Sandra Schäfer / Madeleine Bernstorff
The Ladies

THE YEAR ZERO
During the revolution in March 1979, a number of Iranian women endorsed the idea of finally celebrating International Women's Day publicly again in Tehran, forty years after it was banned by Reza Shah in 1938, who instead declared January 7 National Women's Day. (1) At the same time, representatives of the French group Politics and Psychoanalysis (2) and the U.S. American author Kate Millet travelled to Tehran to support and give an account of the political work of Iranian feminists. As one can learn from Millet's book, Going to Iran (3), even the search for a venue for the event on International Women's Day was already quite difficult because the emancipation movement met resistance from both the Islamists and the majority of the left. In the left's opinion, the women were creating a divide in the revolutionary and class struggle. They judged their concern as "trivial" and "bourgeois". The Islamists, in turn, accused the women of being degenerate, subject to "Westoxication" and hostile towards Islam (Moghadam 1990: 9). The responsible committee blocked the provision of the event venue. On the evening of March 7, 1979, Khomeini's decree on the compulsory headscarf was announced. On the morning of March 8, 5,000 women gathered at the Tehran University to protest against it, they climbed over the gate locked by the Islamists and marched through the city. For the first time the established order met resistance. The women of the French Politics and Psychoanalysis group documented the protests with a 16-mm camera and conducted interviews with the demonstrators. This led to the joint production of the 13-minute film Mouvement de libération des femmes iraniennes - année zéro.

The camera is in the midst of events and at times pans to the outside where passers-by curiously watch the protesters. Old and young, secular and a very few religious women are among the protesters. Banners can be seen. Then the French voice-over sets in and translates the discussions with the participants of the demonstration. "We women sacrificed ourselves for the revolution - just like the men. We fought for our freedom and the freedom of our people with or without headscarves. If Khomeini continues in this way, I shall give up my religion - even though I am a devout Muslim". Another woman angrily declares: "I have been wearing the chador for years. It makes me immobile, I can't work well (...) I fight for my daughters not having to wear it anymore". Numerous schoolgirls participate in the protests. One of them criticizes: "They should have said right from the beginning that men and women are not equal. We raise our voices for our rights, for the same rights as men. If we don't rebel now, the constitution will be drawn up and we will be denied all our rights. We are not only protesting against the compulsory headscarf but for many more rights that are even more important". The voices against the decree are varied and vehement.

Shortly after these protests, Khomeini made concessions and relativized his decree by calling it a "request". Yet on March 12, 1979, 20,000 women again took to the streets. They did not trust this concession and made political demands such as the right to work, equal pay for equal work and freedom of press, assembly and expression. The protests in front of the television station in which ten to fifteen thousand women participated were ignored by the public media. In the following months the subsidies for day nurseries were cut. Women who had previously worked there lost their jobs. Looking after children was now a family matter and thus delegated to the women. In the name of Islamic law, women were banned from practising as judges. The protests of female judges and articled clerks were immediately supported by educated women's associations and individuals. The subordination of women under men was legitimated by clerics such as Ayatollah Motahari by the natural weakness of women (Bassiri 1991: 59). On June 6 the order was announced that women must wear headscarves in all state institutions and schools. Revolutionary guards saw to it that this order was followed. Compulsory veiling was soon afterwards introduced in all other public institutions and buildings. The women were gradually accustomed to veiling, and it was therefore not a big step when it was finally enforced on the streets. The establishment of the Islamic state led to a fundamental moral and cultural transformation of society. For women from traditional families, Islamizing initially meant more freedom, while the social room to move for those women who had been active before and during the revolution was drastically reduced. (4)

MORAL CINEMA
Prior to 1979 clerics deemed cinema disreputable and Westernized. During the course of the revolutionary uprising 180 cinemas, regarded as symbols of the corrupt Shah regime, were burnt down, demolished or closed - more than 30 in Tehran alone. Merely 256 cinemas in the entire country were spared (Naficy 2002: 30). But the significance of cinema for re-education was soon recognized. During his famous speech at the Behesht-e Zahrâ cemetery in Tehran in February 1979 Khomeini stated: "We are not opposed to cinema, to radio or to television. The cinema is a modern invention that ought to be used for the sake of educating the people, but as you know, it was used instead to corrupt our youth. It is the misuse of cinema that we are opposed to, a misuse caused by the treacherous policies of our rulers." (Khomeini 1981: 258).

At the beginning of the 1980s various institutions were founded whose mission it was to implement Islamic values in cinema, e.g., the Foundation for the Disinherited, the cinema department of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, under which the institution Farabi Cinema Foundation was established in 1983 as its executive branch for cinema. It provided equipment and, under the motto "Supervision, Guidance and Support", controlled the admission of scripts and completed films. Institutions such as the Iranian Young Cinema Society, founded in 1974 for training young filmmakers, or the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Youths (Kanun), newly established in the 1960s, continued their work after the revolution. All films produced or partly produced by the state must have In the Name of God in the opening credits as a sign that they have undergone censorship. Imported international films are also censored. (5) Films with "antirevolutionary" or "imperialistic" contents and films from the United States were banned, as was the screening of pre-revolutionary B-pictures called "Farsi films". "Incorrect passages" were cut or covered with a magic marker (6).

In order to inform the filmmakers of the current moral guidelines, a booklet with rules on correct filmmaking was published once a year by the responsible ministry. In its claim to virtuousness it resembles the "Hays Code" (7) introduced by film studios in the United States in the 1930s. It was believed that the female body radiated the threat of seduction, so that their provocative gait would divert the male audience's attention away from the ideological contents. Women were to be filmed in a seated position, without changes in their facial expression and with no close-ups. Preferred female roles were the loving mother, the devoted wife or the caring nurse. Filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Naderi and Panahi circumvented the rules of censorship by making children or men their protagonists.

The depiction of love on the screen was a great challenge for the filmmakers after 1979, since men and women were not allowed to touch each other. (8) The gaze was desexualized. Women had to be treated as siblings by men (Naficy 1999: 56f.). The female filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, in her film Banu-ye ordibehesht ("May Lady", 1998), doesn't even have the lover of the female protagonist Forugh appear on the screen. He is only present in the film through his letters and his voice on the answering machine.

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