Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T09:29:53.751Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Seeing, Iranian Style: Women and Collective Vision in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sara Saljoughi
Sara Saljoughi*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between remediation and intertextuality in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008), arguing that the act of absorbing and transforming other texts and media within one film creates new conditions for collective vision within the post-revolutionary Iranian discourse of visuality. Focusing on the faces of 114 actresses as they watch a film adaptation of the story of “Khosrow and Shirin,” Kiarostami challenges the post-revolutionary modesty laws and their emphasis on not looking at women and at avoiding a spectator–image relationship based on the fulfillment of the desiring male gaze. By making women the spectators, the film suggests that there is no collective vision without women's vision.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , June 2012 , pp. 519 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This is a revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in San Diego, November 2010. I am grateful to Emily Fedoruk, Keya Ganguly, Rembert Hüser, Alice Lovejoy, Jessica Mathiason and Foad Torshizi for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi for his enthusiasm and support, to Negar Mottahedeh for our joyful collaboration(s), and to John Mowitt who has seen this essay through its many iterations.

References

1 Mottahedeh, Negar, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham, NC, 2008), 128–29Google Scholar.

2 For more on Sepanta's work and the early history of Iranian films based on traditional stories, see Naficy, Hamid, “Iranian Writers, the Iranian Cinema, and the Case of Dash Akol,” Iranian Studies, 18 (1985): 231–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is covered more extensively in Naficy's four-volume A Social History of Iranian Cinema (Durham, NC, 2011), which was not yet published at the time this article was written.

3 Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 45Google Scholar.

4 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 47.

5 Kuntzel, Thierry, “The Film-Work 2,” Camera Obscura, 2 (1980): 6–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 2.

7 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 100.

8 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 103.

9 Kiarostami's style has often been called modernist, a designation which, when used euphemistically by his detractors, has maintained the hierarchical logic that understands modernism as a movement that excludes the non-European. Godfrey Cheshire, for example, argues convincingly for a reading of Kiarostami that resists the familiar binaries of tradition and modernity and avoids confusing “modernism” with “modernity,” while also arguing that intimacy with Kiarostami's work requires fluency in both European and Iranian art traditions. See Cheshire, Godfrey, “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste, 25, no. 4 (2000): 8–15Google Scholar.

10 Barthes, Roland, “The Face of Garbo,” Mythologies (New York, 1972), 56Google Scholar.

11 Barthes, Roland, “The Third Meaning,” Image, Music, Text (New York, 1978), 62Google Scholar.

12 Linderman, Deborah, “Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York, 1986), 143–52Google Scholar.

13 Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 62.

14 Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 62–63.

15 Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1977), 50Google Scholar.

16 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier.

17 Nancy, Jean-Luc and Kiarostami, Abbas, The Evidence of Film (Paris, 2001), 12 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.

18 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 98.

19 Doane, Mary Ann, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 9.

21 Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 100.

22 Khatereh Khodaei, “Shirin as Described by Kiarostami,” Offscreen, 31 January 2009, http://www.offscreen.com/index.php/pages/essays/shirin_kiarostami/

23 Nancy and Kiarostami, The Evidence of Film, 10.

24 Nancy and Kiarostami, The Evidence of Film, 16.

25 Linderman, “Uncoded Images,” 152.