In the cavernous hall where the auditions for Salam Cinema take place (and a succession of ordinary Iranians profess their similarity to Paul Newman or Marilyn Monroe or fall into imitation death throes on command), near the table where Mohsen Makhmalbaf issues curt orders to his would-be stars, stands a large mirror. Makhmalbaf has said the mirror stands for cinema. As such it has plenty of company in this director’s work. From his very early films, which were made to be shown to the faithful in mosques, until he abandoned Islamic fundamentalism and developed his own cinematic language, mirrors have proliferated in Makhmalbaf’s films — just as they do in mosques throughout Iran, just as they do in virtually all forms of Iranian literature, both secular and sacred.
What do we make of this peculiar obsession with cinema, one that takes the mirror as its symbol? As noted above, when Westerners began to encounter sophisticated,
artistically vital post-Revolutionary
films from Iran, it was natural that they were seen initially from the viewers’ own cultural perspectives, which often meant assuming lines of influence running from West (especially Europe) to East: first came copious comparisons to Italian Neorealism, followed, thanks largely to the impact of Close-Up and its progeny, by manifold invocations of the French New Wave. Cinema, after all, is a transnational art, and it was perfectly reasonable to understand Iranian filmmakers as working within its global traditions. Yet, though this approach undeniably has much to teach us, it is only one half of the coin, so to speak. The other half is to look from the opposite pole, geographically and culturally, in order to ask how
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Iranian filmmakers have operated — and projected themselves toward the world — from within their own artistic traditions.
In his film The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), Kiarostami offers ample, witty proof of the axiom that poetry is to Iranians as opera is to Italians: part of the national DNA, permeating the consciousness of people at every age and social level. This is a tradition most often transmitted orally, though it refers to written texts (Kiarostami himself purports to have memorized vast quantities of poetry, both traditional and modern). In absorbing the work of poets such as Rumi, Hafez and Attar, Iranians also inevitably imbibe many of their central symbols, such as the one celebrated by Makhmalbaf.
“The motif of the mirror is one of the most fascinating and variegated in Persian poetry, particularly in mystical thinking,” according to art historian Johann Cristoph Bürgel, who enumerates some of its traditional meanings:
The world is the mirror of God. Beauty is never absent from this mirror. Nonbeing is a mirror for being. The Prophet is a mirror in which the faithful and unfaithful can see their true nature. Likewise, “the faithful is the mirror of the faithful,” as the Prophet is reported to have said in a hadith. The shaykh is a mirror placed in front of the novice. “Lover and beloved” are like two mirrors which gaze into each other.” The heart is a mirror which through steady polishing becomes able to perceive God’s light…. 2
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