Figure 1: A screenshot from the film Bugzār Zindagī Kunam (Let Me Live), directed by Shāpūr Qarīb, 1986.

Toward the Formation of the Image of Woman in the Turmoil of the Revolution

In the thick of the revolution, 180 theaters from the existing 436, or 451 based on another estimation, were burned down.¹Humā Jāvdānī, Sāl shumār-i tārīkh-i sinimā-yi Irān (Tīr 1279 – Shahrīvar 1379) [Chronology of Iranian Cinema History (June 1900 – August 2000)] (Tehran: Qatrah, 2002), 139; Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic, (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 35; Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 21-22. More than anything else, the hostilities had formed around the roles of actresses in the commercial cinema in the second Pahlavi period, known as Fīlm-Fārsī. In these films, a number of female stars appeared in roles that were considered seductive by audiences who were mostly men, as the camera used to focus in a voyeuristic fashion on the bodies of the actresses. These actresses’ fame was based mostly on their sexual attractions rather than on other criteria. In this way, the creation of a unified entertainment industry in Iran was facilitated and films were integrated with the popular culture. A number of other actresses were professional singers and dancers who performed for audiences in cafés, bars and night clubs and helped to boost the financial success of the films. Despite the social taboos that existed in that period, too, some of these actresses successfully entered the burgeoning media of radio and television and gained high popularity.²Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, 207-213.

Figure 2: A screenshot from the film Raqqāsah-yi Shahr (The Dancer of the City), directed by Shāpūr Qarīb, 1970.

Although it was common to censor scenes that were considered “immoral” even before the revolution,³Censorship had been multifaceted, involving state, religious, commercial, and internal self-censorship. These different forms collectively shaped the film industry, often applied inconsistently and locally. Some films, like Khāchīkiyān’s Qāsid-i Bihisht (Messenger from Paradise, 1958), faced multiple censorship demands despite already having an official exhibition permit. This included removing nudity, dialogues, and scenes that different groups found objectionable, leading to significant delays and financial strain for producers. See: Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 259-260. this censorship went to a different level after the revolution. Cinema, along with other western phenomena such as theater and dancing, was looked at with suspicion and its revision was considered inevitable. Thus, the words of the returned-from-exile leader of the revolution about the reprehensibility of the cinema of the Pahlavi period became a foundation for the later changes: “Why was it necessary to make the cinema a center of vice? We are not opposed to the cinema, to radio, or to television; what we oppose is vice and the use of the media to keep our young people in a state of backwardness and dissipate their energies…. The cinema is a modern invention that ought to be used for the sake of educating the people.”⁴Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar. (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981), 258.

Therefore, one of the main concerns, or perhaps the most important concern, was the necessity of formulating a new image of woman. This image was one of the foundations of the new government, as in a period before the revolution, too, the women’s hijab was declared to be a symbol against the west and its manifestations. In demonstrations leading to the revolution, hijab turned into the banner of resisting a government which was thought to be promoting the westernization of the country while resisting religious values. For some women, even those who usually had no hijab, wearing chador became a tool for stabilizing the cultural and religious identity. Hijab was not just a piece of clothing, but a manifesto against the cultural invasion of the west and a testament to the desire to return to native roots. These ideas not only influenced the Shiite traditional women, but also attracted the attention of educated women through the writings of ‛Alī Sharī‛atī.⁵Anne H. Betteridge, “To Veil or Not to Veil: A Matter of Protest or Policy,” in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Guity Nashat Becker (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983), 119-124. Therefore, the roots of this transformation can be found as much in religious books and the Shiite groups which craved for political powers as in anti-imperialist ideas of thinkers like Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961), the French theoretician of the middle of the 20^th century, which were quite influential at that time. In his article, “Algeria Unveiled”, which was published before the revolution in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon suggested that woman’s hijab is the key to understanding the symbolic hegemony of colonialism and the ways to resist this hegemony. It was assumed that while colonial powers are trying to dominate over cultural symbols such as hijab, the resistance can create a new signification for hijab (or the absence of it) and in a kind of symbolic battle against the colonizer, fight against this hegemony in a battle-ground which was the body of the veiled woman.⁶Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, Trans. Haakon Chevalier, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 36-37.

Figure 3: A screenshot from the film Dāyarah-i Mīnā (The Cycle), directed by Dāryūsh Mihrjū’ī, 1978.

In consequence, a change in the image of woman which was created in the Pahlavi period was thought to be inevitable because the revolutionary discourse defined itself as opposed to all the ideals and norms of the previous regime and aimed at cleaning and reforming everything that was pictured before. These changes were not only necessary for establishing a new political and economic base and popular legitimacy through new mechanisms, but also instrumental in the recreation of culture, daily and intellectual life, and its cleansing of the “contamination” of western elements.

Increasing attempts were made around the formation of the image of the revolutionary woman from the very beginning of the revolution.⁷After the revolution, one of the first laws to be annulled was the law for supporting the family which was enacted in 1967. It limited the rights of men for polygamy and for divorce upon request, and eventually preserved the rights of women for divorce and taking custody of their children. In 1973, these reforms were expanded and strengthened. It was the annulment of this law that sparked protests on women’s day. In cinema, too, following the society, there was no doubt in the need to change the way women were presented; however, due to the initial chaos, it took a few years to institutionalize this image and to formulate the detailed regulations about what and how this image should be.

A few years after the revolution, the whole society was engulfed in chaos. The expansion of parallel powers along the established government made it impossible to maintain order.⁸Among them were revolutionary committees, revolutionary courts of law, the Revolutionary Guard, and many parties and political movements which supported various radical policies, and last but not least, the citizens who had the military bases, police stations, palaces and ministries under their control. See, Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution, (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 55-56. In such circumstances, cinema was in a period of chaos, too. The cleaning process had begun as a part of the changes in cinema after the revolution. Movie theaters were periodically closed and opened again; some of them changed their use; and some of them, like the theater scene in Rūdakī Hall, were cleansed from the previous “immoralities” by performing religious rituals such as ghusl (washing away with water).⁹Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, 22. It was not clear which ministry had to handle the affairs of cinema; therefore, not surprisingly, there was no agreement about how to picture women in films in this chaotic situation. The changes seemed inevitable, but no one knew how necessary these changes were and who was responsible for formulating and implementing them.

