Reimagining the Cinematic Gaze: An Analysis of Iranian Mystical Cinema in Majid Majidi’s Baran

Theories of the gaze developed in the West—such as the male gaze, female gaze, objectifying gaze, and imperial gaze—are inadequate for analyzing mystical cinema from outside the Western mainstream, particularly Iranian mystical cinema. Unlike capitalist, consumer-driven films that cater to scopophilia (the pleasure of looking), Iranian mystical cinema is theopoetic and focuses on ordinary protagonists grappling with mundane experiences to pose philosophical questions about life, death, and the connection between the real and the spiritual. The paper argues for a new concept, the mystical gaze, as a culturally specific framework for processing such films and applies it to Majid Majidi's film Baran.

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Abstract

For the last few decades gaze as a theoretical concept has been explored from philosophical, political, and psychological perspectives. However, its exploration in media studies has been the most extensive where it has been used to explore the viewers’ engagement with visual media. Theories of male gaze (Mulvey), female gaze (Lorraine Gamman, Margaret Marshment), objectifying gaze (Fredrickson and Roberts) and imperial gaze (E. Ann Kaplan) have explored the function of art and viewer’s relationship with the views in the West. However western-centric theoretical frameworks that explore the role of gaze become problematic when one initiates a discussion on mystical cinema as it is developed outside the influence of mainstream cinematic thrust and its purely capitalist and consumer-driven markets. A case in point is Iranian mystical cinema that is theopoetic in tradition and provides a viewing experience distinctly opposed to scopophilia. Taking everyday ordinary protagonists, instead of larger-than-life heroes, this cinema takes us on a journey of their inner selves as they grapple with mundane experiences of life. The objective is not to depict the everyday life of individual characters objectively but to use the ordinary, banal, and everyday to ask philosophical questions about life, death, and the connection between the real and the spiritual. The need for a gaze theory that is steeped in Iranian culture is required to process these films. This paper argues for the idea of mystical gaze as a broad code with which to process these films and applies it to Majid Majidi’s film, Baran.Keywords: Iranian cinema, cinematic gaze, media studies, gaze theory, mysticals