Development of Visual Expression in Dialogic Moments of Iranian Cinema 2001-2011*

Iranian cinema is well-known in international movie festivals. A lot of internal and external researchers have conducted many articles about Iranian cinema and its filmmakers. Usually these articles are affected by cultural studies and have the same approach to content and meaning. This has become the reason that we have few researches about visual aspects and cinematic structures in Iranian cinema. One of the neglected issues of visual aesthetics analysis in Iranian cinema is the dialogic moments: scene in which two or more characters talk to each other. Because dialogic moments have been used frequently in movies, its use has become conventional and almost no movie can be found without them. One of the dominant conventions in directing dialogic moments is shot/reverse shot technique. This research tries to analyze Iranian filmmakers’ approach to dialogic moments and aims to reveal how their visual expressions have been transformed. In order to achieve this, ten movies from 2001 to 2011 have been selected as statistical domain of the research. These movies are: Killing Mad Dogs (Bahram Beizai, 2001); I am Taraneh: 15 (Rasul Sadr Ameli, 2002); Light Nights (Farzad Motamen, 2001); Gavkhooni (The River’s End) (Behrooz Afkhami, 2003); Green Fire (Mohammad Reza Aslani, 2007); Day and Night (Omid Bonakdar and Keyvan Alimohammadi, 2008); About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2008); A Seperation (Asghar Farhadi, 2010); A Walk in the Fog (Bahram Tavakoli, 2009); A Cube of Sugar (Reza Mir-Karimi, 2011). First, the nature of shot/reverse shot (as the dominant pattern for visual expressions of dialogue scenes) and its characteristics will be discussed. In this part, we review a brief history of forming the shot/reverse shot in order to define where this pattern began and in which years it had been developed and became customary in cinema. Then, all the movies in the statistical domain of the research will be reviewed in order to indicate what percentage of the dialogic moments formed in these works have been using shot/reverse shot. Two concepts, “Becoming” and “Became”, in cinematic image and its effect on dialogic moments will also be examined. The concept of “Becoming” in the picture alludes to moments which are continuous in the present time and develop, while the concept of “Became” alludes to those which are removed of continuity and time. Reviewing the substance of shot/reverse shot shows that this découpage pattern postpones the picture from the spectator, and transforms it into something that has happened in the past. Then recurring samples of this pattern will be analyzed and an attempt will be made to single out films that have chosen the dominant pattern. Finally, films that have gone beyond shot/reverse shot and have questioned its established position will be discussed. In this chapter, few works are resolved which have creative suggestions for picturing the dialogic moments, and do not bind themselves of a repeated pattern. This research will show that although most Iranian films of this period have been dominated by shot/reverse shot, there are some movies which deviated from the expected cinematic technique.