This confusion created a constant struggle between film producers, cinema owners and the government. The producers made small changes in the films made before the revolution in order to escape censorship. Sometimes, only the name of the film was changed and the content remained the same.¹⁰“Sinimā dar vīdi’u: Rāhnamā-yi film-hā-yi mujāz-i vīdi’u (Cinema in Video: A Guide to Permitted Films on Video in Iran),” Māh-nāmah-yi Fīlm 1 (June 1982): 98. Another solution was to cut some scenes that were deemed immoral and to replace them with scene that were shot anew. Cinema owners, too, tried to control the “damage” by voluntary omission of sexual relations and behaviors and clothes that went against the new ideology. A common practice was to use marker pen on the frames and the posters of the films in order to cover the naked parts of women’s bodies with skirts, shirts or scarves. However, the government was discontent with these superficial changes and made the obtaining of movie screening permit mandatory. As a result, all the films produced in the previous period as well as imported films were revised. Many films, not only commercial ones, but also those belonging to the New Wave movement or intellectual cinema of Pahlavi period, such as Muhammad Rizā Aslānī’s Shatranj-i bād (The Chess of the Wind, 1976), were banned forever, and some films had to suffer the blade of censorship to become compatible with the Islamic values.

Figure 4: A screenshot from the film Shatranj-i bād (Chess of the Wind), directed by Muhammad Rizā Aslānī, 1976.

Radical conservative groups went even further and demanded the government to prevent the well-known filmmakers and actors in the pre-revolutionary commercial cinema from working. Even when these filmmakers and actors received official screening permits for their films, their own history sparked protests. For instance, despite the initial success of Īraj Qādirī’s Barzakhī-hā (The Imperilled, 1980), huge protests erupted against the use of film stars of the Pahlavi period for playing the roles of epic Islamic heroes,¹¹An unknown writer of Kayhan wrote: “Actors whose tasks in the past were to soil the honor of the society are now, with the same appearances and the same trite techniques, playing the roles of revolutionary and Islamic figures, even the role of Imam [Khumaynī]. See: “Dūzakh-i Ibtizāl dar ‘Barzakhī-hā’ (The inferno of Vulgarity in ‘The Imperilled’),” Kayhān (May 30, 1982): 13. which eventually led to the banning of the film. Qādirī’s look toward women in his other film, Dādā (1982) also made him the target of harsh criticisms; for instance, an article in Film Monthly (Māh-nāmah-yi Fīlm) read, “now that Qādirī cannot picture women naked, he cannot hide from view the essence of women that he has in mind. From the very beginning, the new bride of Dādā gets raped, which motivates Dādā to take action. In other words, once again it is an act of dishonor that sets the wheels turning.”¹²“Dādā,” Māh-nāmah-yi Fīlm 4 (1983), 48.

In such a volatile situation, filmmakers were also confused in their encounter with this trend. Many of them omitted the picture of woman from their films altogether, such as Farīburz Sālih in Safīr (Ambassador, 1982) and Muhsin Makhmalbāf in Isti’āzah (Fleeing from Evil to God, 1983), and by avoiding stories that needed the participation of women, tried to appease the new sensitivities. The director of Ambassador opined that “in this confused and chaotic situation” for filmmaking, it is better to “close down cinemas for a while so that the officials and experts could sit down… and prepare the practical guidelines” clearly. He claimed that there actually were some women actresses in his film, “but the camera angle was in a way that they were not in the frame.”¹³“Musāhabah bā Farīburz Ṣālih, Kārgardān-i Fīlm-i Safīr (Interview with Farīburz Sālih, Director of Ambassador,” Māh-nāmah-yi Fīlm 4 (July 1983): 7-12. However, there was still a minority of filmmakers who did not turn away from women. The roles played by women clearly changed, though, and there were no more dancing and singing in the films. No agreement had yet been reached about hijab. This is evident in films about the political situation before the revolution, such as Khusraw Sīnā’ī’s Zindah bād! (Long Live! 1980), Mas‛ūd Kīmiyā’ī’s Khat-i Qirmiz (Red Line, 1982) and Ghulām-‛Alī ‛Irfān’s Āqāy-i Hīruglīf (Mr. Hieroglyph, 1980), which revolves around the life of a guerilla girl and narrates the story of the armed struggle of leftist movements in 1970s Iran. In the mythological and historical works of Bahrām Bayzā’ī, too, such as Charīkah-yi Tārā (Ballad of Tara, 1980) and Marg-i Yazdgird (Death of Yazdgerd, 1982), the image of the modest and reticent woman epitomizing the decent woman after revolution was not completely formulated yet. Many of these films were made without official permit and were never screened, or if they did, they were taken down after a short screening.

Figure 5: A screenshot from the film Khat-i Qirmiz (The Red Line), directed by Mas‛ūd Kīmiyā’ī, 1982.

These rather spontaneous and unorganized exercises were approved neither by the new government officials, nor a number of cinema owners and filmmakers who demanded the organic and full blown intervention of the government in cinema industry.¹⁴In December 1980, in a letter to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the society of cinema owners criticized the government for its inattention to cinema. It was also announced that with the help of government, the private sector is able to harmonize the cinema industry with “the revolution and the people” in five years. Filmmakers had similar concerns, too. In 1981, they wrote a letter to “the people and the government” claiming that two years after “the holy and anti-dependence revolution of the people of Iran”, the revolution has not rooted in the cinema industry and “a kind of dependence” is created, not different from the dependence of the previous period. The writers asked the government to implement the new law “organically and comprehensively”. See:

Hamid Naficy, “Islamizing Film Culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami Update”, in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 35. Therefore, in February 1983, the government passed a set of regulations about the screening of films and videos and assigned its implementation to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.¹⁵“Nizārat bar namāyish-i fīlm va islāyd va vīdi’u va sudūr-i parvānah namāyish ān-hā,” Markaz-i Pazhūhish-hā-yi Majlis, 23/02/1983, accessed in 10/11/2024, https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/print_version/106928. These regulations stipulated that all the films and videos that are screened publicly should have official screening permit; also, a supervisory committee was made responsible for regulating the presence of women in a way that does not contradict the “human dignity” of women.¹⁶This committee consisted of one cleric familiar with artistic fields, three individuals familiar with political, social and Islamic issues as well as film and cinema, and one expert in the field of domestic and foreign film and cinema. This committee should determine and provide the Islamic regulations to be applied in all films, whether Iranian or foreign.

