Maryam Tafakory Reimagines an Erased Iranian Film History

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 250, ‘ON SET’

Over the last few years, I have opened each of my solo film programmes with a brief request: that the audience attends to what they cannot see, to consider why visibility may be overvalued. I’m attempting to distinguish between the acts of seeing and of witnessing, while encouraging viewers to read the images with a critical paranoia, assuming something is always missing. 

When it comes to Iranian post-revolution cinema, there is no shortage of missing subjects or bodies erased by the censors. Despite this, traces of them can be found in every single frame. For my younger self, watching these films always involved a form of double vision. I would see what was shown, but also what wasn’t – or, rather, what I knew I wasn’t allowed to see. You had to become aware of the things you couldn’t see before you could recognize how certain images or actions were serving as substitutes for what couldn’t be shown.

The rules are not there simply to remove all traces of banned elements; they are there to remind us of power structures and how, even in our most intimate viewing experiences, we are being controlled. Some find certain rules in Iranian cinema to be comical. But the more absurd a rule is, the more it reveals the sheer power of the authority enforcing it. Film crews, by bending to the rules, are not the only ones complicit in keeping the status quo: so, too, are those of us who have internalized these rules to have an uninterrupted viewing experience. For example, in an emotional scene where an injured soldier returns home to his mother, instead of embracing him, she throws herself at his feet, as physical touch is not permitted. Realizing that this act is merely a substitute for the prohibited embrace initially jars and disrupts the viewing experience but, over time, we begin to accept such substitutions, normalizing censorship.

No matter how much I enjoyed watching these films in the ’90s and ’00s, I almost never found myself reflected in their images and, when I did, it was always as a baddie, a castoff, a lost cause. It would only take a few strands of dyed hair escaping the veil, gum chewing or cigarette smoking to designate a female villain. It wasn’t just the misogyny or the absence of queer stories that was unsettling, but also the distortion of our realities and the insistence on punishing those who transgressed the boundaries.

In my short video Irani Bag (2020), I suggest that, because of the prohibition of touch in post-revolution Iranian cinema, words, objects and exchanges conspire and become mediators of the sensual. Bags are examined within the work as an intermediary of touch, both barrier and interceptor between two bodies, reminding us that physical contact is never erased, merely fetishized.

In my work, I try to imagine a new archive that draws on those films to highlight stories and bodies that have been erased. When I returned to this catalogue of post-revolution Iranian cinema, there was, of course, an urge to rewrite it with the stories that it could never contain. In Nazarbazi (2021), I did that through montage and banned poetry. In Mast-del (2023) and Razeh-del (2024), I wanted to write these forbidden stories directly onto the same images of the censorial cinema in which they were denied.

Razeh-del, for instance, is about two schoolgirls – myself and my friend Roya – who sent a letter to Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper, Zan, which ran for less than a year before it was shut down in 1999. There are four parallel stories in the film, but they are repeatedly interrupted. I kept each plotline unfinished so they could merge. To me, they are the same story: that of the erasure of women, not only from Iranian cinema but from society at large. There has always been a war on women. Within the multiple narratives of Razeh-del, our imaginations fill in the gaps of what is not depicted, inventing new stories. Imagination always escapes the rules.

As told to Cici Peng

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Fill in the Blank’

^{Main image: Maryam Tafakory, راز دل Razeh-del (detail), 2024, video still. Courtesy: the artist}