name for himself in Iranian cinema by turning the novel into a successful film in 1974. The picture hanging over the director’s head in The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, a painting by Aydin Aghdashloo, bears a striking resemblance to the original cover of the book and the movie poster, and its presence places Khatami in conversation with Farmanara’s career (figures 3.3 and 3.4).

The director’s cinematic career literally sprawls out on the screen in front of us as Khatami’s voice resonates in the foreground. Khatami effects Farmanara’s career and shapes his film as we watch it. By keeping Khatami onscreen for more than two minutes, Farmanara does more than simply reference Khatami or reform. He provides the viewer with a sample of the president’s philosophies, and these lessons in political reform stay with us for the rest of the film. Certainly, The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine benefited from Khatami’s administration. Farmanara’s requests for permits had been denied previously, and he received his first permit to direct within the Islamic Republic during Khatami’s presidency, no doubt a result of Khatami’s support of the film industry at this time. At the same time, The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine also seeks to understand how reform redefined the Iranian intellectual at the turn of the twenty-first century. The film is an exploration into mourning: private mourning, public spectacle, and the death of an older order of intellectualism. The sense of melancholy that consumes the first two-thirds of the film clears the way for a new kind of reformist intellectual, and video serves as the medium through which this new intellectualism finds hope.

The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine is largely autobiographical, a fact reiterated by the director’s role as the main character, who is also named Bahman. Farmanara was born in 1942 in Tehran and studied film first in London and later at the University of Southern California. He returned to Iran in the mid-1960s and began working for Iranian national television, first promoting art films on the network and later directing short films himself. His first feature film, Shāzdeh ehtejāb (Prince Ehtejab, 1974), won critical and popular acclaim and instantly solidified the director’s place as a serious filmmaker in Iran’s New Wave. Farmanara followed Prince Ehtejab with Sāyeh-hā-ye boland-e bād (Tall shadows of the wind, 1978), also based on a story by Golshiri. Like his first film, Tall Shadows of the Wind was controversial and features a scene that juxtaposes images of a mullah praying and a man masturbating. A year later the revolution halted Farmanara’s directing career, and he and his family eventually settled in Canada, where he successfully ran a film distribution company. His work took him to Los Angeles, where he lived for a brief period of time before returning to Iran in the mid-1980s to deal with family issues. He decided to remain in Iran rather than return to his work in Los Angeles.

Almost immediately, he began to submit scripts to the ministry in order to obtain a permit to make films in Iran. Until The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, however, the ministry rejected all of his scripts. Farmanara has suggested that the authorities took particular offense to his representation of Islam in Tall Shadows of the Wind, and they were suspicious of the fact that he was successful before the revolution and left immediately after it.⁷² The director worked as a producer and taught in the Cinema Department at the Arts University in Tehran while continuing to submit scripts. Shortly after Khatami’s election, the complex system of censorship in Iran loosened slightly, and the process no longer required the submission of scripts for preliminary approval.⁷³ Nevertheless, Farmanara continued to submit his scripts as a precaution, worried that the films would later be denied a permit. After eleven rejections, he found success with the proposal for The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine.⁷⁴ Since then, Farmanara has directed three other films: Khāneh‘i ru-ye āb (A house on water, 2001), Yek bus-e kuchulu (A little kiss, 2005), and Khāk-e āshenāi (Familiar soil, 2008).

The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, an autobiographical investigation into the nature of mourning, disillusionment, and the fate of intellectualism within Iran, tells the story of Bahman Farjami, a director who has not made a film in more than twenty years. Farmanara plays the role of Farjami, and the similarity between the director’s name and the character’s is striking. The word farjām literally means “concluding” or “near the end,” and this name adds to the overall sense of death that pervades the film. Farjami suffers from a heart condition, and his death is imminent. On top of that, he mourns his wife, who died five years earlier, and his colleagues and friends, who have all died recently. More than anything, he mourns his life, his failures, and his career as a filmmaker. The film is divided into three acts: “A Bad Day,” “Funeral Arrangements,” and “Throw a Stone in the Water.” In between each of these acts are scenes of Farjami sitting on a train, traveling to some unknown destination. The progression of acts along with Farjami’s name and travel indicates that for Farmanara, like Kiarostami, the journey to death is a linear one. This understanding of death is reaffirmed in the film when characters refer to birth and death as arrival and departure, respectively.

The autobiographical details of the film extend beyond the reference to Prince Ehtejab and the naming sleight of hand. Farmanara also alludes to the beginning of his career, and the small role he played in Ebrahim Golestan’s film Khesht va āyeneh (Mudbrick and mirror, 1965), which is about a taxi driver who discovers an infant in the back of his car. The taxi driver spends most of the film trying to find the baby’s mother, and he encounters cynicism at every turn. In The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, Bahman Farjami picks up a woman walking by herself, and when she exits the car, she leaves behind her stillborn child in a plastic bag. Whereas in Mudbrick and Mirror the baby ultimately becomes a symbol of hope and a positive force in the taxi driver’s life, in The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, the baby is another source of mourning. It is the death of a long but unproductive career.

