Sandra Schäfer / Madeleine Bernstorff
The Ladies

Tondar as Tomboy in Dokhtar-e Tondar (»A girl called Tondar«, 2000) byHamaya Petracian.

Youth-photo of an exil iranian woman in "Kopftuch als System/Machen Haare verrückt?" (2004) by Shina Erlewein, Fatiyeh Naghibzadeh, Bettina Hohaus and Meral El.

During the Berlin- Iran-conference of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, April 2000, in "Kopftuch als System/Machen Haare verrückt?" (2004).

BERLIN
In their video Kopftuch als System/Machen Haare verrückt? (Headscarf as a System/Does Hair Drive People Crazy?) (2004) the directors Shina Erlewein, Fatiyeh Naghibzadeh, Bettina Hohaus and Meral El span a broad range of issues from the women's demonstration in 1979 - using excerpts from the film Mouvement de libération des femmes iraniennes - année zéro - to the heatedly debated events at the Berlin Iran Conference organized by the Heinrich-Böll Foundation in April 2000. (26) Iranian women living in Berlin describe how compulsory veiling was introduced after the "so-called" revolution. They give an account of how the left did not take the women's issue seriously at the time and that it was not clear to them how men, too, can be controlled via the women - and thus the entire society. All women protesting against the compulsory headscarf were regarded as "bourgeois capitalistic dollies". One of the protagonists comments on two photographs from her youth that both show her austerely dressed, on one with and on the other without a headscarf: "That's how I dressed as a Marxist, the only difference is the headscarf". She thus describes the fatal uniformization and splitting off of "what is feminine" in the classical left that in phenomenological terms is similar to the veiling of femininity in the Islamic dress code, which underscores the sex, while clothing of the left tends to be unisexual.

This is followed by pictures from the Berlin Iran Conference in April 2000 which was held after Khatami's election. One sees crowd barriers and at a distance protesters with banners reading: "Stop the stonings, Abolition of the death sentence, Down with the Islamic Republic". A commotion starts, a woman demands "one minute silence for the people executed in Iran". Shouts and whistles - she's dragged out of the hall by two guards in a military look - the camera is in the middle of the scuffle. One female activist came up with "the most provocative kind of performance": She strips down to her underwear, puts on a headscarf and leaves the hall. A man strips naked and shows his torture scars and a photo of his executed brother. In press reports at the time, from the daily papers Tagesspiegel to taz, the protests were discredited as "fanatical" and "undemocratic". (27) A book later published by the Heinrich-Böll Foundation distances itself from the protesters. The video Kopftuch als System/Machen Haare verrückt? deals with feminist positions and irreconcilable controversies that are carried out in a vehement way, especially in exile.
"No discussion is complete without considering the output of Iranian filmmakers in exile since the Revolution. [In one study I conducted, they had made over 300 fiction, non-fiction, animated and avant-garde films in two avant-garde films in two decades of displacement in nearly a dozen European and North American countries.] This made them by far the most prolific filmmaking group among the middle Eastern exiles in the West. Although these filmmakers are diverse politically and religiously, the majority of them are united in their opposition to the Islamist regime." (Naficy, Hamid: Islamizing film culture in Iran, in: Tapper, Richard: The new Iranian cinema, 2002, London, p. 57)

