In light of the globally resonant cultural revolution of Iranian women during the past few years with its Kurdish motto—Jin, Jiyan, Azadi––the recent nomination of Mohammad Rasoulof’s Farsi-speaking, Iran-based The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2023) for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award in the category of Best International Feature Film as a German production once more foregrounds the longstanding, complex transnational trajectory of Iranian cinema (Naficy 2011), commencing with the very first Iranian talkie, Dokhktar-e-Lor ya Iran-e-Diruz va Iran-e-Emruz/The Lor Girl: The Iran of Yesterday and the Iran of Today (Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhossein Sepanta, 1932).

Separated by almost a century yet bound together by their centering on women’s struggles to claim freedom in the vicious, confining, patriarchal structures of modern Iran, these films nevertheless bespeak an uneasy relationship between representations of women and ethnicist regimes of aesthetics and mimesis. Hatching from the Persian psyche as well as its official archive, this tenseness typically both feeds and yields the erasure of Iranian Black people from Iran’s cultural memory. Looking at narratives of Iranian women’s resilience and resistance through the lens of transnational cinema exposes how myths of Persian racial superiority and ethnic homogeneity sideline or fully subtract racialized identities. 

Crafted by the Imperial Film Company in colonial Bombay amidst the steady rise of Indian nationalism in opposition to British Raj India, The Lor Girl was produced under Parsi-Zoroastrian patronage of the Iran League––an organization founded in 1922 by prominent Parsis, the descendants of refugees who migrated to the Indian subcontinent after the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century. Initially assisting their fellow Zoroastrians in India, Iran League gradually and through its official journal,The Iran League Quarterly, and films like The Lor Girl, expanded its objectives of revitalizing and strengthening the Indo-Iranian cultural and political ties and publicized ideas of purified Persianness with an eerie echo of Aryanism. 

The Lor Girl intersectionally calls forth Persian identity in nationalist, gender, ethnic, and racial terms. It mobilizes the literary trope of the damsel in distress, but ethnically pronounced as a non-Persian (Lor) girl figure threatened by male Arab predators and hence in need of heroic protection by the military Persian men of the “new” Iranian nation. An icon of Iranian womanhood wed to the Pahlavi king’s modernizing, male-controlled ideology during an ambitious expression of Parsi-Persian imperial aspirations, the film’s protagonist, Golnar (played by Roohangiz Saminejad), also affords a gendered image of modern, Persian-dominated Iranian identity.

From feminist as well as film historical perspectives, Saminejad’s pioneering performance today is commonly known for enacting the drastic change of enforced unveiling of women in the process of Iran’s modernization (Ṣadr 2006). Nevertheless, the actress herself faced harassment due to her (involuntary hyper)visibility and was later ostracized for years. At once carrying an emancipatory impulse and symptomizing marginalization, the duality in the persona of Saminejad/Golnar also bears a mark of gendered-ethnic encounters, foreshadowing not only the cult, camp, transnationally hybrid of Filmfarsi (Tabarraee 2020; Naficy 2011) but also the canonized arthouse works of Iranian filmmakers after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Dabashi 2001). 

Indeed, The Lor Girl evokes Orientalist imagination (Said 1979) in its visual cueing system and sonic use of phonological elements of Persian poetry and music. The narrative begins with Golnar’s dance with dayereh-zangi (tambourine) in the exoticized soundscape of a teahouse in Khuzestan (Nooshin 2019), progresses dramatically to colonial Bombay as a site of liberation (Fish 2018) and culminates in the propagandist resolution of the piano-playing scene (Jabbari 2023) that is designed not only to fulfill its immediate, contradictory political objective––the annexation of the image of unveiled Iranian woman to the service of the state’s transgressive unveiling of women––but also, I content, proliferate racist ideas in sync with the Enlightenment-informed, contrapuntal conceptions of anti-Black taste and European civility (Gikandi 2011). 

Golnar the Lor girl, the feminized zeitgeist of the modern nation of Iran under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi, not only had to be(come) “free(d)” from the thievery and tyranny of the regressive Oriental Other. But also, in the eventual close-up of her unveiled content face, Golnar shared docility with an almost invisible Other whose “proper,” that is submissive, portrayal in the anxious ethnocentrism of Persian fantasy was distinct from the uncivilized invasive Arab. In the film’s concluding moments, both poles of the gendered-ethnic Other in asymmetrical relation to the Persian identity––the (un)veiled Iranian woman and the aggressive, excessive Oriental Other––collapse into the architecturally footnoted Black figure of the servant.

Although in 1929, the Iranian National Parliament ratified an anti-slavery bill and Reza Shah ensured the official abolition of slavery in Iran, The Lor Girl’s finale omits this crucial aspect of modernization from the “factual” intertitles that boast the tenure of the Pahlavi government. In that, the film works in tandem with the scarcity of archival materials about the Indian Ocean network of slave trade that spanned over millennia. To be sure, unlike the substantial, theoretically sophisticated literature of Black Studies that deals with transatlantic slavery and its aftermath, scholarly considerations of racialized blackness that would connect West and Southwest Asia to East Africa have only recently become a subject for the compulsively comparative studies in visual and performative arts. 

