There always seems to be an imaginary asterisk placed on discussions centered around films made by filmmakers who have been pushed into a Kafkaesque corner. The very existence of the film — its daring means of production and distribution — becomes the focal point of attention; the filmmaking itself comes secondary, or, worse still, doesn’t factor in at all. It would, of course, be foolish to discuss the image’s low-res quality and audio’s unclarity without addressing the circumstances under which a filmmaker made it. But wouldn’t it be similarly reductive to champion a film just based on its context? Shouldn’t an equal amount of consideration be given to how the filmmaker, operating within such a confined space, uses cinematic tools to create infinite dimensions from it?[ppp_patron_only level=”3″ silent=”no”]

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, now rightfully if perhaps too simplistically identified as the flagbearer of a cinema of defiance, has always done this. Before 2010, however, when Iran’s theocratic regime literally tied his hands down, his filmmaking, not simply the act of making films, brought him international acclaim. His three “street” films centered on women — The White Balloon (1995), The Circle (2000), and Offside (2006) — follow in the footsteps of films made by his mentor, co-writer, and legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Shot extensively on Tehran’s streets with non-professional actors, these three films are particularly reminiscent of Kiarostami’s deceptively simple early docu-fiction shorts at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran. They feel thrillingly unscripted and unplanned, like Italian neorealism minus all the stock saccharine music: an excuse to record Tehran’s bustling marketplaces, ghostly alleyways, and colorful characters, then build a narrative around it. This cinema verité-style, naturally, allows these films to go beyond their central characters; interactions with people (and in many cases, animals!) seem to reveal, not forcefully represent, their discontentment (or not) with the State’s traditionalist ideology.

The State’s petulant response: issue an arrest warrant and filmmaking ban. On March 1st, 2010, local authorities barged into Panahi’s house and arrested him, his wife, and his daughter. 15 of his friends, including internationally renowned filmmaker Mohammed Rasoulof, were also taken into custody. The authorities released most of them in less than 48  hours. But Panahi, the most high-profile vocal critic of the conservative party elected in 2009, was held in Tehran’s Evin prison for three months. The State eventually released him on bail because of the international outcry against his arrest, especially at the Cannes Film Festival. Upon release, however, they officially charged Panahi for “assembly and [collusion] with intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Come December, Panahi was convicted: he faced a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year ban on making movies, writing screenplays, giving any interviews, or leaving the country.

Credit: Kino Lorber

13 years have passed since, and despite the State still upholding his filmmaking ban, Panahi has made five feature films (and four shorts). His first two post-arrest features — This Is Not a Film (2011) and Closed Curtain (2013) — are, for lack of a better term, his house-arrest films: they reflect the period before his traveling ban was relaxed. His subsequent three films — Taxi (2015), 3 Faces (2018), and No Bears (2022) — see him travel outside the confines of his house. They are, in some ways, his attempt at getting back to make the “street” films he made before his arrest.

But the centering of self that, in turn, leads to gnawing guilt of self-centeredness is unavoidable in Panahi’s post-arrest work. He hints at a degree of such self-reflexivity in his pre-arrest film, The Mirror (1997), whereby his fictitious narrative about a young girl’s fumbling search for her mother through the intimidating, crowded streets of Tehran gets disrupted by the amateur actress’s decision to disobey Panahi’s directorial orders. It’s an astonishing jolt of a narrative rupture that, nonetheless, feels more self-congratulatory than self-critical: the second half of the film (objective “reality”) mirrors the first half (“directed” reality) to such an extent that it only reifies Panahi’s docu-fictional approach to cinema. In his post-arrest work, however, this self-reflexivity — employed less as a trick and more as a necessity — becomes as much a means for cinematic (and self-) interrogation as it is for celebration. In other words, his five films post-2010, individually and especially taken together, artfully complicate and at times outright contradict his otherwise picture-perfect image as a daring filmmaker who uses the film camera to reveal societal truths often hiding in plain sight. For both cinema and Panahi in Panahi’s cinema hide as much as they reveal, intrusively obsess as much as they curiously investigate, and hurt as much as they heal.

This tension is most notably absent in the first of these five films — This Is Not a Film. Co-efforted with documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi made the film while his case was on appeal, and it is, without a doubt, his most defiant and optimistic work. Both filmmakers seek cinematic (un)certainty in a time of grave uncertainty: they believe that simply “keeping the camera on” will, with the guiding hand of a filmmaker, find filmic material any and everywhere.

