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FILM ARCHIVES AND ONLINE VIDEOS

The Search for Reform in Post-Khatami Iran

The 2005 elections effectively closed the moderate atmosphere cultivated by Khatami’s presidency and marked the rise of the neoconservative movement in Iran.¹ During his presidency, Khatami had positioned himself as a populist champion. Now, with Khatami precluded from seeking reelection in 2005 due to Iran’s consecutive two-term limit, a new self-styled “populist” rose to take his place. Although Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline conservative platform radically differed from Khatami’s moderate policies, Ahmadinejad also chose to position himself as a populist during the election, in stark contrast to his main rival, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a cleric and member of the ruling elite. With the support of Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad promised to address the country’s economic problems, especially its alarming unemployment rates, a promise that helped him garner more than 60 percent of the vote and solidify his position as the people’s voice.²

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election reflected the country’s frustration with the reformist movement and Khatami’s broader failure to liberalize the government during his eight-year presidency.³ Almost immediately, Ahmadinejad and his newly formed cabinet began codifying more conservative cultural policies. The newly appointed minister of culture, Hossein Saffar-Harandi, banned the distribution and exhibition of films that promoted “secularism” and “feminism.”⁴ However, this ban was not enough for conservative members of the Majles. In early 2006, the Majles sharply criticized Ahmadinejad for his failure to better regulate the film industry. Specifically, the Majles claimed that the films released during Ahmadinejad’s first year as president were “not significantly different” from “Khatami-era” films, did not meet the “higher values of the Islamic regime,” and thus needed tighter control. This criticism brings into focus two important features of Iranian cinema after Khatami’s presidency. First, a shift toward neoconservatism created new conflict within Iran’s film industry. Second, the reformist aesthetic project, initiated under Khatami’s presidency, remained relevant during Ahmadinejad’s first term.

The previous chapters have thus far examined the ways in which cinema and political reform came together at various points in Mohammad Khatami’s political career, and how these intersections created a reformist aesthetic that continued to develop and transform even after the reformist movement, as a political entity determined by Khatami’s presidency, ended. Cinema continued to seek the relevance of Khatami’s popular discourse, and specifically it attempted to evaluate the terms of his political platform after the reformist movement failed to create the changes that it promised. Although the films released after Khatami’s presidency do not benefit practically from his political leadership, these films are nevertheless invested in a reformist aesthetic. And, should we narrowly define the reformist movement’s impact on cinema only in terms of its ability to foster a culturally liberal political atmosphere, these films might otherwise be overlooked.

Massoud Bakhshi’s Tehrān anār nadārad (Tehran has no more pomegranates, 2007), an experimental documentary, and the music video “‘Eshq-e sor‘at” (Love of speed, 2007), performed by the underground band Kiosk and directed by Ahmad Kiarostami, demonstrate that reform as a media event functioned outside of the temporal limits of its political antecedent. Although both works were released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended and did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism, the experimental documentary and music video are still central to the reformist debates. Specifically, they question the legacy of Khatami’s political platform, which included concepts like “civil society” and “religious democracy.” The films’ experimentation with form further suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it. Analyzing a film alongside a music video connects cinema innovations to trends in social media and youth culture, introducing a new model for studying media ecology in contemporary Iran.

CELLULOID REFORM

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is a self-described “musical, historical, comedy, docu-drama, love story, experimental film,” and although relatively short (68 minutes), it succeeds in encompassing all of the styles and genres to which it lays claim. Playing with fact and fiction is a common stylistic device in Iranian cinema. Massoud Bakhshi’s experimental film takes this interplay and Eisenstein’s notion of cinematic montage to new extremes. The film changes mediums, switches narratives, and makes disorienting jumps in space and time. In doing so, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates forces disparate images to collide across distant temporal and social boundaries, much as the city itself exists in a constant state of flux and perpetual evolution.

Because the film actively resists the informing logic that often determines the documentary genre, some critics have questioned whether Bakhshi’s creation can even be categorized as a documentary. Other critics take a more extreme view and argue that the film is better classified as zed-e mostanad (antidocumentary) because of its willingness to defy the argument-based conventions of the documentary genre.⁵ By viewing the film through the lens of reform, however, we may approach the question of categorization from a different vantage point. Reform is both a point of entry into the narrative and a strand to be traced throughout the film. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates’s composite style makes a profound statement about the history and legacy of reform in Iran. Significantly, because the film is also about the process of documentary filmmaking in the country, it theorizes reform as an aesthetic possibility.

As we begin our analysis of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, it is useful to consider the film in comparison to Kamran Shirdel’s Un shab keh bārun umad (The night it rained, 1967), discussed in chapter 2. Although the two plots may differ substantially, both films ultimately offer a self-reflexive critique of the “real.” Shirdel’s The Night It Rained plays with the disconnection created by contradictory images and sounds. This approach to filmmaking challenges the formation of truth, prompting the viewer to question truth as an epistemological category. Similarly, Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates creates tension between image and sound within the film’s first minute. In the opening scene, wild images of Tehran’s nighttime traffic fill the screen. Simultaneously, a voice reads from Zakariya Qazvini’s thirteenth-century text Āthār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-‘ibād (Monuments of the countries and the history of their inhabitants): “Tehran is a large village near the city of Rey, full of gardens and fruit trees.⁶ Its inhabitants live in anthill-like underground holes. The village’s several districts are constantly at war.” The images of a modern, chaotic metropolis in perpetual motion directly clash with this aural description.

This audiovisual collision foreshadows the entire viewing experience: one must prepare to reconcile this collision by neglecting either the audio or the visual or by reaching a conclusion about why the difference exists. By forcing viewers to contemplate how film constructs an “accurate” portrait of Tehran, the reliability of the film itself (including the specific medium of film) is brought into question. Five minutes into the film, just as we are coming to terms with this basic premise, a warning flashes on the screen: shabāhat-e ādam-hā va havādes-e film bā namuneh-hā-ye vāqe‘i dar besiyāri az mavāred ettefāqist (similarities between the people and events of this film and real cases are, in many cases, coincidental).⁷

The statement’s tentativeness is what makes it so important. The film is neither purely factual nor fictitious. A kernel of truth is embedded in all the events, more evident in some than others, and it is up the viewer to discern fact from fiction. Bakhshi reminds the viewer of this tension between fact and fiction, reality and perception, throughout the film. For example, Bakhshi overlays his “found footage” with a narrative voice that reminds viewers, “Owing to problems in verifying facts, this film is probably full of mistakes.” Nosrat Karimi, who provides the voiceover in this section, repeats his warning twice, because he intentionally misspeaks the first time. The film’s initial onscreen warning and subsequent voiceover mistake challenge the viewer to determine which people and events merely bear a fleeting resemblance to historical fact and which people and events are truly grounded in historical fact, thus calling into question the very nature of “history” and “truth.” This intentional obfuscation makes latching onto specific arguments within the documentary a near impossibility.

