Modern Iranian cinema and classical Persian poetry

Iran has a rich cultural tradition extending over thousands of years. At the same time, modern Iranian cinema has begun to generate a great deal of interest among international audiences committed to serious art cinema. Is there a visible connection between these two sentences? My answer is yes. One can establish a line of interaction between classical Persian culture and modern Iranian cinema.

Let me frame this problematic in the fallowing way. Cinema as an art form was introduced to Asia from the West, but it very quickly took root in the soil and the consciousness of the people. One reason for this is the deft way in which certain gifted Asian filmmakers sought to draw on traditional cultures and thereby fortify the power of the social imaginary.

Zen culture

Chen Kaige drew on traditional Chinese painting, while Yasujiro Ozu was inspired by Zen culture. The well-known Korean film director Im Kwon-taek was stimulated by Buddhist thought and traditional Korean music while the celebrated Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak was indebted to classical Indian visual registers.

Similarly, many modern Iranian filmmakers have drawn on traditional Persian poetry in constructing a modern cinema.

For example, I recall that in two of his films – Where is the Friends Home and the Wind Will Carry Us – Abbas Kiarostami refers to Omar Khayyam. A modern Iranian filmmaker like Alireza Ghanie has made a film titled The Wind game which is based on classical Persian poetry.

In this column I wish to focus on this connection between classical Persian poetry and modern Iranian cinema as manifested in the work of the distinguished Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami. He sees this as a way of strengthening the social imaginary projected through his films,

I would have liked to discuss the work of a number of Iranian filmmakers who have displayed an interest in this connection. Clearly that is not possible owing to limitations of space.

Comment

Therefore, what I would like to do is to focus on the work of a film director who is probably the most well-known of Iranian filmmakers. His work bears witness to the way cinema connects to the social imaginary in interesting ways. Before that let me briefly comment on one other filmmaker who has exemplified the importance of the intersection of cinema and the social imaginary.

The filmmaker I have selected is Dariush Mehrjui (1939-), who has exercised a profoundly beneficent influence on the forward movement of Iranian cinema. He is the author of such widely-discussed films as ‘The Cow’ (1969), ‘The Postman’ (1972), ‘The Cycle’ (1977), ‘Hamoun’ (1990), ‘Pari ‘(1995), ‘The Pear Tree’ (1998) and ‘Santoori’ (2007).

All these films, in their different ways and with their diverse emphases, shed light on the complex and inviting space that is the Iranian social imaginary. Indeed, the social imaginary and its construction are the major thematic focus and abiding interest of Mehrjui as a filmmaker.

The term social imaginary has bee put into wide circulation by the distinguished social philosopher Charles Taylor. It seems to me that this is indeed a concept that can be pressed into service productively in investigating cinema. As Taylor observed, this concept of the social imaginary signifies something broader and deeper than intellectual categories and schemes of analysis that scholars often make use of in their studies of society.

He focuses attention on the ‘ways in which they (people) imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underline these expectations.’

Social life

What Taylor is seeking to do here is to call attention very insistently to the experiential and existential facets of social life, the dynamics of existence within a collectivity. This concept of the social imaginary, to my mind, allows us to make our way in the complex world of Iranian cinema with sympathy and understanding.

Dariush Mehrjui is one of the most important contemporary Iranian film directors. He has won numerous national and international awards for his work. Dariush Mehrjui is an intellectual who has an informed interest in expressive art in general. He has a deep understanding of painting and music and philosophy, and these diverse interests come together within the matrix of his sensibility in interesting ways to enrich his art of cinema.

Peasant

His film ‘The Cow’ (1969) in many ways ushered in a new style of filmmaking into Iranian cinema. This film deals with a simple story about a peasant named Masht Hassan who is deeply attached to his cow. When the cow dies during his absence, his fellow villagers do not want to disclose the bitter truth to him. He initially believes that the cow has run away.

However, eventually he learns the truth. And then a surprising turn if events take place and Hassan comes to believe that he has become the cow. It is a tale with both social and metaphysical meaning. It is a narrative that connects to ideas of the transmigration of the soul found in Persian mysticism.

Dariush Mehrjui explores this deeply touching human story deploying the resources of the art of cinematography at is command, never allowing the emotions or the techniques to get in the way of narrating the story.

What is interesting about this film is how it illuminates one aspect – am important one – of the Iranian social imaginary consisting of individual, social and metaphysical components The filmmakers deploy emotions as a mode of thinking, and thinking as a mode of feeling, in this film.

