“This is not an Iranian arthouse film”
Taxi Tehran, 2015
Av og med: Jafar Panahi
Tigjengelig på norske strømmetjenester
Since 2010, Jafar Panahi has been banned from making films in Iran after being found guilty of producing propaganda against the Iranian government. Unlike other directors, Panahi has decided to stay in his home country where he continues to make films. Since his arrest, This is Not a Film (2011) and Closed Curtain (2013) have both won prizes at international film festivals. In Taxi Tehran, Panahi’s third film after the interdiction, he has found a particularly subtle way of commenting on his working conditions. In the film we follow Jafar Panahi, who plays himself as a former director, as he navigates his way through the streets of Iran’s capital city in the taxi he now drives for a living. Filmed partly by a set of cameras fixed to the interior of the taxi, partly with mobile phone cameras, the film follows Panahi on a seemingly aimless odyssey as he encounters a number of individuals, some of them customers and others old friends from different walks of life.
Because of the political context under which Taxi Tehran was produced, the film has been interpreted by critics as an act of defiance against his persecution by state authorities in Iran. The film, however, is much more than a protest march through Tehran by taxi. By focusing exclusively on the political dimension, we ignore the ways in which Panahi celebrates the medium of cinema in the film, exploring the state of art cinema, revelling in cinephilia – a love of cinema – and interrogating his own role as auteur.
In his essay “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, David Bordwell argues that although the term “art cinema” describes a heterogenous and varied body of films, there is nonetheless enough consistency for it to be understood as a distinct genre with coherent “narrative and stylistic principles”[1]. For Bordwell, the two main principles that motivate art cinema are realism and authorial expressivity [2]. In Taxi Tehran, Panahi self-consciously mocks both of these formulaic elements. First, we find ourselves in a “real location” – a modern Middle Eastern city with all its bustle and chaos. Panahi immerses the spectator in the sounds of the city, with car horns, sounds of noisy construction and other street sounds penetrating into the semi-private space of the taxi. In addition, he brings into his taxi gritty, realist elements which are extreme to the point of absurdity. First appears a mugger who approves of the death penalty for thieves. Then an injured man, covered in blood from a head wound, is brought into the taxi by a group of men. The injured man’s wife cries out so loudly in her grief that her husband tells her she must stop because his voice cannot be heard in the “film within a film” being made on Panahi’s mobile phone. Panahi has often been accused by his detractors within Iran that he makes films for a western audience. No doubt the inclusion of a wailing woman wearing a headscarf is a jibe at this close-minded expectation of Iranian art cinema.
Secondly, Panahi arguably comments on his difficult legal situation by recreating a tragi-comical exaggeration of Bordwell’s description of art cinema in which “characters may wander out and never reappear; events may lead to nothing” [3]. In Taxi Tehran the irony is that the directionless director of “slow” art cinema becomes a taxi driver who is both slow and has a poor sense of direction. Several of his passengers criticize his directionlessness as they ride along in his taxi. The first passenger, a self-described criminal, is astounded when Panahi offers another driver the wrong directions, saying “You call yourself a taxi driver? Is this even possible? You don’t know how to get to the Parsian Hospital?”. When his journey ends he complains that Panahi made several wrong turns along the way. Later two elderly passengers urge him to “go faster” and complain that “he has no sense of direction. Can’t even drive.” Surely Panahi is self-consciously referencing the slow and directionless quality of his film and by extension the standard expectations of art cinema, with his long takes tying together unrelated characters in a wandering narrative.
While Panahi reflects upon established formulas of art cinema, he also engages with Iranian grassroots cinephilia in the form of the third passenger to arrive in his taxi: Omid, the bootleg DVD seller. The meeting between an internationally renowned filmmaker and a street vendor of pirated DVDs may seem a jarring juxtaposition of two social spheres. However, when we consider that in 2003 Panahi smuggled his film Crimson Gold out of the country in a suitcase and in 2011 managed to get This is Not a Film into Cannes Film Festival in a birthday cake we begin to see the similarities between the two men. Considering that Panahi’s films are banned in the country, the figure of an illicit dealer in film art is a powerful commentary on his position as filmmaker. Moreover, through the role of Omid – who is present on screen for a quarter of the film – Panahi comments upon the place of cinema in the everyday life of Iranians by foregrounding the importance of unofficial networks of film distribution, while at the same time playing with expectations of high and lowbrow film culture.
