“Limitations offer inspire storytellers to make better work, but sometimes, those limitations can be so suffocating, they destroy a project and often damage the soul of the artist.”, said Darren Aronofsky, known for his directorial works like Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream, when announcing the winner of the ‘Golden Bear Award for Best Film’ at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015) won the award, as the audience thundered with applause. The 8-year old Hanna Saeidi, Panahi’s niece, who also acts in the docu-fiction, was called up on stage to say a few words. She welled up and just said “I would prefer he could be here himself.” in Farsi. Jafar Panahi has been banned from making films and traveling outside Iran for 20 years. Despite these bans, he has been able to make This is not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), and Taxi. Taxi is about a day in the life of Jafar Panahi himself, if he were to be a cab driver. The film blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction to such an extent that it is unclear if the people are characters in a drama film, or participants in a documentary. This film is juxtaposed with his criticism of the theocratic Iranian regime.
Far away, in the United Kingdom, another Farsi-language film made rounds in the festival circuit. Two & Two (2011) directed by Babak Anvari was nominated for the prestigious BAFTA award. Based in a classroom, the film is about a teacher who forces ‘2+2=5’ upon his conforming students, except two. It points to the larger picture of the madness of a tyrannical autocracy- symbolizing Iran’s own oppressive regime.
Taxi has a very slow burn start to it. It opens up with a shot of Tehran during the morning rush hour. Jafar Panahi plays himself, although under disguise of a cab driver. Passengers enter and exit his car, and it provides a new depth and insight into the contemporary life of an Iranian. The first set of passengers that he picks are a man and a woman, unrelated to each other. The man points to the dashboard-mounted camera, and whether it is a security device. Almost the entirety of the film is shot through this camera. Panahi pans this camera multiple times, and some participants are aware of the presence of the camera. The second passenger is an underground DVD-bootlegger. He distributes foreign films banned in Iran, like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. He recognizes Mr. Panahi and acknowledges that he’s making a movie. The video pirate then meets his client, a film student who asks Panahi to give him an idea for a story. Panahi says that the story has to come from within. After dropping them, he picks up two old women who are headed to “Ali’s Springs”, which is a shrine. They are carrying a fish in a bowl to the spring as an offering, and they must be there before noon, lest they be cursed with bad luck. After a minor scuffle, Panahi finds them another cab. These superstitious, angry and hostile characters are symbolic to the contemporary Iranian regime and its religious backbone.
Things get really personal when Panahi picks up his 8-year old niece, Hanna Saeidi from school. She has taken a filmmaking class, and discusses with her uncle about the feedback she got- on how to make a movie distributable. The concept that is discussed here is “siahnamayi”- Farsi for ‘portraying like black’, which is a term used by the conservatives in the country, against the films depicting Iran in the dark. The two discuss the guidelines Hana’s teacher has issued- women characters to wear the hijab, or that men and women may not mix with each other, that men with a good character may not wear a tie, to stay away Persian names for characters, and instead have names of Islamic saints, or to stay away from “sordid realism”. This is the “siahnamayi” that filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhidi have been accused of, on multiple occasions.
As explained in the film, “sordid realism” means to not show what’s “real real”- if the real is murky or off-putting, to not show it. It comes into play when Hana tries to film some documentary footage from the car, when Panahi has stopped the car and has stepped out. It is a sequence where the person she is shooting does something that isn’t virtuous. In order to keep away from showcasing this unpleasant reality, Hana tries to argue with the person to change his behavior to keep in line with the directions her teacher has given vis-a-vis “sordid realism”.
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi acknowledges reality, subverting the conservatives’ call against the apparent “siahnamayi,” thereby risking imprisonment and torture at any given moment. It is really a concurrence with the Orwellian principles of “2+2=5” in his book 1984 (1955). In the account of a future totalitarian state, George Orwell, through his protagonist, ‘Winston Smith’ explains how whatever an authority states, must become the gospel truth, no matter how illogical it maybe. The protagonist wonders whether the people holding authority and power, symbolized by The Party, may require us to believe in certain false slogans. The quote, “2+2=5” is used as an example in the contemporary times to reflect on how power works. The equation is false, mathematically, but if the authoritarian figure states that it is true, everyone obeys, and hence, the protagonist rightly ponders if now that everyone believes it, does it make it true? It is also a comment on how The Party has a control on truths, and thereby our freedoms. Babak Anvari’s film Two & Two is based on this very statement.
Set in a classroom, Two & Two gives us a taste of the famous Orwellian statement through a headmaster, the strict and authoritarian teacher, and his conforming students, all except two. The Headmaster makes an announcement of the teacher introducing to the students, the new normal. The teacher takes over and writes “2+2=5” on the blackboard. One students points out the anomaly and is duly silenced. However, one student sticks out like a sore thumb, vehemently opposing the false statement that has been thrust upon him. Angered, the teacher leaves the class and comes back with his three “top students”, who repeat after him, “2+2=5”. The rebel student is called upon and asked to fill in the answer to 2 + 2. He is “shot” right after he writes 4 by the senior students. Aghast by the dramatic turn of events, the students comply with the teacher. The last bencher repeats “2+2=5” after the teacher but writes “2+2=4” in his notebook.
