Archive of Incomplete

Revolutions interrupt art projects and artists’ careers in various forms and stages. These projects can come to a halt during their creation, progression, or exhibition. I argue that these interrupted and unfinished projects—if discovered and studied— create a unique historical archive of incomplete artworks that allow us to uncover their unwritten past and detect their future emancipatory potentials.  I call this imaginary collection the archive of “unfinished.” Here, I focus on the interrupted work and career of Kobra Amin Saidi, the Iranian actress, dancer, filmmaker, and poet during the 1979 revolutionary era to examine the ways in which the “unfinished” can be formed and informed by gender and class. In order to write about Amin Saidi, who is perhaps better known by the artist name Shahrzad, I have benefited from the texts and journal articles that are concerned with her artistic life, as well as a phone interview that I conducted with her in September 2018.

Despite the increased level of women’s participation in public life in Iran in the 1970s and ’80s, when looking at the history of professional women artists, the scarcity of women is striking. This was a result of both the sexist politics of the modern state (pre- and post-revolution) that did not provide structural support for women, as well as the class disparities that blocked women’s opportunities to create artwork. Adding to Linda Nochlin’s work that investigates the impact of the art world’s structural injustices on the absence of great women artists, this text discusses the elimination of women’s incomplete projects from the art historical archives as one of the reasons that contribute to the absence of women’s names in the official art historical texts. Although Nochlin has looked at these structural limits in the context of European culture and society in her 1971 essay about art and feminism, her text is still relevant beyond the specifics of time and place, and can be applied to the modes of social injustice that women faced in Iran within the same decade.

In this essay, Nochlin writes about the fact that there have been no “great” women artists, so far as we know, although there have been many “interesting and good” ones. Nochlin explains that this absence is due not to the fact that great women artists remain unknown, but to the fundamental inequality and injustice of a system that did not create similar opportunities for women to grow and exhibit their work.^[1] Nochlin also writes that due to the desire—mostly dictated by men—to see more diverse kinds of performance, women were only given the opportunity to appear in certain forms of art, for example, in dance (especially ballet) and writing.^[2]

Similarly, the history of Iranian prerevolutionary art is filled with female pop singers and dancers, just as there are renowned women writers and poets. The availability of “tools” and infrastructures to perform and write in comparison to other forms of artistic production, such as painting or filmmaking, played an important role in the presence of women performers and poets. But when it comes to visual arts and filmmaking, women have been consistently marginalized and opposed by the patriarchal regimes at work, and thus many of their art projects have remained incomplete.

In addition, this absence of women in art can be intensified by political turmoil. For example, as a direct result of the changes that followed the 1979 revolution, the artistic careers and projects of many women were suspended. Shahrzad was one of the artists who experienced such interruptions in her career and although she was among the first Iranian women to both write and direct her films, she has remained largely unknown. The study of Shahrzad’s “unfinished” films and career sheds light on the ways in which grand political and social transformations affect artists differently on the basis of their gender and class. Shahrzad’s experience was similar to that of many Iranian women artists who were active during the 1970s and 80s (whether in the film industry or visual arts), who due to numerous obstacles, were unable to complete their art projects and films. The problems that women faced in finishing their artwork, or pursuing their careers, ranged from economic injustice, gender bias, social mobility limits, ideological censorship, and unequal funds, and therefore, they could not continue their artistic careers as “successfully” as their male peers, and stood outside the circle of great artists.

On March 12^th of 1979, during the mass protest of Iranian women against the new orders on mandatory hijab, Shahrzad was using her 8 mm camera to document the protest. Standing among the women who were chanting “we made this revolution to go forward, not backward,” Shahrzad was both invested in the protest’s cause, and enthusiastic about recording it for her new film project. But hours later she was arrested by the police, who confiscated her camera and film and sent her to prison. Thus, her film project remained unfinished, and her footage and camera were never returned to her.^[3] Shahrzad not only lost her 8mm film in her quest to share the perspective of the protesters, but her whole artistic life and career came to a halt with the establishment of the new orders after the revolution. Yet, the ground for the incompletion of her career was built long before that, during the Pahlavi era when she faced numerous obstacles to continue her work as she wanted.

