A Cinema of Refusal · the very syntax of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. For example, the...

SARA SALJOUGHI

A Cinema of Refusal

The Sealed Soil and the Political Aesthetics of the Iranian New Wave

ABSTRACT Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (1977) is one of the few feature films made by a

woman in Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This article argues that the film inaugurated

the “distanced look” that most scholars attribute to Iranian art cinema made after 1979.

Through a reading of the film’s thematic and formal articulations of refusal, the essay claims

that this work can open new readings of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in

Iranian cinema. KEYWORDS aesthetics, feminist cinema, Iranian New Wave, politics, The

Sealed Soil (1977)

One of the very few feature-length narrative films directed by a woman prior tothe Iranian Revolution, Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (Khake sar behMorh, ) is a meditation on the politics and aesthetics of refusal. The filmrevolves around an eighteen-year-old woman named Rooy-Bekheir, whose re-fusal to marry amounts to a crisis for her mother, her immediate family, and therural community in which they live. Rooy-Bekheir has refused all the suitorswho have proposed to her, a decision her community does not understand.Within the existing representational regime of Iranian cinema in the s,Nabili’s experiments with form constitute another refusal: the spectacle of thefemale body is circumvented for another mode, one much closer to the interna-tional women’s counter-cinema movement of the s. Under the sign ofrefusal, The Sealed Soil joins the Iranian New Wave with other radical filmmovements, while also challenging the intersection of historiography and for-mal analysis within the study of Iranian cinema, particularly in its treatment ofgender.1

In this essay, I argue that Nabili’s film articulates a politics of refusal thatemerges on three registers and demands rethinking the existing analytical cate-gories through which Iranian art cinema is understood. The film’s first refusal isthematic and centers on Rooy-Bekheir’s refusal to marry, or to reveal her rea-sons for doing so. Paralleling this narrative of refusal is a secondary plot in

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which the men of the village contemplate giving up their land to an agriculturalcorporation. The second iteration of refusal is articulated in film form, particu-larly through Nabili’s resistance to mainstream cinematic conventions. By keep-ing the camera fixed for the bulk of the film and relying almost exclusively onlong shots and extreme long shots (and totally eschewing close-ups), the film re-fuses to allow the viewer intimate entry. At every turn, even when the narrativemight demand proximity, the camera stays at a distance and refuses to satisfythe desires of the spectatorial gaze. I argue that through this second register ofrefusal exhibited via film form, The Sealed Soil inaugurates the “modest” or dis-tanced look that most scholars attribute to later, postrevolutionary Iranian cin-ema.2 Although this argument troubles the already problematic and prevalentnotion that Iranian cinema splits neatly into pre- and post- categories,I want to suggest a different framework for thinking about Nabili’s formal in-novation, one that emphasizes the distinction between modernist and realiststrategies. Through a textual analysis of Nabili’s formal aesthetics, I argue thatthe investigation of the cinematic gaze in relation to women’s bodies and sen-sorial experiences is a question of the politics of aesthetics. Here we arrive at thethird register of refusal, which happens at the intersection of the historical andthe political: the camera’s distance from Rooy-Bekheir’s face and body is astaunch refusal of the tradition of mainstream Iranian cinema, particularly themode of women’s representation seen in the Film Farsi movement.3 But thefilm must also be understood in the context of broader feminist critiques ofcinema. The third register of refusal begins, then, with the second, for detailedattention to the formal language of the film makes it possible to reconsider theemergence of particular film aesthetics. Thus it is also this third register thatallows us to rethink some of the critical tendencies that have shaped the recep-tion and analysis of gender in Iranian cinema.

NABIL I , THE IRANIAN NEW WAVE, AND THE POLIT ICS OF GENDER

Marva Nabili has occupied a minor space in histories of Iranian cinema. Her di-rectorial career, as well as the trajectory of The Sealed Soil, however, situates thefilm firmly within both the aesthetics and the politics of the Iranian NewWave,as well as the history of feminist filmmaking. Prior to making The Sealed Soil,Nabili assumed various roles in Iranian film and television productions, most no-tably at National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT), a public broadcastingnetwork established in the early s. Prior to making The Sealed Soil, her firstfeature film, she worked as a director, producer, and writer of Ancient Fairy Tales(Afsanehha-ye Kohan, ), a television miniseries about traditional Iranian

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folktales produced by the NIRT. The production of The Sealed Soil is intricatelywoven into Nabili’s work at the NIRT. In an interview with the film historianHamid Naficy, the director stated that The Sealed Soil was secretly shot on loca-tion while filming an episode of the miniseries. She said that she was able to com-plete the film very quickly by preparing with a detailed shooting script specifyingcamera positions, and by utilizing nonprofessional actors from the village ofQaleh Nurasghar in southwestern Iran, where the film was shot and where ittakes place.4 It is easy to imagine that working quickly and secretly with the localvillagers allowed Nabili and her minimal crew to blend into their surroundings,creating optimal conditions for the film’s distanced, unobtrusive style.

