But he is determined, seeing the publication of hundreds of these photographic relics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a way to reconstruct a part of Iran’s visual history, filling a vacuum left by a government that lives in constant denial of its pre-revolutionary past.
“There should be a whole office doing this, and I don’t even have an assistant,” he said. “But I believe in it.”
For Mr. Oskouei (pronounced os-koo-WEE), picture postcards are as much a part of the cultural healing process as the documentaries for which he was a recipient of a 2010 Prince Claus Award of 25,000 euros (about $37,000) from the Dutch Foreign Ministry. His films have broached delicate issues like female suicide in traditional communities, juvenile drug addiction and Iran’s crisis of youth identity, themes that could easily land an Iranian in jail.
He is best known outside Iran for his 2006 film, “Nose, Iranian Style,” about the prevalence of nose jobs in Iran, a world leader, per capita, with 60,000 to 70,000 operations a year. That reflects in part the fierce competition among young women for marriageable men after the 1980s war with Iraq, in which 400,000 Iranian men died. But the film’s real target, Mr. Oskouei says, is the consumerism and nihilism of contemporary Iran, compared with the years after the 1979 revolution, when people were prepared to die for their ideals.
In his 2004 film, “The Other Side of Burqa,” Mr. Oskouei’s camera captures the hurried night burial of a young bride who hanged herself from a ceiling fan in a fishing village on the Persian Gulf island of Qeshm, an all-too-common occurrence in a traditionalist society where young women can feel trapped.
His knack, experts say, is to capture these deeply personal scenes almost as if neither he nor his cameras were in the room. “He gets what he wants without any disturbance in the process,” said Ahmad Alasti, a professor of film studies at the University of Tehran.
Mr. Oskouei even penetrates the pagan exorcism ritual of zaar, a dance that originated in East Africa but is practiced in the coastal regions and islands of southern Iran. It is a wildly expressive dance performed to the driving rhythms of drums and the chants of men, and provides a rare outlet for women to unleash their passions in a restrictive society. Many of the women in the film speak frankly of their struggles with patriarchy and economic hardship, which severely limit their development as individuals.
But perhaps his most remarkable accomplishment is to handle these subjects mostly without running afoul of the clerics, the censors or other artists, some of whom have accused him of being too accommodating.
“In the Western world it is enough just to be an artist, but not here,” said Ali Dehbashi, the editor of a cultural magazine, Bukhara. “Knowing the censors, knowing how things are monitored, is the most important thing.”
“Art is not having one film banned and running to Los Angeles or Paris,” Mr. Dehbashi added. “The point is to stay, to work and to continue.”
When asked about his ability to take on apparently taboo topics without retribution, Mr. Oskouei said in measured tones, “We live in a very particular social and political situation.” His own extensive footage of supporters of both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the top opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, during the 2009 election campaign remains unedited — perhaps for historians to examine in a later age.
“Should I make a film that means I get thrown out of this society?” he asked. “I don’t want that. Should I make a film and use it to seek asylum in another country? I don’t want that at all. In the end, people have to be flexible. I think about how far I can go.”
Many of the giants of Iranian cinema, like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, have avoided the issue by shifting their base of operations abroad. But for Mr. Oskouei, that would risk what a close friend, Nasser Fakouhi, described in an article as a “slow death,” far away from all the “little rascals and desperate women” who populate his films.
没有评论:
发表评论