Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema

'You all have lost a woman, you all are looking for your lost one.'

(B. Beyzaie, Fath Nameh Kalat)

Dir. Tahmineh Milani, Yeki Az Mā Do Nafar (One of Our Two), 2011.

by Niloofar Beyzaie, IranDokht

In February 1994, Ms. Niloofar Bayzaie gave a lecture titled “A Look at Women’s Role in Iranian Cinema” in Frankfort. Ms. Beyzaie graciously provided us with a written version of her lecture. Due to limited space in the magazine, we will provide only parts of her text here. Another friend and colleague, Jamileh Nedaee, also discussed women's cinema in the same seminar, and we hope to publish her lecture as well in the future.

The movie camera is a tool to record images. It searches the world to find and select particular subjects. The camera focuses on personal problems and displays what it finds to the audience, which. Is then obligated to see what the camera shows. With that in mind, when a male filmmaker directs a female actor, he focuses only on those aspects of women that are important and worthwhile to him. Therefore, the female character is influenced by the director’s own stereotypes. Now let’s look at a female filmmaker directing a female actor. Under this theory, a female director would portray women differently than a male director. Does this actually occur?

In reality, not every woman filmmaker is capable of creating work that truly defends women’s rights. Additionally, most movies made by men are extremely anti-feminine, since our patriarchal society emphasizes the power and capabilities of men and the weakness and incapability of women. Studying the roots and causes of this problem is not within the scope of our discussion.

A Brief Look at the Post-Revolutionary Cinema

The dominant image of women in post-revolutionary cinema is that of a tempting, seductive and dangerous person.

Muslima: Muslim Women's Art and Voices Featured at IMOW Exhibition

by Samina Ali, The Huffington Post

As the curator for the International Museum of Women’s new global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, the one question I’m repeatedly asked is, “What common trait do Muslim women artists and leaders around the world share that strikes you?”

My answer: their courage.

The sad reality is that many of us have grown accustomed to –and comfortable with –seeing Muslim women portrayed as victims.

Yet brave women around the world undertake heroic acts every day. Many do so without anyone bearing witness.

 

From Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian's series "Nil, Nil," included in the International Museum of Women’s online exhibition at muslima.imow.org. Courtesy Shadi Ghadiria and The Huffington Post

To even out that ledger, I want to share the heroic stories of three women I interviewed for Muslima. It’s just a small glimpse of what you’ll see in the upcoming exhibition, which just launched.

Dr. Shirin Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. For more than 40 years, Dr. Ebadi has worked to improve the lives of women and children in Iran.

The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces

An Interview with Jennifer Heath, Writer, Activist and Curator

by Valerie Behiery, Islamic Art historian, Ph.D., IAM

"My motivations are complex, even somewhat convoluted, but in a nutshell, I grew up in veiling cultures –both heavily Roman Catholic and Muslim– and thus know from experience that what the West perceives as the whys and wherefores of veiling –primarily oppressive, antiquated customs of the “Other”– are often distorted. I wanted to dispute those notions." (Jennifer Heath)

 

Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, award-winning cultural journalist, critic, curator, and activist. Her most current exhibitions are “The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces,” which has been touring the United States since 2008 and “Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource,” which began traveling this year. Others include the renowned “Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate.” She is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore, and Politics and Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (with Ashraf Zahedi) both published by the University of California Press. Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace (with Ashraf Zahedi) is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press, and her collection, The Jewel and the Ember: Love Stories from the Islamic World, is currently under consideration. Future art exhibitions include “The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths-Palestinian, Native American, Irish,” to launch at The Jerusalem Center Gallery in September 2013.

 

The exhibit, The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces, is part of a larger project of yours to unpack the veil which also includes a book. Why did you find it important to address what has become a charged symbol of supposed cross-cultural conflict with both words and images? Tell us also bit about what made you want to address the veil.

 

I love that you say “unpack the veil” – because that is precisely what we’re doing. Unpacking the history and the universality of the veil and veiling practices, so as to bring it to light, engage received wisdom and challenge stereotypes. My motivations are complex, even somewhat convoluted, but in a nutshell, I grew up in veiling cultures –both heavily Roman Catholic and Muslim– and thus know from experience that what the West perceives as the whys and wherefores of veiling –primarily oppressive, antiquated customs of the “Other”– are often distorted. I wanted to dispute those notions. This is also why I wrote The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam. In order to understand the multiple truths inherent in any issue, and speak those truths to power, we must contextualize. The book, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (University of California Press, 2008) tackled the veil from as many cultural and historical angles as possible –Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, various secular and pagan and pre-Abrahamic points of view, male veiling, mourning, the arts– by writers who approached the topic via personal, political and/or scholarly paths. Having had a visual arts, as well as a literary background, I wanted also to see what artists were thinking and doing. And since I am interested in issues of social and environmental justice, I wanted to combat what I perceive as violations of civil liberties and discrimination against veiling practices, particularly in Europe.