Farmanara’s personal ties to the pervasive sense of melancholy extended into the details of the film’s production and publicity. After the distributor only published one newspaper advertisement to publicize the film, Farmanara took matters into his own hands. He printed ten thousand copies of a portrait of himself in the style of an obituary photograph (figure 3.5). In Iran people print such photographs in newspapers and post them publically on neighborhood walls to announce a loved one’s death. Farmanara distributed these photographs to his friends and to students and requested that they post them on the walls of the city. As a result, countless people phoned Farmanara’s father to express their sympathies for his death. The tactic was wildly successful, and although initially the film was slated to screen in only one theater, its distribution was extended to three theaters to accommodate the demand for the film. In the end, it was the third most successful film of the year in terms of box office sales.⁷⁵

More than just a publicity stunt, this move demonstrates how the film mourns Farmanara’s career up until that time, and in this way he joins a group of other filmmakers, including Bahram Reypur, Hajir Dariush, Jajal Moqaddam, and Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Farmanara’s friends and colleagues, whose deaths and funerals are mentioned throughout the film. The presence of these deceased directors within the film’s text leads Hamid Dabashi to label the film as a public means through which Farmanara privately mourns his colleagues in a format that no longer has relevance in Iranian society.⁷⁶ But The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine ultimately offers something much broader than one filmmaker’s elegy for his friends. The deaths of these renowned directors come to symbolize within the film the death of a certain kind of intellectualism. The film brings into focus the futility of an entire generation of artists and intellectuals, disempowered by a new governance system that evaluates their work according to new terminology and a new set of standards. After mentioning the deceased directors, Farjami describes the present environment, saying, “When a filmmaker doesn’t make films or a writer doesn’t write that is death. In fact, I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of living a futile life.” And this was the death that Farmanara advertised by circulating his own obituary photo, and this kind of death spoke to the anxiety of a generation of intellectuals who were prolific and celebrated before the revolution but unable to continue their work after the revolution.

The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine’s representation of the demise of the artist recalls the bleeding out of the intellectual in Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamun a decade earlier. What distinguishes The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine is its resurrection of the intellectual during Khatami’s presidency. If the film had stopped at Farjami’s farjām, his end, then it might have fallen into Dabashi’s categorization, too narrowly focused to appeal to a society no longer invested in that dying intellectual generation. But the film features Farjami’s funeral, which is wild and out of control, unlike anything that he had planned. Farjami is present as both a participant (i.e., the deceased) and an invisible observer, unable to change the camera angles or stop people from crying. A phone call announcing the birth of Farjami’s grandson interrupts the procession. The funeral disappears—it has never happened—and Farjami is imbued with new hope and a desire to return to his childhood and to nature. Farmanara explains the name of the last act, “Throw a Stone in the Water,” as a reference to a quotation from Kafka: “When you throw a stone in the water, you can’t control the waves.” The film ends with Farjami throwing a stone into water, and Farmanara has suggested that this act is a statement: “I am alive. I am back and I am going to keep working.”⁷⁷ This ending suggests the possibility of working within the existing structure of the Islamic Republic and participating in a new kind of intellectualism.

This conclusion to The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine does not strike the viewer as unreasonable, because the film provides the information and tools necessary to reconstruct (or reform) the intellectual figure. Khatami and the reformist movement play a significant role in this process and function as representative examples of the new Iranian intellectual. At the same time the film provides counterexamples to this model and examines the real-life fate of those intellectuals unwilling or unable to repurpose themselves and conform to the new standards of intellectualism in the Islamic Republic. In The Smell of Camphor, the Scene of Jasmine, the old order of intellectualism no longer has a function in Iranian society, and the film identifies Khatami’s reformist movement as a site of new and emerging modes of intellectualism in post-revolution Iran.

Farmanara explained that after the revolution everything in Iran became politicized. Although before the revolution intellectuals were always political, after the revolution the spread of politics into almost every aspect of life demanded the democratization of intellectualism.⁷⁸ This democratization in turn required that the intellectual be well versed in and sympathetic to a number of different modes of thinking, not just one’s own ideological belief set. In his film Farmanara represents this need for intellectuals to access broader sources of information through the use of newspapers. At several points in the film, we see references to conservative newspapers. Characters read them, and they are on display on tables and desks.