The aim was to represent women as chaste individuals who have essential roles in the society and in raising pious and responsible children. Additionally, women were not to be used for stimulating sexual desires. These general and ambiguous guidelines had a deep effect on the presentation of women in cinema.¹⁷Naficy, “Islamizing Film Culture in Iran,” 36. Hijab was gradually made compulsory in the society and a law was passed in 1983 about women’s clothing.¹⁸Article 102 of the Penal Code was about this issue which was later on added as a note to article 141 of the Islamic Penal Code approved in 1996. According to this law, any individual who practically pretends to be doing something illegal in plain sight, public places and thoroughfares, in addition to being punished for her/his crime, will be sentenced to imprisonment from 10 days to 2 months or a fine of 74 lashes; and if the individual commits a deed which is not punishable itself but violates public morals, he/she is only sentenced to imprisonment from 10 days to 2 months or 74 lashes. The note also says: Women who appear in thoroughfares and in public without Islamic hijab will be sentenced to imprisonment from 10 days to 2 months or a fine of 50 thousand to 500 thousand rial. The pressures, however, had increased even before these laws were approved. Cinema theaters were among the first public places that, since 1981, were forced to prevent women without Islamic hijab from entering.¹⁹Jāvdānī, Sāl shumār-i tārīkh-i sinimā-yi Irān, 153. Consequently, the rules of “modesty” dominated the actresses’ behavior and affected their attire, their speech, the narrative structure of the film, and also the mise-en-scène and the style of cinematography.

In this research, we will have a look at how these regulations were institutionalized in films made between 1979 and 1990 which led to the construction of the new image of the “decent woman.” This aim will be attained on two levels: first, we will look into the privative aspect of this image which aims at the process of desensitization of women, i.e. the suppression of their desires in order to give a cinematic form to all the limitations gradually defined by the revolutionary ideology. Then, we will discuss its affirmative aspect which aims at creating an out-of-this-world image of woman that is formed in the level of abstraction and can be explained with the concept of “Eternal Feminine.” These two aspects are examined successively here for the sake of discussion although in reality, both of these aspects are intertwined, proceed in parallel and have no temporal precedence. In order to have a more inclusive research sample, we try to discuss all types of films: films from among the influential works which are considered to have high cinematic values, such as Ballad of Tara and Dāryūsh Farhang’s Tilism (The Spell, 1986), and popular and commercial films such as Shāpūr Qarīb’s Bugzār Zindagī Kunam (Let Me Live, 1986). Such a sample can cover a significant part of the produced works although it is impossible to be comprehensively inclusive since there are films that stand outside this pattern. For instance, from the middle of the 1980s, we witness examples of different presentations of women in films such as Muhammad ‛Alī Najafī’s Guzarash-i yak qatl (A Report on a Murder, 1986) in which a woman is shown as a member of the central committee of Tūdah Party of Iran and has a main role in the story of the film. Some of these examples are discussed in the final section of the article.

Figure 6: A screenshot from the film Guzarash-i yak qatl (A Report on a Murder), directed by Muhammad-‛Alī Najafī, 1986.

Also worth noting is the fact that Hamid Naficy has created a major part of the literature about the changes in the role of women in the post-revolutionary cinema in his articles and books which are the main sources of this article, too. In his article, “Women and the ‘Problematic of Women’ in the Iranian Post-revolutionary Cinema,” he opines that after the revolution, the emphasis is on the radical intermingling of woman with her sexuality.²⁰Hamid Naficy, “Women and the ‘Problematic of Women’ in the Iranian Post-Revolutionary Cinema,” Nimeh-ye digar 14 (1991), 122-169. This shows that femininity is only defined with sexuality. This is not true about men. Therefore, woman is attributed with having a powerful influence on stimulating man’s desires. This leads to the formation of a supervisory system and the change in the image of woman on screen. In “Veiled Visions/Powerful Presences: Women in Postrevolutionary Iranian Cinema,” Naficy examines the changes and expansion of women’s roles in Iranian cinema after the revolution, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.²¹Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Visions/Powerful Presences: Women in Postrevolutionary Iranian Cinema,” in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Sheila Whitaker (London: National Film Theatre, 1999), 44-65. It also discusses how the principles of modesty and sexual segregation shaped the aesthetics of wearing and not wearing hijab, ultimately influencing the representation of women and the theme of love in Iranian cinema. Also, in “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films,”²²Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films,” Social Research 67, No. 2, (2000): 559-576. Naficy explains the changes in the presence of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in three stages: initial absence, limited roles in the background, and finally, powerful main roles, both as actors and as directors. He argues that the rules of modesty have played a significant role in these changes. Supported by the emergence of prominent women filmmakers such as Rakhshān Banī’i‛timād, these rules contributed to the creation of a unique cinematic image.

The Formation of the Criteria for the Image of Woman: Desensitization and the Principle of Eternal Feminine

In the first years after the revolution, women were seldom instrumental in the stories and were presented on the screen in particular forms. Sometimes we deal with what Hamid Naficy calls “absent presence” which means all the aspects of the woman is not shown in the film: sometimes there is her voice but there is no image of her; sometimes the image is there, but the voice is not; and sometimes neither the image nor the voice is there but her presence is still felt.²³Naficy, “Women and the ‘Problematic of Women’,” 141-142. We hear the voice of the mother for a few moments in Ibrāhīm Furūzish’s Kilīd (The Key, 1985), but we only see a distant and blurred shot of her from behind, and a medium shot of her hands. After this scene, neither her image not her voice is in the film, but her absence influences the story.

