Abstract
Traffic on Vali 'Asr, the main north-south artery of Tehran, had come to a standstill. It was almost midnight on a Thursday. As drivers edged their cars into any available space, the grand tree-lined boulevard lost any semblance of order. Blaring horns and techno-pop filled the air. The film director Majid Majidi was driving me home after a day of reshoots for his latest film, The Willow Tree (2005). He now directed me to look out at the cars surrounding us. Had I noticed, he asked, the way the girls were dressed up and the boys were trying to get their attention? At their age, he was taking part in the revolution. "I spent my university years not in classes but in the streets." He didn't understand today's youth or know how to talk to them. When he tried to speak to his own teenage son, it felt like they were separated by "four generations." The media was exposing them to things he never had to deal with. Take pornography. "It used to be that a nude photo graph was a rarity, something people kept hidden. Now all you have to do is turn on the satellite." Such extremes have taken a terrible toll on his generation. They all married young, but now so many of his friends are divorced and with younger women. Drug addiction, especially to opium, is rampant. Even the most committed revolutionary filmmakers have become opponents of the regime. Iran has changed so quickly, he considered. "In the West, it was a dissolve; in Iran, it's like a jump cut." For Majidi, the promise of cinema is its potential to restore our shared humanity and connection to God in the face of such changes, even if we are unprepared to see it. "If the Prophet were alive today, " he later told me, "he would be a filmmaker." Through humanistic and spiritual-themed films about children and young adults like Children of Heaven (1997), The Color of Paradise , and Baran (2001), Majidi had become one of Iran's most successful directors and a prominent figure in the state's proj ect to "Islamicize" the postrevolutionary film industry. The avowed Islamic vision of his films, thus, offers a unique perspective for understanding the cultural work of the Ira nian film industry in all its many dimensions. 1 From 2004 to 2007, I did ethnographic fieldwork on the Ira nian film industry, initially by working on Majidi's film proj ects-starting out as a production assistant, then moving to the cinematography unit, until I fi nally became an assistant to the director himself. During the postproduction of The Willow Tree, I participated in editing sessions and helped coordinate film reshoots, dubbing sessions, and communications with outside labs and studios, among other tasks. In this chapter, I focus on a three-month period in the film's postproduction, between an initial viewing of the rough cut of The Willow Tree and the film's premiere at Tehran's Fajr International Film Festival. After briefly describing the diff er ent stages of the postproduction pro cess and the way it was undertaken for The Willow Tree, I discuss the rough cut screening and the viewers' strongly critical reactions. Then, I examine three key efforts to reshape and reinterpret the film: first, the decision to cut down the film's length and abandon its linear structure; second, the introduction of new cinematic and editing techniques to recapture the spirit of the film's original script, such as flashbacks and voice-overs; and third, the way in which these changes led to efforts to remove the realistic ele ments of the film in favor of the otherworldly, which transformed the pro cess of editing into a search not just for the film's meaning but for the divine in the mundane. In effect, not only did the world the film represented through its story become reenchanted, but so did the very filmmaking pro cess that created it.
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