You’re not Supposed to Be Here, Ma’am!
Offside!
“In a position in a game…on the opponent's part of the field where you are not allowed to be,” that is how Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the word ‘offside’. It is also the title of a 2006 Iranian movie. The storyline of the movie is simple: It’s about some girls who try, individually, to sneak into a stadium during an important game of soccer. They do not succeed, though, and are taken into custody. Why? Because women are not allowed in the stadium where men are playing, according to Islamic Republic laws. The movie is directed by the internationally acclaimed director, Jafar Panahi. Quite naturally, it was banned from screening in Iran, where it made sense most.
The storyline above doesn’t reveal anything of the depth of the social, as well as political, implications of the movie. Most of the movie is dedicated to a negotiation between one of the girls, or a couple of them, and the soldiers who are in charge of detaining them; whom one should be wary not to take as merely the pawns and tools of the state. The characters, the storyline, and the stylistic aesthetics of the movie persuade the viewer to delve deep into the definition of the public sphere in the Iranian civil life. Is it enough to go along with the state defined civil society? Is it adequate to persuade the state into introducing formal social liberties? Does ‘the private’ matter as much as ‘the public’? Which one of the scholarly definitions of the public sphere fits more appropriately with the one depicted in the movie? These and many other questions are among the issues that the movie touches upon in both its form and its content.
Women in the Public, and in Cinema
In an article on women and sexual love in Iranian cinema, Mir-Hosseini mentions three phases in the participation of women on screen in Iran.[1] In the first phase, which is also the oldest one, women were rarely willing to stand in front of the camera and play, since what happened to Sadiqeh Saminejad, the first Muslim Iranian actress to play a role in an Iranian talkie, was so devastating to her life that she decided to seclude from the cinema and society all at once. Mir-Hosseini speaks of the sexual harassment she received in the public whenever she stepped outside, while the male actor of the movie, Sepanta, rose to stardom. This is perhaps a very good illustration of how the society saw the limits of the presence of women in Iran, back then.
The advent of the Pahlavi dynasty and the infamous, forced de-veiling phenomenon, which was the translation of feminism for Reza Shah[2], had a direct role in the increase of the public presence of the women even in posts as high as a judge or a minister. But most of it went up in smoke in 1980, when Khomeini, ‘the Imam of the nation’ after the so-called Islamic revolution, declared forced veiling. During the Iran-Iraq war, lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the role of women in front of the camera was virtually limited to that of a chaste wife or mother.
There have been movies in the 1990s which tried to circumnavigate the stereotypes of women by emphasizing on the rights of women as mothers and wives, specifically the oppressed ones. Tahmineh Milani’s movies are full of these trials. There were other female directors who tried to emphasize the role of women in the society in a more profound way; e.g. by depicting women who are more resilient in the face of oppression than any female persona depicted thus far. Rakhshan Bani E’temad is quite a staggering figure in this trend. Mir-Hosseini’s example for the second of her tripartite phases mentioned above, is Bani E’temad’s Nargess. The movies of this trend were significant in the sense that they were reflecting the tensions troubling the minds of the officials who had already been witnessing the increase of the public presence of women in the post-war and the reform era.
The third phase which Mir-Hosseini titles “debating the taboo,” came along at the height of the reform era. The leash on the film makers’ liberties was loosen a little bit and some movies dared take up issues which had commonly been considered forbidden before. Showkaran (Hemlock; 2000) is the movie that Mir-Hosseini chooses as the archetypal example of this period. There were other movies which had a more vitriolic take on the plight women were suffering. One of the most acerbic critiques of the oppression of women, Nasle sookhteh (Burnt Generation; 1999) was a harbinger in holding both the patriarchal society and the state responsible. It was in this atmosphere that Offside was created.
The Stadium: A Public Sphere?
The movie Offside is about the oppression of women in general, and their efforts to take up a more prominent role in the public sphere, and the civil life of the country, in particular. Panahi uses the soccer stadium and the public celebration in the streets that follows the match as a symbol of the spheres that women in Iran are not supposed to step in. His heroines engage themselves with the very people who are so keen on implementing the patriarchal rules and male-dominated cultural taboos on women. These girls see it as their right to be able to take part in the social activities that involves national interests such as the rare event of publicly celebrating an international sport achievement.