During his taxi ride, Omid conjures up warm memories of when Panahi and his son borrowed films from him and remembers the director ordering Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). The sense of nostalgia and a wish to return to a more innocent cinephile past is doubly present here. In Allen’s film, Gil Pender, a writer played by Owen Wilson, longs for (and magically returns to) the roaring twenties and all the creative and intellectual pleasures that decade offered an international community of artists. The bootlegger, when persuading Panahi to become his partner in DVD bootlegging, argues “this is a cultural activity too”. The French film historian Jean Tulard would agree with this view of film pirating. Tulard has argued that “illegal pirating has saved an enormous amount of films” and compares the pirater’s role to that of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française, who developed the archival holdings of the cinematheque often “under conditions bordering on illegality”[4]. As Omid tells Panahi, “Without me, no more Woody Allen”, highlighting his unofficial role as a cinephilic institution.
Not long after Omid enters, Panahi passes over directorial control to him as an injured man is brought into the taxi with his wife and asks that his last will and testament be filmed on camera. At this point the dashboard camera is superseded by Panahi’s cell phone, operated by Omid. The professional partnership between the two continues when Panahi drives Omid to the home of one of his customers in what looks to be an affluent suburban district. At first the customer, a young film student, appears visibly cautious at the presence of a witness to the illicit exchange. Omid reassures him, “don’t worry. He’s one of us.” That is to say, they are all three lovers of the cinema, they are all cinephiles. It is clear that Panahi delights in bringing the film fan together with the director and illicit “distributor” in this scene. Omid tells the young man that Panahi, now that he cannot make films, has become his partner in the film piracy business. Panahi is amused rather than angered by Omid’s white lie: of course, the irony is that the Islamic Republic of Iran has reduced Panahi to a trader in cinematic contraband. It is no wonder then, that Panahi is so sympathetic in his depictions of Omid and of a street vendor selling pirated CDs who appears later in the film.
Although vendors of pirated DVDs do not only sell films that are banned in the country, Panahi uses this scene to show the impact of state censorship on film culture in Iran, where instead of presenting films to a crowded audience after a festival screening or lecture, Panahi’s role as artist is reduced to offering advice to cinephiles in a taxi parked on an empty street in an unremarkable suburb. Nonetheless Panahi seems optimistic, communicating a sense of fun and excitement as the young man hunts for new cinema discoveries in Omid’s bag of DVDs. Thanks to the global circulation of DVDs, the love these men have for cinema can be cultivated anywhere: even in the back of a taxi.
In the presence of Panahi, an internationally acclaimed director of socially engaged art cinema, the customer renounces his orders of season 5 of Walking Dead and four Hollywood blockbusters, one featuring Mel Gibson, and pretends not to have ordered them. Visibly embarrassed, he tells Omid “no commercial stuff”; instead he wants “art cinema”. He then attempts a gesture of cinephilic solidarity with Panahi, confiding, “I’ve seen most of the famous classics. Which new ones are worth watching?” However, his gesture falls flat as Panahi rejects the distinction between art and commercial cinema: “I think all movies are worth watching”. By refusing to use his position to regulate the film taste of the customer, Panahi replaces the informed expertise of the auteur filmmaker – all-powerful in the domain of classical cinephilia – with a democratic and open approach typical of the ‘new cinephilia’. In recent years film scholars have used the term ‘new cinephilia’ to describe a culture of film appreciation facilitated by the internet, new film formats and mobile screen technologies, ultimately creat- ing a more accessible, democratic and malleable film culture in comparison to the traditional pre-digital theatrical paradigm [5].
Unlike classical cinephilia, new cinephilia rejects strict boundaries between high and low forms of cinema and does not exclude television or trashy Hollywood titles. As Thomas Elsaesser writes, it “confers a new nobility on what once might have been mere junk” [6]. In this regard, Panahi is here clearly having fun playing with cinema outside of the usual paradigms of low and highbrow culture as illustrated in Omid’s final quip that he’ll “bring Big Bang Theory next week.”