Shahrzad started her career as a dancer and singer. In the early 1960s, as theaters closed due to the growth of the film industry, Shahrzad, among many other entertainers, sought work in film. From 1966 to 1973, she acted in more than twenty-five feature filmfarsis, a popular form of commercial cinema at the time. Though she began as a background dancer in films, she soon was cast in leading and complex roles in commercially successful films such as Qaysar (1969), Morning of the Fourth Day (1972), and Tangna (1973). In 1974, Shahrzad left her dancing and acting career to protest the repetitive nature of the roles she was offered; she openly communicated that she was tired of playing mistresses. She then started writing poems and novels, including We Age, Thirsty, and a short novel, titled Tooba. In a few public interviews, she has stated that she never had the opportunity to act differently and freely and that she wanted to write and make her own films.

In 1978, one year before the revolution, Shahrzad wrote and directed her first feature film, Maryam and Mani (1979). This film was a major departure from typical Iranian cinema at the time since it featured a strong female protagonist. More specifically, the protagonist is an independent young woman who takes care of her family and attempts to choose the moral path but also flirts with feelings of greed. Maryam and Mani is an eighty-eight-minute feature film in black and white that narrates the story of Maryam, who dreams about stealing a bag of money belonging to Mani, a man she meets on the street. The entire film takes place in a long dream episode, and the final twist occurs in the last scene when it is revealed that Maryam merely dreamed of stealing the money and had not actually done so. Perhaps the penultimate scene is the film’s most ironic: Maryam stands on a rooftop of a building facing Mani and shouts his name. She keeps screaming “Mani, Mani,” but the pronunciation of Mani’s name in Farsi is the same as the English word “money.” Maryam and Mani is a serious commentary on the economic injustice and poverty that both contributed to the 1979 Revolution and shaped Shahrzad’s whole career. However, as a direct result of the regime change which occurred when the film was in postproduction, Maryam and Mani was not publicly screened at the time.

After the revolution, the new regime banned Shahrzad’s work and branded her as a corrupt dancer and prostitute. Shahrzad lost not only her art life, but also her film archive and all her personal belongings. Extreme poverty forced her to sell (or give away) her personal archive of films and writings.^[4] Even an encyclopedia of Iranian actresses published in 2002 falsely claimed that she committed suicide and died before the revolution.^[5] However, in reality Shahrzad ended up homeless on the streets of Tehran for a while, until an artist community set her up with a room in a rural village in northern Iran. When I spoke to her in September 2018, she said that she has now moved to a room in a village near the southern city of Kerman.^[6]

She came from a poor family, yet despite all her efforts and the fame that she gained through her performing activities in numerous filmfarsis, she remained poor. Her career decisions were also influenced by her poverty. In her attempts to earn money, Shahrzad started dancing in Tehran’s nightclubs at age fifteen in 1961.^[7] When she entered the acting scene, there was not a diverse range of roles that were available to her. In her films, she always played a dancer, mistress, or seducer, which were roles that were not accepted by many other actresses, so her name became associated with these performances. As a woman in the film industry in the 1970s, in order to receive different and more complex roles, she needed to have a higher socioeconomic class standing and family support. Although her prolonged state of resistance and her personality have preserved her name in the margins of history, she has lived out her lonely life in extreme poverty and has been forced to live with an interrupted and unrecognized career. It was Shahrzad’s poverty that made her indifferent toward the set of values and morals that society forced upon women who aspired to be dancers and actresses. Her lower-class status in class-based Iran did not allow her to move beyond these clichéd roles, which in turn motivated her to experiment with other creative opportunities in writing and filmmaking.