Although The Sealed Soil was shot in Iran, it has a transnational productionhistory. Like many other filmmakers active in the years leading to the Rev-olution, Nabili left Iran to return to the United States, where she had previouslylived while studying in New York and Vermont. She took the film’s negativeswith her and completed the final cut in the United States. Owing to her exiledstatus and the temporary termination of film exhibition in Iran during the earlys, The Sealed Soil was never screened in any official capacity in Iran. Seen inthis light, the film’s distanced look seems to be a poignant double of the painfulexperience of geographic distance resulting from Nabili’s exile. It is, perhaps, theexperience of exile, which Edward Said describes as offering a “contrapuntal”awareness and originality of vision, that enables Nabili’s finished film to main-tain such a persistent distance.5

The Sealed Soil had a number of screenings throughout the United States inthe late s under the auspices of Middle Eastern or Iranian film festivals,including the Iranian Film Festival that took place at Bombay Cinema inManhattan in , which is claimed to be the first festival of Iranian cinemain New York.6 At this and similar screenings that took place at the New Com-munity Cinema in Long Island (), the MidEast Film Festival at CarnegieHall Cinema (), and the Middle East Film Festival at Bleecker StreetCinema (), all in the greater New York area, Nabili was present to intro-duce her film and talk to audiences.7 In the climate of Iran’s revolutionaryfervor, The Sealed Soil was one of a set of films that informed American andEuropean film audiences about the contemporary crisis in Iran. It was also anintroduction to the cultural production of the Iranian avant-garde, particularlyas it pertained to anti-Pahlavi discourse, thereby forging a discursive link be-tween aesthetics and politics.8

Another important aspect of The Sealed Soil’s reception was its connectionto the concerns of women. For example, at the International Women

Saljoughi | A Cinema of Refusal 83

Filmmakers Symposium, which took place during the Thessaloniki Inter-national Film Festival in Greece, Nabili appeared alongside filmmakers such asJeanne Moreau to discuss issues deemed of importance to women filmmakers,including “the new heroine, career advancement, perspectives on directing,film financing, and audience identification and exhibition.”9 Nabili and theEgyptian feminist filmmaker Laila Abou-Saif raised similar concerns in an in-terview with the New York Times in conjunction with the Middle EastFilm Festival in Greenwich Village. Here, Abou-Saif described watching TheSealed Soil: “When I saw Marva’s film and the conflict it expresses, I thought:This could be the same for a woman in Egypt.”10 Nabili added: “It could be awoman anywhere.”11 Screened in these exhibition contexts, The Sealed Soil did

FIGURE 1. Poster from a screening of The SealedSoil (Khake sar beh Morh, dir. Marva Nabili), , atthe Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.


the important work of sharing the politics of the Iranian Revolution with for-eign audiences. Like feminist films from other revolutionary settings, such asSara Gómez’sOneWay or Another (La Cierta Manera, , Cuba),The SealedSoil accounts for the absences of gender—how women’s experiences as workersand subjects are often overlooked in the context of general revolutionary strug-gles. Thus, The Sealed Soil is not just an example of the modernist and radicalsubset of the Iranian New Wave; it is also a powerful example of feminism inthe New Wave. As such, it presents an opportunity to begin rethinking theIranian New Wave in terms of the contributions of feminist texts.

Feminist theories of cinema have widely engaged in discussions of contempo-rary Iranian art cinema. In the s and s the success of Iranian art cinemaat international film festivals coincided with a burgeoning scholarship on thelanguage of the “New Iranian Cinema.” Scholars have taken particular interestin how the new rules of representation established in the early s by theIslamic Republic of Iran, which sought to manage and ultimately prohibit a de-siring look, produced a cinema that seemed, everywhere, to comment on thislook. Laura Mulvey, for example, considers it an “unexpected” coincidence thatthis form of censorship “creates new challenges for the cinema” by doing awaywith conventional ways of seeing that depend on the sexualization of women.12

Naficy elaborates on this “unexpected coincidence” by pointing to how a systemof modesty (women wearing the hejab, or veil, on-screen in situations that inreality would not require it, such as in the home or a female-only space) pavedthe way for women’s participation in the Iranian film industry, both in front ofand behind the camera. This increased participation was achieved mainly by dis-rupting “the direct discursive link between the representation of women and thepromotion of corruption, amorality, and pornography.”13 It was the perceptionof such a link between women and corruption—due in part to the eroticized re-presentation of women common in Film Farsi productions such as The Dancer(Raghase Shahr, , dir. Shapur Gharib)—that modesty regulations attemptedto combat, requiring that Muslim women be shown as chaste and “to have animportant role in society as well as in raising God-fearing and responsible chil-dren.”14 Furthermore, women were prohibited from being placed in a position,formally or thematically, as objects of sexual desire. It is precisely this type of re-striction, despite its vague formulation, that many argue resulted in the specific-ity of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. Negar Mottahedeh, the first scholar tomake this claim, thus describes postrevolutionary cinema as a “displaced allegoryof the limits placed on, and the conditions informing, the industry itself.”15

Drawing on s feminist film theory, Mottahedeh contends that the rules


placed on representation threaded the political conditions of filmmaking intothe very syntax of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema. For example, the “absentpresences” of women in Abbas Kiarostami’s work (until ’s Ten [Dah])create a structural link between the veiled female body and the self-effacementof the “enunciative technologies, the productive apparatus of film,” thereby sug-gesting that postrevolutionary Iranian cinema foregrounds what is repressed inclassical Hollywood cinema.16

The analysis of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema through psychoanalyticallyinformed feminist film theory has produced a rich reading of the paradoxicalopenings offered by the limitations of censorship. In addition, these types ofreadings focus sharply on how practices of looking, often figured through thetropes of veiling and unveiling and experiments with the notion of voice, coin-cide with and at times disrupt the projects of Islamic nationalism and nationalcinema. Cinema during the era of the Islamic Republic is indeed marked bythese “displaced allegories” of the material conditions of film production. Butwhat is at risk in this periodization is the notion that this style emerged froma cinematic nowhere and is linked solely to a present determined by both cen-sorship and the demands of the international film festival market. The SealedSoil was made outside of these conditions, in a radically different era, and par-tially in exile, yet it would seem in many ways to belong to the post- cine-matic landscape discussed in the scholarly literature. Thus the film forces us tochallenge dominant histories of Iranian cinema by questioning whether ideasabout representation can easily fit into neat pre- and post- categories.Furthermore, the film is not isolated in having these qualities. Without imply-ing that The Sealed Soil is emblematic of the entire New Wave, I want to sug-gest it is precisely the film’s “out-of-place-ness” that makes it useful for openingthe tight strictures through which Iranian cinema has been thought. Movingaway from strict periodization allows us to consider how films from vastly dif-ferent historical moments, ranging from Mohammadreza Farzad’s brilliantessay film Blames and Flames (Falgoosh, ) to Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, theLittle Stranger (Bashu, gharibe koochak, ) to the early featureHaji Agha, theCinema Actor (Haji Agha aktore cinema, , dir. Ovanes Ohanian), share im-portant aesthetic and political concerns.

