Michael M. J. Fischer responds to Thomas Redwood’s review of:
Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004.
This review was published in Issue 20.

Thank you for reviewing my book, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Duke 2004) in Screening the Past. I would like to provide your readers with another chance to know at least what the book attempts to do, and I welcome any re-analyses or help with of what I have tried to put on the table. Although the book itself is not only directed to film studies readers, I will try here to flag those issues that I think should particularly interest such readers.

First of all, I would have thought a film studies review might have focused on the chapter, ‘War Again’ about film in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, nowhere mentioned by your reviewer, but the topic of an upcoming conference in England later this month on film and war in Iran. There are two general suggestions that this chapter makes that might interest film scholars. The first is the homage to, and difference from, Italian neo-realist films of the post-World War II period in Italy. The second is the suggestion about the way in which affects and emotion are made into quasi-formal elements of cine-writing particularly in such films as Beyond the Fire and Red Ribbons. I mention these two threads because the first relates to the way in which a social scientist explores the relation between narrative film and social contexts, which might engage with film studies writing about third cinema, Italian neorealism, or German expressionism; while the second relates to more formalist film studies, and to the openings that from one angle the philosopher Lyotard makes with his suggestions about how figuration and narration disrupt one another, or from another angle how the filmmaker Kiarostami describes the cube of sensation, where only one side of the cube is seen visually on the screen and much of the rest is supplied by sound. The term “Mute Dreams” comes from the film maker Makhmalbaf and refers to the ways in which film, like prophetic language, operates oneirically as a mode of encryptment and decipherment rather than just presentation. The term comes from the poet Rumi, who describes prophetic visions as something the prophet cannot quite describe in human language and which even if he could people would not hear (hence mute), the point being, to use another bon mot, that more is always going on than what you see.

The other long chapter on film places Iranian New Wave films of the 1970s in relation to the traditions of modernist prose in Iran. The entire book is structured around the differences of media (orality, writing, film) that again is nowhere mentioned in the review. In the first half of the book, oral mnemonic rituals as a means of cultural transmission are contrasted, on the one hand, with narrative epic story-telling (built around formulas, but also free improvisation, such as those unpacked by Lord and Parry for epics in the Balkans, and studied in various parts of the world), and on the other hand with philosophical imagery. From a formal point of view, it is interesting that each of these media often inverts the meanings of its historically prior source. From a sociological point of view, it is interesting that each of these media is maintained by different segments of the population. I do argue that story structures are repeated with variations, often in three generation units, and that such ‘intersignification’ or ‘intertextuality’ is important to the enjoyment and meaning of the parables in the epic, as they are in the Bible, and as they become in the film traditions of Iran (and elsewhere).

Few societies in the Muslim world have purged themselves entirely of pre-Islamic elements; it is no different from the Christian world in that respect. At least the review got that right. Cultural traditions are complex: that makes them interesting, and also resources for political contestations over meaning.
Finally, I must disagree that I do not own up to my opinions (‘aversion to accountability for his ideas’). If anything, I overload my text with accounts of data, how I develop my ideas, and from where I borrow clues and suggestions. Moreover, although the reviewer finds this ‘irresponsible’, I do insist that crude stereotyping (‘categorical definitions’) of other cultures is usually done pejoratively and as avoidance of meaningful communication with people and their own interpretations. While I am stimulated by the writings of the late Jacques Derrida, I do not, as is alleged, submit to his authority, and one of the essays is situated in explicit, if friendly, disagreement with him.

I am sorry your reviewer did not find pleasure or edification in my book. Hopefully it will speak more pleasurably to other readers who have an interest in Iran, in media genres, or in the varied essay topics: Zoroastrianism, the national epic of Iran, Illuminationist philosophy, Iranian surrealism, reconstruction after war, as well as Iranian cinema. I do not try, as the reviewer suggests, to directly link Zoroastrianism to contemporary Iranian film; the book is a collection of essays pitched at different modalities of media operation and how they stage and teach ethical reasoning, including the ways in which three different circuits of audiences receive Iranian films (domestic audiences, diasporic ones, and non-Iranian international ones). The cover and epilogue deal with yet another medium in which Iran participates: global technoscientific competitions, in this case robotic soccer.

If readers have other readings of, and insights, both formal and otherwise, into the films produced in the aftermath of war in Iran, or in relation to other contexts, I would be interested in hearing from them either directly or through a forum in Screening the Past.

Michael M.J. Fischer

Created on: Saturday, 9 June 2007