Let us see how (and how come) Panahi considers the soccer stadium a public sphere. At approximately the beginning of the movie, there is a scene on a minibus where some football fans are riding. An apparently mild clash begins between two of the passengers. Later on we find out the whole thing had started because one of the passengers felt offended when he was asked why he was taking his ‘blind’ dad to the stadium. The blind man gives a peculiar answer to the curious guy. He says that he believes the stadium is not just for a soccer match. It’s a place to talk, shout, and reveal your true colors; where you can say whatever you want; you can even curse at anybody and everybody; it’s a place to feel excited among other people.
If one knows how politicized the atmosphere in the Iranian soccer stadiums is, no doubt they will agree with what the blind character of the movie says. It is a place where people chant highly politicized slogans, especially in provinces of Iran where people generally believe they have been neglected by the central government for so long. This happens on a regular basis in cities like Abadan and Tabriz. Even in Tehran, especially when the national soccer team is not playing in harmony, protestation shows itself in the form of chanting slogans in favor of the rival team. In another incident, when six of the players of the national team wore a ‘green wristband’ in an international match outside Iran (apparently in support of the Green movement), they got immensely popularized; for months they got cheered by the football fans in the stadiums regardless of the team they were playing for or against. Right when the Green movement was in its height, many of the matches were reported on the state TV without the live sound of the stadium whose amateur videos on the internet showed a great deal of chanting in favor of the movement. The soccer stadium in Iran is definitely more than a place for watching a game of soccer, as ‘the blind man in Offside’ says. It’s a public sphere in its own uncharacteristic manner.
This brings us to an age-old debate on the definitions of the public sphere and its features. Two somewhat competing approaches toward the public sphere that this paper is going to elaborate on are the Habemas’ conceptualization of public sphere and Gandhi’s Indian variants of it.
Habermas’ Public Sphere and its Critiques
Let us now review very briefly the tenets of the Habermasian conception of public sphere and its critiques. In a way public sphere is defined as “a modern institution and a set of values which brings private persons together in public to engage in the context of reasoned debate.”[3] It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment."[4] Habermas’ notion of public sphere “designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk...in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs.”[5]
Though still looked upon as a determining theory, Habermas’ notion of the public sphere has come under some critique. Fraser, in her article, Rethinking the Public Sphere, attacks some of the assumptions which a masculinist and bourgeois conception of the public sphere - the way Habermas defines it - possesses. She asserts that this kind of public sphere actually excluded women and lower social classes. Fraser believes that the idea that “the institutional confinement of public life, to a single, overarching public sphere is a positive and desirable state of affairs”[6] has also proved inadequate. The other aspect of the Habermas’ definition of the public sphere which Fraser finds problematic is the boundary he draws between the private and the public, saying that there are no “naturally given, a priori” boundaries there. On the whole, Fraser believes that “Habermas stops short of developing a new post-bourgeois model of public sphere.”[7]
Gandhi and His Indian Variants of Public Sphere
Gandhi’s effort were directed at getting his message beyond the literary elites to a non-literate mass public. In his very first experiments in creating a public sphere, Gandhi tried out “organizational forms that could be used to attract new constituencies as politics – a very different function than the coffee house’s deliberative exchange among the politicized.”[8] Gandhi started a movement which only later got to be called Ashram. People who lived there learned to become trained resistance professionals who were so influential in some of India’s greatest social movements, such as the Delhi Satyagraha, and the legendary salt march.
In elaborating the characteristics of Gandhian ashram that makes it different from the Habermasian coffee house - both representative of a public sphere - the Rudolphs, in Coffee House and the Ashram, name these traits as the most significant differences: The ashram “sought to draw uneducated: urban and rural, working and farming people into the public sphere in the context of mass politics.” And “…Gandhi’s ashram deliberately challenged the differentiation between private and public that characterizes the modernist public sphere.” Also, “[Ashram was] dedicated to social and political change in a polity where illegal political action is the only action possible for a free person.”[9] The transgression of the borders between the public and the private, the writers believe, is what gives the Gandhian public sphere its revolutionary quality. Let us now see how these traits work into the Iranian public sphere and Panahi’s representation of it: the soccer stadium atmosphere.