As a filmmaker, Mehrjui seeks to approach the space of the Iranian social imaginary from different angles and perspectives. Some of his films such as ‘The Cow,’

Consciousness

‘The Cycle’, deal with the peasant consciousness; some others deal with the life and tribulations of Iranian intellectuals the class to which the filmmakers belongs as evidenced in films such as ‘Hamoun’ and ‘The Pear Tree’; yet others explore the emotional and economic life of the urban proletariat. Speaking of the concept of the social imaginary,Charles Taylor says, ‘Our social imaginary at any given time is complex.

It incorporates a sense of normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out collective practices which make up our social life.’

What is important to bear in mind is that there is a factual as well as normative dimension to the idea of social imaginary; this is to suggest that is to say our sense of how things function is inextricably linked to how they ought to function. This is precisely what Mehrjui’s is seeking to enforce in his film whether through the predicaments of the protagonists in such films as ‘The Cycle’ or ‘The Cow’ or ‘Leila’.

What is interesting about Dariush Mehrjui’s films in relation to the Iranian social imaginary is that they not only raise question of theme and narrative but also questions of style and technique. The representational strategies of his films are complexly interwoven with his thematic interests. He is a filmmaker who firmly believes that the visual and aural registers of a film, the complex sign system, the representational strategies deployed by the director enact the theme of the film.

In other words, the style and techniques of his films serve to recreate that intended social imaginary. In his early films he pursued a kind of poetic neo-realistic style of filmmaking as evidenced in works like ‘The Cow’. Later, he sought to make use of melodramatic styles of representation and reconfiguration that are vitally connected to, and grow out of, popular consciousness.

It seems to me that these stylistic innovations reflect his deep-seated conviction that the content and style if films have a crucial role to play in capturing in cinema the social imaginary of a people.

Consciousness

As a filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui is interested in uncovering the different layers of consciousness of people. In films such as ‘Sara’, ‘Pari’, ‘Leila’ and ‘The Pear Tree’, he sought decode the ways in which traditional Persian mystic thinking has permeated middle class consciousness in Iran. It is indeed his conviction that the social imaginary constitutes a complex and many-sided unity.

Another important aspect of this Iranian social imaginary that filmmakers such as Dariush Mehrjui is the significance attached to history. Iran with a long and rich history; Persian culture excelled in poetry and art. This fact weighs significantly on the sensibility of these filmmakers as they focus on the modern social imaginary. Lyric poetry of poets such as Rumi (1207-1273) and Hafez (1320-1388) has inflected the sensibilities of many contemporary Iranian filmmakers.

They seem to be saying that this rich history is not only a formative influence on modern behaviors but also can and should become a yardstick of moral assessment. It is indeed their belief that the complacent conviction that everything modern has to be understood solely in terms of the modern has to be challenged.

Instead, they argue, modernity has to be understood in terms of a historically informed, culturally resonant, local idiom. This orientation is clearly evident in many of the films shown at this online festival. Therefore, one way in which the films shown at this online festival underwrites the theme of understanding persian culture through film is by focusing on the uniqueness of the Iranian social imaginary.

Influence

In discussing the influence of traditional poets such as Rumi and Hafez on the sensibility of modern Iranian filmmakers, I wish, as I stated earlier, to focus on the work of the director Abbas Kiarostami (1940-). I have discussed aspects of his work in earlier columns. Today, what I propose to do is to indicate how he constructs the social imaginary that I alluded to earlier by drawing on the work of the eminent classical poet Rumi.

Let me first state why I think Rumi is a very important and consequential poet for the Iranians.(I have commented on Rumi’s ghazals in my columns). Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is justifiably regarded as one of the greatest classical Persian poets. He combines a kind of literary mysticism with the lyrical ghazal form with remarkable success. He was a prolific writer, and wrote over 65,000 verses during his life time.

There are a number of themes that find constant articulation in his poetry. The nature of love – both human and divine – is one. Interestingly, he perceives a mutually nurturing relation between the two. The mysteriousness that surrounds the world and how logic and reason fail before its awesome presence is another.

The limits poetry, the inadequacy of language and hence the valorisation of silence is a third recurring theme. These themes, to be sure, intersect in interesting ways. Let me cite a few passages to convey a sense of Rumi’s poetic art.

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
There is a field, I’ll meet you there

If the whole world
Is covered with blossoms
You have labored to plant
What do you think will happen?

Get up O lovers, let us soar to the sky
We have seen this world, let us pay a visit to the next.
Let us rush to the sea prostrated like the flood;
Then clapping hands let us journey on the waves.