And when the woman is present with both her image and voice, the rules of hijab and modesty are dominant over her clothes (long, loose and dark), her behaviors and actions (demure and avoiding any bodily contact with the unrelated men) and her gaze (avoiding direct and long look). Therefore, we only see some faces whose bodies are wrapped in several layers of clothing, which are described by Hamid Dabashi as “body-less faces”; faces that deny their bodies and testify to the impossibility of femininity in post-revolutionary cinema. Dabashi believes that there is a striking inconsistency between these faces and the cliché distortion which should be their bodies.²⁴Hamid Dabashi, “Body‐less Faces: Mutilating Modernity and Abstracting Women in an ‘Islamic Cinema’,” Visual Anthropology 10, no. 2-4 (1998): 362.

According to the ever-expanding criteria for filmmaking, close-up shots of women’s faces or the exchange of lustful glances between a woman and a man were forbidden. Additionally, women were most often than not shown in long shots and in static roles in order to prevent the appearance of their body lines because, as the Islamic law decrees, a woman’s clothing should be in such a way as to “conceal the features and the beauties of her body.”²⁵‛Alī Khāmanah-ī, Risālah-yi Āmūzishī (2): Ahkām-i Mu‛āmilāt (Educational Thesis (2): The Rules of Transaction) (Tehran: Fiqh-i Rūz, 2019), 369. It is only allowed to look at the face and hands of a woman, without any sexual pleasure, provided that these parts are without makeup or jewelry. In this discourse, the woman’s body, its reproductive potentials and its sexual appeal, is both a symbol and a physical and tangible tool for putting the world in order. Being a woman was the principal sign of unity and independence of the changing society and had to be “protected.” This symbology revealed itself in the tendency to limit women’s freedom in choosing their clothing and movements.

As a result, “both women and men were desexualized… Love and the physical expression of love (even between intimates) were absent.”²⁶Naficy, “Veiled Visions/Powerful Presences,” 45. Meanwhile, even marriage was pictured as devoid of desire. Murtazā in ‛Alīrizā Dāvūdnizhād’s Bī-panāh (Exposed, 1986) is an officer who takes it upon himself to marry A‛zam, a lonely woman who has come to him for help. Murtazā does not even know her name but is worried that if he does not marry her, she would be “exposed,” After marriage, he assures her that he has taken the vow of marriage so that he could take care of her. There is no desire involved, and he will not approach her unless she wants him to. A‛zam also insists on wearing her chador in his house. After a while, it comes to light that A‛zam is a divorced woman, and more importantly, a mother. Being a mother has created such a “holiness” for her that she should not be tainted by being touched. A “decent mother” is a woman who is sexually inactive. Well aware of the preference of being a mother over being a wife, Murtazā gets separated from her at the end so that she could go back to her husband, Ahmad, and raise her child, Rizā. He assures Ahmad that he has treated A‛zam, who is now addressed with her main role as “Rizā’s mother,”, as his “sister,” rather than as his wife.

Figure 7: A screenshot from the film Bī-panāh (Exposed), directed by ‛Alīrizā Dāvūdnizhād, 1987.

This treatment reminds us of the titles for women and men in Islamic leftist political parties. When encountered with the inevitable closeness of the two sexes, these parties used these titles as tools for keeping women away. In order to be separated from their sexual attractions, fighting women are addressed as “comrade” or “sister” by their peers, and are constantly reminded of the prohibition of having sexual relations with them. The imaginative walls of the private world can be extended to eternity. Away from the taboos of incest, a woman can magically turn into a “sister” and a “comrade” and get sexually out of reach. In this way, the imaginative borders replace the real borders.²⁷Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The emerging voices of Iranian women writers (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 27.

The border between the private and the public space is erased. As strangers enter the private space and become “brothers,” the private space of the house is turned into a public space because of the presence of the unrelated spectators. Consequently, women in these films are always covered and obedient even when they are with their close relatives. Keeping hijab in the presence of the intimate ones creates an unrealistic and distant space which presupposes the presence of an unrelated spectator. In this situation, not only touching each other becomes a taboo, but also there is a change in the characters’ gaze at each other and the spectators’ gaze at the film because

An unveiled woman, like Medusa, should not be gazed at… In a veiled society, seeing, far from being considered a mere physiological process, takes on a socially determined, potentially dangerous, and highly charged meaning. Considered much more than windows to the soul safely concealed, eyes become subject to the strictest regulations for both men and women. Men’s eyes attain phallic power… Men’s forbidden act of seeing thus becomes a violation, a sin, a visual rape.²⁸Milani, Veils and Words, 24-25.

If women are supposed to cover their bodies, men are also supposed to cover their eyes. Therefore, the film is worried about the gaze of the male spectator. There are complications in the process of this gaze which is implicated in the nature of the cinematic picture.

The most obvious instance of the look in cinema is the one that originates with the spectator, whose gaze is directed at moving images on the screen. But looking in cinema is more complex than this. Cinematic address may also, for example, construct looks at the spectator. This is particularly clear in the shot/reverse shot structure…: the viewing subject, in standing in for the look of a protagonist in the film, becomes the object of the fictional gaze of the other protagonist.²⁹Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1994), 56.

This structure of looking and looking back is used abundantly in the scene of arguments between the modest Farīdah and her husband, Manūchihr, in Let Me Live (Shāpūr Qarīb, 1986) about the failures in performing their assigned tasks as wife and husband, and mother and father, and the shrewdness of the women of the family (Figure 8). In a sense, these characters are aware of the presence of not only each other, but also an unrelated man who is the spectator of the film and is required to obey the “rules of looking” just like the characters in the film.³⁰Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 8-9.

Figure 8: Shot/reverse shot of Farīdah and Manūchihr, from the film Bugzār Zindagī Kunam (Let Me Live), directed by Shāpūr Qarīb, 1986.

