Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 8

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

applied to those particular filmmakers, since Kiarostami’s work is also presented as mystical, defined as beyond the discursive and the dogmatic
(formalistic), and Majidi’s work as poetic. Could affliction and pain explored by Majidi be analyzed through the proposed Wittgensteinian
understanding of the “spiritual” and death and disaster explored by Kiarostami, and be studied with that of Sufism and the “mystical”? A stronger
case might have been made had one of these two analytical vantage points been applied throughout the work. It could have provided greater
analytical cohesion and perhaps help identify a clearer central thesis to be argued throughout the work.
This issue might be linked with some of the difficulties encountered when defining the parameters of religion and approaches for its study. While
some approaches to the study of religion and spirituality in Western cinema are listed (pp. 5-6), some briefly discussed—Jesus/Christ figures;
theological approach; mythical; religious function of form and reception; religious interpretation of film with explicit or implicit religious material;
film as “hierophany”—(pp. 4-10) and to which, at times, appeal is made in the course of the work, one would have liked better focus and less
equivocal discussions of “religion”, the “religious”, the “spiritual”, etc. True, the topic is highly complex, but evaluative statements like, “various
subsequent attempts at defining ma‘nagara cinema by the Farabi Cinema Foundation, academics, journalists, film-makers and others have so
widened its scope of interpretation that it is clear there is no one comprehensive definition and no one approach can do justice to the numerous
possibilities of studying religion or spirituality in films” (p. 65). This is a view that one encounters a few times, like a persistent reminder of the
difficulties at proposing a “definitive explanation” (as if one in fact would ever exist) of “what constitutes religion, who is religious, which
members of the social strata endorse a specific religious practice … or publicly express one’s [religious] views’ in Iran” (pp. 194-195), seem overly
reductive. Did the coining of “spiritual” (ma‘nagara) cinema (and ensuing debates and discussions) occurr only in 2005? Hence, further elaborations
on the significance and implications of the major views and trends uncovered in the study of Iranian understanding of the “religious” and the
“spiritual” and cinema, long before 2005 (and after), in the highly ideological and institutional understanding of religion, of post-revolution history
of Iranian cinema that one cannot overlook, would have been most welcomed.
Passages that provide insight into the developments of contemporary local Iranian debates and theories not readily available to non-Persian speakers
surrounding the nature of what might be spiritual, as opposed to religious cinema remain the most fascinating ones. In short, Pak-Shiraz has written
the first exploratory study of religion and Iranian cinema to serve as an introduction to students of film in the significance of religious aspects of
Iranian Shi‘a society. This is so crucial for the understanding of quite a number of contemporary Iranian films.

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