| Details | Available in the United States from April 16–May 2
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Director’s Note:
Eliminating anti-Islamic elements such as sex, song, dance and especially any tactual contact between female and male performers in Iranian postrevolutionary cinema did not prevent the public screening of intimacy. Rather, it encouraged new forms, motifs, and methodologies for it. Sensuality was/is usurped by censure: dogmatic interventions creating both spatial remoteness and textual reticence. Iranian filmmakers working their way around Ershad (Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance/the censoring body) continue to find surrogates for communicating that which is unsayable: that which is forbidden. This short video essay playfully narrates the humor of an impossible prohibition: touch (both societal and cinematic). Using fragments of films made between 1986–2016, this video visualizes the regime’s failed attempt to purify the media by simply concealing and erasing any form of intimacy. The prohibition of direct contact between genders in films led to new forms of “touch” immune to the state’s regulations. From the large, codified vocabulary and objects employed as surrogates to communicate the unmentionable, and to touch the untouchable, for this video essay, I focus primarily on what I call “the handbag technique” in Iranian films. This wearable item (often with shoulder straps) has served tirelessly in films (especially soap operas): an exhausted prop utilized as a mediator performing “contact” between bodies of the opposite sex. (Dir.: Maryam Tafakory, Iran/United Kingdom/Singapore, 2020, 6 min., no dialogue) Images courtesy of the Asian Film Archive |
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