These rules prohibit men and women from looking lustfully at unrelated persons. Looking at women’s hair is forbidden for men; therefore, women are required to cover it. Looking at the unrelated people, whether in person or by the way of the picture (live picture or recorded, such as a photo) is not allowed if it is accompanied with sexual pleasure and lust. These rules created a certain kind of look which is called “averted look” by Hamid Naficy: “to satisfy the rules of modesty, a situationist grammar of looking has evolved that ranges from direct gaze to what I have called the averted look. In this case people avoid looking at others directly…. When meeting each other, they tend to look down or to look at the other’s face in an unfocused way so as to avoid definitive eye contact.”³¹Naficy, “Veiled Visions/Powerful Presences,” 56.

Nevertheless, every now and then we encounter a close-up shot, a distinct face, a rather direct look and a significant role in the story. In these cases, to desensitize women, it is necessary to get distant from the tangible facts of life and the unique moments, and to go toward abstraction which is predicated on relinquishing the unique and special aspects of life. This situation can be best explained by the principle of Eternal Feminine. Simone de Beauvoir makes extensive and detailed references to literary works in order to explain what she calls Eternal Feminine, or “that vague and basic essence, femininity.”³²Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parchley, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 214. This myth takes different forms, like the holiness of the mother, the purity of the virgin, the fertility of the earth and the womb; however, in each and every one of these forms, the aim is to negate the individuality of women and to relegate them into the unattainable dreams.

Mythical, ghost-like and unworldly women permeate the cinema of this period. The most remarkable example is Ballad of Tara. Tārā is considered “the manifestation of mother earth…, the mythological image of woman that can belong to yesterday, today or tomorrow and always be a woman complete.”³³Shahla Lahiji, Sīmā-yi Zan dar Āsār-i Bahrām Bayzā’ī (The Image of Woman in the Works of Bahrām Bayzā’ī) (Tehran: Rawshangarān, 1988), 49. Tārā, or the “mother earth”, only falls in love with an unworldly man; someone who is not bound by flesh and blood but is other-worldly, an inhabitant of the territory of the dead; a man who cannot go gently back to his own world because he has fallen in love with her. Tārā finally falls in love with him and reveals her body to him and invites him into her arms. Tārā intends to make life and blood flow in the veins of the man who is living in another world for centuries. To become alive, the man asks for the lives of Tārā’s children. Tārā cannot forsake her children, so she gets ready to go with him to the world of the dead. Such a sacrifice breaks the man’s spell. He leaves the earth and returns to his world with comfort and sorrow. In the real world, each woman manifests herself with different aspects; however, each of the myths constructed about woman claims that it can summarize her completely, since each of them claim to be unique. Therefore, Tārā “is considered to be a tale in praise of every manifestation of women” (Figure 9).³⁴Lahiji, Sīmā-yi Zan, 49.

It is not only in this period that such an image of women is presented. In the pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, too, similar characterizations can be seen. For instance, Gharībah va Mah (The Stranger and the Fog, 1973), is one of the first steps by Bahrām Bayzā’ī for entering the world of myths. He starts using symbols in here that become more unified and understandable in his later films. The character of Āyat is considered a “fugitive from the world of death” who should “return to his home sooner or later”; and the character of Ra‛nā is “an allegory of life and rebirth against death and destruction.”³⁵Lahiji, Sīmā-yi Zan, 43-46. This image of women can be traced back to fictional literature and the ethereal woman in the first part of Sādiq Hidāyat’s Būf-i Kūr (The Blind Owl), where the woman is heavenly and her beauty is unrelated to the earth and its belongings. The perfect woman is pictured as thus: “She was not like ordinary people. Her beauty was not ordinary, too. She manifested herself to me like a vision in an intoxicated dream.” For the narrator, she is an inaccessible woman: “I never wanted to touch her. The invisible rays that radiated from our bodies and entangled in each other was enough.”³⁶Sādiq Hidāyat, Būf-i Kūr (Tehran: Chāpkhānah Sipihr, 1972), 9-10.

Nevertheless, in the post-revolutionary period, this type of characterization became more frequent and more varied. In the film The Spell, we find out that many years ago, the future lady of a mansion has disappeared on her wedding night after entering the mirror salon and since then, no one has heard from her. Then, it is revealed that she is imprisoned by the butler of the lord of the house in a cellar and many chains and gears surround her. In the past five years, everyone thought the lady of the house has escaped; however, she is still wearing her wedding gown and her hair and face are the color of her dress in that dark cellar, making her look like a ghost. Her memories are also frozen like her dress in the wedding night, and she has become immortal at a point outside history and time, as though that night has not ended yet (Figure 10).

Figure 9 (Left): Tārā calls the other-worldly man to herself. A screenshot from the film Charīkah-yi Tārā (Ballad of Tara), directed by Bahrām Bayzā’ī, 1980.
Figure 10 (Right): The lady of the mansion is imprisoned in the cellar. A screenshot from the film Tilism (The Spell), directed by Dāryūsh Farhang, 1986.

Khusraw Sīnā’ī’s Hayūlā-yi Darūn (The Inner Beast, 1983) presents another instance of such characterization. A man has gone to a village to escape from his past, while his wife follows him like a ghost without skin and bone (Figure 11) who challenges the picture of a real and down-to-earth woman. The woman’s ghost separates him from time and place and takes him to the past. This is the man’s sinful past in which the woman has become immortalized. Each of these women is abstracted from reality in a similar way. They are both “innocent” women who are sacrificed. Being ladies in white, they imply closeness to light and ideas of cleanliness, purity and the principle of Eternal Feminine.

