Shirin Neshat: Islamic Counterpoints

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Amei Wallach

In Passage, the chador functions mostly as an unspecific, timeless costume which separates the circle of women from the advancing trajectory of men. There is the poetic implication that out of their encounter with death could come the child who embodies future possibility. Neshat is constantly adjusting her reconstruction of the chador's opposite, incendiary meanings in East and West. Those dissonances, however, continue to be as essential to the resonance of the work as the crinkle of a candy wrapper or the clearing of a throat is to a John Cage Silence performance.

The Question of Narrative

With Possessed, Neshat returns to the theme of exile and how it infects public space. Or at least that is one reading of the 9 1/2-minute black-and-white film, in which for the first time Neshat offers an individualized character with a vivid internal life. The film opens with a single wide-screen shot of a woman's face in three-quarter profile against an empty sky, strands of dark hair ruffled by the breeze. The woman is perhaps in her 30s. Her head is uncovered; she is wearing a dirty caftan instead of a chador. She is muttering to herself, but Deyhim's score drowns her out with its keening urgency. She is seen full face and then from the other side as the camera circles her. A leaf brushes her face, the camera travels vertiginously, and her face is lost in shadow. It is an electrifying moment. The screen goes briefly blank, then the camera rediscovers her talking at a wall.

As the music ratchets up in intensity, the woman stumbles into an alley and edges into a town square where children play, men drink tea, women in chadors go about their business (in this film, the portentous black garment is relegated to a bit part). Cellos descend into a minor key and instruments screech distress as she mounts stone stairs and by her aberrant behavior draws the attention of the crowd. The townspeople are all around her, the men closest. She screams. Some in the crowd threaten her, some move in to protect her. A fight ensues, and the music intensifies. As the crowd wrangles and shoves, the woman forces her unheeding way through the faces and chadors and disappears off the bottom of the screen. In the end we see her full-screen again, lost in her solitary reality. The music subsides as she disappears through a doorway and down an alley.

Is she someone driven mad by her situation, or by the political torture that has been as prevalent in the Iran of the clerics as under the shah? Is she a gypsy, singing "to register [her] presence in people's ears,"[11] as in a poem

by the Persian poet Simin Behbahani? Is she a woman who felt imprisoned in her chador? Is she an artist as well as an exile, capable of churning the smooth surface of everyday assumptions?

This is a film in which inner life is central to the action; the events unfold from the woman's point of view, the music mirroring her internal discord. This is the closest Neshat has yet come to feature filmmaking. The gifted actress Shohreh Aghdashloo plays the woman. Neshat is apparently good with actors: Aghdashloo says that her direction gave her space in which to improvise. The crowd includes compelling characterizations as well, though on first viewing one is too focused on Aghdashloo to notice.