The most notable example is Keyhān, a newspaper that is under the direct control of the Supreme Leader and is one of the most influential publications in Iran. Even though Farjami is represented as an artist and intellectual, a director with a demonstrated knowledge of both Western and Iranian thought and a flawless American accent, conservative newspapers like Keyhān appear on his coffee table. And this moment in the film suggests the need for the intellectual to “foster a much wider connection.” Although this detail may seem small, it is unprecedented in Iranian cinema, and Farmanara notes, “It is like a bombshell” that “young people will notice.”⁷⁹

Khatami similarly promoted broader connections through the press. One of his major contributions to the country during his first few years as president was a rapid liberalization of the press. Almost immediately following his election, Khatami’s administration made it easier for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to issue press permits, and within the first year of Khatami’s presidency, 779 new press permits were issued, which raised the total number to 930. In other words, there was an approximately 500 percent increase in press permits and press activity in one year. However, like many of Khatami’s initiatives, this one was thwarted by conservative forces, which had grown resentful of Khatami’s relationship with the press.⁸⁰ Beginning in 1999 and continuing in 2000, the Majles, led by speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, passed a series of laws that limited freedom of press and initiated the closure of several prominent reformist newspapers. The 1999 closure of Salām, the most popular reformist newspaper at the time, prompted student demonstrations that were violently squalled. The paper’s closure incident, which remains one of the greatest blemishes on Khatami’s presidency, calls attention to the contentious nature of the press in Iran at this time. In The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine, which was released in the wake of Salām’s closure, the subtle use of newspapers is a reminder of the debates over open press and the significance of these debates to the reformist movement.

In contrast to the more restrained use of newspapers in the film, Farmanara’s inclusion of a video clip of a speech by Khatami forcefully draws the viewer’s attention to the reformist movement. In Under the Skin of the City, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad also uses a real Khatami speech, but she uses just the sound bite in order to contrast Khatami’s words with images from the street. In contrast, Farmanara inserts an entire video clip, and the effect of this technique is that the viewer is made to watch and focus on the video of Khatami without additional visual stimulus. In this video, Khatami argues that “the fate of the social aspect of religion will always depend on our viewing of religion in such a way that it is compatible with freedom.” With this statement, he establishes the necessity of multidisciplinary thinking when it comes to the study and practice of religion.

Khatami studied Western philosophy at the University of Isfahan and then undertook traditional seminary training at Qom. He thus embodies the coalescence of two different modes or styles of thinking. Certainly, Khatami’s attempts to introduce democracy, civil society, and the rule of law into Islamic thinking mark a significant step in the effort to bring together disparate beliefs and ways of thinking. This endeavor was one of the great philosophical contributions to Iranian society. The view of religion as something that can be pitted against or reconciled with freedom also harkens back to Abdolkarim Soroush’s ideas that were discussed in chapter 1 of this study, wherein religious knowledge is a manmade tool through which humans approximate and access religious truth to the best of their abilities.

Within the scheme that Khatami describes, freedom is the undisputed champion in human societies. He says, “If you read the pages of history, you will notice that anything that has confronted freedom has suffered in the process…. If religion has confronted freedom, it has been damaged. If justice has confronted freedom, it has been damaged, and if development and construction have confronted freedom, they too have been damaged.” Khatami cites two examples to make his point that to challenge freedom is to dismantle one’s own cause. His first example is “from the Middle Ages when religion and freedom confronted one another, and religion suffered the defeat. The other one is from the world of communism in our age, when economic justice and freedom confronted one another and justice lost, even though the people might not have gained their freedom either.” These two examples both reference ideologically closed periods in which political systems did not accommodate freedom and consequently suffered. The irony of this speech in the film is that the viewer watches it as Farjami lies motionless on his couch, unable to work and direct films. Farmanara has mentioned that one reason he included Khatami’s speech was because he found Khatami’s assertion that not every encounter with freedom is positive to be congruent with this part of the film’s sense of despair. Nevertheless, the film posits Khatami as a new brand of intellectual who works within different theoretical frameworks and brings together different types of knowledge and ideologies in order to appeal to broad, popular audiences.

Whereas The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine positions Khatami as the new intellectual, it also considers the fate of those intellectuals who were unable to work within the new structure of the Islamic Republic. One of the film’s most daring aspects is its direct, though subtle, reference to the qatl-hā-ye zanjireh‘i (serial murders), the name given to a number of unexplained murders of dissident intellectuals in the late 1990s.⁸¹ These intellectuals were, by and large, what remained of the generation of pre-revolution intellectuals, who were usually socialist or communist. In the film one of Farjami’s friends, presumably a fellow intellectual, disappears for several days. When he returns, he has been badly beaten, and he eventually dies. In the several years following Khatami’s election, a number of intellectuals, artists, writers, and translators and their families suffered similar fates or suffered other violent deaths.

The unexplained murders of intellectuals in the Islamic Republic began as early as 1988, in a fashion strikingly similar to murders carried out by SAVAK, the shah’s intelligence and security agency, in the decades before the revolution. However, the murders gained unprecedented momentum and organization once Khatami was elected president. This connection between the escalating murders and Khatami’s new leadership led some people to the conclusion the murders were directly related to Khatami’s victory and were a backlash against his cultural liberalism.⁸²