Putting two and two together, the Headmaster represents The Party: an invisible and intangible entity to the common man. It controls the power and authority, thereby keeping the freedom from the common man signified by the students. The teacher, in this case, is the media, the mouthpiece of The Party. The “top students’ wear a red band on their sleeves, which is a sign for blood and war. The backbencher, whose spoken and written statements are contrasting, give off an idea that compliance in public is rewarded. It ties back to Jafar Panahi, who “complies” with the authorities clamping down on his freedoms on public filmmaking and traveling outside the country.
if you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk
what do you think will happen
go my friend
bestow your love
even on your enemies
if you touch their hearts
what do you think will happen
– Jalal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi.
Rumi was a 13th century Persian poet, who is known for the Persian literary form called the ghazal, which is still practiced in Iran, Afghanistan and parts of South Asia. It has a particular style of condensation of narrative, which gives rise to a unique sense of symbolization and characterization of elements. Khatereh Sheibani, in her book The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film after the Revolution argues that Iranian cinema derives aesthetically and structurally more from this traditional literary form of Ghazals, rather than the Western sources, as generally held. Sheibani gives us an example of Kiarostami and Truffaut, and states that Kiarostami could discern the past of his own culture and poetry, through Francois Truffaut and his film The 400 Blows (1959).
Abbas Kiarostami started out in 1969 as the head of the film division of Kanun, also known as the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which was set up by the Shah’s wife. A majority of his work at Kanun was making educational films which were experimental and jolly at the same time. They featured children, and Kiarostami was the pioneer that got films about children in vogue in Iran just before the Iranian Revolution in 1979. His films, Bread and Alley (1970), Recess (1972) and Two Solutions to One Problem (1975) all feature children, and Recess and Two Solutions to One Problem are set in schools. Two Solutions to One Problem is a little tussle between two young schoolboys over a torn notebook. The 1970s saw a lot of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. The Six-Day War had ended and the countries were back on the negotiation table. The beauty of Kiarostami’s films are that they can be scaled up. They raise a lot of philosophical questions, and along with a few more Persian films, forms the bedrock of the aestheticization of politics in contemporary Iranian Cinema.
As Abbas Kiarostami said, “I would say that no film is apolitical. Any film that is anchored in society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.” In his essay Contemporary Art and The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière touches upon the point of political art. He speaks at length at abut how artists have argued for a bigger role in the political discourse with their art. Art pieces have moved on from just being “artistic” to having being an entity that makes ripples, if not waves politically. Fiction, in filmmaking and writing, often considered just “making stories”, is more about connecting and making sense about characters, times, signs and images for the audience, and pushing the boundaries of art. As Rancière puts it, “Art cannot merely occupy the space left by the weakening of political conflict.”
Another film that was produced by Kanun was Children of Heaven, and was written and directed by Majid Majidi, who shot to fame with the film. It went on to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language at the 1998 Academy Awards. It features the children adopting mature roles, which would generally be seen as that of adults. It is a story about how a boy and his sister share a pair of shoes, since the boy lost the pair meant for his sister. In the times of economic hardship, the boy starts to learn the trade his father practices, and eventually enters a running race where the third prize is a pair of shoes, but he ends up winning the first prize. With one more child born in the family, the pressure adds up on the family which is already not being able to make ends meet. Post revolution, as Iranian critic Hamid Reza Sadr mentions, children have become “surrogates” for what adults and adult values stand for. Children are shields against the draconian “siahnamayi”, which considers the mingling of men and women, women without the hijab and men with Western clothing as taboo.
Censorship in films was present during the Shah’s reign as well as after the Revolution of 1979. Before 1979, however, it applied to political criticism, and it was after the Revolution that criticism about religion became the new red-line. Since children weren’t under the purview of religion and social “rules,” it was an easier way to make big political criticism. Children have always been looked at as “innocent,” and handing them tropes of an adult added extra depth to their character, and made the films even more impactful. These “innocent children’s films” made it easier to circumvent the watchful eyes of the religious elites in the country. Dancing and singing, which was prohibited for adults, now could be used in these children’s films.
It has been almost 40 years since the Islamic Revolution and about 45 years since Two Solutions To One Problem came out. It dealt with a simple narrative, which could be scaled up to be a metaphor for issues concerning adults- especially foreign policy, as Iran was battling squabbles, both inside the country and abroad. This set off the precedent of using children cinema and having a universal appeal. Two and Two has swayed away from the traditional forms like the ghazal, and the principles of the Iranian New Wave, but still uses children as personas delivering the deep, mature and complex Orwellian messages. As Jafar Panahi once said, “When a filmmaker does not make a film, it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail. The main question is: why should it be a crime to make a movie? A finished film, well, it can get banned but not the director.”