This image of woman, like other eternal concepts, becomes meaningful in a duality, that of angle/whore.³⁷The Madonna/Whore complex was formulated by Freud. According to this complex, women are divided only in two categories of Madonna, which means she is pure, virtuous and nurturing; or Whore, which means she is sexually active, devious and unruly. Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique believes that the most recent representation of the duality of Madonna/whore, which has dictated the dominant image of women from a long time ago, can be seen in the chasm between the housewife and the working woman. See: Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 5. The Madonna is usually represented as a young woman who is as beautiful as she is chaste and pure and has an innocent heart. The more she suffers, the purer she becomes. On the other side of the spectrum, there is the woman who reveals herself, breaks all the boundaries, and accepts her role as a sexual object. This reminds us of the fall of the ethereal woman of The Blind Owl to the state of a prostitute who is earthly, wicked and devious, accessible to all and “has numerous lovers.”³⁸Hidāyat, Būf-i Kūr, 46. She has her way with anyone except her husband and has gone too far in her debauchery. In The Inner Beast, too, it is only with committing suicide that the woman can escape from falling to this state. Simone de Beauvoir explains the principle of Eternal Feminine in this way:

There are different kinds of myths. This one, the myth of woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition -namely, the ‘division’ of humanity into two classes of individuals- is a static myth. It projects into the realm of Platonic ideas a reality that is directly experienced or is conceptualized on a basis of experience; in place of fact, value, significance, knowledge, empirical law, it substitutes a transcendental Idea, timeless, unchangeable, necessary. This idea is indisputable because it is beyond the given: it is endowed with absolute truth. Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless.³⁹De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 260.

In this situation, the reality that is directly experienced or conceptualized based on experience is dissolved in abstract concepts that, regardless of the specific details of life, are formed around the generalities and the fundamental nature of femininity. Reality and the experiences of women of flesh and blood are replaced by a transcendental, timeless and inescapable idea. The changing and contingent existence of real women is countered by the mythical principle of Eternal Feminine. To create this immortality, the this-worldly femininity should be questioned. de Beauvoir borrows this term from the last lines of Goethe’s Faust:

What is destructible

Is but a parable;

What fails ineluctably,

The undeclarable

Here it was seen,

Here it was action;

The Eternal-Feminine

Lures to perfection.⁴⁰Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans. W. Kaufman, (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 503.

Figure 11 (Left): The woman’s ghost follows her husband after her suicide. A screenshot from Hayūlā-yi Darūn (The Inner Beast), directed by Khusraw Sīnā’ī, 1983.
Figure 12 (Right): Nāyī’s direct look. A screenshot from the film Bāshū, Gharībah-yi Kūchak (Bashu, the Little Stranger), directed by Bahrām Bayzā’ī, 1989.

The special moments of the woman’s life disappear because, historically, her experiences have turned into private and specific experiences of her own. Just as a wall of cloth covers the woman’s body in Islamic societies, a wall of silence covers the details of her life, too. She is a secret. Like the walls that enclose the house and separate the inside from the outside, hijab is also a clear declaration of the separation of specific feminine experiences and the public space. Hijab maintains an order which silences the concrete, specific and private experience, and signifies the power of deindividualization, protection and secrecy.⁴¹Milani, Veils and Words, 23.

In such a situation, it is captivating to witness moments of the representation of the real experiences of a woman in the rather this-worldly femininity of Nāyī in Bahrām Bayzā’ī’s Bāshū, Gharībah-yi Kūchak (Bashu, The Little Stranger, 1989). There are, of course, interpretations of Nāyī as a general and non-individual character and there are implications in the film itself to support such interpretations; for instance, it is believed that “Bashu is the continuation of Ballad of Tara”; and that Nāyī is “a description of and a gratitude toward motherhood in all its aspects, as an attribute, a characteristic, a virtue that is expanded everywhere.”⁴²Lahiji, Sīmā-yi Zan, 54-55. In here, too, love is desensitized and “an indirect, complex and ambiguous love comes in.”⁴³Naficy, “Veiled Visions/Powerful Presences,” 59. Nevertheless, there are moments and frames that contain Nāyī’s individual feelings rather than the feeling of a generalized idea. Most remarkable is the sudden close-up of Nāyī’s face which, while showing her with a white scarf covering her hair and chin, concentrates on her passionate eyes. This is the look that shows us the potentials of an earthly and lively look (Figure 12). She creates this moment while covering herself in a scarf, which signifies that the paradox between Nāyī’s modesty and her direct look at the camera is meant to emphasize on the conflict between the compulsory decency and personal expression. It also shows the simultaneity of accepting the rules and challenging them which is one of the characteristics of cinema in later years and will be discussed at the final section.

We will end the discussion of Eternal Feminine by referring to a film that is different from the previous films in its search of realism: ‛Alī Zhikān’s Mādiyān (The Mare, 1986). The film does not attain realism, though, because in many parts of it we can see the infiltration of generalizing ideas, such as the innocence of the virgin, and the attempts to omit the accidental and “extraneous” elements of the life of the real woman. Rizvānah is a widowed woman who is breaking down under the burden of taking care of her children. Therefore, she intends to exchange her small daughter, Gulbutah, who is meant for a forced marriage, with a mare. It may be concluded that Rizvānah is not the ideal mother but an earthly and fragile woman because we witness some moments which show the loving relationship between Rizvānah and her children and the tasks that is created for her for raising them. But with a closer look, we find out that all her failures are transcended in her role as mother in which she occasionally stumbles. Rizvānah’s rebellion and violence are also transcended when she sees Gulbutah in a miserable state and gives up exchanging her. She is the kind of mother that could have taken form in any other situation:

The film talks about generalities and does not limit itself to specific realities of a specific environment. It goes from parts to the whole. This poignant story can also happen in a village at the margin of the desert, or even the traditional cities further than that, in places with similar social and cultural circumstances as the society of the film.⁴⁴‛Alī Zhikān, Mādiyān (Tehran: Nay, 2010), 128.