One of the larger claims of this essay is that the Iranian NewWave is in needof further analysis and theorization. Most critics refer to Dariush Mehrjui’sThe Cow (Gaav, ) as the beginning of the movement, identifying in thatfilm a set of characteristics (rural setting, simple narrative, neorealist influences,adaptation from contemporary Iranian literature) that would be found in the

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works of many other filmmakers such as Sohrab Shahid Saless and AbbasKiarostami. This strain of the New Wave is characterized by a realist style, theone most obviously continued or elaborated in contemporary Iranian cinema.Films from the s and s that are textually more obtuse and use modern-ist strategies of alienation have tended to occupy very little space in the criticallandscape.17 I place Nabili in this other group, along with filmmakers such asForugh Farrokhzad, Ebrahim Golestan, Fereydoun Rahnema, Parviz Kimiavi,and Farokh Ghafari. From this list, it is Fereydoun Rahnema who is mostimportant for considering Nabili’s trajectory in the New Wave. In , Nabiliacted in Rahnema’s experimental film Siyavash at Persepolis (Siavash dar takht-eJamshid, ). The Sealed Soil begins with a black frame dedicating the film toRahnema. Nabili’s affiliation with Rahnema, a rather fringe figure in Iraniancinema, positions Nabili as part of a distinctly oppositional section within theIranian New Wave. The model of the distanced look in The Sealed Soil is aniteration of the variety of techniques of estrangement used by filmmakers likeRahnema, Nabili, and their contemporary Parviz Kimiavi.

REFUSAL AS SURFACE , THE THEMATICS OF REFUSAL

Refusal is thematized in a number of ways throughout The Sealed Soil. First,refusal is articulated on an individual level in terms of gender norms: Rooy-Bekheir has turned down all of the marriage proposals she has received, andshe refuses to listen to the counsel of her parents and the village elders. Ateighteen years of age, she continues to stay home with her family, though sheis expected to accept a marriage proposal—any marriage proposal—andleave. In the context of rural social practices conveyed in the narrative, thisposition, which might not be radical today, is a strong and assertive stance.Furthermore, she does not offer a reason for her refusal, which creates someunrest in those around her. There is no hint that she has been previouslyscorned, or wanting (or not wanting) a particular marriage proposal. Quitesimply, the matter of marriage seems to be unconnected to the purpose ofher life as she sees it. Her refusal to acquiesce to the practice of marryingupon reaching a certain age disturbs the traditional structure of village life.Some perceive this quiet rebellion as bothersome, unusual, and suspect forthe ways in which it challenges the manifold assumptions beneath norma-tive practices. Toward the end of the film, the village chief is summoned byRooy-Bekheir’s parents to help convince her to accept a suitor. Although thechief admits, “Today, you can’t force a girl to marry a man,” he nonethelesshopes that she will “come to her senses.”


A second, parallel narrative of refusal is related to the fate of the village inwhich Rooy-Bekheir lives. This narrative concerns the villagers’ refusal to con-cede their traditional way of life and comply with the state’s modernizationplans. The village chief informs the men of the village that a large agriculturalcompany plans to develop their land. The company will offer each villager theopportunity to buy a house with a down payment of twenty thousand toman.The men express concern that they will not be able to afford this. They alsowonder what will happen when they are forced to move into the corporation’snewly built homes, thereby abandoning their farmland and cattle. The villagechief, acting as an intermediary between the needs of the village and those ofthe encroaching corporate interests, admits in response that they can hence-forth purchase milk, cheese, and meat from the agricultural company’s villagestore. He assures them that this convenience will mean they do not have toworry about anything; they will be free from the burden of producing their ownfood. What is implied here is that the village must give up its traditional modeof life in order to enter the twentieth century as envisioned by the state. Thevillage must lose everything it knows and holds dear in order to serve the inter-ests of this vision. It is of no consequence to the state’s modernizing aspirationsthat the villagers do not desire this development or consider it progress. This isthe dilemma of an unwanted relation, much like marriage is for Rooy-Bekheir.

In many respects, the story of the villagers’ newly precarious position is aclear allegory of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime (–) and its attemptsto modernize Iran at all costs. The totalizing vision of the Pahlavi state’s mod-ernization programs was oblivious and even hostile to the heterogeneity of Ira-nian social life.18 The struggle to maintain traditional cultural, social, andreligious practices formed an important part of the dissent against the Pahlaviregime, whose modernizing aspirations began with the elder Pahlavi’s reign inthe early twentieth century. In The Sealed Soil, this national dilemma betweentradition and modernity is largely a male problem. The purely male form thatthe villagers’ refusal takes dramatizes the connection between the two refusals.When the village chief delivers the news of his discussion with the agriculturalcorporation—his arrival marked by the grating sound of his motorbike, whichpierces the peaceful quiet of the village—he tells the village children (who gatheraround him with excitement and adoration, a marked contrast to the way theytaunt and are bewildered by Rooy-Bekheir) to summon all the men of the vil-lage. The remainder of the sequence offers the most explicit commentary anddiscussion of the land problem. The shots comprising this sequence depict onlythe men in the village. They are gathered close together and situated in the


foreground of the frame, almost crowding it and thereby drawing attention tothe gender homogeneity and, more tellingly, to how decisions are made aboutthe village’s future.

