Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  “I don’t believe you are a corrupt person.”

  Dara equally gently replied:

  “Brother, in this world everyone claims to be the best human being. But only God knows who is good, who is bad … I have studied a little.”

  Even more gently the interrogator said:

  “In my line of work I come across all sorts of people. From illiterates and louts to university graduates and professors. Once they even arrested someone who had two doctorate degrees, economics and—I don’t know— management of something or other.”

  “Well, brother, there are no jobs out there.”

  “I think if an illiterate person who grew up on the streets and who cannot tell right from wrong gets into distributing vile films, he is less guilty than the educated person who does it.”

  “You are absolutely right. I completely agree with you.”

  Dara saw the young interrogator’s eyes fill with sorrow, and he heard a telltale voice of deep-rooted pain:

  “Everyone says the same thing. When you are arrested, you are all immediately sorry and ask for forgiveness.”

  “But I was being sincere.”

  “I don’t want to insult you and others like you. But I just don’t understand why you get involved in such filthy rackets. When you all walk out of here, you simply serve your sentence and go on with your lives. But what about the likes of me? I cannot stop thinking of why people commit such crimes and sins. I feel sorry for you. This very night I will see your innocent face in my dreams, and I will have to get up and pray for you.”

  The young interrogator’s face now resembled that of a tortured saint.

  Dara said:

  “Thank you for your sympathy.”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “No … Not at all.”

  “I sensed it in your voice. You were being sarcastic.”

  “I swear I wasn’t. I am truly grateful. But I find it very strange that someone like you, here …”

  “It is exactly people like me who should be here. Here, this department, organizations similar to ours, have the most sensitive responsibility. If we can eradicate social corruption, we can claim that the revolution has successfully turned its final corner. We can then show our revolution to the entire world and invite the people of the world, especially the corrupt Westerners, to follow our lead.”

  The young interrogator’s eyes were brimming with tears, and he was pressing his hands against his temples. In the same sad and suffering voice he asked:

  “Then why? Why do you do such things? How can you swallow food that was bought with ill-gotten gains … How does your conscience allow you to sleep at night when you know that with your vile tapes you have corrupted the pure and innocent souls of hundreds of youth?”

  “But, brother, my conscience is clear, at least as far as what I have done. I don’t corrupt anyone’s soul. Quite the opposite, I allow my clients to see excellence. I teach them that there is still beauty in this world. The beauty of art, creativity …”

  Wide-eyed, the young interrogator stared at Dara:

  “What do you mean? You just said that you agreed with me.”

  “I say it again. I too believe that people who rent out worthless films are doing a bad thing. But I rent out films by Altman, Forman, Kubrick, and Welles.”

  “These people, where are they from?”

  “They’re Americans … Have you ever seen Orson Welles’s The Trial?”

  “No.”

  “You have to see it, brother. You have to see it… The film is based on Kafka’s novel The Trial.”

  “Where is Kafka from?”

  “He was from Czechoslovakia.”

  “You mean he was a Communist?”

  “No … He was Jewish.”

  “So he was a Zionist?”

  “No, he was just a Jew.”

  “Well, Marx was Jewish, too.”

  “No, Kafka was an artist. His novel is a literary masterpiece. In most cases when cinema has wanted to adapt a literary masterpiece to film it has failed, except…”

  Dara, who had a tendency of becoming quite excited whenever there was talk of film and cinema, had forgotten where and in what situation he was. He passionately continued the discussion:

  “In rare cases … I consider Orson Welles’s The Trial to be one of the masterpieces of cinema that has gone unappreciated. It is even better than Citizen Kane. The Trial is very rich in semiology. Whenever there is a discussion of this film, to prove that the codes of cinematic language are different from those of literary language, I use the example of the American version of War and Peace. The film has completely failed. I will never forget, the minute I laid eyes on Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei, I burst out laughing. The guy doesn’t have the dignity and majesty of Prince Andrei at all.”

  “Are you a monarchist?”

  “Not at all. Allow me to finish.”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I mean the art of cinema can be even more powerful and more beautiful than literature.”

  “We believe this, too. Our enemies know very well how effective and destructive cinema can be. The Americans have tested this, and they have learned that they cannot bring our revolution to its knees with coups d’état and wars, so they have resorted to exporting filthy films to weaken the will and faith of our youth.”

  “I agree with you. I completely agree. But… Am I giving you a headache?”

  “No, not at all. Speak. Your comments are new to me. I have never come across anyone like you in this place.”

  “Don’t you realize that some people are starting to like those trashy films that were made before the revolution? Well, why do you think that is … ?”

  The young interrogator was avidly listening to Dara. He said:

  “Tell me. I find this interesting.”

  Dara was gasping from the excitement of the discourse and the stifling dank air in the room. He continued:

  “Whenever I hear one of my compatriots praising a corny Iranian or Indian film, I am angered to the point of madness.”

  The young interrogator interrupted him:

  “I see you are very angry.”

  “I am sorry, brother. But to tell you the truth, I am furious.”

