IRAN’S WOMEN FACE THE CAMERA
David Parkinson

guardian.co.uk
Thursday 25 June 2009 12.23 BST

As images of Neda Agha Soltan’s lifeless face circumvent the globe,
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has made a compelling study of
the female face with Shirin

In Kiarostami’s Shirin, 113 actresses’ faces are filmed as they watch
a sentimental drama

There’s a horrific irony that Neda Agha Soltan should become an icon
of Iran’s struggle in the same week a sensitive study of the Iranian
female face opens in cinemas. Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin is an ingenious
film that deserves the widest possible audience. It cannot, of course,
match the horror and power of those images of the 26-year-old student
as she lay dying on Karegar Avenue after being shot in the chest last
Saturday evening.

Shirin Release: 2008 Country: Rest of the world Cert (UK): PG Runtime:
90 mins Directors: Abbas Kiarostami Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Juliette
Binoche, Mahnaz Afshar, Niki Karimi More on this film Eyewitnesses
maintain she was targeted by the Basij militia, despite playing a
peripheral and wholly peaceful part in the protest. But, as Shirin
also suggests, it’s the impact of the image on the screen – not the
truths behind it – that dictates the spectator’s emotional response.

Rarely has the status of women in the Muslim world been explored
with such devastating simplicity as in Shirin. By exclusively
employing close-ups of=2 0the shifting expressions of 113 actresses
as they appear to watch a sentimental romantic melodrama, Kiarostami
demonstrates the cultural, political and emotional intelligence that
is often downgraded in patriarchal societies. Expanding upon ‘Where
Is My Romeo?’ – Kiarostami’s contribution to the 2007 portmanteau,
Chacun son cin̩ma Рand his 2008 multimedia installation, Looking at
Tazieh, this is a masterly variation on the 1920s Kuleshov experiment
that demonstrated filmic meaning’s heavy dependence upon context.

Moreover, it continues his audacious attempt to put the abstract into
arthouse and even seems to reinforce the contention that Iran has
developed a cinema of moral anxiety similar to the one that emerged
in Poland in the late 1970s, when Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi,
Agnieszka Holland and Krzysztof Kieslowski anticipated the rebellious
spirit of an oppressed society prior to the formation of the Solidarity
trade union.

It’s tempting to suggest that Iranian film-makers like Kiarostami, the
Makhmalbaf family, Jafar Panahi, Abolfazl Jalili, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad
and Bahman Ghobadi have been reflecting a similar undercurrent of
popular discontent, as so many recent releases have explored topics
that would previously have been considered taboo. And what is so
intriguing is that the majority of these insights into women’s
rights, urban poverty, prostitution, drug addiction, bureaucratic
incompetence, legal intransigence and the growin g student fascination
and familiarity with outside ideas and new technologies have been
granted export licences by a regime that is supposedly stricter than
Poland’s pre-glasnost communists.

Shirin consists of a group of women watching a movie adaptation
of Nezami Ganjavi’s 12th-century fable about the rivalry for an
Armenian princess between Farhad the sculptor and the Persian
prince, Khosrow. The storyline is an irrelevance, however, despite
the impassioned performances of an ulterior vocal cast and an emotive
score. What does matter is the art of screen acting, the perceptiveness
of the camera and the persuasive power of cinema.

Kiarostami reportedly mocked up an auditorium in his living room and
coaxed his cast into exhibiting a range of emotions while following
three dots on a blank sheet of paper. With Hedieh Tehrani, Niki Karimi,
Leila Hatami and Juliette Binoche among those enduring the relentless
gaze of Gelareh Kiazand’s camera, this is a compelling catalogue of
such basic audience responses as rapture, distraction, longing, fear,
laughter and tears.

However, it’s also a subversion of narrative norms that lauds cinema’s
ability to offer consolation, as it compels the viewer to speculate
upon the personality and domestic situation that prompts each woman’s
reaction to the unseen scenario. Moreover, Kiarostami courageously
confounds fundamentalist attitudes by challenging the wearing of
burkas, as he showcases the expressive bea uty of the hijab-framed
face in close-ups as affecting as those of Renée Falconetti in Carl
Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpice, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

Kiarostami’s use of subtle shifts in expression to celebrate life is
mesmerising. But Neda Agha Soltan’s lifeless face will rightly and
undoubtedly leave the deeper impression.