Throughout the film, the mise-en-scène reinforces the glaring contrast be-tween tradition and modernity. Shots of the rural village and the riverside arejuxtaposed with shots of what lies just outside the edge of the village: a fairlybusy highway flanked by power lines and a barrier gate operated by a lift arm.In contrast with the warm, golden light in which the village is shot, the highwayis dominated by a muted and bleak gray. The children who leave the village toattend school are shot walking through this modern space wearing gray andnavy school uniforms that appear drab compared to the bright white and crim-son clothes worn by those inside the space of the rural village. A tall brick arch-way marks the boundary, reinforcing the division between the familiar and thestrange.

It is in the combination of these two refusals, the refusal of gender normsand the refusal of the state, that The Sealed Soil is most perhaps most politicallyradical. This combination is embodied in Rooy-Bekheir herself. In addition torefusing marriage, she also expresses solidarity with the largely male refusal ofthe state. In this way, the film nuances what might otherwise be seen as a reac-tionary politics defending tradition against an encroaching modern state. InRooy-Bekheir, both the state and the gendered constrictions of tradition arespurned. In this way, the film itself refuses easy solutions for depicting these pro-cesses of personal and historical change. We might read this simultaneous de-fense and refusal of tradition as a sophisticated analysis of the competingvisions that comprised the Revolution.

One of the ways in which Rooy-Bekheir’s refusal of the state unfolds is in herrelationship with her younger sister, Golabatoon. This younger sibling, who at-tends school on the other side of the highway, often expresses a desire for ma-terial luxuries of the world outside the village. Her behavior is alleged to resultfrom the influence of the young, modern schoolteacher who has presumablycome to the village from a city, and who tells the schoolgirls how to maintaintheir bodies and appearances. The teacher, whom the younger sister and herschoolmates look up to, is a representative of the state’s modernizing aspira-tions. The teacher’s contemporary look—a buttoned shirt tucked into fittedbell-bottom pants—marks her status as an outsider.19 Thus when the youngersister says she wants to wash her hair, the outside authority of the schoolteacheris invoked. Rooy-Bekheir tells the sister, “You washed it two days ago,” to whichthe younger girl responds, “but the teacher says we should wash our hair every


day so that it is clean.” Recognizing the judgment implicit in the urban teacher’sinstruction, Rooy-Bekheir answers, “Your hair is clean, don’t waste the soap.”The younger sister (by way of the teacher) gets the last word: “It’s called sham-poo.” The new, foreign word “shampoo” at once signifies the modern worldbeyond the village, a genteel femininity, and an expensive material object. Thesquabble over the right word is also a tidy indictment of commodity fetishism:Does soap not already achieve the same result?

In another scene, Rooy-Bekheir asks Golabatoon to go to the communalwell, which lies at the edge of the village and in full view of the highway and themodern infrastructure beyond it. When the younger sister explains to the villagewomen, “Rooy-Bekheir doesn’t go to the well,” one of them, seeming to recog-nize the implications of this stance, remarks, “We live in a strange time.” YetRooy-Bekheir’s resistance to the world beyond the village is complicated by herrefusal of the gendered dimensions of tradition. The mild resentment she seemsto exhibit toward the teacher cloaks her own desire for what the outside worldoffers, suggested by her ambition to learn to read. In one sequence, we see Rooy-Bekheir sitting alone in a darkened doorway of her home, holding a book, andslowly straining to read aloud the words, “This . . . is . . . a . . . door.” A neighborappears asking for some dried beans, startling her, and she scrambles to put herbook away. Rooy-Bekheir has a dilemma that allegorizes the national, which ispresented through the villagers’ story. Learning to read would give her moreautonomy, and yet her resistance to change or leave the village problematizesthis desire.

Rooy-Bekheir’s wish to read and her avoidance of the well, like the pressureshe faces to marry, are moments of turbulence in what in most other scenesappears to be a tranquil way of life. The film is awash with images that conveyRooy-Bekheir’s profound connection to the land. Long takes feature her per-forming tasks like cleaning rice in a state of veritable idyll: animals surround herwhile she works peacefully, the only sounds are of birds chirping and chickensclucking. She tends to the land with great intention and care, as though it werean intimate relation. Watching Rooy-Bekheir perform tedious domestic laborwith such deliberation is reminiscent of the experience of watching DelphineSeyrig in Jeanne Dielman, quai du Commerce, Bruxelles (, dir.Chantal Akerman, Belgium). The impression we have of Rooy-Bekheir’s root-edness in her village allows for a more dynamic relationship to emerge from herstance of refusal: the connection to the land is the positive side to her negativerefusal of the state. Ultimately, the film also imagines this dual refusal as alimit. When Rooy-Bekheir experiences a breakdown, she silently consents to


treatment by an exorcist. It is only at this point that we see shots of her sur-rounded by the villagers, who gather en masse to take her to the exorcist.It might be tempting to read this turn of events as cynical or suggestive of herfailure to resist. But we might consider the dual refusal instead as a potentialthat is not actualized. However much the dual refusal indicts tradition for itsgender inequalities, this contradictory relation to tradition (suggested byRooy-Bekheir’s dual refusal) remains an un-actualized potential. In occupyingthis strange status, it reminds us of what may have been swept aside by the con-victions of the Iranian Revolution.

THE FORM OF REFUSAL

In discussing the form of refusal, I shall focus first on how the formal style ofThe Sealed Soil reinforces Rooy-Bekheir’s connection to the land. It emphasizesher dual refusal and thus correlates with the thematic investigation of refusal.Second, I will discuss the film’s formal refusal vis-à-vis its relation to the specta-tor. My examination of the formal politics of refusal derives from a textual anal-ysis of The Sealed Soil, which seeks to articulate the film’s aesthetic strategies inrelation to the politics of gender and visuality in Iranian cinema.