Rumi’s poetry is replete with recurring symbols that carry a heavy freight of meaning. These symbols have a way of connecting to the cultural imaginary brought into being by the Persian past. Some of his most commonly deployed symbols are the sun, the moon, sea, rose, wine and nightingale. The sun figures as a guide and teacher to the human world while the moon symbolises beauty and calmness; the sea signifies life while the rose stands for God.

Very often, in Rumi’s poetry, the nightingale is emblematic of the soul. These are all common objects that the reader can readily identify with. What is interesting about Rumi’s poetry is that he inflects these common symbols in a way that serves to direct our attention towards experiences that lie in a representational space located in between the human and the divine.

Interplay

An aspect of Rumi’s poetry that readers with a deconstructive turn of mind would find fascinating is the interplay between speech and silence. He uses language to demonstrate the inadequacy of language. One of the objectives of a poet, according to Rumi, is to create an original artifact out of language.

This demands a control of language by the poet. However, language is not totally controllable by the poet; it exceeds his or her grasp. This prompts the valorization of silence through the medium of language. This paradoxical theme is repeatedly highlighted by Rumi in his lyrics.

Now a silence weaves
That shroud of wonder

The theme feeds into the ideas of ineffability, inexpressibility, absence in presence that I alluded to earlier.

It is against this background that I wish to discuss briefly the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. His films it seems to me, gain in depth and definition when placed alongside some of the thematic preoccupations and stylistic preferences of Rumi.

It is indeed true that Rumi and Kiarostami are separated by a distance of eight centuries. It is this very distance that makes the affinities of interest and the convergences of strategy that much more compelling. What I wish to call attention to are certain commonalities of understanding and technique and vision that mark the approaches of Rumi and Kiarostami.

Critics

Abbas Kiarostami is possibly the most well-known Iranian filmmaker in the world. Many critics as well as filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Jen-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog and Quentin Tarantino have described his work in glowing terms. The great French director Godard once memorably said that, ’Films begins with D.W.Griffith and end with Abbas Kiarostami.’

Numerous books have been written on his work in Western languages. Apart from being a distinguished filmmaker, he was also a photographer, painter and poet. An invigorating poetic impulse informs his cinema. Kiarostami s the author of such internationally acclaimed works as Through the Olive trees, Taste of Cherry, Close-up, Life and Nothing More and The Wind Will Carry Us.

In his films there are constant allusions to classical Persian poetry as well as modern Iranian poetry. In films such as Where is the Friends Home? and The Wind Will Carry us, there are references to the classical Persian poet Omar Khayyam. In other films, there are references to the modern Iranian poet Sohrab Sephrey. In this column I wish to establish a connection between Kiarostami’s work and the poetry of Rumi – a connection that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been highlighted.

One important point of similarity between Rumi and Kiarostami, to my mind, is the fact that both of them comment reflexively on their chosen media even as they communicate experiences through them. In other words Rumi’s poetry shows signs of meta-poetry while Kiarostami’s films show signs of meta-cinema. Laura Mulvey an eminent British theorist and filmmaker made the following astute observation on Abbas Kiarostami’s films.

‘While Kiarostami has played an important role in defining the aesthetics and formal characteristics of the Iranian new cinema, his films reach out towards key questions about the nature of cinema as a medium.

To my mind, this is the main reason why his films have had such an impact on western cinephiles and film theorists, who find themselves contemplating once again a cerebral, conceptual cinema of a kind that has more or less completely disappeared in their own countries.’

Reality

Mulvey then goes on to assert that Kiarostami has chosen to investigate the narrow line between illusion and reality that can be regarded as the defining characteristic of cinema. Jettisoning an either/or approach, his interest resides in the boundaries and intersections between the ability of cinema to register the actual image in front of the camera and its capability to transform it.

As she remarks, ‘this ‘what is cinema? approach to filmmaking affects the spectator’s relation to the screen. Here, issues to do with the gaze and ways of seeing are extended beyond ideological content into a wider demand to question the nature of the image itself.

To ask the spectator to think – and to think is to create a form of questioning and interrogative spectatorship that must be at odds with the certainties of any dogmatic ideological conviction.

What is interesting about Rumi’s poetry is that it too seeks to question the nature and limits of poetry as a medium of creative expression. He is concerned with such issues as the limits of linguistic power, the role of the reader or listener in the attribution of meaning to poetry.

