City in Iranian Films

‘City’ is a word and the image this word creates in mind implies place and location. Actually in many feature films, city goes beyond a denotation. Posited in the corpus of a film, ‘city’ creates different significations. In the film Rome, Open City by Roberto Rosselini, city is the symbol of vulnerable and oppressed people, while in Sin City (Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez) it’s a locale where sin is founded. Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese) observes the historical basis and origins of people. From the other hand, films like The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci) or Sleepwalkers (Doug Aitken) illustrate city as a historical context for humans to go through experiences and to find their social definition.

Throughout the history of Iranian cinema, urban life has always had a particular status. Migration from villages to the cities has rightly been interpreted as a significant cultural issue, and city regarded as a symbol of power. Village, the symbol of rural life, always confronts city which exploits migrated peasants. For its incongruous architectural context and unsightly visual composition, the Iranian capital Tehran has been considered as the symbol of confusion, a perilous environment which always threatens human characters. Meanwhile, those Iranian directors who began their career in documentary cinema offered a more harmonious composition in terms of narratives and themes.

One of the prime examples of these directors is Rakhshan Bani-E’temad, who employed such a vision in her later fiction films Under the Skin of the City and Mainline. Under the Skin of the City depicts Tehran as a grey city in both explicit and implicit terms which leads the characters to a living hell. The same is reiterated in Mainline where the central character, a drug addict girl cannot loose her habit while staying in Tehran. Shortly after leaving the city, she enters the process of healing and recovering. The images of the busy and tense city are of course to be compared with the peaceful and tranquilizing environment of northern Iran. In the same vein, The Last Wednesday Fireworks by Asqar Farhadi also depicts city as the symbol of agitation which provides ground for unpredictable forthcoming events. With Song of Sparrows, Majid Majidi recently illustrated immoralities of life in Tehran. The city is a strange place which cannot tolerate the simple and innocent main character of the film. Obviously, similar characters can be observed in numerous other Iranian films, such as the significant Killing Rabid, by Bahram Beizaei. Here city always threatens the main female protagonist while shadows of invasion and alienation dominate the film atmosphere.

Such visions are even more evident in documentary cinema, in which city is the center of unusual incidents. The documentaries by Mehrdad Oskouei, for instance Days without Calendar and Nose, feature urban people with numerous concerns and troubles. They reveal their inner feelings, thoughts, and contradictions. The works of irectors like Kaivan Ali-Mohammadi, Omid Bonakdar, Robert Safarian, or Pirouz Kalantari have differently looked upon city; however none of them offer a positive view. Nonetheless, in his film, Tehran has no more Pomegranates, Massoud Bakhshi presents a different viewpoint of the subject. The film draws on Tehran with a satirical approach. People there have several contradictions which lead to humorous moments.

Those cities which are in the transitional stage from tradition to modernity transpose such images in cinema. It offers more often sadness than delight: people there tend to experience modern world through their traditional ideas, which leads to lots of dramatic contradictions.

Ramtin Shahbazi – Translation: Ali Ameri