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Notes

1. At the time this decision marked the beginning of the so-called unveiling campaign within the frame of more far-reaching modernization programmes. Even women who opposed wearing the chador regarded this campaign not as an emancipation strategy but as a measure of political oppression. Three years earlier, Reza Shah banned all independent women's associations. He only allowed charity work, sport clubs and alphabetization courses for women. After Reza Shah stepped down (1941) independent women's organizations and publications were again established. Women played a decisive role in the support of the national movement and the national government (1951-1953). Reza Shah's son toppled the Mossadegh government in a coup initiated by the CIA in 1953 and suppressed numerous women's organizations and publications in the process.
2. The group Politics and Psychoanalysis was a French women's group lead by the authoritarian psychoanalyst Antoinette Fouque, who today counts as the "most extreme advocate of a biologically determined difference-feminism" (Galster 1999: 597).
3. Cf. the contribution by Nicolas Siepen in this volume.
4. Cf. the contribution of Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi and badjens.com in this volume.
5. During the Khatami period there were several possibilities to privately produce, distribute and export films. In October 2005 the new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned the screening of foreign films claiming that they insult Muslim culture by depicting alcohol, drugs, liberals, anarchists, secularists and feminists.
6. When I viewed the film Gozaresh ("The Report") by Kiarostami (1977), I was irritated and had to keep on looking at a dancing black spot that covered a portrait of the Shah on the wall of the Ministry of Housing, thus emphasizing it more than concealing it. [Note by S.S.]
7. According to the "Hays Code", criminality was no longer to be shown, the sacredness of the institution of marriage was to be upheld and rooms with which sexuality is associated, e.g., bedrooms, were to be avoided.
8. In Persian literature authors could play with the ambiguity of divine and worldly love or with whether the lover is a man or woman (due to the lacking differentiation between the sexes in Persian grammar).
9. "It is true that a film must have a message, but this does not mean that we must deny its entertaining aspects. Society needs entertainment; lack of joy reduces one's effectiveness and involvement" (Rafsanjani 1985, cited in Naficy 2002: 49).
10. Naficy comments on this development in a sarcastic way as the successful learning effect with filmmakers who have meanwhile internalized the rules.
11. Cf. the contribution of Dominik Kamalzadeh in this volume.
12. 12 Nahid Rezaie started studying at the Film Academy in Tehran in 1983, from which she was suspended two years later for religious reasons. She continued her film studies in Paris. Back in Tehran she shot a short film and several documentary films. Over several years Nahid Rezaie was head of the private organization of Independent Documentary Filmmakers in Iran which was founded in 1997 on the initiative of several documentary filmmakers with the permission of the state. In 2004 she organized a week of Iranian documentary film in Tehran.
13. Even if 63 percent of the students are women today, the pressure is very high on school-girls because there are by far not enough university places. (cf. Amirpur 2003: 84).
14. Transsexuals are met with rejection and often accosted as homosexuals. According to Iranian law, homosexuals are sentenced to death. In July 2005 two youths were hanged because of homosexuality. But there are other private practices beyond the official order. The report Iran's sex-change operations by Frances Harrison, which was broadcast by the BBC on January 6, 2005, is dedicated to the theme of transsexuality.
15. Turkey, for which Iranians do not require a visa, is the most important transit country from where they try to reach Europe or the United States. The United States Embassy in Tehran has been closed since 1979.
16. Prominent filmmakers and politicians had supported Milani, who would have been sentenced to death. After Khatami informed the court of the existence of a screening permission issued by the Ministry of Culture and convinced them that the government should have made its objections clearer in the past, Milani was released on bail.
17. The poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) rebelled against bourgeois conventions in her life and in her poems. She speaks openly of sexuality and her emotions in her poems, something which is still a male privilege in public. In 1958 she met the filmmaker and producer Ebrahim Golestan. In 1959 she studied film in London and after her return to Iran she worked at the Golestan Film Studios as a cutter, e.g., for the film Yek atash ("A Fire") about the burning oil fields in Khuzestan. In 1962 she shot Khaneh siah ast ("The House is Black"), a film about the leprosy colony in Tabris. Cf. the obituary Keine Irrtümer mehr by Chris Marker in this volume.
18. "It was my idea, but the dialogues belong to the actors", Kiarostami says (cited in Geoff 2005: 44).
19. Conversation with the director in November 2002 in Tehran.
20. Already in the films Va zendegi edameh darad ("And Life Goes On...", 1992) and Zir-e derakhtan-e zeytun ("Through the Olive Trees", 1994), many scenes take place in a car. Ta'm-e gilâs ("A Taste of Cherry", 1997) was almost entirely shot in an automobile.
21. The Fadjr Film Festival is the largest international film festival in Iran.
22. Like, for example, in the book Not without my Daughter by Betty Mahmoody (1987) which was filmed.
23. In her book Marriage on trial (1993), the anthropologist Ziba-Mir Hosseini, who lives in London, examines Islamic family law in Iran and Morocco. In 1996 she met the documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto, who together with Claire Hunt in 1990 had made the film Hidden faces with and about women in Egypt, in which an issue is the disappointment by the feminist Nawal El Saadawi.
24. In Iran, men file a divorce without giving a reason, except if there is an agreement between both partners prior to the marriage stipulating this.
25. Some criticized that the film only shows the lower middle class, thus painting a backward picture of Iran. Others found that the film presents the situation of women too positively and accused it of being propagandistic (cf. Mir-Hosseini 2002).
26. Parts of the Iranian opposition in exile felt passed over by the preparations for the conference. The organizers were criticized because the majority of guests were from the government.
27. Cf. Der Tagesspiegel from April 9/10, 2004, and die tageszeitung from April 10, 2004.
28. Eine Konferenz und ihre Folgen. Iran nach den Wahlen (2001) documents the various conference contributions from the religious and secular camps. An excerpt from the preface: "The conference which was accompanied by positive expectations by many sides was clouded over by the actions of an inconsiderate minority that in the name of 'revolutionary resistance' spared no effort to prevent the dialogue on an internal reform of Iran by various social movements. Tragically, these actions met the interests of the Islamic right in Iran - as the ensuing instrumentalization of the disturbances of the conference by the Iranian state television and the fundamentalist power faction demonstrated." After the conference around 30 people were arrested in Iran, and starting in fall of 2000 sixteen trials against participants were held. In January of 2001, ten defendants were sentenced to up to ten years in prison plus five years of banishment.

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Literature:

Amirpur, Katajun 2003: Gott ist mit den Furchtlosen, Freiburg

Bassiri, Nasrin 1991: Nicht ohne die Schleier des Vorurteils, Frankfurt/Main

Dönmez-Colin, Gönül 2004: Women, Islam and cinema, London

Galster, Ingrid 1999: Positionen des französischen Feminismus, in: Frauen Literatur Geschichte, Stuttgart, S. 591-602

Geoff, Andrew 2005: 10, London

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Hg.) 2001: Eine Konferenz und ihre Folgen. Iran nach den Wahlen, Münster

Khomeini, Ruhollah 1981: Islam and revolution: Writings and declarations of Imam Khomeini, Berkeley

Millett, Kate 1982: Im Iran, Reinbek

Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 2002: Negotiating politics of gender in Iran, in: Tapper, Richard (ed.), The new Iranian cinema. Politics, representation and identity, London, S. 167-199

Moghadam, Val 1990: Revolution En-Gendered: Women and politics in Iran and Afghanistan, Ontario

Naficy, Hamid 1999: Veiled vision/powerful presences: women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in: Issa, Rose und Whitaker, Sheila (ed.), Life and art - the new Iranian cinema, London, S. 44-65

Naficy, Hamid 2002: Islamizing film culture in Iran: A Post-Khatami update, in: Tapper, Richard (ed.), The Iranian Cinema Politics, representation and identity, London, S. 26-65

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