Arts & Culture
Inside the revolution
Published 03 April 2008
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is Iran's premier female film director. For 20 years she has quietly challenged the status quo in her homeland.
In the late 1980s, Iranian post-revolutionary cinema burst upon an unsuspecting world. Isolated examples of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, such as Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow (1969) and Sohrab Shahid Saless's A Simple Event (1973) and Still Life (1974), had screened in the west, but most pre-revolution films were for a popular audience and of little international interest. After the burning of film theatres and the regime's initial pronouncements against cinema, Ayatollah Khomeini announced that films appropriate to Islamic revolutionary ideals were permissible. Thus began the west's involvement with Iranian cinema, led largely by the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes was instrumental not only in profiling film-makers but also in influencing who among them would become international stars: Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Majid Majidi. These directors were soon followed by a younger generation, including Jafar Panahi, Bahman Ghobadi and Samira Makhmalbaf.
Yet, strangely, one of the most compelling figures in Iranian cinema has remained largely unrecognised in the UK. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, the subject of a season at the BFI Southbank this month, has been one of Iran's most successful directors for 20 years, artfully combining an ability to do well at the box office with a determination to critique the status quo in her homeland. She follows in a fine tradition of female Iranian directors, beginning with the pioneering Forugh Farrokhzad and running through to Samira Makhmalbaf, who is well known for her prize-winning films The Apple and Blackboards.
Bani-Etemad abandoned her planned career as an architect to work in television, while also studying cinema. She progressed to reporting and, in 1984, to documentary film-making. Early subjects included Iran's economy during the Iran-Iraq war and the influx of people from the countryside into Tehran. She continues to make documentaries, noting that it was social conditions in Iran (and especially Tehran) that took her into film-making. Her first fictional film was a comedy, Off-Limits (1986); this was followed by Canary Yellow and Foreign Currency. All were from scripts that she substantially rewrote, reflecting her socio-political sensibility.
Nargess (1992), one of the first films post-revolution to deal with sexual relationships, was Bani-Etemad's first personal project. It is also the start of a body of work that has been consistently well received critically and, with the exception of Foreign Currency, commercially successful at home: The Blue-Veiled (1995) and Under the Skin of the City (2001) were big box-office hits. The Iranian-American scholar Hamid Dabashi argues that whereas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf offer two different ways of rereading Iranian culture, Bani-Etemad's films are "a visual assault on that culture's Achilles heel, namely, its conception of femininity". Moreover, he writes: "Her subversive jolting of sexuality is something exclusive to her cinema, an extraordinarily powerful component almost pathologically absent from the work of those great male colleagues." (Kiarostami remedied this with Ten in 2002.)
This is particularly true of Nargess, The Blue-Veiled and The May Lady. Her assault on gender relations also takes place mainly in the milieu of the underprivileged. Nargess, a daring contemplation of mother/son/lover relationships in the petty criminal underworld, makes it clear that, as she has said, "I use characters to reflect a social situation." Nargess screened at the 1992 London Film Festival; most of her works have appeared there since. They have also shown in most European countries, in Asia, the US, Canada and Australia. So why is she not better appreciated here?
There are several reasons possible. Bani-Etemad's output, unlike most Iranian films with an international profile, has been financed in Iran, rather than by French companies able to promote productions internationally. Besides, her work is difficult to define, lying somewhere between entertainment and art-house cinema, fiction and documentary. "I cannot separate documentary from fiction cinema," she has said. "That does not mean that I would insert documentary shots in a feature film. Rather, it specifies my outlook and point of view."
If her films do not allow for easy categorisation, that is their strength. This retrospective should be an opportunity to recognise them for the treasures they are.
The Rakhshan Bani-Etemad season is at the BFI Southbank, London SE1, from 11-30 April.
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