The Supervising Gaze and the Shaping of the Docile Body in Baluch (1972)

Baluch (1972) is the story of a man from the countryside who takes revenge on two men from the city who smuggled antiques. The story is a description of the ups and downs that the Baluch go through in this way. Throughout the film, the character of Amir (one of the two smugglers) gains his power from the possibility of being invisible and seeing without being seen. Initially, he makes the Baluch, who is out for revenge, his visible subject and in this way brings him under his control. However, Amir’s surveilling gaze, as a disciplining power, has the ability to influence and can transform the Baluch into a docile and disciplined body by impressing his principles upon him. At the end of the film, however, there is a fundamental shift in the direction of the gaze. With the overthrow of the panopticon, Baluch also gains the power of the gaze and the safe and invisible position of Amir disappears. In the present study, conducted through the descriptive-analytical method and using library sources, drawing on Michel Foucault’s views on the regulatory mechanism of disciplinary power, an attempt is made to examine Amir’s surveillance gaze on the Baluch and the role of this gaze in transforming the Baluch into a compliant body. From this perspective, Amir’s “surveillance gaze” can be seen as an allegory for the surveillance gaze of the Pahlavi period government, and the Baluchi body can also be seen as an allegory for the social body of Iran during this period. This research argues that Amir’s efforts to subjugate and modernize the Baluch body can be examined in the context of the Pahlavi government’s disciplinary approach and its efforts to shape a cohesive social body. A homogenizing view that aims to shape a docile and homogeneous social body by denying and eliminating differences.