In the hands of Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, the suicide turns into an escape from an arranged marriage. The woman falls in slow motion and leaves no blood where she lands. Later she becomes a politically active ghost.
Known for her stark photo portraits and experimental videos, Neshat weaves magic into the lives of four female characters who are sexually and verbally abused by men in her first feature film, “Women Without Men.” The movie won her the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival in 2009.
Sitting in her Manhattan loft, Neshat’s raven hair crowned striking features accented by dramatic black eyeliner. A caramel Labrador named Lulu greeted me with a loud bark. Neshat offered to brew fresh coffee.
My intention was not to say that the men are against the women or give a general sense of the situation of women in Iran. This is a story of a few women in 1953.
That period was one of the best in Iranian history. We were not oppressed like we are today. Today, women absolutely have no choice because it’s a religious society. At that time, it was a secular, traditional society. The image people have of Iran today is that we’ve always been one backward society. In this film you see that we were a democracy, we had the Communists, Muslims, pro-West, anti-West. It was an incredibly vital artistic and intellectual moment. The kind of theaters we had, literature, music, even fashion. And all this was broken down particularly because of the Western intervention.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once explained magical realism as the story your grandmother told you. And the grandmother told it with such conviction you never asked her, like grandma, this doesn’t make sense. You just totally believe everything she says.
The government banned the book on which it’s based and its author was imprisoned for five years. My film is, obviously, banned, but it’s distributed underground.
I made video installations first. I was trying to learn how to make a transition from making video art to a more narrative style of working. A lot of the footage is the same but it has completely different logic and structure.
Yes. Each video is about $100,000. As a group, they would get a huge discount, I think.
I just shot new photographs. The last time I did studio photography was in 1997. And I am really happy to do simple black-and-white photographs of only men. I’ve optioned another book to make into a film. It’s called “The Palace of Dreams” by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It’s a story about how the state tries to control people’s dreams.