Taking Risks in Art and Politics

Shirin Neshat: An Artist — Iranian, Muslim and Female — Engages

Image courtesy of Scene in NY

by Aysegul Sert, NYTimes

Over the past two decades, Shirin Neshat has drawn on her personal experience of being an artist at home in the West with roots in Iran to illustrate her creed: “People should be free to choose what they want to do with their lives, what they want to wear, what religion they want to believe in; this is not something a government or a community should impose.”

Perched in her spacious studio in downtown New York, she added: “Globalization is happening, and the world is becoming more homogenous. We have to accept that we are not going to be all the same; we have to tolerate each other’s differences.” 

Born in 1957, Ms. Neshat left Iran before the fall of the shah, settling in New York after a short stay in California. “I will never belong to anywhere completely,” she insisted. “I will never fit in anywhere completely.” Although if Iran were to become democratic, she allowed later in the conversation, “then maybe one day I could go back.” 

Ms. Neshat has exhibited at the Tate in London and the Whitney in New York, and she earned a Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. She first gained attention in the mid-1990s, with “Women of Allah,” a series of photographs depicting women in veils, their skin covered in calligraphy of Islamic poetry. It was a meditation, she said, on the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran — on martyrdom, patriotism and religion. 

That revolution, she asserted, led to many Iranian women becoming “brainwashed and submissive.” In recent years, first with the opposition protests in Iran in 2009 and then with the Arab Spring, “we see a generation of women and men no longer divided but equal. They are educated, they are not ideological, their interest is pure and positive, which is change, democracy and freedom.” 

It’s a Man’s World

Interview with Shurooq Amin, Kuwait’s Rebel with a Cause

Shurooq Amin, My Harem in Heaven, Image courtesy REORIENT

by Joobin Bekhrad, REORIENT

On March 5, 2012, just three hours after opening, Shurooq Amin’s highly anticipated exhibition at Kuwait’s AI M. Gallery, It’s a Man’s World, was shut down. Commencing at 8 PM, the exhibition attracted a large number of people, and Amin managed to sell a few pieces, although by 10 PM, the local police stormed the scene, and began questioning both Amin and the gallery owner. Apparently, the authorities had been informed that Amin’s work was of a ‘pornographic’ nature, and as such, could not be shown in Kuwait. As the evening progressed, more and more officials arrived at the galleries, taking pictures of Amin’s paintings to send to the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce. Needless to say, in the end all of Amin’s paintings were taken down, and the exhibition was cancelled.

Although various accounts of the incident exist in both Arab and Western media, I talked to the woman behind the paintings herself, to hear her side of the story. As Amin would say, this is the story heard straight from the horse’s mouth!

Reversing the Stereotypes

by Roxane Zand, Sotheby's

As a student I was a great fan of Edward Said’s Orientalism and used to feel offended by the vague, notional stereotypes that the West held about Middle Easterners. That sensitivity has been turned on its head in recent times with Middle Eastern artists ready to invert the very elements and aspects that used to caused offence.

Take Shirin Neshat’s series of Stills from her film Women Without Men. The other day I was arrested by a print from the series hanging on the ground floor at Sotheby’s New Bond Street. Zarin, the subject of the film, lies crumpled in the foetal position, her anguish contrasted and witnessed so poignantly by the Western icons that surround her.

Shirin Neshat’s Zarin in Bedroom, a still from her celebrated film Women Without Men. Sold for £17,500 in the Contemporary Art Day sale in London on 27 June. Image courtesy of Sotheby's

Her exotic-looking bedroom could be a Moroccan or even Ottoman brothel, although it actually references Tehran’s seamy ‘shahr-I naw.’ While the images of Elvis Presley and Deborah Kerr evoke so many layers of meaning!

For those of us who remember the smoke-filled cinemas of Tehran or Cairo or Baghdad, these actors were not brands the way film stars are today, but larger-than-life characters that symbolized the golden era of Hollywood. I simply love what Shirin has achieved in this series, and totally covet the one that hangs in the study of my good friend Layla Diba in NYC. Just the other day Susanne, another friend who collects Iranian art, showed me the image of her latest acquisition and yes, it was one of these and yes, I felt a pang of envy!

'The Other Resurrection': Storytelling through images

The exhibition The Other Resurrection runs until May 30 at Contemporary Art Platform (CAP), Kuwait. This stunning photography exhibition gives a chance to explore the work of the Middle East’s best photographers. They take you on a journey with their poignant images and their visual stories are powerful, haunting and heart wrenching to say the least. In the current exhibition, 40 outstanding images have been selected from the works of six distinguished female photographers, each with her own process, technique and source of inspiration. The featured photographers are:  Laura Boushnak (Palestine), Myriam Abdelaziz (Egypt), Tamara Abdul Hadi (Iraq), Tanya Habjouqa (Jordan), Dalia Khamissy (Lebanon) and Newsha Tavakolian (Iran).