Despite these challenges, Bakhshi establishes reform as an important theme early in the film, starting with the film’s narrative premise. This premise—a production report presented as a written letter from Bakhshi to the president of the Documentary Center within the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance––underscores reform’s importance as a central theme. Throughout the film, Bakhshi’s voice functions as the narrative voiceover, describing the filmmaking process and claiming that the film he set out to make is incomplete. Bakhshi starts the film by identifying himself using details such as his name, birthplace, marriage status, and employee number at the Documentary Center. He explains how writing the film script five years earlier, and the subsequent five-year journey to obtain the necessary permits, has rendered the original script obsolete. The permit Bakhshi (finally) obtained flashes onto the screen, along with other official documents, including his ID card and contract. Bakhshi argues that because “Tehran is constantly in a state of reform,” the five-year-old script bears no relevance to Tehran today. Accordingly, the director and his crew decided to produce a different film, one that compares an old found documentary with images of contemporary Tehran. This statement also forces viewers to contemplate the bigger reality that even if Bakhshi had filmed the original script shortly after he wrote it, the natural passage of time between writing, filming, producing, and distributing would have meant that the Tehran that Bakhshi filmed would have already evolved in new directions and would no longer exist as it did on film. Throughout the film Bakhshi skillfully layers these multiple messages, which continually push the viewer toward unexpected examination.

Bakhshi’s description of the film’s production locates reform temporally, geographically, and structurally within the film’s text and context. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates premiered at the twenty-fifth Fajr Film Festival in February 2007. Thus the five-year window Bakhshi references in his letter positions the film’s genesis well within Khatami’s presidency and the reformist movement. As minister of culture, Khatami played an important role in forming the institutions that oversee filmmaking in the Islamic Republic to this day. Repeated references to permits, both in Bakhshi’s voiceover and visually as evidence onscreen, together with direct references to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance bring Khatami’s reforms––and the very state of Tehran––to the film’s forefront.

In Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, Bakhshi suggests that Tehran is in a constant state of physical, political, and social reform. The constant cycles of construction and physical transformation mirror the city’s ongoing cultural and spiritual evolution. Like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad in her film Zir-e pust-e shahr (Under the skin of the city, 2000), Bakhshi uses the city of Tehran to signal reform. At the same time, the atmosphere of reform literally reshapes Bakhshi’s project and determines a new direction for the film, and as a result, we see reform affecting his filmmaking methods and aesthetics. The connection between Tehran Has No More Pomegranates and reform, which Bakhshi introduces early in the film, becomes increasingly complex as the film proceeds. Although at times these complexities appear to obscure Bakhshi’s central message, together they constitute a convoluted but cogent statement about the legacy of reform in the post-Khatami period.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates’s basic narrative structure comprises two main sections. In the first section, the director and his film crew compare images of contemporary Tehran to images of the city from the old “documentary” that they allegedly find in the archives of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. In this part, the film evaluates the effectiveness of reform as a historical process and considers its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century iterations. In the second section, the film crew focuses on the institutions that define Tehran, in an attempt to construct a “realistic” image of the city. Here, the film questions how reform, with its roots in the nineteenth century, plays out in contemporary Tehran, a sprawling megametropolis.

The message from both film components is clear: Tehran, Bakhshi tells us, is a city defined by foreigners with preconceived agendas and by Iranians who stretch the truth. There is no singular, realistic contemporary or historical image, and it is futile to attempt to create one. The film’s methodology engenders a comparative and cross historical perspective, and Tehran Has No More Pomegranates ultimately guides us to the conclusion that reform—as an alternative to revolution—is an ineffective instrument for enacting true social and political change in Iran.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates formally introduces the theme of reform when the voiceover for the found documentary declares that Naser al-Din Shah, on returning to Iran from Europe, declared himself an eslāhtalab, or reformist. The Qajar ruler of Iran from 1848 to 1896, Naser al-Din is also the first king in Iran’s modern history to travel to Europe. Fascinated by Western technology during his trips abroad, Naser al-Din published his travel diaries and is credited with initiating early reforms in Iran. Significantly, he also brought the first filmmaking technology to Iran. In Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, Bakhshi equates Naser al-Din’s early reforms to Westernization or the “Europeanization” of everything. For example, the film discusses Naser al-Din’s attempts to reform the gardens of Iran by introducing new produce. This discussion is followed by sounds from the bazaar: tut-e farangi (“strawberry,” literally “European berry”), gujeh farangi (“tomato,” literally “European plum”), hamash farangiyeh! (all of it is European!). Is “reforming” gardens true reform?

With the Europeanization of everything in mind, the film ultimately questions the effectiveness of the changes that Naser al-Din Shah made by comparing them with similar phenomena in contemporary Tehran. Although modern Iran has been in a constant state of transformation, including several waves of reform driven by at least two revolutions, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates demonstrates that Tehran faces the same struggles in the twenty-first century that it faced in the nineteenth. The film utilizes such points of comparison to introduce this argument to the viewer and in the process emphasizes it through the use of humor, which ultimately strengthens rather than tempers the director’s critique of reform. The beginning of the found documentary introduces old Tehran as a place of “clay huts, grand gardens and narrow alleys,” and Tehranis of that time as “illiterate, stupid, and vulgar people.” In contrast, Bakhshi, the narrator of contemporary Tehran, states, “By the grace of God, today we have wide highways and wise citizens.” However, the images that the film presents as visual evidence refute rather than support this statement.

A wide highway is made narrow by an expansive traffic jam. The narrator describes “wise citizens” as onscreen images depict a zurkhāneh (traditional Iranian gym). The carnivalesque music and slow motion that accompany the images from the zurkhāneh make a mockery of the athlete’s movements, which do not seem to be the pursuit of a wise individual. The camera abruptly cuts to a wide-angle shot of a supermarket that emphasizes the narrow aisles, a contemporary rendering of old Tehran’s narrow alleys. This scene, in contrast to the preceding one, is in fast motion, which emphasizes the narrowness of the aisles that people are quickly navigating. Although the highway, the zurkhāneh, and the grocery store are initially onscreen for less than 60 seconds, these exact images are repeated again and again throughout the film. Superficially, these shots attest to the technological experiences of modernity and progress: they are colorful, industrial, and in motion. Fundamentally, however, they signal the absence––rather than the presence––of reform. The technology may have changed, but the underlying challenges Tehran residents face remain the same.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates continues its examination of historical reforms through Amir Kabir, a nineteenth-century reformist whom Naser al-Din Shah appointed as prime minister in 1848. The film introduces Amir Kabir, like the other nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures, through the found documentary. A voiceover declares, “The Shah appointed the reformist Amir Kabir as prime minster. He opposed court bribery and corruption. He condemned all kinds of crimes: stabbing and lewdness.” Often considered Iran’s first reformist, Kabir sought to modernize and Westernize the country while working within the existing monarchal framework. Massoud Bakhshi uses his discovery of Amir Kabir’s reformist efforts in the found documentary as a springboard for investigating reforms in contemporary Tehran. The results of his investigation, Bakhshi states, are as follows: “I discovered that reforms are still widespread in Tehran. Today the state reforms trees, grass, parks, and male facial hair.” This statement, though humorous, functions as a biting critique. The contemporary Iranian government is only interested in superficial changes that fall far short of the systematic reforms promised by Mohammad Khatami, such as rule of law, civil society, and religious democracy

