상품화된 이미지와 이미지적 세계 ‘사이’에서: 압바스 키아로스타미의 <바람이 우리를 데려다 주리라>

Abstract

Negar Mottahedeh, from her postcolonial feminist perspective, has read both the Iranian government’s censorship and the New Iranian Cinema as subverting Western male-centric liberal capitalism. Mottahedeh has highlighted how the New Iranian Cinema and especially Kiarostami’s work, by following the government’s film regulations for maintaining the system of modesty, purify the cinematic image of the Iranian woman and thus liberate the spectator from “the commodified image” toward the messianic “imaginal world,” which has been emphasized in the tenets of Shiite Islam. By drawing on the late Lacanian theories of the ethics of visuality, however, this paper critically discusses Mottahedeh’s arguments and rethinks about the Iranian government’s purifying film censorship and the way that Kiarostami’s work responds to the censorship by focusing on his The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Unlike Mottahedeh’s argument, some of Kiarostami’s films, such as Through the Olive Trees (1994) and The Wind Will Carry Us, which deal with young adult women’s desires, have clashed with the aim of the Iranian government’s film censorship. This paper shows how The Wind Will Carry Us, despite its ostensible conflict with the system of modesty, succeeds in overcoming the Western male-centric capitalist logic of commodification in a way that goes beyond the limitations of this system. By detaching marginalized Iranian women’s desires from the metropolitan or Western male subjects’ voyeuristic and exoticist fantasies, The Wind Will Carry Us not only successfully highlights the unfathomability and untranslatability of these desires. But by inscribing indeterminate third gazes that provoke senses of shame from both the voyeuristic male protagonist and the spectator who identifies with him, the film also allows the spectator to imagine a new mode of social bonding that not only deconstructs the oppositions between urban and rural, male and female, and western and non-western but also enables subjects to alter each other while keeping the opacities of their desires. In this regard, The Wind Will Carry Us goes beyond the dominant tendency of the New Iranian Cinema and attempts to invent a third cinematic veil, which is reduced neither to the commodified image nor to the imaginal world.