Opinion The artist begs to differ

In his essays,“The Government of the Tongue” (1988) and “The Place of Writing” (1989),Seamus Heaney focuses on an essential role for the poet: the task of the poet is the preservation of beauty,especially when tyrannical regimes seek to destroy it. This is a prescription that underlies not merely the adversity that the artist must battle and triumph against (which,experience shows,might even heighten her expression and exactitude) but also,by implication,the conditions that should prevail in a liberal,“free” society. In a perfect world,there wouldn’t be any censorship. But the world isn’t perfect,and real life can’t bear out Heaney’s implication for societies where tyranny doesn’t reign — because there are no free societies. If the world were perfect,there wouldn’t be any need for WikiLeaks. In the absence of such an unattainable state of socio-political being,we find ourselves compelled to generally agree,not with Julian Assange but with governments,that we’d be better off without a lot of those “dangerous” disclosures in the public domain. When Jafar Panahi is sent to jail for six years and ridiculously barred from making films or even writing scripts for 20 years,do we the people (Iranians or otherwise,liberal or conservative) see ourselves behind this farce that could amount to tragedy? Here’s what Panahi himself had to say: “The assassination of ideas and sterilising artists of a society has only one result: killing the roots of art and creativity. It drives this crystal clear but sad message home: ‘You’ll repent if you don’t think like us.’”If the instinct to censure,or the fear of a liberal free-for-all,blinks in all of us,would that still place Tehran in the league of full-scale totalitarianisms (Nazi Germany,Stalinist Russia,and what have you) because it’s institutionalised this instinct? Panahi has been sentenced for “assembly and collusion and propagation against the regime”. He was arrested in March this year for his support for the opposition green movement and detained last year for attending the slain Neda Soltan’s memorial. But the regime denied in March that his arrest was political. Why jail him and ban his filmmaking if not to set an example for Iran’s artists who cleverly work within the system’s constraints to highlight injustices and indicate possibilities? Panahi’s films,astute social commentaries as they are,are not designedly political. Their political implications come by default,as a consequence of the films being made in a public,political space. And we know that the personal space is also political,shaped in response to the currents that flow outside.Yet,Iran is a complex place,where the clichés that apply to tyrannies elsewhere fall short because of the layered ironies and ambiguities. For example,it’s been standard among Western film scholars to say the Islamic Revolution’s codes distort reality on-screen — women in private don’t wear veils,but women in films are made to even at home. A less ethnographic perspective on Iranian cinema shows how the formal innovations of Iranian cinema began as the Revolution’s own tools to subvert this Western art form,to undo (Hollywood) cinema’s voyeuristic point of view,and create a new “national” cinema along with a new spectator. This “rupture” with dominant Western cinema automatically allowed the self-reflexivity in films such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994) or Panahi’s The Mirror (1997) — where the camera intrudes into the frame — that had earlier come to European cinema as a distancing and formally re-

orienting device. The Revolution made such devices indigenous and ideological.In her book,Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008),Negar Mottahedeh uses Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” to show how the regime grasped early on cinema’s ability to politicise the viewing experience — a tool to “regenerate” the “national body” in a “politicisation of the aesthetics”. Iranian cinema’s supreme irony is this: a new film grammar meant to perpetuate the Revolution turned on the regime when filmmakers like Panahi (whose films are proscribed) optimised the free aesthetic space available and began discomfiting the regime,even through pirated DVDs. The “terrible beauty” the Revolution had created came back to haunt it. Heaney’s tyrannical regimes don’t preclude the individual’s ability to think,but control and re-engineer her every thought. But that attempt at captivating the mind,as another refugee from totalitarianism — Czeslaw Milosz — would say,scares the individual about thinking for herself. The Iranian regime had tried that through cinema,and it backfired. An imprisoned Jafar Panahi is afraid not so much of being prevented from making films,but of not being allowed to think as a consequence of not making his films. Free societies,such as ours,don’t jail our Panahis,care little about cinematographic tools,but concede to allow state or private censors to monthly bowdlerise “foreign” films for our screens. That’s not really a subversion of the alien aesthetic or values. It’s a consensus of thoughtlessness.