Offside, A Transgressive Illegal Act!
Offside begins its story with a dad who is looking for his daughter. He believes she has gone to the stadium to watch the Iranian national team’s soccer match with Bahrain. It’s an important match and Iran’s team will go to the World Cup if it wins. Thousands of people – and by people in this situation, one means ‘men’ – are heading towards the stadium. The story doesn’t linger on the dad, though, and we come to know of a girl, cross-dressing as a boy, sitting among male football fans on a minibus. A boy finds out and tries to inform a friend of his, another boy on the same vehicle. The friend’s reaction comes as a shock, “I know. And guess what! She is not the only one. A lot of them sneak into the stadium all the time.” Right there, Panahi draws a line between the people who tacitly agree with the participation and presence of women in public events and those who don’t; and he doesn’t try to hide his suspicion and contempt for those who don’t. Later on in the movie, we even see some young people helping a detained girl run away.
Soon enough, the aforementioned girl gets caught by a soldier. Panahi shrewdly depicts the arrest of the girl as an unusual effort a soldier goes through when he gains no apparent benefit in doing so. Therefore, the pressure on women’s public presence is still, up to this point, from people, and not necessarily an iron fist of the state; especially evident when the very same soldier asks the detainee to lend him her cell phone to call a certain person who is obviously the soldier’s girlfriend. In this sense, the long negotiation between ordinary individuals and the soldiers which takes up most of the time of the film is emphasized as a necessary part of the public sphere. What it means is that, in order to be free, to be normally considered as an individual who wants to be a member of the public sphere, the girls have to negotiate their presence.
The illegality of the girls action – being present in a sphere which is considered forbidden for women –is consistently emphasized since the location where this girl, and the others like him, are kept becomes the main location of the film for almost two-thirds of the film. Panahi chooses a place within the stadium, close to a large gate where the soldiers can watch the soccer match, but the girls can’t, as a symbol of the absurdity of the situation. The place is not a prison; it’s a small restricted area with a rather short fence around it. The prisoners and the soldiers are in constant contact. All of them, and us as the viewers, can hear the cheers of the fans who are in a situation where they can watch the game. However, once again in a clever decision, Panahi abstains from screening the actual sight of the match. This makes the viewer of the movie more sympathetic towards the fate of the girls who, like the audience, are deprived form watching the match they were willing to risk their neck on watching.
As mentioned before, one of the characteristics of Gandhi’s ashram was to ‘deliberately challenge the differentiation between public and private’. This is a strong motif in the movie which is repeated over and over. The first instance of this is when one of the girls tries to smooth talk a young officer into being less aggressive. The officer, who we later find out is from an economically neglected rural area of Azerbaijan, is initially depicted as an agent of the state; a hegemonic tool who is doggedly inflexible to the point that he doesn’t let a girl go and use the bathroom, while she obviously needs it. He is blaming the girls for his own obligatory stay in Tehran while his mom is sick and needs him. Instead of asking the very structure of the state that is responsible for his plight, he decides to take out his rage at the detainees. Then comes the dialog: the girl, who is as adamant in defending her presence there as the officer is in reprehending her, manages to get to the soft side of the officer and ask him some pretty serious questions about the credibility of his ideas. She doesn’t give up even after hearing some tired clichés about the chastity of women. She keeps pushing until she persuades the young officer to think over his prejudices.
Panahi chooses civil disobedience, the way it was practiced in Gandhi’s movement, as the core strategy that the girls of his film capitalize on, not only against the state, but also their own families. For instance, one feature much favored by the ashram movement was to peacefully break the rules and regulations which they saw as unjust, simply because it was the only action they could take. The role of women was also significant: in Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement “[t]he uncommon appearance of women as political mobilizers…and outrage at ‘the insult offered to our womanhood’ caused their call to spread like fire.”[10] Like those women, the girls in Offside are already guilty as charged for their presence there, but they are far from accepting that guilt. They see it as their unquestionable right to be at the stadium; and even at times they make fun of their situation there and laugh about it. They see transgression of the rules as the only method of getting what they consider to be their neglected right.
Gray People, Black Officials!
