[in]Transition

In Maryam Tafakory’s ‘chaste/unchaste’, excerpts from 32 Iranian films, spanning three decades, are rhythmically marshalled in a virtuosic ‘comparative’ sequence lasting under four minutes. This breathtaking audiovisual essay moves briskly from quadrilogical screen arrangements, separated (or joined) by a quantifying, ruler-like grid, or guidelines, through diptychs, finally arriving at single screen compositions featuring (more qualitative?) superimposition, coupled with varied forms of internal division. Screen mirroring, switching and (Venn-like!) colorised-overlapping visual techniques, meet swirling, echoing audio, both elements working constantly — to feminist ends — to defamiliarize, decenter, and unmoor our gaze and audition from their at-times hierarchical fixities. This montage purposefully complicates supposedly simple questions like: ‘is this me?’; and: are the components or terms of the depicted ‘chaste/unchaste’ binary really so different?  

For me, this very original audiovisual work needed no particular supplement. But the highly compelling and scholarly creator’s statement that Tafakory has provided is nonetheless most welcome. It adds richly useful contextualisation with regard to feminist theory, to Iranian culture and history, as well as to Tafakory’s biography and other video essay and artistic works. It also helps ‘chaste/unchaste’ make an even more explicit - at least, more verbal - connection to areas of growing importance in feminist screen media studies, such as art design, costume and prop studies. Working with such a large corpus of films, set out for us onscreen so swiftly, contiguously, and powerfully, helps to make this video a very significant and eloquent artefact indeed, in both scholarly and political terms.

[The main review, below, refers to Maryam Tafakory's original submission that has since been revised for publication]

Maryam Tafakory’s ‘chaste/unchaste’ opens on a black screen with a title quote from Hélène Cixous: ‘the binary hierarchy is always a relationship of violence and the feminine term, is always killed’. This sets up expectations about how to read and view what follows. 

Formally, the screen is split into quadruples, the images in the upper left and right being repeated but reversed on the lower row. Formally, in the fast-paced edit, this results in both a horizontal contrast between the two images in the upper and lower rows as well as their repetition on the diagonal. The images of women are culled from Iranian cinema from the 1990s over a 30-year period. 

Initially, the contrasting images are obviously binary: in one image the woman is a seductress (unchaste?); in the other, more subservient (chaste?). All cover their hair, the main seductress (the same images reappear in the edit) wearing a fur hat, (and collar), the others, wigs and/or richly coloured scarves, the more subservient wearing traditional black hijabs, though some wear pearls and portray a defiant air. Sometimes text takes the place of an image contrast. For example, in the first sequence, the word ‘chaste’ appears in the upper left hand slot, ‘unchaste’ in the lower right hand one. Occasionally, an image of a leopard appears in lieu of a ‘seductress’. 

To an audience versed in classical Hollywood cinema, in which, as feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane have discussed, the image of woman is a male fantasy that oscillates between virgin/mother and whore/femme fatale, Tafakory’s binary is no surprise. Tafakory’s accompanying statement that in Iranian cinema ‘woman is neither censored nor misrepresented; she does not exist’, also chimes with mainstream Hollywood’s reductive categorisation and control of female sexuality, as well as its use of codes. Although the ideologies of Hollywood cinema and Iranian cinema are different, and the lives of women in Iran are severely constricted, nonetheless, the cinematic image of the woman as a male fantasy resonates across borders. 

However, Tafakory has hijacked these images of women from Iranian cinema, taking them out of narratives in which perhaps they do ‘get killed’, her video 'chaste/unchaste' performing, to my mind, a reading against the grain, an approach which has been and still is adopted by feminist film theorists who love cinema and its female stars despite the reductive binary of the patriarchal imaginary. While the single screen sequence at the end intimates another direction, in the main body of the short video, what starts out as a clear binary begins to blur due to the fast-paced edit and the interchangeability of images across both the contrasts and the repeated diagonals, which make the women, only glimpsed for seconds, seem as if they are talking to one another. This is pleasurable, as is the alternation of props such as the fur hat, a rose, sunglasses, and other jewellery which can allow a female spectator to look at stereotypes with a different gaze – I’m thinking of Doane’s work on the accoutrements of femininity as pleasurable cinematic signifiers for a female gaze. 

What I am calling Tafakory’s ‘reading against the grain’, or in technical terms, hijacking, reaches a climax in the quadruple edit when the women in the contrasting clips converge towards the middle of the frame, one, holding dresses and asking which one is the nicest, the other, trying on various scarves with enjoyment. This climax is technically registered by a glitch that disrupts the quadruple like a stutter, while the women’s voices are slowed down, the distortion sounding like an underground groan. This sequence offers at least two ways of reading: one, the excess of female pleasure is too much for the image to contain, so it glitches. This could be seen as the video’s internal resistance to patriarchal constraint. But, given that the binary doesn’t seem to go away, the sequence could also be read as an internalised policing of desire, in other words, the women, across the diagonal, are censoring one another about what they can or cannot wear. The video’s strength is that in such a short space of time – just over three minutes – so many readings coalesce. 

As the video moves towards its dénouement, it becomes split-screen, and in the final sequence, single-screen. Here Tafakory seems to undermine reading against the grain and the promise the glitch might afford in terms of disrupting the binary. Single shots of women looking askance into mirrors touching their faces as if uncertain of the reality of their existence, or dismantling their image by pulling off wigs, jewellery and false eyelashes, set up expectations of another space outside of the binary, one in which the woman might assert a realness beyond the prop, but, rather than this, the video ends with a shot of the glamorous fur-clad woman, who opened the montage, still sniffing a rose as she glances out from under heavily made-up eyes. The cyclical, non-narrative temporality of Tafakory’s video seems to suggest that there is no way out of the imaginary binary of chaste/unchaste, although for a moment it looked and sounded like there might be. Having seen Tafakory’s previous videos, which often combine poetic forms of writing with her appropriations from Iranian cinema, I wondered if another title quote or text might be useful in the conclusion, one that might underscore the ambiguity that is always at work even in the most stereotypical cinematic images of the woman. The ending left me with nowhere to go other than to repeat the same cycle over again. But perhaps that is the point? 

Update

Maryam Tafakory's resubmission makes what was already a strong piece of video criticism even stronger. The revisions include substituting the previous opening citation for a quote from Cixous that foregrounds the personal and also addresses the viewer directly. The addition of the repetition of the question 'is this me?' at the end opens things up without leaving them hanging. And the concluding image sequence now includes some visually stunning and materially critical superimpositions that further complexify the binary. The women are now 'speaking' to one another even more than before across the diagonals and horizontal juxtapositions. This is a brave work.