<underfire> realism and global sense perception

[negar mottahedeh]

I am encouraged  by Ananya's intervention to end the week's posts by 
reflecting on some contemporary feminist debates in Iran; debates around 
the question of representation in cinema.  Listening to these debates, I 
am, in particular struck by the persistent evocation of the notion of 
realism and, in thinking self-reflexively, by the global demand for realism 
in representation. A recent Sunday Times Magazine article on the election 
of the Iranian President Ahamadinejad focuses on his "image maker" whose 
film about the modest then-mayor  portrays a simple man who eschews the 
luxuries of his predecessors. "Asked if he thinks this was authentic," 
Javad Shamghadri, the president's visual arts adviser replies, "People can 
tell he is genuine. That's why they voted for him. The image corresponds to 
his true self."    The image corresponds to his true self. ...Shamghadri's 
film about the mayor attracts the voting masses because of its realism, its 
realistic portrayal of a man who despite his humility is today the Iranian 
"President of the Apocalypse".

In watching the success of Iranian post-Revolution films in film festivals 
around the globe, critics repeatedly argue that the films depict 
unrealistic representations of Iran and its "way of life." Central to these 
critiques is the industry's problematic representation of women.  In the 
Iranian context and increasingly in the West, a particular mode of critique 
introduced by Iranian feminists, articulates the shift from 
pre-Revolutionary cinematic depictions of women as "unchaste dolls" to the 
"chaste dolls" of the post-Revolutionary period.  Shahla Lahiji's work on 
the representation of women in Iranian films is at the forefront of these 
critiques, suggesting that "the unchaste dolls" of the pre-Revolutionary 
cinema were banished from the cabaret stage and are now chastened and 
confined within the interior walls of the kitchen and engaged in domestic 
chores.  It seems to me that  while these critiques of stereotypical 
representations may be seen as progressive in the context of a national 
industry that is charged by its government to propagate proper standards 
for Islamic life through film, they become quite problematical as they make 
the rounds of international film festivals. What is key in this context is 
the critical appeal to realism once again.

For if  we accept the global effects of Americanization  on our senses of 
seeing and hearing (Westoxification in another register), if we accept this 
as an historical given, if we , in other words, come to understand the 
convention of realism as an historical imprint of an imperial logic on 
cinemas globally,  can "realism" still stand as the measure of feminist 
approaches to representational strategies in national films? In the context 
of Hollywood's imperial domination of what constitutes value in film, 
namely narrative realism,  can a feminist critique of  say, Iranian films, 
proceed by merely reading the film narrative for realistic representations 
or by suggesting that stereotypical representations be undercut and 
replaced by more realistic ones?  In the global circulation of fictive 
female characters on screen at international film festivals, what films 
offer up to knowledge is not, it seems to me, an access to the knowledge of 
the real beyond representation, but "a negative return on an absolute 
investment" in representation as truth.  While a simplistic articulation of 
this formula would have it that if there is a camera there, what you see on 
screen cannot possibly be real, its corollary in a feminist analytics of 
cinema must be the recognition that “realism” stands as a discursive 
alibi for “an authentic encounter with difference” be it with the 
female body on screen or the other’s nation in effigy.

Given these reflections on realism, I wonder about the expectations we 
often carry when we watch fiction films by  filmmakers such as Oday 
Rasheed, the Iraqi filmmaker who made the first feature length fiction film 
in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Oday Rasheed's  film is entitled 
UNDEREXPOSURE (2005).   The following synopsis of the film will have to 
serve as an introduction to the issues I would like to raise momentarily: 
"UNDEREXPOSURE, a title that refers not only to the outdated film stock 
that was used to make the film, but also to the generation of Iraqis that 
have been isolated from the world for decades, takes an unprecedented, 
uncensored look into the lives, hearts, and minds of those living in Iraq 
during the tumultuous days after the fall of Saddam. Director Oday Rasheed 
has created a vivid world set against a real backdrop of war and upheaval. 
Friends, lovers, strangers and family members are woven together by the 
complexities of their new reality. The past is only a moment behind them, 
with the presence of death a constant companion into the future...The first 
feature length film shot on location in Baghdad after the war, 
UNDEREXPOSURE  blends reality and fiction to create a lyrical and textured 
work that captures the dizzying atmosphere of life during war and fiercely 
illuminates a part of the world long left in the dark. "

To me, what is striking about the film UNDEREXPOSURE is the long sequences 
that are set indoors. Here, the characters return to their preoccupation 
with the impossibility of existence, the impossibility of filmmaking, the 
impossibility of love and of friendship. Having lived through the encounter 
with the violence of Saddam's rule and present to the prohibiting 
conditions of occupation under American rule, the camera despite its use of 
outdated 20 year old film stock, refuses to capture the outdoor environment 
of war and occupation. It wraps itself lyrically around spaces and images 
and colors. The soundtrack captures anecdotes and bits of conversation. 
Together sight and sound reflect more on the interiority of the film's 
hopeless characters, than on that hope for a different, utopian, future 
that shaped guerilla filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s in the colonial 
world-- in the Third Cinema movement, for example.

When we screened UNDEREXPOSURE as part of a film series marking the  five 
year anniversary of September 11, 2001 at Duke, the audience kept raising 
the issue realism as if the authenticity of the filmmaker as Iraqi would 
inform the realness of the representations of post-war Iraq as these 
appeared on screen.  Somehow I wonder if it isn't a feeling of the 
impossibility of contemporary Iraqi existence-- one informed by the 
injustices of the past, the violence of the present and the unsettled 
vision of the nation's collective future-- that leads to the film's 
rejection of "the real" as the standard for its filmmaking practice. To 
reject the imperial mark of realism on the senses of sight and hearing 
through cinema is, it would seem,  the only possibility of resistance for a 
film industry under American occupation today.

The conditions of Iraqi cinema may not be unique in this regard. As the 
Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami suggests regarding the defining codes of 
American cinema globally, the American film industry is an industry whose 
power is even greater than America’s military might.  What we may not 
realize is that our global demand for realism (that demand for an 
"authentic encounter with difference") is implicated in this assertion of 
power over the senses.

Negar Mottahedeh
Program in Literature
Women's Studies
Duke University