Hacia donde va la resistencia bacteriana?

In many British documentaries representation of non-urban Iran is focused on the primitiveness of life, and is themed around water and its scarcity. As a precious resource, water is not utilised effectively in rural areas because irrigation and pumping systems are centuries old. The narrative manages in this way to at once suggest the backwardness of

8 The extract is my translation from the original Farsi text (23/05/2008).

Iran and to dramatise the importance of Western machinery for progress. As part of the non-urban settings, the representations of desert and also tribal and nomadic life in Iran are also very prevalent as explained below. The representational function of non-urban Iran is discussed fully in Chapter 4 in relation to the Iranian society and history, a theme that is then developed further in Chapter 5 in discussing the films sponsored by the British oil industry.

Being one of the most common images for depicting an Oriental setting, the desert conjures up a complex set of often contradictory associations. On the one hand there is the romance and adventure associated with the desert (Stollery, 2000b). On the other hand, the desert stands as an unchanging, infertile landscape, symbolic of the history of the inhabitants of the desert, a history that neither changes nor progresses. The desert is

“a place governed by nature, in all its beauty and harshness, rather than by history”

(Stollery, 2000b: 61). In documentary representations of Iran, the desert stands only for the latter, functioning as evidence for historical stagnation leading to under-development.

I have discussed this theme throughout Chapters 4 to 6. The visual components of desert symbolism in British documentaries on Iran include camels, camel-caravans, caravanserai, and (semi) arid lands (even though this last is not strictly desert, it is often included in the arsenal of images used to depict deserts – sometimes done through the verbal commentary accompanying such images).

One other example in the British Instructional Films (BIF) series in 1928, A Persian Caravan, shows the activities of a camel caravan by following it throughout its journey in the Iranian desert. The desert and camel (caravan) are amongst the commonest markers in creating an Oriental geography. In this film, extreme long shots of the desert and the camel caravans are edited with extreme close-ups, close-ups and medium shots of caravan people. Shots depicting people engaged in daily activities of eating, sleeping and praying are combined with intertitles that emphasis the primitiveness of their lives. In some places the editing of particular shots with tongue in cheek intertitles has a derogatory effect on the depiction of men and their lifestyle. For example, a shot of a poor man looking sheepishly at the camera is followed by the intertitle: “a new fashion in

a sleeveless coat where the sleeves were sown up as they are never used”. It is this simplistic and yet very detailed presentation of customs and habits that M.J. Harper refers to as coded by “the distancing conventions of ethnographic scientific documentation”

(Harper, 1996: 60). Therefore, the choice of subject matter across the series suggests the producers’ predisposition towards topics and themes that contextualise Iran in light of Orientalised geographies and histories.

In documentaries representing Iran, desert symbolism sometimes acquires such a prominence that the constructions of urban and rural settings, and even the general landscape and climate, are influenced by that symbolism. For example, in the film In A Persian Town, produced by British Instructional Films in 1928, the non-representative town of Yazd, which is at the edge of the otherwise uninhabited central desert of Iran, is used as metonymic for the whole of Iran. This leads to the assumption that the adjectives

‘Persian’ and ‘desert’ can always be used interchangeably. In This World: Iran’s Nuclear Secret (BBC, 2005), the filmmakers’ choice of images to accompany the commentary about the history of the crisis is a tracking shot of seemingly arid plains. Through these and similar shots of an eerie landscape (for example, the extreme long-shots of nuclear power stations in the middle of nowhere) the film evokes an air of suspicion, and creates a sinister atmosphere around the issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Images of the desert can also be used to advance political propaganda. In Oil the Wealth of the World (British Pathé, 1950), the Middle East is claimed to be a desert with no inhabitants. It is a “no-man’s-land” and “everyman’s-land,” and as such, its natural resources are the wealth of the world and belong to human kind in general. The desert image is thus used to efface the Middle East of its peoples and change it into what Said refers to as “an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom” (1978b: 286) with the aid of Western technology. This is done in order to advance the film’s message, namely, that oil is a global property with no national claim over it. The inhabitants of the desert, if any, are implied to be what Said describes as “inconsequential nomads possessing no real claim on the land and therefore no cultural or national reality” (ibid). The denial of

territorial boundaries and national existence of the people of the Middle East is achieved in the film using desert images.

The recurrence of the Orientalist notions of Islam, people, women, the governance and geography of Iran is one reason, among others why documentaries on Iran should be regarded as more attuned to the mainstream views of the Middle East (despite the rare instances of alternative views among them). This inclination has as much to do with the discursive contexts in which those documentaries were produced, the discourses of Orientalism and imperialism (as discussed in Chapter 2), as it has with the sponsorship and production of those documentaries. The sponsorship and production of the majority of those films (by the British oil companies, as well as the governments of Britain and at times Iran), required that the subject of many of those films were related, directly or indirectly, to issues of modernization, industrialization and development. It is necessary therefore to broaden the realm of what has been considered here as the ‘discursive context’ for documentary representations of Iran to also include theoretical perspectives on modernization and development. These perspectives will be fully discussed in Chapters 4 to 7, but here I briefly discuss them in relation to Orientalism and the interrelations between them and the Orientalist preconceptions about the ‘other’ (here Iran).