One advantage of the illegal film distribution network depicted in Taxi Tehran is that it is organized from below by the film fans themselves, rather than being regulated from the top either by cultural gatekeepers (as may be the case with official cinematheque programmers and film critics) or by the official representatives of the Islamic Republic’s morality. Panahi’s niece Hana, another passenger, reveals what this state control means for the industry when she outlines her teacher’s rules for a “distributable” film: “Respect for the Islamic headscarf, no contact between men and women, avoid sordid realism, avoid violence, avoid the use of a tie for good guys. Avoid the use of Iranian names for good guys. Instead use the sacred names of the Islamic saints. Avoid discussing political and economic issues.” This dystopic picture of heavy state censorship and control in Iran is matched with an idyllic, if exaggerated, picture of the idyllic possibilities offered by the DVD bootlegger Omid, who tells Panahi that not only can he bring him films that haven’t yet been released, he can also provide “daily rushes of movies in the making.” With Omid’s unbelievable assertion, Panahi plays with the idea of cinema having the same immediacy and direct accessibility as online digital cultures.
By highlighting the paradigm of cinephilia in the Iranian national context, Panahi imbues the cultural phenomenon with a political punch which it simply does not have in the Western context. For Panahi, piracy means cultural resistance. He is positive about the opportunities for a new cinephilia facilitated by the illicit circulation of films. As Darren Aronofsky, head of the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival that awarded Panahi the Golden Bear for Taxi Tehran, explained, “Instead of allowing his spirit to be crushed and giving up, instead of allowing himself to be filled with anger and frustration, Jafar Panahi created a love letter to cinema. His film is filled with love for his art, his community, his country and his audience.” The idea of the director catering to all kinds of film publics and tastes can be extended to Panahi’s role as benevolent taxi driver catering to all his passengers’ needs in all kinds of exaggerated social-realist and comical situations, such as allowing his phone be used to film the injured man’s last will and testament.
Many art films are characterized by an intertextuality that primarily relates to other films, creating a kind of self-referentially closed-off canon internationally recognized as ‘arthouse’. In Taxi Tehran Panahi drops in heavy references to his other films. When Panahi arrives late for his niece she tells him, “I’d find my way like the girl in your “Mirror” film” referring to his 1997 film The Mirror. When the mugger leaves the taxi, Omid asks Panahi, “His last line was like the coffee shop scene in Crimson Gold wasn’t it?”, recalling Panahi’s 2003 film about a pizza delivery man who turns to crime. And when his lawyer friend “the flower lady” describes the situation of one of her clients – a woman arrested for trying to get into a volleyball match – she compares the situation to Panahi’s 2006 film Offside, which revolves around female football fans trying to get in to see matches.
Although Panahi’s films are part of an essential canon of what could be referred to as a New Iranian Cinema which is extremely familiar to Western art cinema audiences and festival networks – who would recognize these references – we must remember that in Iran his films are banned. Upon winning the Golden Bear for Taxi Tehran at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2015, Panahi told the Hojatollah Ayoubi, then Vice-Minister for Culture and Islamic Guidance, that he would gladly trade in his award in exchange for being able to show his film in his home city of Tehran at the Fajr International Film Festival. In these moments of self-referentiality, then, Panahi demonstrates that despite his positive critical reception and many accolades, his films are for friends and family and for cinema audiences in Iran – here represented by the lawyer, his niece Hana and Omid the bootlegger. These characters stand in for the one audience Panahi wishes he could have, the audience of his home country.
Sadly, the familiarity that his films have with his micro-public of taxi passengers cannot be extended to population of Tehran more generally. After all, when the DVD bootlegger Omid advertises his wares to the young cinephile, the abundance of art and commercial cinema titles on offer masks the startling lack of Iranian film titles. This again illustrates a characteristic of ‘new cinephilia’ in a global context, one highlighted by Jasmine Nadua Trice in her study of the city of Manila, in which she points out that “attention to world cinema’s cosmopolitanism and history only emphasizes the absence of national cinema artifacts”[7]. In Panahi’s Tehran, too, Omid’s DVD library amounts to a forced cosmopolitanism due to the banning of filmmakers like Panahi and the difficulty Iranian filmmakers have in getting their films made and distributed. Trice writes, “I would suggest that this cosmopolitanism is as much a product of necessity as of desire. It is a kind of obligatory cosmopolitan- ism, borne of local independent cinema’s narrow circulation”[8]. In this sense, she draws attention to “the persistence of boundaries” [9] where others have optimistically seen an erasure of borders. While Omid presents a selection of international filmmakers from South Korea, Japan and the United States – Iranian titles are absent.