Several elements of film form in The Sealed Soil emphasize Rooy-Bekheir’scontinuity with the land or soil, and her separation from the other villagers.This formal method of aligning her with the land represents her refusal of mo-dernity (emphasized by continuity with the land) and her refusal of marriage(emphasized through her separation from other villagers). First, the film practi-ces an extreme use of the long shot throughout. (There is only one shot in itthat is closer than a medium shot.) This style of shooting is a spatial depictionof her relationship to the land (she is one with it) and her simultaneous separa-tion from the villagers around her. It is almost as though the vastness of the landis a buffer sealing her off from those who alienate and intrude upon her. Herewe might consider the English translation of the film’s original title, Khake sarbeh Morh. While the Persian title describes a secret that is intimately close tothe self and cannot be revealed, the English translation of this proverb impliessomething else. The notion of sealed soil, from an agricultural point of view,represents a buffer of sorts. It is soil that cannot receive hydration. Water runsoff, potentially causing landslides.

The use of long shots is one of the more striking elements of the film. Thesecreate a sense of observational distance between the viewer and the action on-screen. It is almost impossible to identify with any character because the dis-tance between the camera and the action it films reinforces the separation of


the screen. The world of the film seems to us distant and unreachable. But whilethe long shots keep us away, they work to tell us a great deal about Rooy-Bekheir’s place in the world of the film. The camera articulates a seamless con-tinuity between Rooy-Bekheir and her physical surroundings. As Naficy notes,the film’s aesthetic qualities bear the influence of Persian miniature paintings, inwhich figures are represented as part of their surroundings.20 At the root of theminiature tradition is a certain flexibility and permeability that allows the paint-ings to be used to transmit various social and political messages. ChristianeGruber suggests that through iconographic elaboration and oral explication,miniatures could symbolically be transformed into “topical messages belongingto larger political, cultural, and religious agendas.”21 We might consider the im-plications of this reading for Iranian art cinema. On the one hand, the type oflong shot familiar to viewers of postrevolutionary Iranian art cinema can beseen as exemplary of a certain “political escapism” that some critics have identi-fied in the globally successful Iranian art films.22 Often placing the subject in arural setting that serves as a kind of global anyplace, the long shot in postrevo-lutionary Iranian cinema can be seen as a reinforcement of exoticized but ulti-mately disengaged visions of Iran. On the other hand, the long shot as part ofthe syntax of The Sealed Soil, for example, can be regarded as a politically moti-vated stylistic intervention. Not only does this device respond directly to thedominant commercial cinema (and its international counterpart) by refusing tomake a spectacle of the female protagonist, but it also weaves itself politicallyinto the thematic content of the film. Through the spacious framing of the longshots, Rooy-Bekheir is afforded the space and recognition (and perhaps evenautonomy) that the presence of the villagers threatens. Thus the use of thelong shot transforms according to its place in the more general aesthetics of agiven film.

The distanced quality of the action as a result of the long shots is also thema-tized in the encounter between Rooy-Bekheir and her village community. Theydo not understand her motivations and actions. In fact, whenever she is filmedwith other people, the composition of the frame carefully separates her from theother individuals. Her demeanor also signifies a certain distance, which is rein-forced by the film’s sparing use of dialogue. When asked a question, she re-sponds with great brevity. She performs her tasks in silence and, importantly,does not ask anything of anyone. While she has a strong desire to be a part ofand contribute to her community, the formal language of the film reminds usthat it might be difficult for the villagers to understand that a major componentof her refusal is the desire to remain. In Nabili’s utilization, the long shot


achieves a certain capaciousness that allows it to serve multiple functions atonce.

A second striking formal pattern in The Sealed Soil is a refusal of cameramovement. With very few exceptions, the camera remains in a stationary posi-tion for the duration of the film. This lack of movement is combined withfigures traversing the space of the image by walking in and out of the frame. Byalmost wholly doing away with the convention of the following shot—that is,camera following character movement—space is presented not as a mere back-drop to the action but as an integral part of a tableau.

In one formally fascinating scene reminiscent of miniature composition, wesee Rooy-Bekheir crouched in the river, washing dishes along with other villagewomen. They are spatially separated and also separated in terms of the colorsthey wear, but they are all part of the long-shot composition (emphasizing con-tinuity) and all are standing in the same river, using the same water (furthercontinuity). The three other women are all wearing red-hued clothing and sit-uated in the background of the shot (fig. ). Rooy-Bekheir is in the foregroundwearing dark clothing, but the scarf around her head matches the red on theother women. The slight differentiation in clothing establishes Rooy-Bekheir’sseparation from the community. The use of color here is inverted in an earliershot inside the house, where Rooy-Bekheir’s red clothes set her apart from the

FIGURE 2. “She’s gone sour!”: Rooy-Bekheir in the foreground washingdishes in The Sealed Soil (Khake sar beh Morh, dir. Marva Nabili), .


dark clothes of the family members around her. This graphic inversion is rein-forced by the way in which Rooy-Bekheir is placed in the foreground and to thefar left of the frame. Furthermore, this explicit removal from the other womenis one of the only instances in which Rooy-Bekheir is so closely foregrounded—indeed, so close to us. The women speak about her audibly, concluding that theonly explanation for why she has “gone sour” is that the devil has cast a spell onher. The scene ends with a black frame, followed by an abrupt cut to Rooy-Bekheir lying alone in a wooded, green area.

The cut to Rooy-Bekheir alone in the woods supports her isolation both the-matically and formally: the way she is shot when alone contrasts with how she ispositioned in scenes with other characters. The sequences of her by the riverdon’t seem to serve any function other than showing us that she is in a state ofharmony when alone in nature, and in a state of alienation when with others. Inorder to experience relief, she needs to go to this space that, like her, is part ofbut separate from the village. In one of these shots, Rooy-Bekheir has labored tocut a large number of leafy branches that she gathers together and mounts onher back. As she walks away from the camera, the green branches partially ob-scure her body, causing an extreme graphic continuity between her and her riv-erside environment. This imaging of Rooy-Bekheir’s body brings a materialityto the otherwise distancing effect of the film’s formalism.

