In December 2010, Jafar Panahi was convicted by Iran's Islamic republic of "making propaganda against the system" and placed under house arrest. He faced a 20-year ban on writing scripts, directing films, giving interviews or leaving the country. As an added bonus, he is currently staring down the barrel of a six-year jail term – he is in a judicial phase known as "execution of the verdict", which means that his prison sentence can start at any moment. Even with all that he is still determined to make films. Like many Iranian directors, Jafar Panahi began making films about children. The popularity of children as subjects stems in part from the existence of state funding for such films. They also serve to steer filmmakers clear of censorship problems that complicate the filming of any domestic or intimate scenes involving adult women. However, after his first two feature films, Panahi decided to tackle these complications head on by making The Circle, a devastating look at the strictures against women in contemporary Iran. The Circle works on the level of interpreting “humanitarian events in a poetic or artistic way,” as the director himself defines his own version of neo-realist cinema. But the film is a far bolder work than most recent Iranian films; and one measure of its boldness is the fact that it is banned in Iran. It chronicles the stories of seven women, not all of whom are connected to each other, but whose fates are invariably interrelated through a circle of repression. The film works as a riveting, compelling testament about the lowly status of women in Iranian society, and about the subtle means with which Iran as a whole exercises its repression over the female sex. Panahi is, however, ambivalent about the political content of The Circle. In the following interview, it comes as no surprise that Panahi prefers to accentuate the human dignity of his characters – a human right that seems trivial in the context of Western society but one which is readily denied in unexpected circumstances and situations, as Panahi himself found out, to his cost. On his way to the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema on 15 April, 2001, after having attended the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Panahi was arrested in JFK Airport, New York City, for not possessing a transit visa. Refusing to submit to a fingerprinting process (apparently required under U.S. law), the director was handcuffed and leg-chained after much protestations to US immigration officers over his bona fides, and finally led to a plane that took him back to Hong Kong. As far as is known, this incident was not reported in any major US newspaper (1), even though The Circle was being shown in the United States at the time (another irony: for that film, Panahi was awarded the “Freedom of Expression Award” by the US National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Panahi attended film school after serving in the army during the Iran-Iraq War. While making short films and television documentaries, he contacted Abbas Kiarostami to offer his services in any capacity. Kiarostami became an enthusiastic mentor, helping to get Panahi’s feature debut, The White Balloon, into Cannes, where it became the first Iranian film to win a major prize at that festival. With his frequent use of non-professional actors, real locations and episodic narratives, Panahi’s films betray the influence of postwar Italian cinema. Some of his later films earned comparisons to Bresson and Scorsese with their terse depictions of alienated protagonists who suffer for their exclusion from the mainstream, which seems to be both imposed and willed. “This Is Not a Film,” is a film he made in 2011. He made this film mainly in the confines of his apartment, depicting himself there, facing the terms and implications of his sentence, and acting out the
story of the dramatic movie that he’d have made if not banned. He was able to have “This Is Not a Film” seen worldwide by an equally audacious ploy: the film was smuggled out of Tehran in a flash drive embedded in a cake. Made in tandem with the documentary director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (who was later arrested for his trouble), This Is Not a Film, which goes on general release on 30 March, catches the exile at play – obeying the letter of the law, if not quite the spirit. “Taxi” is Panahi’s third film that he has made since his arrest and sentencing. He has transformed his work to match the radically transformed conditions of his life. Facing monstrous circumstances—a sentence of house arrest along with a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, giving interviews, and travelling outside the country. Now, in “Taxi,” he raises the stakes of his confinement even further, venturing outside his home, albeit in a bubble—the taxi itself—which he turns into a sort of mobile miniature movie studio, where he’s shielded from view and can hold public conversations in private, where he can film under controlled circumstances that enfold the wider and uncontrolled ones of the city at large. At the wheel of a taxi, Panahi picks up a pair of passengers, a man and a woman, and the man points to the dashboard-mounted camera and figures that it’s a security device. Panahi ironically agrees, at which point the discussion turns to the underlying concept of theft, the kinds of crimes that such a camera might be intended to deter—and to the kinds of draconian measures that the government might employ to deter them. Throughout the film, the squeak of the cranky pivot on which that camera is mounted signifies and accompanies Panahi’s simple, on-camera pan shots—he turns the camera to show what he wants, and that splendid sound, along with the shaky shift of the image, conjures the essence of cinematic determination. Oppression has transformed Panahi’s art. Under the pressure of circumstances, he has turned from a classicist into a modernist, while at the same time transforming the very codes and tones of his frame-breaking aesthetic. He puts his face, his body, his voice, his own life into his film as an existential act of self-assertion against his effacement by the regime. Panahi turns the kind of reflexive cinema that, in the United States, would risk critical dismissal as narcissistic into a furious act of political defiance.The director once remarked that he had spent his entire career making movies "constructed around the notion of restriction, limitation, confinement and boundaries. Panahi, alongside Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was a leading light of the Iranian new wave, the creator of haunting social-realist fables that were suppressed in his homeland but played well with art house audiences in the west. He studied film at the Iran broadcasting college in Tehran, where he became obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and dreamed of imitating the master's icy, high-concept style. But his first short film was a disaster. "So cold and artificial that it had no soul," he admitted. "I knew I had to go another way." Panahi's alternative route involved him first working as an assistant on Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees and then making an acclaimed feature debut with 1995's The White Balloon, a deceptively simple folk tale about a girl's trip to buy a goldfish. If there was any political commentary in those early works (The White Balloon, 1997's charming drama The Mirror), the director kept it low in the mix; shrewdly folded amid the hurly-burly of the city streets. Despite these echoes from the canon of European and American cinema, Panahi has clearly earned his place at the center of contemporary Iranian filmmaking, even though the country’s censors have banned most of his films. Besides his focus on children, Panahi’s approach to narrative reveals him to be a true disciple of Kiarostami: his films tell simple, compelling stories that exist primarily to create interactions among a number of vividly realized characters. Thus despite any number of memorable
protagonists, Panahi’s films tend to become portraits of a community, a city, a neighborhood, a group of people. On the surface, Panahi’s films offer a variation of neo-realism, Iranian-style, by capturing, in his own words, the “humanitarian aspects of things”. But watching the director’s latest film The Circle (currently doing its rounds on the international film festival circuit after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year), one can’t help but feel that his humanitarian cinema is a cloak, masking an even greater obsession. His motif of the circle – the camera beginning from a single point and revolving around characters only to return to the point where it began – aptly describes that obsession, expressed as much as possible through the form of the plan séquence (a long uninterrupted take). The circle is both a metaphor for life as well as a form that the director has subscribed to as his most representative style. Stressing the equal importance of both form and content, Panahi asserts that his work is about “humanity and its struggle”, or the need for human beings to break through the confines of the circle. In his own rather startling way, Panahi’s films redefine the humanitarian themes of contemporary Iranian cinema, firstly, by treating the problems of women in modern Iran, and secondly, by depicting human characters as “non-specific persons” – more like figures who nevertheless remain full-blooded characters, holding on to the viewer’s attention and gripping the senses. Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages. In essence, this has come to define the particular aesthetic of Iranian cinema. So powerful is this sensibility that we seem to have no other mode of looking at Iranian cinema other than to equate it with a universal concept of humanitarianism. Yeah boi, the end. .
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