With Taxi Tehran, Panahi could have made an overtly political film about his situation. Instead he chooses much subtler methods of resistance. Not only does he critique the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strict requirements for making a “distributable” film; he also critiques the strict expectations placed upon Iranian art cinema for distribution in Europe. The international marketing of Iranian art cinema on the film festival circuit has, according to Hamid Naficy, led to a “neo-realist inflected, child-centered art-house ‘festival films’ that became a veritable genre, even a cliché”[10]. Naficy uses Panahi’s 1995 film White Balloon as an example of this festival genre of Iranian cinema. Making Taxi Tehran twenty years later, Panahi is extremely self-conscious and playful in his resistance to being placed in such a category, just as he resists the clamping down on his artistic creativity by state actors in his own country.
During the film Panahi draws on a repertory of street names, neighborhoods and landmarks: Farhang, Moghadam Square, Varnak, the Parsian Hospital, Chamran Hospital, Shahran Boulevard, Izadi Alley, and Cheshmeh Ali. Providing names of these concrete geographical markers only serves to heighten the directionless wandering quality of Panahi’s film. And because Panahi is the auteur filmmaker, the “driver” of this meandering narrative, his directionlessness highlights his creative and physical imprisonment in his home city in a subtle cartographic poetry of overpasses, highways and hospitals. As his lawyer friend describes their mutual feeling upon leaving prison, “When you get out, the outside world becomes a bigger cell.”
The theme of imprisonment is one that Panahi returns to again and again in his films. For example, Closed curtain (2013) and Crimson Gold (2003) both begin and end with a shot of barred windows, and The Circle (2000) begins and ends with a shot of a prison-like door. When the young Hana in Taxi Tehran finds a purse in the back seat of the taxi and her uncle understands that it must have been left behind by a pair of elderly sisters on their way to Ali’s Spring (Cheshmeh Ali), the lawyer tells Panahi, “Ali’s Spring? You must find them. You found your way.” In other words, Panahi’s film finally finds its direction.
Making his final turn to Ali’s Spring, Panahi leaves his taxi, and his film is either stolen by thieves or confiscated by state agents – a final intrusion into what has become, over the course of his film, a space of free conversation away from both state surveillance and the cultural expectations of an international film festival audience.
Notes
[1] Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” in The European Cinema Reader,edited by Catherine Fowler, 94–102. London: Routledge, 2002, 95
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 96
[4] Baudry, Constance, Karim El Hadj, “Existe-t-il une nouvelle cinéphilie?”
Le Monde, May 12, 2005, http://www. lemonde.fr/culture/article/2005/05/12/ existe-t-il-une-nouvelle-cinephilie_ 649139_3246.html.
[5] For recent scholarly discussions of new cinephilia, see: Shambu, Girish. The New Cinephilia. KinoAgora 8. Montreal: Caboose, 2014; Valck, Marijke de, and Malte Hagener, eds. Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005; Balcerzak, Scott, and Jason Sperb, eds. Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Vol. 1. London and New York: Wallflower, 2009; Casetti, Francesco. “Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age.” Screen 52.1 (Spring 2011): 1–12; Rosenbaum, Jonathan, and Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia. London: British Film Institute, 2003; Fee, Annie. “Cinephilia.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, edited by Krin Gabbard. New York: Oxford University Press.
[6] Elsaesser, Thomas. “Cinephilia, or the Uses of Disenchantment.” In Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, edited by Marijke de. Valck and Malte Hagener, 27–43. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 200, 41.
[7] Trice, Jasmine Nadua. “Manila’s New Cinephilia.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 7 (2015): 611–24: 612.
[8] Ibid., 619.
[9] Ibid., 616.
[10] Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, 1984–2010. Vol. 4. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 259. In addition, Azadeh Farahmand writes, “Characteristics that were attributed to Iranian festival films of qualities that filmmakers, film agents, festival programmers, critics, publicists and academics all highlighted, passed along, and reinforced in a process that, in turn folded these characteristics back into local production trends and onto the texture of forthcoming films”. Azadeh, Farahmand. “Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema.” In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 263–81. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 275.
På trykk i Wuxia 1-2, 2018