Colour Psychology and the Mise-en-scène of War and Motherhood in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab’s Gilaneh BY MINIATURE MALEKPOUR | The Australian National University
ABSTRACT The mother figure has been represented in Iranian cinema through a patriarchal lens, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Although women had freedom in pre-revolutionary Iran, roles for women in film were still limited to stereotypical characters. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the mother’s role in films began to be represented as that of a “patriotic” mother in the form of the rhetoric of martyrdom: the term “Basij mother” was coined within Iranian Sacred Defense Cinema. In 2005, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab co-directed Gilaneh, a film about the mother of a soldier who has been injured while fighting in the Iran–Iraq War. This paper examines the beautification, spiritualization, and idolization of the concepts of martyrdom and motherhood through the interaction of the elements of the mise-en-scène of Gilaneh, in particular the symbolic use of colour. This study explores the discourse of martyrdom, and the depictive nature of the “nation's wounds” by identifying the role of the mother, Gilaneh, and her relationship with her son, Ismaeel, amidst the narrative’s representation of maternal agency and conventional signs and symbols, and the juxtaposed sequence that signifies the thematic culture of the social, economic, and political reform of the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War through the representation of colours.
INTRODUCTION Akbar Muhammadabadi describes Sacred Defense Cinema as religious cinema that reflects on a person’s struggle as one with the divine. Their martyrdom is not out of obligation to the state or for the family’s honour, but for spiritual fulfilment. Thus, their ultimate goal is to gain eternal freedom, not through war but through the ‘sacred defense of the enemies of God’ (Muhammadadi 54). In Pedram Partovi’s Martyrdom and the “Good Life,” he says that the Iranian Cinema of Sacred Defense affirms that through the protagonists’ or the heroes’ actions, the nation becomes sanctified rather than transcending the people. Collective destiny is expressed through the narrative on the spectator, exhibiting martyrdom as the backbone of a nationalistic framework (Partovi 513–532). Sacred Defense Cinema (sinamaye difa-I muqaddas) thus captured the spiritual and transformative dimensions of the Iran– Iraq War (513–532). After the highly decorated Filmfarsi era was abolished as part of the Islamic Republic’s cultural revolution, attention turned towards creating a “national cinema” that appropriately represented the “cultural politics” of the revolution as mentioned in Roxanne Varzi’s At the Martyrs’ Museum (86–98).
In postwar Iran, state intervention into both the representation of the war and its aftermath has led cultural producers to adopt very different strategies, largely relating to their own political commitments and subjective identification within the parameters of postrevolutionary ideology. The portrayal of the martyred son’s mother, otherwise referred to as a “Basij mother,”1 represents the ideology of the ultimate sacrifice of the martyr’s love for their country with the support of their mother. By choosing one’s love for vatan,2 martyrdom’s rhetoric is placed deep within the discourses of religious conviction, which differentiates such soldiers from those who did not believe in the state’s rhetoric and were forced to join or drafted into the war. The Basij mother is superior, in the eyes of the state, to the normal mother who also grieves for the loss of her martyred child; however, this would never be admitted since the intention of martyrdom is so deeply entrenched in the ideological structure of the Islamic Republic that the state will stand by the notion of every soldier having died believing in the state’s rhetoric. In Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab's Gilaneh, the female protagonist, who is named MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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