The film’s address of the spectator continues an examination of refusal asform. The very first two shots set up the atmospheric and spatial distance thatwill characterize the rest of the film. The first is a three-quarter shot showingRooy-Bekheir sitting cross-legged on the ground, facing screen left, her face par-tially obscured by her hair, which she is braiding. During the long take (lastingnearly two minutes), she is alone in a darkened space, but the colors of herclothing match the colors of the textiles around her, creating the impressionthat she is continuous with her surroundings. After braiding her hair, shemethodically layers first a red scarf, followed by a black one; red and black arealso the colors of the fabric around her on the floor. She stands up and turnstoward the camera, but the camera remains stationary, in essence “beheading”her instead of, say, showing us her face. She walks out of the frame into screenright, with only her arm remaining in the shot.

The second shot is from the exterior of the house. This time, a long shotwithin another long take (two and a half minutes) shows Rooy-Bekheir lightinga lamp and fire. The camera is again stationary as she moves in and out of theframe at screen left. These first two shots of the film introduce the theme of re-fusal of the traditional eroticized view of the female body. Lighting the lamp


and the fire are the first main actions of the film, and thus set up Rooy-Bekheiras the protagonist leading the action. However, this convention is challengeddue to Rooy-Bekheir being largely hidden from the spectator’s view; not onlyis the long shot dark due to the use of natural lighting, but her clothing also ob-scures her face and body shape, as it does for most of the film.

The film’s deliberate refusal of spectatorial desire sets the stage for a critiqueof the spectacular display of the female body. In doing so, it shares the feministconcerns of a host of Iranian films, from those that address women’s social is-sues to those that use modernist strategies to avoid succumbing to the techni-ques of mainstream cinema. Nabili’s aesthetics are more experimental thanthose of her contemporaries, and through her formal strategies she communi-cates a feminist politics for the New Wave.23 A trace of Nabili’s stylization offormal refusal is seen, for example, in Abbas Kiarostami’s TheWindWill CarryUs (Bad ma ra khahad bord, ), which contains one of the most widely dis-cussed scenes of refusal in Iranian art cinema.24 The scene is set in a darkenedcellar, where a young woman is directly asked to lift a gas lamp to her face sothat the male protagonist can see it. His request voices an assumed desire on thepart of the spectator as well. But she expresses refusal with a silent response; shedoes not lift up the lamp, and the scene proceeds in near-complete darkness. InThe Sealed Soil, the refusal of intimacy suggested by the film’s devotion to thelong take is analogous with Rooy-Bekheir’s distance from her would-be suitors.There is a sense of guarding one’s self from the inevitably desiring look. Thefilm’s title in Persian is an expression about a secret so close to the self (buried)that it cannot and will never, under any circumstances, be revealed. Through itsexamination of refusing the spectator what he or she is accustomed to, the filmanticipates the feminist poetics of postrevolutionary Iranian cinema and, oddly,finds itself strange bedfellows with the regulations emerging from post-modesty laws. However, I contend that the film’s myriad refusals (thematic,formal, political) emerge from a commitment to radical aesthetics.

The utmost example of the film’s formal aesthetics of refusal occurs during ascene depicting Rooy-Bekheir alone at the riverside (vid. ). I consider this scenethe climax of the film for the manner in which it thoroughly shocks, teases, andcontrols the spectator, while also functioning as a cathartic moment in the storyline. This river scene creates a space of female autonomy, of solitude and deter-mination, and it is central to the politics of The Sealed Soil. Up to this point, wehave seen Rooy-Bekheir in long, flowing clothing that keeps the shape of herbody obscured. The cinematography reinforces the effect of the clothing bykeeping us at a safe distance. Thus when she takes her clothes off in this scene,


we experience a highly eroticized moment that is utterly different from every-thing that has come before.

To create this affective experience for the spectator, Rooy-Bekheir is filmedfrom a variety of angles and positions: a low-angle shot, a long shot from theside, and a medium shot from behind. Then, as she undresses, the majority ofthe scene is shot from behind. The act seems to be performed under a spell—an echo of the three village women’s speculations—and appears to be inducedby the rain. As the scene begins Rooy-Bekheir is lying on the ground, but whenit starts to rain, she slowly rises to a seated position, as if summoned to get closerto the raindrops. The rain eventually becomes a downpour and acts as a kind ofpurifying agent. Because the film has already established the riverside as a spaceof respite for Rooy-Bekheir, her actions here suggest that the rain’s ability towash away and renew is precisely what she needs after facing the three womenblatantly gossiping about her. But the rain is also a kind of barrier in the mise-en-scène. In addition to the action being filmed from behind, the rain can beconsidered a “clouding over” of what could have been a spectacular display ofnudity. The rain is a technical interference—a form of static that occludes whatthe screen traditionally allows: an unobstructed view suitable for a voyeuristicexperience. Thus the rain works in conjunction with the plane of Rooy-Be-kheir’s naked back. Once she is fully nude, she trembles and shakes. She makesvery slight movements such as rolling her head and tilting her body from side toside. The camera never moves. We get a kind of spectacle-from-behind that isno spectacle at all except for the fact that it reminds us that we are looking in.The initial shock of Rooy-Bekheir’s nudity is deepened here because of the for-mal refusal to allow us to see; the film incites a highly charged sexualized mo-ment, then frustrates it by keeping it at bay. This dual action of exposing andrefusing highlights the film’s construction of an autonomous female space.