In the context of Iran, this undertheorization is nevertheless irrecoverably at odds with the aesthetic evidence that reveals a persistent presence of “figures of blackness” (Vaziri 2023) in the history of Persian culture in both its traditional forms (Haji Firuz, siyāh-bazi; see Baghoolizadeh 2021) and more contemporary manifestations, from family photographs in private albums (Baghoolizadeh 2024) to public pieces like Rasoulof’s debut film Jazireh-ye-Ahani/Iron Island (2005). Critically metaphorizing the Islamic seizure over Iran’s project of nationalist development as a deteriorating, abandoned ship, Iron Island particularly renders a black Ali Nassirian (as Captain Nemat) in a fashion that taunts the ethical praxis of ethnographic representation and, in turn, is haunted by the black figure of the enslaved Other in the Persian mind.

A paternal persona in Iranian national cinema and television, Nassirian appears in the film paradoxically siyāh: a mimetically Black “southerner” and markedly incompetent, Nemat is also a patronizing leader speaking fluent Tehrani Farsi among the less affluent Black men and women characters speaking sporadically in accented Farsi. Limiting the ethnologic attention to the native characters in a subnarrative capacity, the film’s grim tacit comic effect is primarily released through Nassirian’s central, racial embodiment of ineptitude. Iron Island criticizes Iran’s Islamic state at the expense of racializing blackness in the Perian aesthetic regime.

Wrapping in a feminist envelope Rasoulof’s political dissent against modern Iran’s theocracy, The Seed of the Sacred Fig dramatically narrates the government’s gendered repression by pivoting around an Orientalized Faustian situation that is imbued in the initial moral dilemma of a pious investigator named Iman (literally meaning “faith”). In the very first shot of the film, the newly promoted Iman signs a deal with the Mephistophelian authorities of the Revolutionary Court. Raised salary, the promise of a larger apartment, and a loaded gun are given to him in exchange for his soul and morality: now, he has to approve the death sentences of protestors, most of whom are women. Perhaps the most German element of the film hides from nationalist feminist sight and stops self-disavowal only when spotted on a transnational plane. 

Unlike Goethe’s Doctor Faustus, who, despite all of his wrongdoings, eventually finds transcendental redemption, Iman moves downward, drowning in the sea of his sins. Gradually losing his weapon as well as his tight grip over the women of his family, and finally falling and dying, Iman’s cartoonishly exaggerated ineptness in the face of his religiously disciplinarian, misogynistic character not only belies the tribulations of Iranian women characters in the film. But The Seed’s narrative developments, mounted on an Orientalist framework that betrays the feminist packaging of the film, also subtract racialized blackness from Rasoulof’s ethnopolitics, or rather, abstract blackness principally in the negativity associated with the form of black chador, that is, the most emphatic sign of oppression of Iranian women’s civil rights today.

Juxtaposing The Lor Girl with Iron Island and The Seed thus inescapably magnifies in Rasoulof’s canonized oeuvre an oft-overlooked arc that racializes blackness and then subtracts racialized blackness. An always occluded, stressed, yet silenced Otherness, the significance of racialized blackness remains oddly fundamental nonetheless unfathomable in terms of the hegemonic ideologies on national scales. This oddity, by design, reflects the ways in which the privileged masculinized Persianness depends on the subtraction of Blackness from his ethnic-gendered Other.

Studying figures of blackness from the feminist perspectives that are also concerned with transnational frameworks thus permits a novel critical focus on the blankness within modern discourses as well as audiovisual expressions of women and queer identities present at various locations of the Indian Ocean. By virtue of Blackness, emancipatory modes of thought in modern Iran approach an infinite, unfixed, and underprivileged “bla(n)ckness” (Barrett 1999) that destabilizes and inevitably defaces the dominant methods of value production in order to give a face to a previously unarticulated, unthinkable, unimaginable Other. 

References

Baghoolizadeh, Beeta. 2021. “The Myths of Haji Firuz: The Racist Contours of the Iranian Minstrel.” Lateral (Island Lake) 10 (1). ———. 2024. The Color Black: Enslavement And Erasure In Iran. 1st ed. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press.

Barrett, Lindon. 1999. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double. Vol. 116. Cambridge [England]; New York; Cambridge University Press. 

Dabashi, Hamid. 2001. Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. Book, Whole. London;New York; Verso.

Fish, Laura. 2018. “The Bombay Interlude: Parsi Transnational Aspirations in the First Persian Sound Film.” Transnational Cinemas 9 (2): 197–211. 

Gikandi, Simon. 2011. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Book, Whole. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Jabbari, Alexander. 2023. "The Sound of Persianate Modernity: Gendered Soundscapes in Modern Iran." Philological Encounters 8 (2-3): 121-149.

Naficy, Hamid. 2011. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978. 1st ed. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Nooshin, Laudan. 2019. “Windows onto Other Worlds: Music and the Negotiation of Otherness in Iranian Cinema.” Music and the Moving Image 12 (3): 25–57.

Ṣadr, Ḥamīd Riz̤ā. 2006. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. Vol. 7;7.; Book, Whole. The Hague;New York;London [England]; I.B. Tauris. 

Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. First Vintage books. Book, Whole. New York: Vintage Books. 

Tabarraee, Babak. 2020. “Iranian Cult Cinema.” In The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, 1st ed., 1:98–104. Routledge. 

Vaziri, Parisa. 2023. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive. University of Minnesota Press.