‘Rawiya’ is an Arabic word, which when translated means, “She who tells a story”.  The collective comprises of a group of six female photographers from across the Middle East and made its official debut at the Format Festival in Derby, UK, in March 2011.

Speaking through images, when words fail, these photographers from the Middle East attempt the return to a past that no longer exists and the departure into a future that remains unknown. In their very own words, “They present an insider’s view of a region in flux, balancing its contradictions while reflecting on social and political issues and stereotypes.”

With an artist’s eye, they eloquently capture their visual stories that offer representations against and beyond the stereotypes. The images reflect their diverse perceptions as they successfully explore issues of identity crises, sexual awakening, the literacy crisis and the unconventional graffiti and street art in Egypt and provide insight on the struggles, triumphs, and aspirations.

These women are not only truly remarkable photographers, but their dedication to chronicle the known and the unknown, the forgotten and the oblivious, is commendable.

Feminism Manifested in Art

By Roxana Marcoci

To speak about the feminist epistemes of the year 2000, one needs to look back at the decade of the 1990s, a period when feminist practices related to visual and performing arts, theory, criticism, and activism became more dissenting and schismatic than ever before. While the pioneering Women's Liberation Movement of the early 1970s had a clear mandate -the construction of a distinct female subjectivity and the inclusion of women within the orb of cultural production-, modified ensuing generations to calibrate a clearly articulated oppositionality between "grass roots" and poststructuralist theories of gender, more recent feminist investigations have ceased to operate by any such clear-cut demarcations. In other words, since the end of the 20th-century two aspects have been problematized: the received categories of feminist art, and the idea that "woman" can be literalized in terms of a normative collective identity, a gestalt of some sorts. This being said, one should not hastily conclude that feminism, now fractioned and divergent, is bankrupt or in reflux. On the contrary, I would argue, that if contemporary feminists have less of a sense of themselves as a movement, it is because their power subsists no longer in a unified Pan-feminist voice, but in the disjunctions among their voices, in the differences among women themselves1. 

It is through this prismatic lens that I would like to focus, even if briefly, on three different practices which have contributed to understanding our period and concurrently have extended the social contexts in which these practices still unfold. 

Shirin Neshat - Turbulent

To begin with, nineties feminism not only jettisoned gynophobic stereotyping, but also probed sexual, ethnic and racial differences. This explains why, on one hand, feminism today is more likely to address all the clichés about what it means to be a woman -since as a construct (whether historical or fictional), woman is always open to investigation. On the other hand, it offers a much broader range of positions, not to mention realignments, as in the challenge posed by women of color to the authority of white women to speak for all women in general2. The sustained productions of the last twenty years of Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson are just few of the known paradigms. The same can be said about non-Western feminist rebuttals of Western hegemonic discourses.

Searching for Shahrzad

Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran
The Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist
By Kamran Talattof
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011

Excerpt from the introduction:

On March 8, 1979 (International Women’s Day), less than a month after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, my friend Azar and I were standing near the front gate of the University of Tehran, which was filled with outraged women. They were preparing to protest the mandatory public veiling of all women. Two days earlier, this demand had been voiced by Ayatollah Khomeini in a speech he delivered in the city of Qom.

We were joined by another woman who told us the crowd at and around the University of Tehran was about to move to the prime minister’s office, where another rally was in progress. We all walked down the street and the newcomer, who like the two of us was young and secular, but somewhat more leftist, pointed out famous people who were marching. One woman was a former political prisoner, another was an author, and she laughed when she identified an actress whom I did not recognize at that time.

This rally and others that took place over the next few days were covered at length by the press. One newspaper reported the events in a supportive tone. Others attributed the demonstrations to supporters of the old regime and so called antirevolutionary forces. One published a photo of the demonstration that featured several women wearing makeup and mocked them as “the kind of women” who have been rallying against the revolutionary government. In the center of the photo was a woman with large glasses, a rare color photo in that newspaper in those days. I realized this was the actress whom we had seen on the day of the demonstration: Shahrzad, the dancer. I also learned from these reports that she was one of a few women who were arrested.

More than a decade later, in 1991, in a section of the Graduate Library at the University of Michigan known as “the Cage,” where they stored publications that lacked sufficient cataloging information, I was combing through Persian materials when I came across a book that aroused my curiosity. It was a short book of poetry entitled Salam, Aqa (Hello, sir), written by Shahrzad, whose picture appeared on the cover.