Referring to the Iranian director Mohsen Majmalbaf and his films in Pagina/12 today Luciano Monteagudo says,
.. he has always had a marked predilection for allegory, a mode of expression common in Iranian cinema and one that seems to form a basic part of the country’s culture.
Well, who knows? Maybe he is right. But there is another glaringly obvious possibility; the frequent resort to visual lyricism and allegory in Iranian cinema may have something to do with need to get permission from a committee of bearded bastards in turbans in order to shoot your film and get it shown. The hirsute loons believe that one book in particular contains all that anyone needs to know about cinema or anything else and without their thumbs up, it’s no dice. So, as your characters definitely aren’t going to be allowed to say anything interesting you’d better learn how to hint at what you actually want to say with endless shots of waves lapping onto the shore and the like.
Or to put it another way, in societies where the work of artists is subject to strict censorship aimed at upholding a particular religion and a theocratic regime we ought not to be surprised if a lot of the cultural products that come our way rely heavily on oh-so-subtle allegory.
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