The film’s references to Amir Kabir and to Tehran’s superficial reforms contextualize the reformist movement of Khatami’s presidency within a broader conversation about reform in Iran. In particular, these references evoke Khatami’s predecessor, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as president between 1989 and 1997, a period popularly known as the “Period of Construction,” following the country’s devastating losses during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Consequently, many of Hashemi Rafsanjani’s efforts focused on the privatization of Iran’s economy in an effort to spur development. Although his platform was “economically liberal,” his noneconomic reforms were philosophically traditional.⁸ He attempted to control bodily surfaces, including facial hair and women’s dress. Despite intensifying, rather than lessening, state control over freedom of expression, Hashemi Rafsanjani believed that his policies continued the legacy of Amir Kabir’s earlier reformist efforts. As an avid supporter of Amir Kabir, Hashemi Rafsanjani even wrote a biography, entitled Amir Kabir yā qehremān-e mobārezeh bā este‘mār (Amir Kabir or the hero of the battle with imperialism, 1968). By drawing on the elements of Hashemi Rafsanjani’s political career, Bakhshi intentionally positions Khatami’s reformist efforts as a continuation of the previous presidency. In doing so, Bakhshi creates the same sense of untimeliness that haunts Bani-Etemad’s Ruzegār-e mā… (Our times…, 2002).

As Tehran Has No More Pomegranates cuts from this critique of Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani back to the found documentary, the voiceover notes, “But Amir’s reforms didn’t satisfy the corrupted court so they killed him.” At this moment, the pseudodocumentary film breaks, the magnetic film spins meaninglessly in its projector, and the viewer is left with the jarring sound of the flapping film—an eerie meditation on both Amir’s death and the failure of reform. By juxtaposing nineteenth-century reform with the stark absence of true contemporary reform, Massoud Bakhshi establishes reform in Iranian history as a cyclical process that arguably produces no deeper impact than superficial appearances. Facial hair growth is policed and highways are widened, but meaningful change remains elusive.

Despite being more or less a complete history of modern Iran, Bakhshi’s film mentions the revolutions that radically altered the country’s political systems but does not develop a true discussion of any of them. For example, the found documentary that forms the basis of the film’s first section ends right as the revolution of 1978–1979 is happening. Bakhshi’s choice to acknowledge but never analyze the revolutions instead positions reform as the true system of change around which Iran’s modern history revolves. At the same time, the film’s representation of the lack of progress of nineteenth-century reform and its ultimate collapse suggests reform as an unsustainable and ineffective means of enacting change. Furthermore, the film’s juxtaposition of two of the cycles of reform prompts viewers to reflect on the fate of contemporary reforms, positing that these reforms are also doomed.

The film’s critique of progress, especially within the context of historical reform, continues into the twentieth century. The documentary voice notes the rise of Reza Khan, his overthrow of the Qajar Dynasty in 1925, and the subsequent establishment of the Pahlavi regime. Images of the Pahlavi military rigidly marching accompany this narrative and are interspersed with images of the Qajar military in procession, which the viewer has already seen.

Splicing together these chronologically disparate images forces the viewer to note the similarities between them. The technology of the Pahlavi military may be more advanced, but the basic structure of the two military processions remains strikingly similar. In the Iranian context, nineteenth-century reforms are aligned with Westernization, and in the twentieth century Westernization means modernization and access to new technologies. However, with scenes like this one, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates questions the impact of this technology on Iran, especially in the context of structural change.

This discussion of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century reform efforts also allows viewers to better understand the film’s alternative title. During the opening sequence, the film first introduces itself as طهران/تهران, or Teheran/Tehran, and moments later offers تهران انار ندارد, or Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, as its title. Although the director ultimately favors the latter, the former is in some ways more provocative and instructive. By capturing the tension between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, the alternate title acts as a metaphor for reform both during and between these periods. The title Teheran/Tehran (طهران/تهران) plays with the spelling of the capital city. Although both spellings are pronounced exactly the same in Persian, the first spelling (طهران) is an older spelling with Arabic origins. The newer spelling (تهران) gained wider acceptance in the late nineteenth century, during roughly the same period as the Qajar reforms.⁹

The film posits the orthographical change as analogous to the reforms of both the nineteenth and the twentieth/twenty-first centuries: a superficial spelling change has no impact on pronunciation or meaning. This change on the surface brings to mind the film’s critique of contemporary reform: trees are planted, the grass is greener, and facial hair is policed, but nothing truly changes. Later in the film Bakhshi describes contemporary Tehran as the “age of false construction,” underscoring the futility of these surface reforms. Bakhshi’s description also positions the current era in stark contrast to the era of mass construction that followed increased oil revenues in the 1960s and 1970s. This statement is followed by images of half-completed buildings and bulldozers aimlessly pushing around dirt piles. These shots recall similar images in both Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City and Kiarostami’s Ta‘m-e gilās (Taste of cherry, 1997). Once again we see that the reformist aesthetic is invested in the city of Tehran as a dynamic space that accommodates and represents the sense of futility against which the reformist movement initially reacted and to which it would ultimately fall powerless.

The first portion of the film ends as the revolution of 1978–1979 unfolds at the end of the found documentary. The film crew of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates decides to shoot a “realistic” image of contemporary Tehran. Establishing a fair vantage point for shooting this realistic image, however, proves challenging for the crew. As Bakhshi notes, tongue in cheek, “Tehran has thousands of extraordinary subjects, each worthy of an entire film!” Following careful consideration, the film crew determines that the two most important institutions in Tehran today are the law and the motorcycle phenomenon (padideh-ye motorsiklet). Law is particularly relevant to the discussion of reform in the film. Viewers, especially at the time of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates’s release in 2007, would immediately recognize the film’s reference to the law as a gesture toward Mohammad Khatami’s promise to follow the “rule of law” (hokumat-e qānun) in Iran. Bakhshi states, “Tehran is much more law and democracy abiding than ever before,” but his stress on the word besiyār (much) adds a hint of sarcasm to his claim. A song plays in the background: its lyrics, “Here, everything is shaking, trembling, shaking,” underscore the ironic sentiment in Bakhshi’s statement. At this point in the film, the soundtrack—both the narrative voice and the music—destabilizes the effectiveness of Khatami’s promise to bring the rule of law to Iran.