  “Go ahead, throw a punch, kick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If it’s going to calm you down, take your anger out on this desk. I don’t want you to speak in anger … In Islam it is a sin to speak in anger.”

  With a kick Dara added another dent to the many dents in the desk and actually felt his rage and angst over his arrest subside. Calmly, he continued.

  “Well, you have to allow the likes of me to continue our work and to introduce the art of cinema to people. The language of cinema has its own distinct codes. People have to learn these codes. Once they do, they will completely relate to the language of cinema.”

  It was here that the young interrogator’s eyes sparkled.

  “Codes? There are codes in films?”

  “Yes. Much work has been done on the science of semiotics, on the semiology of film, and on imagery codes in general.”

  “Do you know these codes?”

  “Somewhat. To the extent that my education allows, I try to recognize them.”

  “I knew from the start that you were different from the regular dealers of filthy films. I suspected you were a well-read intellectual and a smart person. What did you study?”

  “I studied cinema as far as postgraduate work.”

  “You mean you have a master’s degree?”

  “No … They didn’t give me my degree.”

  “Why?”

  Dara truthfully confessed that he had previously committed political errors and that he had even spent some time as a political prisoner.

  The young interrogator was again pressing his hands against his temples. Instead of the glint of curiosity, again the fog of sorrow floated in his eyes. But patiently he encouraged Dara to continue, and for another two h
ours he listened to his arguments and reasonings and took notes. Finally, when Dara grew silent from exhaustion and sat down on the floor next to his desk, the young interrogator got up and respectfully shook his hand. With Dara’s file under his arm, he paused at the door and said:

  “I have learned some interesting things from you. Thank you … I will pray for you.”

  Dara was sure the interrogator had left the room to arrange his release. But in the middle of the night two officers came and blindfolded him and transferred him to the special prison for political detainees.

  In fact, by confessing to his political past, together with the strange movies they had taken from him as evidence and his comments about codes in the language of cinema, Dara had made matters worse. Anyone in the young interrogator’s place would have been equally suspicious that Dara was in fact playing the same role that Radio Free Europe had played from behind the Iron Curtain—and, even more important, that by deciphering codes hidden in certain films he was also involved in undercover activities.

  Dara was transferred to a high-security prison and thrown in a small solitary confinement cell so that he would come to his senses and reveal the names of his contact or contacts at that spy agency and divulge the so-called codes. Time in a small cell is more pitiless and painful than any instrument of torture. The agony of solitary confinement is not that time seems to pass extremely slowly, it is that it seems not to pass at all. Dara could not tell night from day. He had lost the comfort and pleasure of the passage of time. After a while, which for the people outside was two months, he realized that he was dancing like Zorba the Greek up the stairway to insanity. He constantly talked to himself and could not tell whether this was good or bad for his mental stability.

  Sometimes tears would well up in his eyes, and the desire to weep would lump up in his throat, but a mysterious energy would stop him from giving in to the tears. This energy had perhaps permeated the walls of his cell from the resistance of past prisoners, and it was now reflecting itself on him. Now and again, he would recall memories his father had shared with him about his own time in prison—which I will tell you about later. Dara would think about the tricks his father and others in his cell block would use to strengthen their spirits, although they were not all that useful to Dara, because each prisoner, much like his unique fingerprint, has his own individual resistance and breaking point.

  Sometime later, he noticed that on one of the cement walls, the wall to the right, he could see strange shapes formed by the configuration of the small pores and the tiny grains of sand. A sheep with dragon’s wings, a heart pierced with a spoon instead of an arrow, the face of a man whose eyes were two female genitals, a pair of scissors with its blades curved in the shape of smiling lips, and, most interesting and familiar of all, a figure that looked a lot like Dopey, the youngest dwarf in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  Searching for these images became a good pastime for Dara. The problem, however, was that they did not last. If he focused too much on them, they would fade away. The moment he would wake up, he would look to where he had seen the last one, but he would not find it. The cold and cruel cement would have regained its imageless quality. The pictures appeared at their own will. But it seemed as if their appearance and disappearance had some particular sequence and time interval. Thus, the cement images became Dara’s clock and calendar. If to escape the silence and timelessness of the cell he had previously wished that they would come and even wake him up from his sleep for another round of intense interrogation with the same old questions and the same old answers, he now wished that they would somehow forget about him altogether. In the next phase, he tried to bring the appearance of the images under his control. Now, without fearing the progression of insanity, he comfortably spoke to the cement wall. To remain focused during the course of the conversation, he even etched an ear and a mouth on the wall with his fingernail. He reached a stage that when he spoke to the ear, images would appear in the periphery of his field of vision. At one point, he didn’t know whether it was day or night; he suddenly thought that the mouth resembled the toothless mouth of Steve McQueen in Papillon. It was the mouth of a man who has aged prematurely but who has triumphantly survived solitary confinement, and now that they have released him, a strange smile has formed on his creased lips. Remembering Papillon’s superhuman resistance strengthened Dara’s will. He reached a point when he could complete the missing features around the ear and mouth and see Steve McQueen’s face. Then he decided to see a more pleasant image from the magical world of cinema and a sequence of superimposed kisses from Cinema Paradiso appeared before his eyes. Dara didn’t know whether this irony was rooted in his own subconscious or in the subconscious of the cement. But he knew he was committing a sin and that he might, under these very difficult circumstances, lose God’s benevolence and forgiveness.

