Stars in World Cinema by Andrea Bandhauer Michelle Royer

Author:Andrea Bandhauer, Michelle Royer [Andrea Bandhauer, Michelle Royer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780769776
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2015-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Alternate Configurations of Stardom in the Islamic Republic

With the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the successful film farsi industry was brought to an abrupt halt, and most of its stars and directors were prevented from working – many of them, like the Shah and his family, leaving Iran forever. The Revolution ushered in a radically altered ideological climate, with the establishment of an Islamic theocracy that opposed the Westernisation introduced by the Pahlavi Shahs and a re-Islamicisation of virtually all spheres of society. The association of film farsi with sex and sin brought initial condemnation of film; however, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s newly installed religious leader, declared that cinema could indeed be used for educational purposes, and that such a cinema would be ‘compatible with the healthy scientific and moral growth of society’ (Haghigi 2002: 112). Thus an entirely new type of cinema emerged within a few years of the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

This new Iranian cinema was ostensibly cleansed of the corrupt and immoral qualities of film farsi, including much of its commercial value and its female superstars. Sadr writes: ‘In clichéd terms, revolutionary cinema was a cinema at war with imperialism. This kind of filmmaking excluded profit, the star system and competition’ (Sadr 2006: 173). More incisively, Naficy writes: ‘By banning the actors’ and stars’ voices, faces, and bodies by legal and illegal harassments, impediments, lashings, and confiscations of their persons and properties, the new regime was not only going after the Pahlavi-era stars but also dismantling its star system’ (Naficy 2012a: 43). The purification of the film industry would have a significant impact on female roles. Until the mid 1980s, women barely made an appearance on the screen, and when they did they were invariably static and filmed in long shot rather than close-up, and were rarely the central protagonists (Naficy 2000: 564–6; Lahiji 2002: 215–26). It would be many years before a new generation of female stars would emerge.

The virtual disappearance of women from the screen allowed very little opportunity for female actresses to attain the kind of screen presence required to construct them as stars. For numerous film theorists, the close-up plays a crucial role in the formation of stars and their consumption. Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs and Roland Barthes have all pointed to the ways in which the close-up of a face can heighten the emotional, sensual, erotic and psychological connections between viewer and star, creating a sense of immediacy, proximity and intimacy (Doane 2003). The virtual absence of the female close-up in Iranian cinema during the first decade of the post-revolutionary period may in part be explained by the problems this implied intimacy between screen and viewer posed for modesty.

Only after the end of the Iran–Iraq war would women begin to achieve much greater screen presence and star power. The last two decades have seen the emergence of numerous female film stars, including Niki Karimi, Leila Hatami and Golshifteh Farahani. While these women might be said to hold

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