The innocence of the virgin of the film, Gulbutah, underlines this interpretation. Gulbutah is a weak and innocent girl who does not get tainted. She seems unattainable: someone who is desired by men but is prevented from succumbing to their desires by her own chastity. In the end, she becomes the sacrificial virgin whose innocence should be taken by force. The scene of her suicide attempt is replete with allusions to the innocence of the immortal idea of the holy virgin (Figure 14):

The sturdy ancient tree…, is rooted in the earth of tradition and the girl is chased by her suitor in it…. In one frame in this scene, we see a sapling growing in the mud and resisting stubbornly under the feet of men and cattle. This sapling is Gulbutah. She is referred to as a sapling in the dialogues, too. Rizvānah says: “My dear Gulbutah, my sapling, my white silk.” And now this sapling is faced with the ancient tree of tradition. Her failure is inevitable. When she realizes that the tree is not her refuge, she takes the final decision and throws herself down with the intent of killing herself. However, … she is caught in a branch of the tree, or one of the branches of tradition. From here on, the sapling is broken and the time of virginity and natural dignity is over.⁴⁵Zhikān, Mādiyān, 124-125.

Figure 13 (right): Rizvānah shows Gulbutah the dress presented to her by her suitor. A screenshot from the film Mādiyān (The Mare), directed by ‛Alī Zhikān, 1986.
Figure 14 (left): To escape the unwanted marriage, Gulbutah throws herself down from the tree. A screenshot from the film Mādiyān (The Mare), directed by ‛Alī Zhikān, 1986.

Accepting and Rejecting the Image of “the Decent Woman”: The Appearance of Aspects of Desire

The image of the Iranian woman in the post-revolutionary cinema was committed completely to the idea of modesty. This ideal gradually took root in cinema, grew with a lot of ups and downs and was normalized. Faced with such impositions from above or the pressure of some of the producers and audiences from below, or perhaps as a result of their own preferences, filmmakers tried to solve or circumvent this issue by fictional and visual techniques in order to prevent damage to the film as a work of art. Beside the main technique discussed earlier, i.e. picturing an unreal woman, other measure were taken to escape limitations. For instance, it is not by accident that Nāyī, just like Tārā and Rizvānah, is a woman from the north of Iran. Other filmmakers of this period showed interest in picturing local women in traditional dresses, too. The frequent display of rural women allowed the directors to get away from the capital and the urban hijab (long and loose manteau, chador and dark scarf).⁴⁶It should be noted that the small societies had come under attention before the revolution by Ghulām-Husayn Sā‛idī’s stories, Suhrāb Shāhīd Sālis’s feature films and Hūshang Shāftī’s documentaries. After the revolution, making such documentaries was in decline; however, perhaps because of the existing limitations, notable films were made about these societies. For further reading about ethnographic cinema, see, Hamid Naficy, “The Anthropological Unconscious of Iranian Ethnographic Films: A Brief Take,” Cinema Iranica Online (2024). https://cinema.iranicaonline.org/article/the-anthropological-unconscious-of-iranian-ethnographic-films-a-brief-take/.

These are just examples of suggested “solutions” that, approaching the end of the 1980s and recovering from the initial shock of the revolution and the war with Iraq, were presented with bolder frequency and resulted in modifications in the limitations. Filmmaker’s compliance with realities after the revolution was predicated on maintaining a balance between obedience and creativity. They found novel ways to tell their stories in the framework of limitations whose general criteria were stablished by then. For example, to prevent the banning of his films, Dāryūsh Mihrjū’ī often compromised with the officials and consented to their demands. For instance, he changed the ending of the film Ijārah-nishīn-hā (The Tenants, 1987) because of censorship while also including criticisms toward the existing situation in the film. This approach let him to stay fit withing the framework. Bayzā’ī also delicately challenged the limitations; as a result, he was able to continue working for several years after the 3-year banning of his film, Bashu.

Meanwhile, Bahrām Bayzā’ī’s Shāyad vaqt-i dīgar (Maybe Some Other Time, 1988) showed women in more multifaceted roles. In here, too, the formation of individual characters is intentionally prevented by one actor playing the roles of the three women –mother, Kiyān and Vīdā; however, the filmmaker, by disrupting conventional cinematic techniques such as “the interrupted shot–reverse shot…, a visual stutter of sorts,”⁴⁷Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 52. draws the attention of the spectator to the mediating conventions of dominant cinema and involves him/her with the narrative, especially with how women are pictured. Additionally, the character of the woman in this film, besides other characters like Farīshtah in Tahmīnah Mīlānī’s Bachah’hā’yi talāq (Children of Divorce, 1991) brought the modern middle-class woman into cinema.

Figure 15: A screenshot from the film Shāyad vaqt-i dīgar (Maybe Some Other Time), directed by Bahrām Bayzā’ī, 1988.

Alongside these new trends, the conservative movements underwent changes, too. These changes are nowhere more visible than Muhsin Makhmalbāf’s films. There is a meaningful break between his initial films and the films he made in the end of the 1980s. As a filmmaker committed to the cause of revolution, in films such as Tawbah-yi Nasūh (Pure Repentance, 1983) and Isti‛āzah (Fleeing from Evil to God, 1984), he had searched for the nature of redemption through living an Islamic lifestyle; however, in 1990, he presented Nawbat-i ‛Ashighī (Time of Love) and Shab-hā-yi Zāyandah-rūd (The Nights of Zayandehroud) in the Ninth Fajr Film Festival and evoked a lot of criticisms. These films were made with the subject of earthly love and the rights of women to select life partners. In addition, Time of Love showed extreme close-up shots of Ghazal’s face such as her lips and eyes, which was a surprise in a cinema which only accepted women’s pictures in long and medium shots. These controversies prompted Murtazā Āvīnī, the journalist and documentary filmmaker, to label Makhmalbāf a defender of “sexual liberalism” who thinks “the way out of despair” is “the sexual attraction between woman and man.”⁴⁸Murtazā Avini, “Nawbat-i ‛Ashighī va Shab-hā-yi Zāyandah-rūd: Vaqtī Bādkunak Mī-tarakad… (Time of Love and The Nights of Zayandehroud; When the Balloon Pops…),” in Āyine-ye Jādū (The Magic Mirror), vol. 2 (Tehran: Vāhah, 2011), 148-176. Although these films were banned, they clearly show the change in the orientation of their directors. This change was not limited to cinema. One year before, Ahmad Samī‛ī Gīlānī, the translator and writer, wrote about his disagreement with the omission of sexual contents in novels and attempted to justify his position by examining ancient Persian literature:

Anyway, if these scenes are included in the novel, perhaps there has been no way to avoid them; as is the case in the discussions of jurisprudence and medical sciences, where there is no way to avoid naked and explicit descriptions and even pictures…. If some scenes of a novel are to be omitted because of protection and chastity, then no small parts from masterpieces of Persian literature should also be omitted; for example, in Kalīlah va Dimnah, the story of the barber’s wife; or the story of a hermit who finds himself in a brothel and has to spend a night in “a wicked woman’s house” who has “such and such concubines” and witnesses obscenities; or in Masnavī-i Ma‛navī, the famous story of the woman who uses the zucchini in a way she should not; or in Sa‛dī’s Gulistān, the story of the judge in Hamedan who has a relationship with a “shoemaker boy”. Anyway, including scenes which are not exactly chaste does not signify preaching and promoting what is going on in them…. It is the nature of novel to refine them through the sieve of art…. Novel is the creation of beauty; and even when vices are described, the description is still beautiful.⁴⁹Ahmad Samī‛ī Gīlānī, “Rumān, Dunyā-yi Khiyāl-i ‛Asr-i Mā (Novel, the Imaginative World of Our Age),” Nashr-i Dānish 55 (1990): 4-5.

We started the discussion with a look at the character of A‛zam played by Farīmāh Farjāmī in Exposed; and now we will refer to another role played by this actor in Nargis (Rakhshān Banī’i‛timād, 1992) to clarify the changes that happened in these years. Both of these films are about marriages that take place due to an external necessity; the first one was because of the dangers that were threatening A‛zam and prompted Murtazā to take her under his care; and in the second one, it is Āfāq who, in order to support ‛Ādil, makes him marry her. Āfāq is an older woman who has gotten married at a very young age and has taken divorce, which resulted in her being separated from her son. This emotional gap with the child was filled with ‛Ādil. But gradually, this feeling results in a one-way love by Āfāq. Now, while meeting Nargis, ‛Ādil suddenly realizes that he wants an ordinary life with Narges. The conflict shown in this film is the result of Āfāq standing between ‛Ādil and Nargis. Although a kind of affection –without any sexual desire– was seen in Murtazā in Exposed, too, he simply and intentionally pulls back and lets A‛zam and her husband to go back to living with each other. But in here, Āfāq does not pull back. The director –although indirectly and through signs– emphasizes on her desire; for example, when ‛Ādil knocks on Āfāq’s door, we see her in the mirror putting make-up on, which shows the existence of desire in their relationship.

Figure 16: A screenshot from the film Nargis, directed by Rakhshān Banī’i‛timād, 1992.

We observe that in this period, the relationships are earthlier and the expressions of desire more direct. This change of direction was possible parallel to the changes in cultural policies. In the end of 1980s, when the revolutionary discourse was replaced by reformist policies in the political field, cinema started to change, too.⁵⁰Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (New York, Columbia University Press, 2016), 4. The year 1989 was a fateful year because of the end of the war between Iran and Iraq and the death of the leader of the revolution. These events created the opportunity to challenge the strict rules of the government and its failures in economic and social fields. The new reformist political party came into being. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, especially under the leadership of Muhammad Khātamī, undertook the task of both supporting and supervising over the filmmakers and their censorship. This dual approach created a complicated situation which to some extent invited the filmmakers to work but simultaneously created remarkable limitations for them. This trend had some ups and downs with the conservatives coming to power, but the changes remained relatively permanent.

The question is, to what extent have these attempts made the limitations more bearable. Is this essentially possible? We tried to take a small step toward answering this question by revealing the fact that in history and through what might today be imagined as an inevitable and self-evident experience in the post-revolutionary cinema, nothing has been really inevitable. It is not an accidental or necessary fact for the post-revolutionary cinema to go to a certain path and formulate a certain image of woman; it is actually the result of certain interactions in this specific period of time. The next steps for completing the discussion of this article and finding answers to the questions can be taken by going deeper in the very existence of the compulsive and the oppressive element in art and exploring the possibility or the impossibility of neutralizing it with cinematic techniques in a way that the work of art is not affected. It should be sufficient to point out that, in a sense, the existence of the oppressive element in art can harm the aesthetic aspect of the work in one way or another, even if this compulsion is kept a secret in different ways. This is because the oppressive element creates an “imaginative resistance” which happens when a competent imaginator is asked to participate in an imaginative activity but he/she experiences a psychological tension. That most people have problems in imagining such subjects as killing of daughters may be explained by the fact that they do not verify this moral evaluation in reality.⁵¹Joy Shim and Shen-yi Liao, “Ethics and Imagination,” In Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art, ed. James Harold (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 711. This resistance cannot be reduced to something outside the film. This is an aesthetic failure.⁵²Noel Caroll believes that when the audience’s imagination does not accompany the immoral themes and situations, we are dealing with an aesthetic failure:

…in order to design various characters and/ or situations in such a way that emotions like anger and indignation will be elicited, those characters and/ or situations must be constructed in such a way that they satisfy the criteria for the emotions that they are intended to elicit. Failure to do so is an aesthetic failure. It is an aesthetic failure because it is a formal failure, since, according to a functional view of form, the formal features of a work are those choices that are implemented or designed with the intention to realize the constitutive purposes of the artwork. If a choice that is designed to realize the constitutive purpose of the work blocks the attainment of the constitutive purpose of the work, that is a formal defect of the work.

See: Noel Caroll, “Moralism,” in Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art, ed. James Harold (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 306-307. This situation can be applied to the limitations imposed on the clothes, looks and behaviors of women in post-revolutionary cinema, too. These types of intervention can evoke imaginary resistance because in this encounter, a sensitive audience is bound to experience this resistance. This does not escape his/her attention, even if this image is embedded in the logic of the story.