The narrow line between illusion and reality that Laura Mulvey saw as a defining feature of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema is also significantly present in Rumi’s poems. Indeed, it is a question that agitates his poetic imagination.

The complex nature of reality is a theme that Rumi repeatedly explored in his writings. What is reality? How can we understand it? Can it be captured in words? Such questions frequently make their presence in his poetic utterances. Similarly as many discerning critics have pointed out, Kiarostami found the intractable nature of reality a compelling subject for cinematic representation. In one of his interviews, Kiarostami made the following remark.

‘The perception of reality is such a complex and nuanced phenomenon that we cannot really give a definite answer to this question.

The best of all positions is undoubtedly consists of being ceaselessly in motion between dream and reality. This is a place of ideal life, my space of preference.

My attitude is to refuse all convictions of reality, it is to sit between the two chairs of the real and the dream, to say in motion and alive.

My perception of reality is always the source, the mobilising force that pushes me to make movies. The real always has a power of fiction and of poetry that excites me and stimulates my creativity.’

Credo

Interestingly, this is a credo that Rumi would wholeheartedly endorse. When we examine his poetry we realise that he was animated by the same kind of impulse that Kiarostami has owned up to in his own writings.

Let us consider a characteristically Rumi passage of poetry like the following.

I arrived, once again, like the spring breeze
I rose like the sun visible to all.
I am the sun in mid-summer, contrary to the old season;
I have brought liveliness and joy to gardens.
A thousand ring doves are searching for me in their songs;
A thousand nightingales and parrot are flying in my direction.
The news of my arrival reached the fish in the sea;
The ferment of the sea crested a thousand waves.

The strength of this passage derives in large measure from the interplay between reality and illusion that Abbas Kiarostami talked about earlier.

Another important facets of Abbas Kiarostami’s creativity as a filmmaker is his approach to the construction of visual images. In films such as Close-up, Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry and Life and Nothing More, we discerns the are and imagination that have gone into the production of his visual image that are so central to his filmic experiences.

Apart from the vividness displayed by his images, we can identify two important features that mark his approach to the construction of images. The first is the nexus that he establishes between image and knowledge. In other words, he turns the image into an epistemological category. Second, the way Kiarostami makes his images function as witnesses, providers of evidence is indeed important. To be sure, these two facets are interconnected.

Importance

The eminent French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy has written a book on Abbas Kiarostami’s films focusing on their importance as providers of evidence. For Nancy, his films such as Life and Nothing more, admirably exemplify this point.

They are more than documentaries or feature films; they are suppliers of evidence of being.

The images created by Kiarostami are central to this aspect of his films because images bear witness. This approach to images displayed by Abbas Kiarostami finds a ready echo in the poetry of Rumi. Let us consider a representative example. This poem is titled sitting together.

We sit in this courtyard, two forms,
shadow outlines with one soul,
Bird sound, leaf moving, early evening,
star, fragrant damp, and the sweet

Sickle curve of moon. You and I in a
round, unsolved idling in the garden
beauty detail. The raucous parrots
laugh, and we laugh inside laughter
The two of us on a bench in Konya, yet
amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well,

friends abiding this form, yet also
in another outside time, you and I

In this poem, it is evident that the imagery is central as indeed it is constitutive of meaning in cinema (we discussed earlier); imagery has a deep relevance to his poetic craftl.

In Rumi’s poems the images are vivid; they perform a valuable function in knowledge production and they bear evidence of being in the world.

In the poetry of Rumi, one observes what I term a complex simplicity. What I mean by this is that the overt simplicity that marks many of his poems conceals a deep-seated complexity that guides the poems. Let us consider a couplet such as the following

Come out here where the roses have opened
Let soul and world meet

Statement

This is a simple statement; but at the same time it points to certain deeper metaphysical themes that Rumi explored in his poetry. He very often used the rose as an emblem of God. So what we find in these two lines is a reference to a triangular relationship among God, the soul and the world that was so central to Rumi’s thinking and imagination.

This same complex simplicity can be discerned in Abbas Kiarostami’s films. If we take one of his early films such as Bread and the Alley .This film deals with a very simple story – how a young boy having bought a loaf of bread is returning home when a stray dog approaches him.

The director enters into the world of children, as he does so often in his films, with great sensitivity and understanding.

As the story unfolds we begin to appreciate the complex layers of meaning the story contains. Here again, we see a similarity of interest between Rumi and Kiarostami.

The effort of some of the modern Iranian filmmakers to create a distinctively Persian poetics of cinema is one that we in Sri Lanka could study and pursue with profit.