Credit: Mubi/Jafar Panahi Film Productions

It’s unfortunate that This Is Not a Film‘s one instance of verbalized cinema worship and its much-publicized spy-film-like “delivery” to Cannes (on a flash drive hidden inside a birthday cake!) out of Iran have become its lasting legacy. Because, more than anything, it undermines Panahi’s editing work on the film, the primary reason for making us believe in Panahi and Mirtahmasb’s own unwavering belief in cinema. As the title describes, the film is not a film; it’s many. It begins as a staid documentary, an unfussy recording of Panahi’s house arrest and his anxiety over his impending sentencing. Twelve minutes into this “film,” however, Panahi, citing the narrative rupturing moment from The Mirror, “takes his [performative] cast off.” At that moment, the film essentially “breaks,” mimicking the State’s disruption of Panahi’s (and other Iranian filmmakers’) filmmaking. But then, after some deliberation, Panahi gets back to “making” another film by reading and enacting screenplays previously scrapped by the State for their anti-establishment sentiments. Gradually, the narrative flow of the first 12 minutes returns. But then again, in five minutes, there’s another “break.” Panahi employs this disruptive making/breaking structure throughout This Is Not a Film: in its most formally audacious moment, a scene cuts straight after Panahi says “cut,” directly and defiantly contradicting an earlier instance when Mirtahmasb refuses to do so when told by Panahi because, technically, he’s forbidden by State law to “direct.”

This Is Not a Film’s overall optimism comes from ending on such a note of uninterrupted making. While escorting Mirtahmasb out of his apartment, Panahi finds a new subject that guides him and his new film out of the apartment. Simultaneously thrilling and candid, the film’s final 10 minutes see Panahi follow Hassan, a young, hard-working arts student, down the elevator as he collects and disposes of the building’s trash. Panahi’s curiosity about Hassan’s ambitions reveals his interests and his struggles to materialize those artistic interests. There’s no hint of performativity from Hassan’s side because there’s no space or time for him to indulge in it: the claustrophobically narrow elevator stops at every floor for Hassan to do his work repeatedly. This immediacy — brought upon by the non-actor and the location — mirrors earlier scenes in the film when Panahi looks back at the similarly spontaneous process in his pre-arrest works, The Circle (2000) and Crimson Gold (2003). It demonstrates how, despite being tied down, the camera allows Panahi to make a film, however short, with the same ethos as he did before.

Closed Curtain argues otherwise. Co-directed by Kambozia Partovi, Panahi’s second post-arrest feature finds him at his most despairing, reflecting the real-life depression he was going through as he spent months on end under house arrest. For that reason, the film’s setting differs from This Is Not a Film: it takes place inside Panahi’s secluded beachfront villa on the Caspian Sea, where he and his crew of four to five people went to shoot the movie secretly.

Credit: Celluloid Dreams/Variance Films

Its narrative structure, too, is remarkably different. The first half is a terrifically shot (cinematographer Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah) slow-burn mystery thriller notable for not featuring Panahi. Instead, Partovi stars as an unnamed man who takes refuge with his dog in a modestly big house. Initially, he does take solace in staying behind the black curtains he puts up after he enters the villa. He has time to write, space — limited as it is — to move. But, as the film’s masterful opening shot implies, this enclosed space is not much different from the open one outside; the closed curtains are just another form of vertical, jail-cell-like bars with patterned “X”s that make the house (foreground) as restricted and suffocating a space as the beachfront (background). The sudden appearance of two other characters, brother and sister (also running away from unseen authorities), only exacerbates this anxiety. Left alone with the unnamed suicidal girl (Maryam Moghadam), who seems to know much more about him than he knows about her, Partovi’s constructed “reality,” his closed-off space, begins to fall apart.

The second half begins with another characteristically astonishing narrative rupture. To Partovi’s shock, the girl abruptly begins tearing down the black curtains covering the house’s many rectangular movie-screen-like windows. As he tries to understand her reasons for doing so, we see a quiet, weary Panahi emerge from “backstage,” revealing (never explicitly) himself as the person hiding behind the first half’s fiction. The more time we spend with Panahi, the more the two characters from the first half seem to disappear (or at least not appear in the same frame as Panahi). Instead, they become contradictory voices rattling inside his head: the man accepting of his decision to center narratives around himself, the woman disapproving of his narcissistic, inward turn, which makes him contemplate suicide (Panahi and Jahanpanah visualize this tension in another memorably devastating shot that sees the director guiltily looking away from the girl in the poster from his film, The Circle). Ultimately, Panahi chooses life, but in doing so, bitterly acknowledges that the stories he tells may always have to center around himself; the restrictions the State places necessitate a self-centered restriction that Panahi, more than anyone else, wants to escape.

His following two films, Taxi and 3 Faces, show him trying his best to do just that. Made in 2015 when Panahi was still serving the final year of his travel ban, Taxi takes a cue from the last shot of Closed Curtain to move away from total seclusion into the crowd’s hustle and bustle: at a slight distance, of course. Panahi, posing as a taxi driver, places hidden cameras (to be precise, three small Blackmagic Pocket cinema cameras) inside the car to record his conversations with a host of colorful characters (most of them played by non-professional actors, some by Panahi’s family members). His aim is simple: ask characteristically curious questions that reveal people’s thoughts on everything from film censorship and traditionalist beliefs to dogmatic regimes and movie piracy. In doing so, they, not him, become the film’s center of attention.