Bakhshi continues to call into question Iran’s contentious relationship with democratic reforms through his continued documentation of the filmmaking process. In the second portion of the film, the cameraman suggests that the crew film the Tehran cityscape. In response to this suggestion Bakhshi replies with glib, tongue in cheek humor, “I, as a respecter of democracy, had to accept this idea.” The cameraman’s request is followed by one from “the young photographer,” who uses “democracy as a pretext” to request permission to shoot portraits of Tehran’s citizens; once again, Bakhshi must “acquiesce” to this demand. The images that follow both of these requests—presumably images captured by the cameraman and the photographer —reflect the paradoxes of contemporary Tehran. Shots of wild traffic in Tehran appear alongside scenes from the zurkhāneh. An old man uses a stick and mallet to gin cotton as a bright yellow train passes behind him, drawing the viewer’s attention to the tension between modern and traditional forces in Iranian society. Bakhshi makes a significant statement by citing his “respect for democracy” as the driving force for producing these images of modernization and tradition in direct conflict. In doing so, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates questions the place of democracy in this polarized system. Is Khatami’s construct of democracy capable of reconciling these disparate forces? Does it even attempt to do so? Whereas Tehran Has No More Pomegranates merely alludes to these questions, as we will see in a later section, Kiosk’s music video “Speed of Love” forcefully answers them.

By critiquing the terms that Mohammad Khatami introduced into popular discourse in Iran, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates directly challenges Khatami’s reformist movement. Abstractions developed by Khatami, such as civil society, are shown to be out of touch with the concrete problems plaguing the contemporary megalopolis of Tehran. In this sense, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates applies a methodology that is similar to the methodology used in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City. In both films, the city of Tehran offers sociopolitical, economic, and geographic problems that the reformist movement is either unable or unwilling to address. Whereas Bani-Etemad’s film focuses on Tehran’s north-south divide and the subsequent socioeconomic problems this divide creates, Bakhshi’s film spotlights Tehran’s epic density dilemma. Specifically, Bakhshi draws our attention to the earthquake experts predict will devastate Tehran at some point in the near future. Bakhshi examines both Tehran’s density dilemma and the earthquake predictions within the context of Khatami’s terminology. In doing so, Bakhshi applies the basic mechanisms of the montage theory that determines the film’s visuality in order to encourage the viewer to question the expansive reach of Khatami’s proposed reforms.

Massoud Bakhshi and his film crew conclude that Tehran’s most pressing concern, “alongside of civil society, democracy, and these kinds of things” is the problem of density. The film defines density as “the space that one occupies in Tehran!” and it determines that this distribution of space differs for every citizen in the city. To illustrate this difference, the film returns to an earlier example that compares a citizen from north Tehran to a citizen from south Tehran. Babak jān is a London-born construction manager living with his wife in a 600-square-meter apartment in north Tehran. Thus, according to the film’s density definition, Babak and his wife each have a density of 300 square meters. In contrast, Āqā Jafar, a Kurdish employee at a brick factory, lives in south Tehran with his wife and two children in a 25-square-meter apartment, so accordingly each member in his family has a density of 5 square meters. This comparison suggests that special distribution disparities are geographically predetermined, a conclusion supported by Bakhshi’s claim that “truths about south and north Tehran” are revealed “just by changing the location of the camera.” The accompanying shots demonstrate the differences in density that distinguish Tehran’s cityscape as determined by the city’s north-south divide.

Bakhshi slyly interweaves his analysis of Tehran’s density problem within the context of Khatami’s reformist movement. He configures the uneven distribution of space alongside of Khatami’s terminology (civil society and democracy), and this formulation initially appears to lend credence to the abstract ideas of the reformist movement. However, by delivering compelling visual evidence and materiality to fully develop the problem of density, Bakhshi decisively elevates this problem above such abstractions as civil society and democracy. Bakhshi further renders these issues inaccessible to the viewer throughout the film, while concretely reinforcing Tehran’s physical and spatial problems (i.e., density). Bakhshi further trivializes the reformist terminology by following “civil society” and “democracy” with va in harf-hā (and such words). This dismissive term marginalizes Khatami’s political agenda. Placing density alongside civil society and democracy forces us to reflect on the impact, or lack thereof, that the reformist movement has had on the physicality of Tehran and the true day-to-day life of its citizens.

When Massoud Bakhshi announces that civil society and democracy are among Tehran’s most pressing concerns, it is with a deep sense of irony. Bakhshi has intentionally structured his film around the social and economic disparities that are, for most Tehranis, far more urgent. One of the film’s most persistent characters is a man named Jafar khān, a recent immigrant to Tehran, who replies nārāzi (unsatisfied) during all of the film’s polls about the city’s current state. Eventually, as the film nears its conclusion, the crew asks Jafar khān why he is dissatisfied with everything. Significantly, Bakhshi visually anchors the scene around a trashcan on which the motto shahr-e mā, khāneh-ye mā (Our city, our home) has ironically been stenciled. In one of the film’s most lucid moments, Jafar khān explains:

I have been in Tehran for three months. I have seen what happens in the parks and on the streets. I have seen the poor. They are without money and homeless. The homeless are forced to sleep in parks. They have nowhere else to go. But the policemen attack them and beat them, which they don’t even do to dogs. These are human beings…. Everyone is human. Yes, we are hungry and homeless, but we are humans.

As Jafar khān makes this plea, the film switches to scenes from a Qajar-era film that play first forward and then backward. Jafar khān’s speech, juxtaposed with the Qajar images (forward and reverse), suggests that Tehran’s urban problems are historically grounded and have been overlooked and unattended by successive regimes and political movements, including the reformist movement, and that no resolution to these problems is forthcoming.

The film’s final critique of reform is similarly related to Tehran’s physical problems; however, in this case, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates examines the geological (rather than socioeconomic) structures of the city. Bakhshi claims that his crew “peered under the surface of the city” and discovered a “menace…a horrible threat.” According to the film, experts predict that an earthquake will devastate Tehran in the near future, destroying 65 percent of the city’s buildings. The film casts this predicted earthquake into a historical cycle, likening it to the earthquakes that devastated the city of Rudbar in 1990 and Bam in 2003.¹⁰ By citing “past mistakes” as the reason for the forecasted earthquake’s vast destruction, the film powerfully positions the cyclical nature of the country’s geological history as a metaphor for the country’s cyclical socioeconomic history. To further this comparison, Bakhshi intentionally chooses language that mimics a thirteenth-century quotation by Qazvini about Tehran. Bakhshi says that postearthquake Tehran will “return to its origins.” The film’s finale epitomizes this idea of stripping away the façade of modernity in order to reconnect with the city’s true roots. The last scene depicts the discovery of a tiny pomegranate—the kind of pomegranate that Tehran no longer has—outside of the city.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates ties the predicted earthquake to the reformist movement when it concludes: “After the earthquake, democracy, reformist movements (jonbesh-e eslāhāt), and civil society will no longer exist.” The powerful, jarring still images that follow this statement depict the vast human suffering that followed the 2003 Bam earthquake. In the context of such suffering, abstract concepts like democracy, civil society, and reform are out of touch with humanity’s most basic survival needs. The reformist movement’s philosophical promises will thus hold little relevancy or urgency in a postapocalyptic Tehran. At first, the incongruous placement of the reformist movement in this world can be viewed as humorous and even amusing; on closer inspection, however, the incongruities force the viewer to consider seriously the reformist movement’s inability to address the foundational (and even geological) issues teeming just beneath Tehran’s surface. Significantly, the earthquake ends the film’s history of Tehran at the same time that it ends the film’s critique of the reformist movement. Just as the film begins with reform, so too does it end with reform, and this fact is crucial to establishing reform as an informing logic within the film’s structure.

