CINEMA AND REPRESSION: JAFAR PANAHI'S WILL TO TRUTH

Abstract

The article analyzes the film In film nist (2011), by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, as a form of resistance to the silencing imposed by the Iranian government on his artistic production, since, in 2009, the filmmaker displeased the authorities of his country by supporting Mir Hussein Mussavi, the opposition candidate in the presidential election. Thus, Panahi was sentenced to 6 years of house arrest and banned from filming for 20 years, however, the filmmaker called his cameraman friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to record his routine in one day inside his own apartment and produced a questioning film. Contemporary Iranian cinema inaugurated a new modality of realism, whose filmmakers build “documentary fictions”, in which scripts are inspired by real stories. The restorative realism of Iranian cinema seeks to restore a fullness to the complex reality that only cinema would be able to achieve, using, for this, the resumption of episodes that happened in the historical and social world. It must be considered that the production of discourses, in any society, is controlled with the aim of conjuring its powers and dangers, weakening the effectiveness of uncontrollable events, with the aim of hiding the forces that materialize the social constitution. In order for the “will to truth” to be satisfactorily exercised, external and internal procedures to the discourse are used. While procedures external to discourse limit the production of discourses, interdicting the word, and defining what can be said/not said in each circumstance, through the “object taboo” and the privileged or exclusive right of the speaker; the procedures internal to the discourse have the function of classifying, ordering and dictating their distribution.