"Self-Censorship Destroys Creativity"

In this series on self-censorship, we asked writers, artists, journalists and human rights activists to define self-censorship. Where possible, they are invited to give examples of their experiences, and to describe what they have witnessed.

We presented each interviewee with the same set of questions, adapting them or asking further questions where relevant.

Our intention was for the interviewees to express their own perspective of self-censorship.

***

Born in 1974, Nahid Hassanzadeh is an Iranian filmmaker. She began her career as a midwife, and continued to work in this field even after she made her way into the world of cinema. In 1998, she received her midwife degree from the University of Tehran but even before that, as she was working as an intern in the underprivileged neighborhoods of southern Tehran, she started studying cinema at the capital’s Iranian Young Cinema Society.

Between 2001 and 2012, Hassanzadeh made seven fiction and documentary short films, most of which deal with problems women face in Iran’s patriarchal society. In 2016, she directed her first feature film, Another Time, which has been screened as part of several international events, including the Sao Paulo International Film Festival in Brazil, the Raindance Film Festival in the United Kingdom, the Kolkata International Film Festival in India, the Exground Film Festival in Germany, the Seoul International Agape Film Festival in South Korea, and Ohio’s Athens International Film and Video Festival (AIFVF) in the United States.

At the 2016 Kolkata festival, Hassanzadeh was awarded a cash prize of $75,000 for Another Time in the category of Best Film by a Woman Director. In 2017 the film won the Special Jury Award from AIFVF.

“I am a midwife and I have been working with women and girls for a long time,” she says. “So it’s easier for me to understand the problems and struggle of women in Iran. That’s how I got the idea to make Another Time.”

 

 

How do you define self-censorship?

Self-censorship means that one excludes something that one knows about and can talk about. In this definition, the conditions under which one self-censors is important. For example, one might see material or spiritual gains in self-censorship or commit self-censorship because of social and political risks.

Is self-censorship an example of social misconduct or prudence?

It is not social misconduct as such. Social misconduct is committed by somebody who forces censorship on others. So I believe that self-censorship is a kind of prudence when the conditions are such that the person is unable to express a thought or a view or perform a deed. Of course, there are other kinds of prudence that might have nothing to do with self-censorship.

Iran is a self-censoring society. Is this self-censorship rooted in Iranian culture or in its history and political events?

I believe that it has deep cultural roots. In their history, the Iranian people have often come under the domination of others, like invasions and conquests by the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks. In Islam there is this idea of taqiyya [“dissimulation”] and this is the same concept that Saadi, one of the greatest and most influential Persian poets, employs in his famous line, “Better a prudent lie than a seditious truth.”

This concept took root in our culture and persists even now. We use it in our everyday lives without any compunction and we have reconciled ourselves to it because our culture has inherited it. I believe that this reconciliation with “prudent lies” has created a wrong culture with the passage of time because most Iranians have no problem with it.

But I do have a problem with self-censorship. I believe that if the humanity had self-censored itself constantly throughout time it would not have achieved the progress in thinking and the civilization that it has. When you censor yourself you are actually censoring some of your dreams and ideals. If all human beings were like most Iranians and resorted to self-censorship throughout history then they would not have arrived at the modern understanding of the world around them and we could not have had the benefits of western thought and western philosophy. All in all, we owe the emergence of human ingenuity to avoiding censoring dreams.

Some artists believe that censorship leads to creativity on the part of the artist. Do you agree with them?

In certain cases it might be said that it can lead to creativity, but it is very important to understand exactly what I mean by this. When censorship is not forced on the artist then the artist herself can prune her work from superfluous elements and become more creative. Otherwise it is torture.

An example is how love is portrayed in Iranian cinema. We face many difficulties in doing this and often we have to use surreal techniques. As far as I know, in such an environment, acting cannot play any role in creating an atmosphere of love and the director has to use dialogue to create love scenes. One might say that for our actors the easiest thing to do is to act in cliché and somehow ridiculous love scenes. In these scenes everything depends on their rhetorical technique and not on how they use their bodies for acting.

In Iranian cinema, sometimes actors cannot tell each other “I love you!” In writing love scenes for cinema we have always murdered love itself. And you can see the results in the society itself.

Self-censorship cannot lead to creativity. It prevents the artist from touching certain subjects altogether. Self-censorship limits the number of subjects that artists choose because they want to avoid censorship. Just imagine such a scene in a movie: A mother is waiting for her son who is coming back home after many years. The director sets up a scene where it is raining. Then he takes an overhead shot of the mother and son going under an umbrella and the audience is expected to guess that they are embracing and kissing each other under that umbrella. But creative solutions like this become repetitive and ineffective and I, personally, do not go for them.

Neither censorship nor self-censorship lead to creativity and those who say that censorship brings out creativity are in effect endorsing a wrong path.

But one of the problems that is hurting our art and our cinema as much as censorship and self-censorship is the absence of lively currents of thought and art in our society. If we see the 1960s as the golden age of Iranian thought and arts it was because there were many such currents. That is why the films of Ebrahim Golestan, Fereydoon Goleh and Dariush Mehrjui and the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad were born in that decade. But these currents do not exist today and the artists yield to self-censorship to survive, and are not after creating daring art.

Sometime ago the Iranian filmmaker Kianoush Ayari announced that he would not make any more movies as a protest against forced hijab for actresses. This might have been the best time to establish solidarity and to create the current of resistance and values that you would support. Did you support your fellow filmmaker?

Not only I but most of my colleagues supported Kianoush Ayari in his decision. Of course I hope that the social environment changes in a way that would benefit Ayari and our demands. All filmmakers want the question of hijab in cinema to get solved so that, at least in interior scenes, we can present the audience with a realistic picture.

But consider this: The average time that Iranians spend on reading is one to three minutes annually and the press is more censored than the movies. Now if we support the just demand of Mr. Ayari by saying that we are not going to make any more movies, that little window that nourishes the minds of audiences will be shut closed as well. Cinema portrays some of the issues that the Iranian society must cope with, but what would happen if we ourselves close this narrow path that is open to us? We really do not like to yield to censorship but we do yield to it to keep this narrow path open.

But don’t you think that if only a few filmmakers stopped making films in support of Kianoush Ayari those currents that you want to exist would begin to develop?

To be honest, this question makes me laugh. Iran has so many filmmakers that they would thank God if worthy directors like Kianoush Ayari stop making films. I have no doubt that they would celebrate at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance if this was to happen. And we must not forget the fact that the number of those who oppose Mr. Ayari’s beliefs are a few times more than those who agree with him. Not only do they have no problems with women wearing hijab at home but they approve of it.

Can you give us an example of when you have practiced self-censorship?

We, the post-revolutionary generation, have grown up under censorship. Sometimes when I have been in places such as a lakeside I would have loved to take off my scarf and run without anybody noticing me. For me, this self-censorship in my personal life is much more painful than self-censorship in cinema.

 

Read also: The Censorship of Forced Hijab: An Interview with Masih Alinejad