At the same time that the film concerns itself with the history and legacy of political reform, it is also acutely aware of the reforms and transformations that are born from the relationship between certain films and the reformist movement. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is a metadocumentary: a documentary about documentary filmmaking. The director, Massoud Bakhshi, narrates the film as production notes for an incomplete film, and in the process creates the film that we are watching. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates constantly refers to its own creativity and its technological processes. Throughout the film, we see shots of the crew organizing their equipment or watch the crew in the very act of filming. Bakhshi employs the same method of juxtaposing contradicting sounds and images to draw attention, often ironically, to the film crew’s onscreen presence as he does to draw attention to the contradictions between reformist agendas and the reality of these reforms. For example, in one scene, we hear a sound bite of the modernist poet Forugh Farrokhzad reading a famous line of her poetry: “va in manam / zani tanhā / dar āstāneh-ye fasl-e sard” (And this is I / a lonely woman / at the threshold of a cold season). As Farrokhzad reads her lines, a woman appears alone onscreen, peering out of a window. However, the bright sunlight is casting a shadow on the wall below her window, creating a perfect silhouette of the film crew (figure 5.1). With the film crew and the bright sunshine, the woman is neither alone nor at the threshold of a cold season; the visual images effectively contradict the stated reality.

FIGURE 5.1. The film crew is visible in a shot from Massoud Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates. Frame enlargement.

In addition to showing crewmembers on film, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates often shows the technology that it uses, including frequent allusions to 35 mm film. Film is loaded, repaired, watched, played back, and transported in canisters. All of these images serve as reminders that Tehran Has No More Pomegranates is in fact a film, created and preserved in celluloid. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates also readily identifies itself as a film that is composed, in part, by other films. Massoud Bakhshi’s composite film is achieved through the inclusion of a “documentary” that the film crew allegedly finds in the archives of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Bakhshi’s use of this kind of archival material positions the film within the global tradition of found footage, an avant-garde trend that initially gained momentum in the 1960s.

Although the found documentary in Bakhshi’s film is overlaid with a narrative voice that lends it authority, authenticity, and continuity, the informed viewer quickly identifies the images that establish the documentary as visual traces of Iran’s cinematic history. The film features scenes from Mirza Ebrahim Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh’s early camerawork with the Qajar court (1900), Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhossein Sepanta’s Dokhtar-e Lor (The Lor girl, 1933), Ahmad Faruqi Qajar’s Tehrān-e emruz (Iran today, 1962), Kamran Shirdel’s Tehrān pāytakht-e Iran ast (Tehran is the capital of Iran, 1966), Bahram Beyzaie’s Kalāgh (The crow, 1976), and others. Meanwhile, the voice that narrates the documentary belongs to Nosrat Karimi, a famous actor and filmmaker. Karimi played Aqa Jun on the popular 1976 television show Dāyi jān Nāpol‘on (My Uncle Napoleon, 1977–1979), which means the sound of his voice is immediately recognizable for Iranian viewers. Therefore, as quickly as the film creates the illusion of a coherent found documentary, it just as quickly destabilizes the unity of these documentary components.

On the topic of found footage, William C. Wees observes that whether films that use archival images “preserve the footage in its original form or present it in new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it as found footage, as recycled images.” He categorizes trends in found footage as constitutive of “collage,” a practice separate from mere appropriation. Collage, the use of montage in the context of found footage, “probes, highlights, contrasts,” while “appropriation accepts, levels, homogenizes.”¹¹ By assembling disparate archival images and sounds under the auspices of a single documentary, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates initially seems to approximate the latter, which creates a sense of leveling or homogenization. However, by splicing the found documentary with contemporary shots of Tehran, the film ultimately achieves Wees’s notion of collage. This technique, creating filmic unity and then tearing it apart, demonstrates how celluloid film is constantly being reformed and reshaped within Tehran Has No More Pomegranates. Significantly, Bakhshi shows the process of film being cut and manipulated onscreen, reminding us that film can be formed and reformed, and old images can therefore be preserved and at the same time generate new meanings in different contexts.

The particular sounds and images that Bakhshi preserves in his film are especially important because they establish a trajectory within which the director positions his own film. The two scenes that Bakhshi repeats most often in Tehran Has No More Pomegranates come from Mirza Ebrahim Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh’s early camerawork with the Qajar court (1900) and Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhossein Sepanta’s The Lor Girl. These two films represent two of the most significant moments in Iran’s early cinematic history. The grainy moving images shot by Akkasbashi depict Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s visit to Belgium in 1900, and scholars generally agree that they are the first moving images shot by an Iranian. Akkasbashi, whose name references the fact that he was a photographer for the Qajar court, was responsible for bringing film technology to Iran, with the support and encouragement of Mozaffar al-Din Shah, the son of Naser al-Din Shah. Mozaffar al-Din Shah shared his father’s interest in technology and reform. Negar Mottahedeh argues that these images, which were taken during a flower ceremony, emphasize the exchange of glances between the Iranian men of the Qajar court and European women. Since its inception, Iranian cinema has been grounded in the tension between engendered gazes.¹² But these images also reinforce the idea that late Qajar reform efforts were grounded in Western technology.