  In fact, even when Dara was a Communist, unlike some Communists, he had not been able to erase God from deep within his heart. In those days, when he read the Manifesto over and over again so that its words would be etched on his brain cells, he felt that from somewhere deep in his soul a whisper of shame rose and echoed in his ear, in that same place where Grandmother had told him to stuff his fingers … But in those days of discovering the pleasures of rebelliousness and defiance, he could not understand from where this whisper rose and because of whom. Until at last, during his first prison term, Dara discovered that all that time he had been ashamed of himself before God, his childhood companion. And just as every night he would remove the pus-encrusted bandages from his feet and inspect the infected whip wounds on his soles, and just as hour by hour he would hunt fleas from his underarms or pubic hair, and because he did not have the heart to kill them he would send them off to the prison guards from under the cell door, he set aside the philosophical theory of materialism and began talking to his God. In the early days of his rediscovered faith, Dara did not allow himself to take advantage of God’s mercy and compassion. He believed that if under those difficult circumstances he asked anything of God, his belief would in fact be insincere and, like so many others, he would be foolishly attempting to deceive a God that is all-knowing. But many months later, when he felt that just as for the prophet Jonah in the stomach of a great fish, God had forgiven him, too, he asked God to do something so that they would release him. And now, too, during his second term in prison, he was ashamed of seeing images of censored kisses from Cinema Paradiso and wanted God to do something so that he would stop seeing them.

  At last, his visual creativity grew so strong that he would first make a white movie screen appear on the cement wall and then the moving pictures of a scene from a film. The first scene he watched in full cinematic clarity and brilliance—having begged for absolution from God, the most creative director in the world—was the scene in which Stan Laurel clenches his fist, stuffs tobacco in it as if it were a pipe, lights it, and sucks on his raised thumb and blows smoke out of his mouth. By remaking this scene, Dara laughed for the first time during his solitary confinement. Hearing Dara’s laughter, the prison guard most probably thought this prisoner too had gone completely insane, and from then on he no longer threw Dara’s food in front of him; instead, with respect and kindness he gently put it on the floor in front of the cell door. Dara’s interrogator too had changed his behavior toward him. Not because he thought Dara had gone mad, but because he saw that this prisoner, with perseverance, with no hesitation or weakness, and, most important, with no duplicity, had stuck to his initial statement and refused to confess to being a spy … Now, Dara could even will the scene of the film he was watching to run in slow motion, and if he felt like watching one of the classics, such as Casablanca, he could watch it in full color. Yet his love of cinema was so true that he would immediately feel that by colorizing the film he had cheated on his lover.

  One day he watched a seven-hour version of Titanic. Don’t rush to tell me that no such version exists. I know. Dara knew it, too. What is interesting is that Dara ha
d never even seen James Cameron’s Titanic. He had only read news of its production and a synopsis of its screenplay, accompanied by two hazy close-ups of the two leading actors, in a movie magazine. They had even printed a black stripe over Kate Winslet’s neck. But Dara’s willpower and abilities were greater than those of any Hollywood producer. With an investment of lengthy meditations, he was able to screen his own Titanic on the cement wall.

  Producing Titanic did not bring Dara fame and Oscars, but it did bring him something far more important. At the very moment when his film’s two lovers bid each other eternal farewell, Dara realized that he had never fallen in love. Yes, it was true that he was, and had been, in love with cinema, and it was true that in his solitary cell he could even make love to cinema whenever he wanted to without having to tolerate the headaches and consequences of making love to a woman. But at that moment he realized something had always been missing in his life: love, in its true sense, for a woman. Therefore, he earnestly asked his God that should he one day be released from this prison, to bestow upon him the gift of love … And the miracle happened far sooner than he expected. Dara’s interrogator finally accepted the fact that he was not a CIA agent. One day, which Dara only later realized was day, the guards opened the door to his cell and politely asked him to walk out. Dara, who really did not want to part with his cell and its magic wall, did not budge. After all, he was watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The guards were forced to drag a kicking and screaming Dara out of the cell and out of the prison. Confused and disoriented by the natural sunlight, Dara walked home. His mother cried out as soon as she saw him and held him in her arms. Dara wept on her shoulder not knowing whether these were tears of joy or sorrow. That day, when he saw his face in the mirror, he was horrified. His skin had turned the color of camphor, and his cheeks were so hollowed that his beautiful Aryan nose protruded like the beak of a bald eagle. A month later he had chosen painting as a vocation and had joined the public library … It was there that he saw Sara for the first time …