Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Modern Time: Abbas Kiarostami's Immersions, from Sponsored Documentary to Slow Cinema

2022; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2022.0029

2578-4919

Simran Bhalla,

Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies

Modern Time:Abbas Kiarostami's Immersions, from Sponsored Documentary to Slow Cinema Simran Bhalla (bio) Abbas Kiarostami's educational film, Beh tartib ya bedoun-e tartib (Orderly or Disorderly, 1981), features four sequences of Tehran's citizens engaging in quotidian activities. In the first, a group of schoolboys descends the stairs to the schoolyard after class. In the second, they line up to drink water from the school water fountain. In the third, they board the school bus. The fourth sequence focuses on drivers negotiating a busy Tehran cross street. For each activity, we see how city life proceeds if citizens are orderly or disorderly. The orderly version of doing things saves everyone time, whereas in the disorderly versions, no one is able to complete their duties. This sense of time loss is experienced by the audience, who see the results of activities completed in an orderly fashion but are left waiting by disorderly citizens who fail to realize their goals. Beh tartib ya bedoun-e tartib is one of many films Kiarostami made for Kanoon, or the Iranian Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, the government organization that employed him for several years before he became an independent filmmaker. These non-profit films were made to encourage and, indeed, model good citizenship. This essay examines Kiarostami's state-sponsored instructional documentaries as pre-digital examples of pedagogical media that animate modes of bodily [End Page 160] conduct, in service of purportedly humanitarian or civic goals. I argue that Kiarostami's use of a time-based, and time-bound, medium's immersive potential aided viewers in their bodily adaptations to new temporal conditions. This history also contextualizes Abbas Kiarostami's immersive use of duration in later independent films, such as 24 Frames (2017). Many of the sponsored films were produced before the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79, when Iran was still a constitutional monarchy ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His wife, Farah Pahlavi, founded Kanoon. The Pahlavi regime's concerted interest in modernization is evident in the lessons and aesthetics of their state-sponsored films. Scholars of colonialism and documentary such as Peter J. Bloom argue that photorealistic imagery of social and public health problems, particularly ones perceived to originate in unmodern practices, helped to justify colonial interventions on a humanitarian basis. Such images link caring citizenship at home with civilizing missions and methods abroad.1 Here I propose that developing nation-states such as Iran likewise configured their state-sponsored educational films in terms of their humanitarian purpose, by tying citizens' bodily conduct to their own good health and well-being. Indeed, the Shah of Iran writes in his autobiography that films help communicate scientific and medical knowledge to the masses, demonstrating "new ways for helping ordinary people everywhere."2 Institutional media pedagogy also has a long relationship to theories of immersion. Museums construct immersive exhibitions and project educational IMAX films, militaries use virtual reality programs for training, and interactive digital projects aim to educate participants about histories and communities.3 Immersion as a pedagogical and epistemological method is also foundational in anthropology and ethnographic research. In anthropology, immersion has historically referred to a researcher's ability to absorb themselves in the field linguistically, socially, and professionally as a participant-observer in order to deepen their knowledge and perspective of the subject being studied. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead popularized this method of cultural learning—of living with the subject, in one sense or another—which now informs some modes of immersion in media pedagogy.4 Immersive pedagogical modes rely on duration, repetition, and the temporality of embodied activities. The instructional films I focus on here, Do rah-e hal baraye yek massaleh (Two Solutions for One Problem, 1975) and Beh tartib ya bedoun-e tartib (both directed by Abbas Kiarostami), also engage in repetition and the evocation of "real time" to communicate various forms of bodily conduct to their audiences. They do so by demonstrating the full duration, [End Page 161] or every necessary step, of various activities. In doing so, they also reveal how individual bodily movements impact groups and environments. In using formal structure to emphasize temporality, these films share an impulse...