As much as in the cases examined above, the questions of who holds the camera(s) and who makes the film are explicitly and self-reflexively laid out in Three Faces, a film whose subject is ultimately the making of films. Film directing and acting are the subject of discussion by way of the cast’s own biographies and respective roles: Panahi plays the film director he actually is; real celebrity actress Behnaz Jafari appear as herself; another myth of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, Shahrzad (whose real name is Kobra Saeedi), though not seen in person, is heard reading one of her own poems, and her biography is also a subject in the film; the centre of interest, Marziyeh, is in real life an aspiring star whom Panahi spotted in one of the three villages where the film was shot and immediately recognised as made
for the part of a wannabe actress. To that extent the film avows itself as film, so as to presumably preserve an authenticity verified in all its other elements, most notably its real locations in Iranian Azerbaijan, in the Northwest of the country, from where Panahi and his ancestors hail, which allowed him to communicate in the Turkic language Azeri with the local population turned into actors, some of whom, such as Marziyeh’s fictional brother, bearing the same Panahi surname. This comes with the narrow winding dirt road (now disused, but still existing) leading to the remote locations, where Panahi’s own car winds its way up the mountains, the animals, costumes, daily routines, the unfailing tea-serving tradition and everything else in the film. But all is also manipulation, as openly suggested from the very beginning of the film. As mentioned above, before presumably committing suicide, Marziyeh records a farewell message on her mobile, which is sent to her best friend, Maedeh, and somehow gets through to Jafari. This much can be understood from seeing Jafari watching this footage on her own mobile. It is also comprehensible that she would abandon her own work on a location shoot, driving her director to despair – as we learn through a mobile call from the latter – and travel by night to a remote village in order to get to the bottom of this suicide story. But the reason why she is travelling with director Panahi remains unexplained and constitutes the first sign of the whole story being a farce.
Jafari struggles with guilt for not having responded to the girl’s previ- ous attempts at contacting her and presses Panahi to establish whether the footage of the girl’s jumping to her death in the cave could have been tricked. Panahi confirms its authenticity, suggesting that only a professional filmmaker could have tricked it so perfectly. At that point Jafari confronts Panahi about his own unrealised project of a film about a young woman who commits suicide for being barred from taking an arts degree. By remaining silent, Panahi again appeals to the spectator’s previous knowledge of his own circumstances and, not least, his previous films, in particular This Is
Not a Film, which is precisely an attempt to stage this very same suicide
story by the director himself in his apartment.
More poignantly, the need to access reality beyond the inevitable ma- nipulation of cinema is signified in Three Faces by the trope of confinement, not least that imposed by the camera on its subjects. Activating once again the mirror effect of his previous films, here Panahi multiplies it threefold, with stories of confinement across three generations of oppressed women, thus punished for embracing the all-too-visible metier of film and TV acting. Marziyeh is imprisoned in her home by the male members of her family, then in a cave in her staged suicide attempt, and finally in Sharzahd’s hide-out, in
the village outskirts, a tiny thatched hut where the erstwhile famous actress now absconds from her fellow-villagers’ hostility. Confinement reigns in the village itself. The narrow road leading to it, carved at the edge of a precipice, holds only one vehicle at a time; an old woman lies in her tight future grave, in the cemetery, waiting for death; Marziyeh’s ranting brother is locked up in a stuffy room by his mother, and so on. Within this context, the camera frame constitutes yet another prison: the narrow vertical framing of the mobile phone conveying Marziyeh’s grainy suicidal message; the tight close-up of Jafari, taken by night apparently with a dashboard-mounted camera, in the passenger’s seat of Panahi’s car, itself a claustrophobic space out of which Panahi is only rarely allowed. Indeed, during his trip he politely declines offers of accommodation from the villagers, preferring to sleep in his own car and to refresh himself at roadside fountains. He even keeps himself away from Shahrzad’s small abode out of respect, being satisfied with looking at the distant shadow on the hut’s window of the three women dancing to music and with listening in his car, from a CD, to Shahrzad’s recitation of one of her poems. These are all indices of the confinement of cinema in Iran, but also of the ways in which cinema confines a Real that overflows its frame.
This is best exemplified, once again, by the figure of the autonomous camera, a desire perfectly materialised through the selfie stick which Marziyeh uses to record her suicide message. Nothing better than a selfie stick to convey the utopian disappearance of the cinematographer into a camera that works by itself, in this case capturing images and sounds even after its subject is gone. The footage produced by this mobile phone mounted on a stick is necessarily grainy, often out of focus and, at the end, blurry, producing what Laura Marks (2006) has defined as ‘glitch aesthetics’, which is political by definition. She finds glitch, for example, in low resolution footage, ‘when movies shot with consumer equipment or mobile phones are screened on platforms for high-definition video’, which is exactly the effect of Marzieh’s recording as it appears in a standard- format film such as Three Faces. Marks (2006: 251) further defines glitch thus:
Glitch is the surge of the disorderly world into the orderly transmission of electronic signals, resulting from a sudden change in voltage in an electric circuit. Ideally transmission is perfect, but in fact it almost never is. Glitch reminds us of the analog roots of digital information in the disorderly behaviour of electrons […] Glitch interrupts the intended message with a more urgent one.
This ‘material base’ within the glitch, as Marks sees it, is none other than the indexical reality at the base of any film, digital or otherwise. This reality here is that of death, hovering over the women in the film, over Panahi constantly driving next to the abyss, over the archaic and utterly flawed male order in focus, as represented, among other things, by the injured bull obstructing the road, a reproductive champion now in its twilight. At the end of the film, Panahi becomes the unwitting bearer of the preserved foreskin of one of the sons of an old villager. Given Panahi’s record of staunch defender of women’s rights, this nonsensical tradition of securing male dominance is certain to be obstructed.