The second film to which Tehran Has No More Pomegranates devotes significant screen time is the 1932 film The Lor Girl. This film is significant as the first Persian-language talkie film. As such, it marked the first time that Iranian audiences could relate to the characters on a linguistic level and hear them speak Persian.¹³ Tehran Has No More Pomegranates makes ready use of The Lor Girl’s sound capabilities. Multiple times during his film, Bakhshi plays a sound bite of The Lor Girl’s main female character, Golnar, screaming “Jafar,” layering this cry over a diverse set of images from contemporary Tehran. The film’s politicized content was also an innovation at the time. The Lor Girl tells the story of Jafar, a young bureaucrat who is sent to Lorestan, a particularly unyielding province at the time. He falls in love with a teahouse attendant named Golnar, who is held captive by a band of thieves. Jafar defeats the bandits, and he and Golnar escape to India, fleeing the chaos of Iran. On learning of Reza Shah’s efforts to modernize the country, the couple returns to Tehran. Hamid Reza Sadr argues that The Lor Girl, through its plot, location, and characters, encompasses many of Reza Shah’s reforms. For example, Jafar’s challenges in Lorestan parallel those of Reza Shah, whose first course of action was to centralize power and break up the tribal system that governed much of Iran. Similarly, Sadr views Golnar’s arrival into the city as an echo of Reza Shah’s “attempt to bring modernity through secularization, industrialization, and the nuclearization of the family.”¹⁴

By referencing Akkasbashi’s early moving images and The Lor Girl, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates positions itself within a tradition of innovation. At the same time, the film makes an important observation about the relationship between sociopolitical reform and cinematic reform. The advent of Iranian cinema and the invention of talkie technology in the Iranian context occurred alongside two of the most significant reform efforts of the early twentieth century. Although scholars have argued that revolution, and specifically the revolution of 1978–1979, has radically altered the course of Iranian cinema, it is reform, a more subtle discourse, that catalyzed some of the most profound changes in Iranian cinema. Tehran Has No More Pomegranates focuses on reform and reconfigures the history of Iranian cinema to favor a reformist orientation.

Tehran Has No More Pomegranates places itself at this juncture between cinematic and political reform movements. It focuses on the history of political reform at the same time that it plays with the possibilities that come with restructuring actual film. Significantly, despite the rise of video and digital film, 35 mm film remains Bakhshi’s medium of choice.¹⁵ With Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, Bakhshi offers an alternative to the digital push, and he revives old-fashioned celluloid film as young and experimental. Specifically, by combining archival footage with new footage, the film creates new contexts and, as a result, new meanings. Bakhshi literally re-forms old films, a process that we witness playing out before us throughout the film. This methodology accords with Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement, which similarly sought to recontextualize (i.e., within the Islamic Republic) the historical cycles of reform that began in the nineteenth century.

The film’s far-reaching appeal is one of its most significant contributions to documentary filmmaking in Iran. As the first documentary to be shown widely in theaters since the revolution of 1978–1979, the film performed surprisingly well at the box office.¹⁶ The film’s successful showing coupled with its attempt to reshape the previously restrictive limits of documentary filmmaking opens the genre up to possibilities that filmmakers like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad never saw. Whereas Bani-Etemad attempts overcome the limited reach of documentary films by bringing elements of documentary filmmaking to narrative film, Bakhshi physically reshapes the conventions of the genre by juxtaposing a sundry set of contemporary and archival images and laying them alongside an equally diverse soundtrack. The effect of this methodology is an aesthetic that is as humorous as it is critical, and one that actively resists the informing logics that normally define documentary filmmaking. The success of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates in 2007 ultimately speaks to the momentum that the reformist aesthetic possessed even after Khatami’s presidency and its corresponding liberal cultural policies came to an end.

The reformist movement might have been over, but its impact on Iranian cinema was not.

POLITICAL PIZZA

The historical-political context that Tehran Has No More Pomegranates examines and the methodologies it creates developed coevally with certain innovations in Iran’s media ecology. Specifically, the music video “Love of Speed,” performed by the underground band Kiosk, directed by Ahmad Kiarostami, and released on YouTube in 2007, shares the film’s aesthetic concerns and its critique of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement. Whereas Tehran Has No More Pomegranates self-reflexively draws attention to the tangible canisters of celluloid film that preserve its images, “Love of Speed” is a digital video whose images and sounds formlessly wander through infinite Internet space, tagged and shared on various social networking sites and available to nearly everyone. Despite these differences in form and access, a real, if unexpected, relationship exists between the two works. Elements of the reformist aesthetic that I have described throughout this book inextricably bind them together. By closely examining the music video “Love of Speed,” one can more precisely delineate the nature of this relationship, and it becomes clear that reform as an aesthetic movement continues to evolve even though Khatami’s presidency has ended. Further, this relationship between philosophical film and the products of youth culture establishes reform, rather than revolution, as a new model for the analysis of cultural productivity in the Islamic Republic over the last twenty years.

Despite scholars’ increased willingness to consider music videos as a medium worthy of serious analysis, the existing framework for this study is limited in scope.¹⁷ These works draw almost exclusively on the American music video tradition, and the critical questions that they ask about race, class, and gender privilege American and Western European values. These studies often position themselves vis-à-vis capitalism and suggest that they are reacting against the idea that music videos are just by-products of capitalism, and they offer the possibility that music videos can resist capitalist models. They work under the assumption that music videos are tied to the music industry, and that the transmission of music videos goes in tandem with the exchange of capital. Kiosk’s “Love of Speed” allows for the expansion this scholarly frame by accounting for music videos that draw on non-Western traditions and that function as products in a global transmission. At the same time, an analysis of “Love of Speed” enables a preliminary theorization on those music videos that emerge from nonindustrialized underground and repressed music scenes that are not tied to the same capitalist models that dominate the American popular music industry. Like the examples in many of the scholarly accounts of music videos, Kiosk’s video is deeply political, but the marriage of lyrical and visual elements in the video requires the contextualization of trends within Iran’s modern cultural and intellectual history.

“Love of Speed” was the first single off of Kiosk’s second album by the same title, released in 2007, a year after the band members left Iran and settled in the United States and Canada. Kiosk formed underground in 2003 at a time when the underground music scene in Iran was reaching its height. However, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 marked the end of Khatami’s moderate era, and the band left the country a year later to pursue their music with fewer restrictions, which in turn allowed them to pursue greater social and political critique in their music. The underground music scene in Iran, like the film industry, is very much tied to notions of reform and Khatami’s reforms in particular. The policies that emerged after the revolution of 1978–1979 drastically restructured the music industry in Iran. Female singers were banned from performing in public, and all forms of music deemed “Western” were similarly forbidden. These policies were based on statements by Ayatollah Khomeini but were codified and implemented by Khatami’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance during the Islamic Republic’s first decade. Just as with Khatami’s beliefs regarding cinema, one can detect a significant transformation in Khatami’s beliefs about music between his tenure as minister of culture and his presidency.