In other words, the fact that Shahrzad had always been typecast as “bad” (badkareh) women pushed her to move beyond the closed structures of the commercial cinema of the time, and to start writing poetry and fiction. In my interview with her, she said she had to start writing in order to “prove” herself to the art scene in Tehran as someone who is capable of intelligent thinking and gain trust. The implication here is that despite acting in twenty-five films, she was still an outsider in film circles and her acting and dancing career was always regarded as lowly and worthless. Anthony Shay addresses this negative perception of dance in the article “Looking at Iranian Dance:”

Professional dancers, both male and female, are often linked to prostitution in the public mind. Such attitudes make the study of Iranian dance difficult and have tempted some writers to whitewash the reputation of Iranian dance. During my research in the 1990s, I encountered this attitude from several Iranian scholars in the United States; one remarked, ‘ham’ash faheshegi-st’ (it’s all prostitution), and did not wish to speak with me because of the topic I was researching.^[8]

In her study of modern Islamic dance in Iran, Zeinab Stellar writes that this negative perception of dancing in films was strong even among the practitioners of the Pahlavi-era raqs-i milli (national dance), who believed that their work was high art and preferred to stay away from the contemporaneous motrebi popular dancers on the stage and in movies.^[9] They hoped that they would not be considered as a raqas (dancer), a word that carried negative connotations.^[10] This disparaging view of women’s dances and performances contributed to women  performers’ general abandonment of their career, a perspective that was later on intensified and legalized after the revolution.

Another example of the prejudice against women dancers that brings their career to halt can be found in the societal response to the first Iranian sound film, TheLor Girl (Dokhtare Lor, 1933), by Ardeshir Irani. This film is centered around a dancer in a local teahouse who seeks independence and resists the advances of a bandit chief as she dances. The film was a box office success at the time, but Roohangiz Saminejad, the woman who played the Lor girl, faced severe backlash from religious fanatics, who excoriated her for exposing her body to the public.^[11] As a result, she moved to Tehran, changed her name, and gradually became marginalized. She lived in Tehran until she passed away anonymously and in fear.^[12]

After the Revolution, the new rules and orders on women’s appearance in public and on the screens inevitably limited women’s presence in films and roles and most certainly their dances and singing. When Shahrzad was forced to abandon her career in 1979, she did all that was in her power to still keep working, but she was not successful. She was gradually marginalized and the only time that her story came back to public was in Jafar Panahi’s 2019 film, 3 Faces, where she appears as a representative of the oldest generation of Iranian women actresses. Although in this film Shahrzad’s character is represented from distance and from behind, Panahi pays a tribute to her long effort to sustain her career and life as a woman in a misogynist and conservative society.

To discuss the scarcity of women’s names in the list of Iranian artists one would need to both discover the stories of incompletion, and at the same time argue for the historic and artistic significance of archiving these incomplete projects. This would mean to accept and discuss incompletion as a common condition of a large body of Iranian art, and highlight the emancipatory potentials that remain in re-examining these incomplete works. The goal here is not to “complete” these projects, but instead to open up a space in the art and film history for the study of these works as they are. The call for creating such an archive also creates a chance to discuss the historical significance of these works, despite the fact that they have no economic value. Thus, a side mission of the study of incomplete is to emancipate art history from its long marriage with the art market; a connection that results in ascribing value and importance only to the finished, consumable and marketable products. The study of an unfinished project, whether a single artwork, film, or a career of an artist, enables us to re-write the name of the marginalized artists into the dominant narratives that ignore incomplete works, suppresses the process of making work, and merely archives market oriented successful results.

The unfinished projects are indeed as valuable, and important as the finished works, since they are the missing pieces of a selectively recorded history. Bringing light to the stories of women such as Shahrazad and her unfinished films and career, reclaims a space in the archives that has been long overpopulated with successful men artists and exposes that women’s absence was not simply due to their failure in being creative, but a result of major structural injustices that forced an unfit frame upon them.

Author bio: Tara Najd Ahmadi is a scholar and artist who works primarily with 16mm film and video. In 2019 she received her PhD in Visual & Cultural Studies from University of Rochester, where she was awarded the George Eastman Museum graduate fellowship.
Najd Ahmadi’s film essays have been shown in various venues including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Alternative Film/Video. Najd Ahmadi has received awards and grants including the Susan B Anthony research grant from the University of Rochester and New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund. In 2018, she co-curated Domitor Conference’s film program, Fifty-Seven Prints of Early Films (1896–1918), and from 2012 to 2016 she co-curated On Film‘s avant-garde film screenings. Between 2013 and 2015 Najd Ahmadi worked in the editorial board of the InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture. She is currently teaching modern art history courses at the Wiener Kunstschule.

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