Given the ways in which postrevolutionary Iranian cinema has been de-scribed as a perfect match for s feminist film theory, we are reminded hereof the deliberate manner in whichThe Sealed Soil rejects the spectatorial regimeof both Film Farsi and Hollywood.25 Nabili’s distance from Rooy-Bekheir isalien from the world of Film Farsi, which framed women as performers bothwithin the diegesis and for the audience. Nowhere is this more evident than inthe ritual song and dance of popular films like Shapur Gharib’s The Dancer,many of which featured the performer Fourouzan. What I have described asRooy-Bekheir’s autonomy is further asserted by Nabili’s oppositional framing,since making her back the focal point rejects the notion of her movements asperformance. Not only does Rooy-Bekheir refuse to entertain the thought of


marriage but she also refuses to entertain by way of Nabili’s framing. If she isperforming for anyone, it is for herself. Instead of forcing an arrest of the plot,as woman has been theorized to do in dominant cinema, the pacing of the filmas a whole allows us to meditate on the distance created in the undressingscene.26

Finally, the riverside scene must also be considered in tandem with a scenethat produces similar effects using an entirely different strategy. The first timewe see Rooy-Bekheir pass under the archway that encloses the rural village, itoccurs roughly sixteen minutes into the film (vid. ). At this point, the spectatorhas become accustomed to the stationary camera, the long takes, and the longshots, all of which are present in this scene. As Rooy-Bekheir approaches the

FIGURE 3. Rooy-Bekheir disrobing in The Sealed Soil(Khake sar beh Morh, dir. Marva Nabili), .


archway, we see her from a considerable distance and the depth of field is notparticularly sharp. As she moves toward the camera, something rather peculiarhappens: she stops, positioned in the center of the frame, and appears to lookdirectly at the camera for several seconds. This unexpected look is significant be-cause it deepens the film’s strategy of estrangement. The direct address of thecamera is symmetrical with the riverside scene in that it produces the same feel-ing of surprise in the spectator. The difference is, of course, a crucial one. Ad-dressing the spectator in this way, with her face plainly visible, foreshadowshow her turn away from the camera in the riverside scene is also an address ofsorts. Both scenes tease at the question of seeing and being seen, disrupting cin-ematic conventions related to identification.

THE POLIT ICS OF REFUSAL

My reading of The Sealed Soil suggests a refusal of the persistent understandingof the Revolution as a moment of absolute rupture in the genealogy ofIranian cinema. Although there are important and unquestionable differencesin cinematic practices pre- and post-, it seems unproductive to considerthese in totalizing terms. Rather, the differences—such as the increase inwomen working behind the camera after —might be said to reflect in filmform the material infrastructure of artistic production in Iran. The Sealed Soil is,among other things, a fruitful case study demonstrating that the relationshipbetween screen and viewer was not wholly imagined anew during the IslamicRepublic era. In challenging the representation of women in prerevolutionaryIranian cinema, Nabili inaugurated a feminist film poetics and politics that con-tinued well into the art cinema of the s.

Rethinking the historical emergence of aesthetic practices makes it necessaryto also reconsider the relationship of cinema to Iranian politics. This line ofthinking opens new possibilities for film analysis, rather than reducing Iranianfilm language to an expression of or compensation for censorship. Thus wemight consider that the popular Iranian response to cinematic spectacle thatsome believe buoyed the political activity of the s should not be solelylinked to a religious (and reactionary) form of nationalism. As I have discussedin my close reading of the film, The Sealed Soil posits the possibility of a femi-nist and radical leftist response to the state’s vision of Iranian culture. The re-fusal put forward in the film articulates a political antagonism to the Pahlaviculture. The antagonism reverberates through many New Wave films andshares much with the antagonism put forward by the religious nationalist move-ment, despite their important ideological differences. This contradiction, as it


were, is what has caused so many commentators to describe the Iranian Rev-olution as possessing an energy unique in its corralling of divergent politicalfactions.

The Sealed Soil strikes me as an especially potent aesthetic object throughwhich to analyze the New Wave’s participation in this phenomenon. Impor-tantly, the film offers two competing refusals: Rooy-Bekheir’s refusal of the gen-dered form of tradition and her refusal to completely surrender tradition to thedemands of the changing nation-state, which is a concern she shares with thevillagers. Her stance is thus both a rejection and a defense of tradition, whichis a compelling way to think about the revolutionary action at the end of thes. In this vein, the defeat of the left might be unconsidered an unactualizedpotential, much like the contradictory refusals Rooy-Bekheir puts forward. Hersurrender to the exorcism does not reduce the vitality of her refusal of genderedforms of tradition, but rather it leaves it open.

The Iranian NewWave has rarely been discussed in terms of its engagementwith feminist concerns.27 The aesthetics and politics of refusal in The SealedSoil belong to a tradition of formal experimentation and feminist politicsthat I argue began with The House Is Black (Khaneh Siah ast, , dir. ForughFarrokhzad). A few other films that we might include in this list are EbrahimGolestan’s Brick andMirror (Khesht va Ayneh, ), Bahram Beizai’sDownpour(Ragbar, ), Parviz Kimiavi’s The Mongols (Mogholha, ), and FereydounRahnema’s The Son of Iran Has No News from His Mother (Pesar-e Iran azMadarash Bikhabar ast, ), and the documentaries of Kamran Shirdel. Theachievements of the few female filmmakers working in Iran in the s ands also merit more scholarly attention. Like Forugh Farrokhzad, the widelycelebrated feminist poet who made the germinal New Wave film The House IsBlack, Nabili’s singular achievement with The Sealed Soil is duly noted in ac-counts of Iranian cinema prior to , but rarely the subject of analysis and in-terpretation. This omission reflects a tendency in histories of Iranian cinema toconform to a male auteur model in conceptualizing and writing film history.28 Inlight of the rather complex status of women in Iranian cinema, Nabili’s film givesus an extremely rare glimpse into what a feminist Iranian New Wave looks like.