Music, like film, benefited from the liberal cultural policies that emerged following Khatami’s 1997 election. In 1998, the ban on Western-style pop music was lifted, and Laudan Nooshin argues that one can trace the origins of the current underground music scene in Iran to that moment when the ban was lifted.¹⁸ This policy change profoundly restructured how Iranian society interacted with music. Most significantly, the ban’s end marks the demarcation point at which Iranians went from only being consumers of Western pop music to also being producers of this music in their own right. Legalizing Western music production significantly increased the number of bands in Iran. Nooshin credits the rise of active musicians to the liberal cultural atmosphere fostered by Khatami’s presidency and the resulting discourses of civil society.¹⁹ All of these factors have created “an unregulated grass-roots popular music movement,” a new phenomenon for a country where pop music had previously been limited to government or foreign sources.²⁰

However, like filmmakers, musicians in Iran need permits (mojavvez) from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in order to distribute their music or perform it in public. Although the new policies in 1998 meant that groups that performed certain kinds of Western music could conceivably receive permits, the reality was that few did, and that fact remains true today.²¹ Generally, the pop bands that have succeeded in obtaining permits from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance perform songs that are almost indistinguishable musically from their counterparts in the Los Angeles–based Iranian expatriate pop music industry but are, lyrically, deeply religious and draw on traditional Shi‘i motifs and images. As a result, Iran’s underground music scene is inherently political, because bands engage in “musical acts of resistance” every time they publicly perform music that is unsanctioned by the government, regardless of whether their lyrics contain a social or political critique. At the same time, the current underground music scene and its many frustrations are tied to Khatami. As Nooshin notes, his election created momentum for the creation of a popular music industry in Iran, founded on the hope that Khatami’s reforms would allow music that had begun underground to come to the surface. However, that possibility was never realized, and by 2007, when “Love for Speed” was released, the underground music scene in Iran had come to a head and had nowhere to go.

The music video “Love of Speed” powerfully captures both the personal frustrations of underground musicians and the disillusionment of Iranian society as a whole as it comes to terms with the end of both Khatami’s presidency and moderate reform in the country. As a form, music videos must reconcile the various layers (musical, lyrical, and visual) that they comprise, making them especially well-suited to representing the various levels of concern about the reformist movement’s legacy after Khatami’s presidency. In her groundbreaking study of music video as a distinct genre, Carol Vernallis explains that music videos create a multitude of complex meanings by establishing give-and-take between sound and image. Music videos are relatively short, because at the time of their inception they were in competition with one another for airtime on limited venues, like specialized television stations.²² Consequently, these temporal limitations, together with the interplay of sound and image, profoundly affect a music video’s narrative abilities.

Vernallis identifies debates in the field about whether music videos function according to narrative, like some movies or television shows, or whether they act as “postmodern pastiche that actually gains energy from defying narrative conventions.” Vernallis argues that attempting to examine music videos through the lenses of other forms and genres fails to capture the rich meanings that emerge from the collision of the various elements that form the basis of a music video. Instead, Vernallis argues that videos take shape according to the song’s form, which favors “episodic” or “cyclical” rather than sequential direction.²³

Vernallis’s model is a useful tool in the comprehensive analysis of Kiosk’s music video “Love of Speed.” The video cohesively critiques the reformist movement, a critique that defies the conventions of narrative, but not in a self-reflexive, postmodern way. Instead, the video’s lyrics and images generate a system of contradictions and playful suspense that positions Khatami’s reformist movement in the context of a larger set of contradictions that define urban life in Iran. By positioning reform as just another urban problem, Kiosk’s music video operates in a manner similar to Massoud Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates.

Through its lyrics and images, “Love of Speed” establishes Iran, and Tehran specifically, as a site of paradox, a place where contradictions live in a functional—if somewhat unsettling—harmony. The video’s first few moments capture the unique tension between opposing forces in contemporary Tehran, at the same time that the opening scene demonstrates the profound connection between word and image in the video. The song’s countdown, seh, do, yek, boro (three, two, one, go), coincides with a counter on a traffic light, and traffic, which is an important motif throughout the video, begins as the song begins. The framing of this opening scene depends on the traffic coming from the right side of the frame and a mosque that fills the left side of the frame (figure 5.2).

FIGURE 5.2. The opening shot of Kiosk’s music video “Love of Speed” balances the tensions of modern urban life. Frame enlargement.

The video visually achieves balance by creating tension between the traditional and contemporary elements that create the Tehran cityscape. Whereas the mosque architecturally and religiously represents tradition, traffic is one of the quintessential markers of life in a contemporary metropolis, and traffic lights operate as the mechanism that systemizes and regulates vehicular movement. The tradition-modernity theme is picked up and repeated as the video continues. We see shots of different kinds of city traffic, including busy streets, narrow alleys, and big highways. The video creates visual interest as it pans from undistinguished highway traffic (that could exist anywhere) to a bright digital billboard advertising BMWs, before finally settling on a huge neon, hillside side that resembles the Hollywood sign but reads yā Hossein.²⁴ Once again, we see the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity in these iconic symbols of religious and urban life.

The song’s first words, which begin after the instrumental introduction that ends with the yā Hossein sign, underscore the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity as a central theme for the song and video: “qodrat-e ‘eshq o ‘eshq-e qodrat / modernitiyeh yā sonnat” (the power of love and the love of power / modernity or tradition). The arrival of sung words also introduces the video’s unique way of performing its lyrics. Throughout the music video, the lyrics are lip-synched by people on the streets of Tehran, rather than by the band, Kiosk.²⁵ Lip-synching is a standard, though not uniform, convention in the music video genre. In its most basic form, lip-synching seeks to create (or underscore) a relationship between word and image. Lip-synching is also a means through which the performer visualizes the production of voice and claims authorship of the work. Kiosk’s video subverts this convention and plays off of viewer expectation, using this subversion to heighten the relationship between word and image. Because the body does not match the voice, we are more aware of the image and thus better able to sense the disconnection between the individual we see and the voice we hear.

The video’s lip-synching technique, drawing on the relationship between the lyrics and the people on the streets of Tehran, positions the person who performs the lyrics as representative of the lyrics being performed. Like the montage in Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, the mismatched lip-synching in “Love of Speed” forces the viewer to confront these disjointed mash-ups and to consider further their layers of meaning. The delivery of the song’s first lyrics, mentioned previously, establishes this system through a particularly significant juxtaposition. The song opens with a man who is clearly not Arash Sobhani, the lead singer of Kiosk, performing the words “qodrat-e ‘eshq o ‘eshq-e qodrat / modernitiyeh yā sonnat” (the power of love and the love of power / modernity or tradition). Instead of Sobhani, it is a cleric, standing on the street with a huge work of graffiti behind him, who sings these words. The cleric’s performance instantly brings a new layer of meaning to the lyrics. The lyrical structure takes “the power of love” and inverts it into the “love of power.” The cleric’s onscreen presence emphasizes the powerful role religious institutions play in Iran, with the lyrics (“the love of power”) calling into question the motivation and legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

By asking, “modernity or tradition?” the opening couplet’s second line propels the discussion of power into a temporal dimension The cleric’s onscreen performance suggests, perhaps somewhat ironically, that tradition and modernity exist side by side in the Islamic Republic. The cleric represents a traditional force in Iranian society, but in the video he is singing along to an underground rock song and standing next to graffiti. Nevertheless, there is uneasiness in his performance, which makes it especially jarring and introduces the idea that perhaps tradition and modernity cannot comfortably coexist in Iranian society—an idea that is repeated in the song’s refrain and its critique of the reformist movement.