Credit: Kino Lorber

3 Faces, made after Panahi’s travel ban within the country was relaxed, pushes this idea further. Unlike any of his previous films, the director remains a supporting character throughout here. Moving away from the city into a rural village right next to the Iran-Turkey border allows him to, finally, take a backseat. The film, instead, primarily focuses on three actresses young, middle-aged, and old; each hypocritically ostracized by a rural, male-dominated traditionalist society for choosing to be an “entertainer.”

And yet, it’s impossible not to take note of how Panahi’s necessitated presence in the frame, peripheral as it may be, creates this consistent (though mostly thrilling) tension between the docu-fiction film he wants to make and the self-reflexive docu-fiction film he’s forced to because of his reality. In Taxi, the expressive exuberance of, say, Panahi’s adorably spunky niece or the glowing optimism of the “Flower Lady” always competes with Panahi’s constantly agitated performance. Yes, the director is, in a way, where he feels most comfortable — Tehran’s busy streets. But he’s also not exactly there. He occupies a position similar to the fixed dashcam in his car: passively observant of what’s in front of him. The gurring sounds of a prowling motorcyclist, presumably state-sanctioned, are consistently present. But it’s not just him at risk now; it’s also the people seated next to him.

3 Faces similarly simmers with an undercurrent of violence, even though Panahi says “it’s the safest” he’s felt since his initial arrest. Partially because Amin Jafari’s cinematography makes the already sparse and rugged mountainous landscape look doubly imposing: low-angle and even wide establishing shots often position Panahi (and other characters) as dwarfed by the landscape’s enormity. And partially because of the constant suggestion that filmmaking (and acting) itself is fraught with uglier tensions than its young characters yet perceive: heated discussions between Panahi and Behnaz Jafari (the famous Iranian actress playing herself) about distrusting each other, and stray comments about Iranian directors mistreating actresses in the recent past, rub against the film’s otherwise empowering images and relaxed rhythms.

Credit: Sideshow/Variance Films

His most recent feature, No Bears, amplifies the concerns bubbling underneath the surface in these last two films. In other words, the tensions implied there are narrativized here: No Bears is an explicit interaction between two films — one meta-fictional, the other conventional drama. The first, shot chiefly with hand-held cameras to make the drama feel documentary-like, is about Panahi — still under a filmmaking and international travel ban imposed by the Iranian government — attempting to direct a feature film from a remote village on the Iran-Turkey border. Struggling to find a network connection to communicate with his crew members online, he spends ample time roaming around, clicking photos and (gently) probing the people housing him about the rationale behind their traditionalist beliefs. Before he realizes it, though, his curiosity gets him entangled in village politics. He has taken a photo of a couple not meant to be seen together because the girl, according to Sharia law, has been engaged to another man since birth. The village folks want to use this photo as evidence to incriminate the boy and potentially force the girl into marriage with her predestined husband. Panahi lies to protect the couple.

On a parallel track, the film he is directing (distinguished from the first visually by its use of noticeably orchestrated camerawork) is also about a couple trying to escape from Turkey to Europe. They have been in transit as refugees for over 10 years. The man, Bakhtiar, has finally arranged forged documents to allow his wife, Zara, to flee to Paris. But she refuses to go without him, demanding they leave together. So, with the help of Panahi (heard talking to actors and crew members while the camera is still rolling), he tries to find a way out for himself, too.

Both film and film-within-film reflect Panahi’s current anxieties. His feeling of profound isolation, of feeling homeless in a place supposed to be his home, manifests itself in both couples’ stories. His only way out, his only means of connection, seems to again be cinema: he seeks, through his directorial control, to find an escape route for his protagonists, otherwise confined by strict geographical and ideological boundaries.

But what if, rather than helping them, his camera’s intervention hurts them? What if the very medium he championed in This Is Not a Film, questioned but eventually reconciled with in Closed Curtain, destroys other people’s lives while serving his solipsistic need to “keep documenting” in No Bears? Panahi’s scathing self-indictment comes when Zara (Mina Kavani) breaks the fourth wall to tell Panahi to stop trying to manufacture a “false happy ending” for his movie characters, whose reality he’s turning into digestible (docu)fiction. The aftershocks of this characteristically jaw-dropping narrative rupture reach the central narrative starring Panahi in no time. The couple whom he was trying to protect with his lie attempt to flee the village and are shot (off-screen) by invisible forces situated at the border. Inadvertently but tragically, Panahi and his obsession with documenting reveal too much in No Bears; defiant filmmaking, unintentionally, becomes self-serving and, most troublingly, surveillant.[/ppp_patron_only]

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