Although censorship seems to render realism in film completely impossible, the history of Iranian cinema can be regarded as a history of attempts to put into effect a specific kind of realism. The assumption of the workshop is, that Iranian cinema never strives to represent reality but to produce it in a strategic and tactical manner. Realism remains a question of form, politics and effect. For our workshop, we ask for proposals that are focused on forms of realism and concepts of reality that can be found in the history of Iranian cinema before and after 1979.

The event is organized by Seminar for Media Studies of the University of Basel (Chair for Media Aesthetics, Prof. Dr. Ute Holl)

Concept / Organisation: Prof. Dr. Ute Holl, Dr. Matthias Wittmann, M.A. Hemen Heidari

A lot that usually drives the narrative or holds images together is left out in Iranian cinema. And a lot of theories have been invested in those ruptures, deprivations and ellipses, theories about the symbolic ways Iranian films work on our imagination and open up our receptivity of what can’t be shown. “How to say something which at the same time sounds you have not said anything? How to say something, which while it is perceived that you have not said anything, people understand that you have indeed said something”, Bahram Beizaie asks in his speech After a century (1996). Although censorship seems to render realism in film completely impossible, the history of Iranian cinema can be regarded as a history of attempts to put into effect a certain kind of realism. Realism is always a question of form, politics and effect, it is a form that consciously is influenced by reality and consciously influences reality (Brecht). The relationship of Iranian Cinema to reality and realism is always a strategic and tactical relationship.
We are talking about cinematic forms that on the one hand are hybrid products of transcultural appropriations of European and international movements like neo-realism, free cinema and third cinema. And on the other hand we are talking about unique forms without comparison that had been developed under specific circumstances and challenges: be it the permanently shifting red lines of censorship – before and after 1979 –, be it the influence of Islamic and pre-Islamic concepts of reality and its relation to the image like for example Sufism is offering. It is a leitmotif of Iranian Sufism that truth would be a perfectly polished mirror where the light is given shape (Corbin), but this mirror has been broken into pieces. Images of mirrors are a recurring motif in Iranian cinema. In many cases, they are shattered as in Bahram Bezaie’s post-war film Travelers (Mosaferan, 1992) when a wedding ceremony turns into a funeral since the family who is supposed to bring the wedding mirror dies in a car accident. Subsequently a lot of mirror images are broken by the mourners, lamenting not only the death of the family but also the unredeemed promises of the celebration.
The notion of the broken mirror opens up several possible perspectives on the relation between image and reality. Be it, that the way of searching the truth is more important than finding it, be it, that the reality of the image is defined by a deficit, always referring to a
multiplicity of other possible realities (= mirror fragments), be it, that the measurement of universal truth is lost and artists are committed to a particular shape of the mirror fragment. This is the legacy of Abbas Kiarostami whose films share a lot of philosophical themes with Sufi poetry. According to Kiarostami the shortest way to truth is a lie since the image is a way of producing a certain reality in cooperation with the imagination of the recipient and his mirror fragments. Thus, a film like Close-Up is “not a film about cinema in the self-reflexive modern sense, it is about reality, more particularly about reality’s current state of impoverishment and the potential of the cinematic image to restore its luminous dimension” (Joan Copjec). Another style of confusing the clear cut between fact and fiction, documentation and transformation of reality has been developed by Kamran Shirdel whose films – Women’s Prison (1965), Red Light district (1966), Teheran is the capital of Iran (1966) and The Night It Rained (1967) – stand at the beginning of a whole tradition of dialectical, socio-critical movies – like Massoud Bakshi’s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (2006) – that juxtapose and contrast different versions of reality. In a country where different fictions are quarreling about the right to overpaint reality, only forms of frictions and contradictions can approach the lived experience of the social reality: “I think that even the government itself has come to accept some realities and this has forced it to adopt a different attitude towards certain boundaries. […] it is within these contradictions and gaps that the roots of alternative thinking are formed. Even in the government there isn’t a single, fixed point of view; so existing censorship does not necessarily comply with the government’s own laws!” (Bani-Etemad) Thus, not everything is decided by law. What we can experience is not a success story of censorship, but a history of its failure. We are watching “uncensored marks of censorship”: “Censorship is at one and the same time, and without it being possible to make a clear distinction, the place things cannot get past […] and the place things can get past (but it’s the same place).” (Christian Metz)
A lot of Iranian films are compared to Italian neo-realism or cinema verité. The starting point of the workshop will be the assumption that those links and parallels don’t do justice to the complexity of Iranian forms of realism. Therefore, we are asking for proposals that are interested in carving out differentiations: What forms and concepts of realism can be found in the history of Iranian cinema before and after 1979 or 1950 (when cinema regulations had been passed that “held throughout the second Pahlavi period”, Naficy) or 1958 (when the Savak officially had been founded) etc.? Is there any possibility to draw a line between fictional and documentary impulses? What ontological and social status, what reality of relations do moving images have in Iran’s visual culture, also in relation to an economy of political power? What tactics have been developed in order to produce documentarising viewing modes (Odin) and effets de réel (Barthes)? What layering of acting modes, what interleaving of pretending to pretend (to pretend) might lead to certain effects and dimensions of social reality? What can be said about the cooperation of image and sound- design regarding things that can’t be said or shown? How does imagination cut into the reality of image-sound-relations and how can the forms with which Iranian movies work on 'our' imagination be brought into dialogue with specific philosophical traditions?

Please send abstracts which should not exceed 600 words accompanied by short biographical notes to:
matthias.wittmann@unibas.ch

Abstract submission deadline: 2.6. 2017
Notification of acceptance: 30.6. 2017