Throughout the music video, just as in the first performance, the interplay between word and image is as playful and humorous as it is critical. For example, at one point in the video, Kiosk claims, “doktor-e qalb nemikhāim, jarāh-e fak o bini” (we don’t want cardiologist, just facelifts and nose jobs). On the surface, this lyric pokes fun at the fact Iran that has become a world capital for cosmetic surgery, with young, upper-class Iranian women increasingly opting for nose jobs.²⁶ The two women who perform these lyrics epitomize the type of Tehrani woman who puts a lot of effort into her appearance. This moment in the video is representative of the humor that runs throughout the work but also contains a serious critique. The lyric highlights the fact that Iranian society favors superficial transformations (plastic surgery) rather than addressing the heart of the problem (cardiology). This preference is inscribed onto the bodies of women, both within the video and on the actual streets of Tehran.²⁷

The lip-synching methodology created in “Love of Speed” establishes a relationship between word and image that is central to the video’s successful critique of the reformist movement. Carol Vernallis argues that lip-synching participates in a “history of articulations” that every music video contains.²⁸ Professionally produced music videos typically feature a vast number of articulation points. First, for the song’s production, singers and musicians lay separate vocal and instrumental tracks; sound engineers mix and add new layers; and producers and editors cut and reorganize. As the music video is filmed, the song is played on set and performers react to it and add new interpretations. Then the video footage is edited and reorganized before the song is laid on top of the images. In effect, the song is synthesized and reinterpreted multiple times through multiple layers.

The most important point in this history for “Love of Speed” is the moment at which performers react to and interpret the song’s lyrics while on the set of the music video. With everyday people—rather than the band members—performing the song lyrics, we witness a wide range of reactions and interpretations that do not necessarily belong to the band. This feature of the video is most apparent during the song’s refrain: “demukrāsi-ye dini, pitzā-ye qormeh sabzi” (religious democracy, qormeh sabzi pizza).²⁹ Several times in the video, the performers break into laughter when they say this line.

The performers are reacting to the idea of a “pitzā-ye qormeh sabzi” (qormeh sabzi pizza), which combines a traditional Iranian dish and pizza, and the inability of the nonprofessional actors to maintain a straight face marks the incongruity of these two dishes. The ridiculousness of qormeh sabzi pizza punctuates and accentuates the incongruity of the couplet’s first line: “demukrāsi-ye dini” (religious democracy), a more serious concept being evaluated by the song’s refrain. The song’s lyrical structure recalls the structure of certain genres in the classical Persian poetic tradition, in which the two mesras that form a bayt, or couplet, generate unity. In “Love of Speed,” there is an equational or analogous relationship between the two terms of the couplet. In the case of the song’s refrain, the coupling of religious democracy and qormeh sabzi pizza renders the former just as implausible (and undesirable) as the latter. With four simple words, Kiosk destabilizes the notion on which the reformist movement was premised. Khatami’s efforts sought to create a religious democracy and introduce democratic ideals into the Islamic Republic’s governance. His promise was that Islamic democracy could be created in Iran and that it would be the country’s ultimate solution. However, “Love of Speed” casts doubt on that possibility by making a joke of it, and by bringing it down to the same level as a ridiculous food combination.

Released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended, the music video’s critique of the reformist movement’s most basic tenets benefits from the hindsight that allows it to evaluate the effectiveness of Khatami’s efforts. In between the lip-synching performances, the music video for “Love of Speed” features shots from the streets of Tehran. Many of these images establish the contradictions that determine contemporary life in Tehran. For example, we see a group of women in chādors entering a mosque, a huge billboard for Dolce and Gabbana, a verse of Nezami’s poetry, posters of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, and a car with an ornate Fatimah sticker in its rear window parked next to a car with the popular “peeing Calvin” decal on its bumper.

However, another category of images depicts Tehran as a troubled and problematic city. There are shots of dilapidated buildings, street violence, poverty, and pollution that echo the images from Tehran Has No More Pomegranates. Because the criticism of religious democracy is repeated several times—it is in fact the only lyric repeated in the song—“Love of Speed” situates the reformist movement in the context of Tehran’s contradictions and problems. Like Tehran Has No More Pomegranates and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s films, “Love of Speed” positions Tehran as a space where the country’s lack of reform is especially visible.

The video’s final scene, at twenty seconds long, is significantly longer than any other shot. It shows a man spraying a pile of wet trash with a hose, kicking it, stomping on it, doing anything he can to get it to go down a wired drain in the street. Because the scene stays onscreen for an uncomfortable amount of time, especially after the video has trained the viewer to become accustomed to rapid visual changes, the futility of the man’s actions is especially salient. The length of the scene also gives rise to questions about the practicality of the man’s efforts. Would it not be easier to pick up the small pile and throw it away? Is a pile of trash even supposed to go down a street drain? This scene is particularly interesting because an almost identical scene exists in Massoud Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). In both instances, this act functions as a metaphor for what the reformist movement was able to achieve—or not achieve, as the case may be. Two years after Khatami’s presidency ended, both the film and the music video posit that the reformist movement achieved very little. Furthermore, the film and music video both posit that these minor achievements could have been more easily accomplished through other means, critiquing Khatami’s futile expenditure of energy and resources. As “Love of Speed” and Tehran Has No More Pomegranates demonstrate, post-Khatami Iran has been marked by the same sense of futility and hopelessness that afflicted the intellectual classes in the early and mid-1990s.

FIGURE 5.3.

FIGURE 5.4. Similar shots from Kiosk’s music video “Love of Speed” and Bakhshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates. Frame enlargements.

As the final scene in the music video “Love of Speed” demonstrates, the city of Tehran is a dynamic space that conforms to the contours of the successes and failures of the reformist movement. The metaphorical and transformational powers of Tehran represent one of the definitive features of the reformist aesthetic, especially in those works created during and after Khatami’s election in 1997. “Love of Speed” also furthers our understanding of the relationship between visual media and Tehran, because the music video makes evident the ways in which urban locality can be transmitted globally. Although the music video is visually grounded in the physical streets of Tehran and the national and sociopolitical concerns of post-Khatami Iranian society, the video is also very much a transnational product.

A Los Angeles–based, Iranian-born videographer filmed “Love of Speed.” Local Iranians performed the song. The song is the product of an Iranian band whose members currently live in the United States and Canada. Most importantly, the music video was released and continues to be transmitted and accessed on the Internet. In her study of the role of the Internet in the development of Iranian national identity among individuals in exile, Janet Alexanian argues that new media have allowed the Iranian nation “to be imagined as a transnational entity.”³⁰ The “Love of Speed” music video proves that the reformist aesthetic has indeed entered this transnational public sphere. Because Khatami ostensibly sought to free Iran from its global isolation and to initiate global dialogue, the video’s Internet location—YouTube—is a fitting place for the artistic responses to the reformist movement. The video “Love for Speed” creates a critical but also complicated and visually exciting picture of contemporary life in Iran that is open and accessible to the world.