The close analysis of “forgotten” films like The Sealed Soil allows for a deeperunderstanding of the Iranian New Wave, which is underexamined in the liter-ature on Iranian cinema. The Sealed Soil employs several New Wave strategiesthat developed into the core language of Iranian art cinema, such as naturallighting, location shooting, and the use of nonprofessional actors. However,it also allows us to expand our analysis of the New Wave by looking at issues


such as the representation of women. The film’s female-driven narrative, forexample, is an explicit riposte to the contemporaneous Film Farsi tradition,which tended to follow conventional representations of women as objects ina male-centered storyline. Prior to , women were represented in the main-stream cinema in flamboyantly sexualized terms. Shahla Lahiji argues that these“unchaste dolls came to dominate the silver screen as the sole cinematic repre-sentation of Iranian women.”29 Not only does Nabili’s heroine lead the actionin the film, but Nabili situates her in a wider social context with which the char-acter is deeply engaged.

The distanced camera of The Sealed Soil works to foreground the problem ofwomen’s acquiescence to structurally determined forms of relation. It is there-fore a more explicit use of the distanced look than the one we find in the cin-ema of the Islamic Republic. Nabili’s experimentation with the distanced looksignals that the problem of women and representation was always already partof the resistance to patriarchal forms of governance in Iran—that is, it was notmerely an articulation of post-Pahlavi religio-nationalist politics. Furthermore,an analysis of The Sealed Soil within the context of the Iranian New Wave asa global s cinematic movement draws our attention to the aesthetic andpolitical resonances of prerevolutionary Iranian cinema that remain to be ana-lyzed and interpreted. It is here that the film’s commitment to refusal offerssome lessons for the preconditions of a renewed and continuing practice ofwriting Iranian film history.

SARA SALJOUGHI is an assistant professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Toronto.She is currently working on a book about the aesthetics and politics of the Iranian New Wave in the1960s and 1970s. Her writing has been published in Iranian Studies, Film International, Film Criticism,and Jadaliyya, and is forthcoming in Camera Obscura.

NOTES

. The term “Iranian New Wave” (mowj-e no) refers to art cinema made prior to the Iranian Revolution.

. See Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).

. Film Farsi was a commercial film movement active between and .Consisting largely of genre films, it was characterized by its mimicking of Hollywoodand Indian commercial cinema.

. Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. , Industrializing Years,– (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .

. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), .

100 FEMIN IST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2017

. “Line Up Iranian Pix as Series in Gotham,” Variety, September , , .. Jennifer Dunning, “New York Sound Track,” Variety, June , , C; Barbara

Crossette, “Films from Political Hot Spots Arrive: Films from Mideast and Quebec atFestivals,” New York Times, June , , C.

. By “Pahlavi,” I refer to the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known as the Shahin the West. NewWave filmmakers were especially concerned with critiquing the Pahlavimonarchy’s surveillance, censorship, and policing of dissidents, which led to a cultureof paranoia. For example, see the film Brick and Mirror (Khesht va Ayneh, , dir.Ebrahim Golestan).

. “Greeks Have a Word for Talent: Women,” Variety, September , , , .. Barbara Crossette, “MidEast Feminism: Views of Female Film Makers: Feminist

Films Trying to Change Attitudes,” New York Times, June , , A.. Ibid.. Laura Mulvey, “Afterword,” in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation

and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, ), .. Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Vision / Powerful Presences:Women in Post-Revolutionary

Iranian Cinema,” in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, ed. Rose Issa and SheilaWhitaker (London: BFI, ), .

. Ibid., .. Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, .. Ibid., .. Recently, the pre- Iranian New Wave has garnered international interest via

retrospectives held at venues such as Asia Society in New York and the TorontoInternational Film Festival, as well as programs at the Edinburgh International FilmFestival. However, the period prior to continues to live in the shadow of thecinema that came after the Revolution.

. See Afshin Marashi, “Paradigms of Iranian Nationalism: History, Theory, andHistoriography,” in Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, ed. Kamran ScotAghaie and Afshin Marashi (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), –.

. The outfit is also suggestive of the Shah’s Literacy Corps (Sepah-e Danesh), aneducational program that emerged during the White Revolution (–) and wasstaffed by young urban Iranians. For an analysis of the paradoxes of this program, seeZohreh T. Sullivan, “Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformationsin Twentieth-Century Iran,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in theMiddle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ),–.

. Naficy, A Social History, .. Christiane Gruber, “Questioning the ‘Classical’ in Persian Painting: Models and

Problems of Definition,” Journal of Art Historiography (June ): .. See for example Azadeh Farahmand, “Perspectives on Recent (International

Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema,” in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation andIdentity, –.

. Bahman Maghsoudlou argues that the women who made feature films during thisera (Kobra Saidi, Goli Taraghi, Tahmineh Mir Mirani, and Nabili) were careful not


to openly call themselves feminists, despite their films having clear feminist concerns. SeeBahman Maghsoudlou, “Iran,” in The Women’s Companion to International Film, ed.Annette Kuhn (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .

. For analyses of this scene, see Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past,Present and Future (London: Verso, ), , , ; and Mottahedeh, DisplacedAllegories, –.

. On the relation between feminist film theory and postrevolutionary Iraniancinema, see Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories.

. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen , no. ():–.

. This is due in part to the disproportionate attention paid to Iranian cinema madeafter , as well as the notion that the post- cinema was the first to attend tofeminist concerns.

. See Hamid Dabashi, Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington,DC: Mage, ); and Shahab Esfandiary, Iranian Cinema and Globalization:National, Transnational, and Islamic Dimensions (London: Intellect, ).

. Shahla Lahiji, “Chaste Dolls and Unchaste Dolls: Women in Iranian CinemaSince ,” in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, .

102 FEMIN IST MEDIA HISTORIES WINTER 2017

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