Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat’s video installations explore issues of gender and cultural identity as constructed and experienced in Islamic cultures. Her two recent short films, Munis and Faezeh, on view at Gladstone Gallery earlier this year, continue her series based on the novella Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur who, like herself, is an Iranian living in exile in the United States. Written—and promptly banned—in Iran in 1989, Parsipur’s book concerns five women who struggle to achieve self-determination in the rigidly patriarchal culture of her country. Like Neshat’s past videos Mahdokt (2004) and Zarin (2005), Munis and Faezeh loosely adapt from the narrative and characters of the novella, while retaining its crucial elements of the fantastic.

After an intertitle situating Munis against the backdrop of the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, in which British and American intelligence operatives worked with the Iranian military to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister and re-install the Shah, the film introduces the titular character as she listens to news accounts of these events from a radio in her home. The voices being broadcast into her living room are translated into subtitles, allowing viewers access to narrative information, thus creating a parallel to the radio as the symbol of access to the social world for the inquisitive Munis. When her brother enters the room and aggressively pulls the plug from the wall, their dialogue is not translated, situating the non-Persian-speaking viewer outside the exchange, thereby foregrounding the unsettled nature of exilic cultural identity.

Neshat has noted that the stark spatial divisions along gender lines that figured prominently in her earlier work have given way to explorations of gender through shared spaces (Scott MacDonald, “Shirin Neshat,” A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), and indeed, the presentation of gender in Munis refuses any simplistic spatial binaries. The introductory exchange between Munis and her brother is exemplary, as private space is presented as a site of masculine control rather than one of feminine domesticity. The radio functions as a medium through which Munis can escape this physical site through access to the outside world, a flight that is further enacted when she then appears on a rooftop, from which she witnesses the death of a revolutionary in the street below. Leaping from the building, Munis looks directly into the camera, which follows her descent in slow motion, until she joins the revolutionary, lying by his side on the pavement. While the film depicts Munis moving through the confrontation between rioters and the military in both static long shots and moving close-ups, the voice-over narration of both characters laments the blind spots of memory: “No one remains to chronicle the darkness of human history.”

Neshat takes up the fantastic tone of Women Without Men to collapse the personal and the political, bringing together Munis’s transgression of traditional gender separations and the revolutionary’s lament of the inadequacy of memory to construct an ambiguous retelling of the political unrest in 1953. As the film shifts from an overhead shot of the recumbent couple in color to the chaotic black-and-white shots of the riots, Munis is shown participating in history in her dream-like state of suspended death while we hear the revolutionary lament the way in which dreams displace remembrance. Bound together in this fashion, Munis seems to link a society in crisis to the patriarchal desire to control and limit the capacity of women to develop as autonomous beings. The film ends when Munis arises and walks out of frame as she tells the revolutionary in voice-over that she is setting him free like a fish being returned to water, another ambiguous act that implies that she will serve as the agent of remembrance engaged with the wider social world beyond the domestic sphere. Hovering between life and death, Munis is in a liminal state that suggests potential or promise rather than a sense of closure.

Like Munis, Faezeh begins with a brief argument between Munis and Faezeh, after which the principal character exits a naturalistic setting to enter a more oneiric space. Here, though, issues of gender are examined through the experience of personal trauma, as Faezeh confronts a memory of being raped. After moving through a gate from a dusty road to a misty forest, she is surrounded by eerie whispering voices that coalesce at times into fragments from the past: “What should I wear to Parveen’s wedding?” “What time was it?” She enters a house where the memory of the wedding briefly materializes as a scene of music and dancing but quickly fades to reveal Faezeh praying alone before the whispering voices approach again. In the forest, she pursues a woman wearing a chador, who is revealed to be Faezeh herself in a slow-motion shot of her rape. In a formal echo of Munis’s suicidal leap, the camera follows Faezeh in close-up as she backs away from this vision, until cutting to a long shot in which she looks over her shoulder at a young girl.

The correspondences in narrative form across both films continue the development of the thematic relationship between gender, memory, and the integration of the personal and political. In Faezeh, this unfolds in relation to the female body as a site of patriarchal control. Through juxtaposing the memory of her sister-in-law’s wedding with that of her own rape, the film foregrounds one of the dominant themes of Parsipur’s novel, the enforcement of gender roles through the construction of female purity that denies women’s sexual desire. In the novel, the rape scene occurs as Munis and Faezeh walk together along the road to Karaj, and as Munis consoles the weeping Faezeh, she says: “To Hell with it. We were virgins, now we’re not” (Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2004, 97). This blunt refusal of masculine obsession with the sanctity of virginity is a refusal to allow the myth of purity to delimit identity. Neshat transforms this refusal with the extraordinary shots of Faezeh gazing upon an unidentified girl after witnessing the memory of her rape. As the mise-en-scène shifts from the somber forest to a colorful landscape, Faezeh smiles at the girl, who, in another parallel with Munis, seems to end the narrative on an ambiguous note of promise and possibility.

The remarkable climax, depicting Faezeh as she gazes in horror at her own violation, recalls the rape scene in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), in which the transgendered main character, Brandon Teena, is shown gazing upon himself as he is raped by two men. From within the film narrative, this scene constructs a spectatorial position between the viewing subject and the object of the gaze that corresponds with Teena’s in-between transgender identity. Faezeh also occupies this ambiguous position of looking at oneself from within the diegetic space of the film, destabilizing the classical model of cinematic spectatorship at the moment of horrific trauma that shapes the narrative. One of the most striking characteristics of both Munis and Faezeh is how both construct a point of view that is marked by ambiguity and instability. The characters refuse to take a proper position in relation to narrative and the cinematic gaze, formally evoking the refusals of patriarchal limitations that take place in the story. Munis, suspended between life and death, and Faezeh, observing herself through the distance of memory, open an array of thematic possibilities in Neshat’s art as she moves from the iconic tropes of conceptual and experimental film into more linear narratives.