It is probably worth mentioning that Offside uses a range of diverse features in order to highlight the universal quality of the specific situation it is depicting. The first and foremost is the lack of classic character building which is an indispensible part of a mainstream movie. The characters do not bear names. We do not know who they are, or what their personal stories are. Their political worldviews, except for the brief dialog between the girl and the young officer, is not revealed to us. All we know about the characters is the hunches we can make based on their rural accents and more importantly on their exchanging of their viewpoints on soccer and on the legitimacy of their own actions. Although the scenes in which one or two members of each group tries to defend him/herself are lengthy and numerous, rarely can we pick any personal information about the characters.
At the beginning of the movie one gets the feeling that it’s a standoff between the oppressed women and ‘the state’ with the police force as its apparatus. Before half of the movie is elapsed, we find out that the gravity of the problem that the movie is portraying goes well beyond a simple political message. The movie claims that there is a fraction of the male society which is still against the presence of women in some spaces of the public sphere. In all fairness, I should add, that at the end of the movie Panahi alludes to how very hopeful he is that keeping up the dialog with this fraction of the society, even in the problematic and impaired form of the public sphere, will bear fruit in changing them. However, Panahi has never been famous for making compromises. The only high rank officer of the movie is also the only character which is portrayed in solid black; a rude unorthodox alpha dog who shouts at everyone, and doesn’t care a fig about what happens to the other people. He is a person who sees it right to impose his own private ideas on the public. Panahi’s reaction to this is clear-cut and unambiguous: “Coercion, presumably including lawful coercion by states, vitiates the civil society.”[11] Panahi remains uncompromising in holding the state as the most responsible body for the plight of women.
Stylization of the Public Sphere
Jafar Panahi belongs to a generation of film makers who introduced the Iranian cinema to the world. The most significant attribute of this coterie is the unique language they devised in portraying their society under a repressive régime with a firm system of censorship. The language they came up with was unprecedented in the history of cinema.[12] In Offside, one can witness a mastery over the medium of cinema in the service of a socially amenable mind. Panahi takes his camera into a public sphere as the audience’s invisible eye. He uses the cinema vérité techniques to make us believe that the situation depicted in the movie is true and happening right then. He refrains from allocating preference or significance to any of the characters in order not to make it a personal story. He makes the viewer ponder on the social structures that makes the two otherwise congenial groups of people, the soldiers and the detainees, antipathetic. The movie makes you wonder whether there ever is any logical reason to exclude women from the public spaces and social life on the whole, for that matter.
And finally the way Panahi suggests out of this deadlock is through individual efforts to change the patriarchal minds of the fraction of the society that thinks what they consider as private is the outline of the standard legitimacy for the public. By taking an active role in challenging the unjust rules, and by physical presence in the spheres of the public life traditionally forbidden to women, they can change the social structures of the society they live in. And on this path the characterization of the public sphere of which Gandhi’s movement is the greatest manifestation seems to be the most plausible aim.
Panahi proves, via his cinematic genius, that any change in the social structure that we might wish for will come along through social activism. Change is possible and for Panahi, following Gandhi, it comes in the form of “a societal act engaging subjectivities as well as social structures.”[13]
P.S., As of the time of writing this paper, Jafar Panahi, has been sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment and 20 years of not making movies or leaving the country, based on the allegation that he was “planning for” making a movie against the Islamic Republic.
[1] Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. Negotiating the Forbidden: On Women and Sexual Love in Iranian Cinema. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 27, Number 3, 2007, pp. 673-679: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v027/27.3mir-hosseini.html
[2] Bahramitash, Roksana. The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 223–237, Summer 2005.
[3] Gheytanchi, Elham. (2001) Civil Society in Iran : Politics of Motherhood and the Public Sphere. International Sociology, Vol. 16(4): 557-576
[4] Hauser, Gerard (1998), Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public Opinion. Communication Monographs 65(2): 83–107
[5] Fraser, Nancy. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 84
[6] Fraser, Nancy. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p.89
[7] Ibid p. 85
[8] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 391
[9] Ibid p. 399-400
[10] Satyagraha in South Africa p. 251 ff. Cited in Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 39
[11] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 380
[13] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 404