The failure of
love
Cleric Ali Afsahi teaches that films with violence and sex have
valuable things to show us about society. In his native Iran,
those opinions eventually put him in prison. Malu Halusa reports
Imagine Robert De Niro as an Iranian cleric. In a floor-length
robe and a white turban, Ali Afsahi stands in the front of an
Islamic university lecture room in Iran's holy city of Qom, showing
a video of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. With Woody Harrelson
on the rampage with a gun and Juliette Lewis screaming - enough
blood to make western audiences squeamish - religious students
and clerics watch impassively. Afterwards, Afsahi analyses the
film as a morality tale: the failure of love results in unbridled
brutality.
"People suppose that Stone's film is violent," he says
over the phone from his home in Tehran, "but to my mind it's
important to study the roots of things. If we understand how violence
starts, we can programme society to increase love and reduce violence."
In any other country, Afsahi's critiques of western auteurs, such
as Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers and Jim
Jarmusch, among others, would not be unusual. In Iran, it is an
offence that could lead to jail. His remarkable story is the subject
of Elli Safari's documentary, Medium of Love.
Iranians are no strangers to western cinema. Illegal video distributors
release the most recent Hollywood film the same week it is released
in the US. This was not always the case. During the revolution,
180 cinemas - 40% of the country's movie theatres - were burned
down, demolished or closed to protest against the corruption of
Islamic values by the west and the Shah. Immediately afterwards,
western movies were banned, but if you looked hard enough, they
could be found.
Afsahi, 40, is of the generation formed by the revolution. He
studied Islam 18 hours a day for 25 years. He saw his first western
film, The Wall, aged 22. Eventually, he stopped his religious
studies one proof short of becoming ayatollah and concentrated
on getting a thorough grounding in Chaplin and Hitchcock.
Afsahi watched uncensored western films denied to the general
Iranian public in film archives. One was in the government-run
Farabi Foundation, currently in charge of domestic film production
and foreign film distribution. Another was Kino Video, a collection
started by the documentary-maker Safari and three friends, which
screened films by Fassbinder, Welles, Kazan and Leone every evening
in Safari's northern Tehran home. Safari worked for Iranian TV
before the revolution, but when hardline clerics took over and
replaced the country's longstanding documentary tradition with
anodyne nature programmes, she helped to manage the archive and
then, in the late 1980s, joined the Commission on the Improvement
of Iranian Cinema for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
However, once Kino's owners refused to hand over the archive to
clerics in another department at the ministry who wanted to control
access to it, Safari and her friends were embroiled in a decade-long
court case. Eventually, a settlement stipulated that the archive
could only rent films to its clients - among them Abbas Kiarostami,
Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Daryush Mehrju'i, people working in or studying
cinema. Afsahi's religious students began borrowing films, but
Safari didn't know that their teacher was a cleric who taught
a Critique of Modern Film course within the context of Shi'a Islam
until she saw his picture - robes and all - in the Iranian Film
magazine.
For Afsahi, his course marries two traditions. "Religion
and cinema can be the window of love for human beings. They can
travel together on the highway [of life] without any problems."
He believes that films are modern-day parables. "Reservoir
Dogs by Tarantino, for example, refers to Christian myths. A simple
story: Jesus is on the road and he meets three people who found
a treasure. On the way back he sees that they have killed each
other." Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal taught the cleric
not to fear death.
In his classes in Qom and the holy city of Mashad, no topic is
taboo - even sex. He explains: "Whether the relations between
men and women on the screen are loving or cheating, in my society
it is automatically assumed that men and women shouldn't be together.
This makes my work difficult in the beginning. Some students react
by arguing, others threaten. It's dangerous, but I show that the
relations are not simple, and in some cases, they're deeply chaste.
Little by little, my students understand it's not pornography."
Movies, he stresses, have another vital function. "Through
cinema, very different societies can meet each other directly
and learn about humanistic ideals without interference."
Interference - or rather censorship - is a major problem in Iran.
Since the wave of murders in 1998 that targeted intellectuals,
the country has been at war with itself. The battle between fundamentalists
in charge of the judiciary and moderate reformists under President
Khatami has been taking place around issues of freedom of expression
and how much ordinary life can be revealed in newspapers, documentaries
and feature films.
As the editor of Cinema va Varzish, a weekly cinema and sports
magazine who also programmed film festivals for the Ministry of
Culture and Islamic Guidance, Afsahi understandably sided with
the reformists - in effect placing a bull's eye on his own head.
In 2000, after a four-day Cinema and Reformation film festival,
including the movies End of Days and Any Given Sunday, in the
southern Iranian city of Bushehr, he was summoned to the special
court for the clergy in Tehran. During the trial, he offered to
show and discuss the films with the judge. Instead, he was found
guilty of "insulting and libelling the clergy", and
sentenced to four months in the notorious Evin prison, where ironically
Afsahi once worked with political prisoners and found a roomful
of confiscated Iranian films, which affected him profoundly. As
part of his conviction, he was also defrocked.
In Medium of Love, he quotes Bergman - "Hell is like meeting
people who don't understand you" - and unpacks his robe and
turban kept in a cupboard in black, rubbish-bin liners, a metaphor
not lost on him. He refuses to wear them, even though President
Khatami, a personal friend, told him to ignore the court's ruling.
Afsahi is adamant. "If times change and the robe is no longer
a symbol of oppression, associated with the closing down of newspapers
and the arrest of intellectuals, and becomes a symbol of dialogue
and love, then I will put it on again."
Safari's documentary was shot in eight days, with some scenes
filmed in secret through a curtained car window. After she and
the crew had been spotted and arrested by a secret policeman near
the University of Tehran's campus, she pleaded that she was only
filming "positive" images of Islam. Before she and the
crew was released, a drug addict was beaten up in front of them.
Safari, who lives in Holland, remembers the clear message it sent:
"If you do something wrong, this could happen to you."
Medium of Love was broadcast in spring on NMO, Dutch Muslim Broadcasting,
which has one hour a week on Holland's TV channel NED1. Her film
provides a critical glimpse of Iran that the people living there
are not allowed to see - officially. Unofficially, the documentary
has joined the massive underground market in illegal videos.
Nowadays, whenever Afsahi plans a screening and lecture, he is
stopped by fundamentalist hardliners - some in powerful conservative
positions who have supported his work in the past. Once considered
a phenomenon in the world of clerics, he videoed all his interviews
for his religious students. Some archival footage appears in Medium
of Love, where a high-ranking religious leader insists that a
part of Islam's 10% tithe should go to making films.
Against this backdrop of Afsahi's theoretical love of cinema is
real love for his wife, the young Iranian director Zahra Amiry,
who recently finished her debut film, I Say I'm in Debt and She
Says Go On Pilgrimage, a critique of traditional Islam. Because
information and imagery are controlled in Iran, symbols take on
enormous meaning. When Amiry was writing her script, her husband
hoarded her pencil stubs, revealing his secret stash in Medium
of Love. Clandestine tokens of undying love might be all that
Iranians have in the unsettled days ahead.
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